States of Inquiry

New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History

Howard Brick, Series Editor
 States of Inquiry
Social Investigations and Print Culture
in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States

oz frankel

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore
 © 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2006
Printed in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

The Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Frankel, Oz, 1958–
States of inquiry : social investigations and print culture in nineteenth-century
Britain and the United States / Oz Frankel.
p. cm. — (New studies in American intellectual and cultural history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-8018-8340-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Social surveys—United States—History—19th century. 2. United
States—Population—Statistical methods. 3. Printing, Public—
United States—History—19th century. 4. Government publications—United
States—History—19th century. 5. Social surveys—Great Britain—
History—19th century. 6. Great Britain—Population—Statistical methods.
7. Printing, Public—Great Britain—History—19th century. 8. Government
publications—Great Britain—History—19th century.
I. Title. II. Series.
ha37.u55f75 2006
314.1072⬘3—dc22 2005027400

A catalog record of this book is available from the British Library.

For my parents, Sara and Yair Frankel
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 contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

pa rt i mo numents in p r int 25

1 Blue Books and the Market of Information 39

2 The Battle of the Books 72

3 The Bee in the Book 104

pa rt ii t he c ultur e of the s o c ial fac t 137

4 Scenes of Commission 139

5 Facts Speak for Themselves 173

6 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 204

part iii totem envy 235

7 Archives of Indian Knowledge 243

8 The Purloined Indian 273

Conclusion 302

Notes 311
Essay on Sources 343
Index 359
This page intentionally left blank
 ac knowledg ments

Researching and writing this book was an extraordinary privilege made possible
by the magnanimity of family, teachers, colleagues, friends, and institutions. My
chief resources have been the unwavering devotion and support of my partner
Alyson Cole, my son Tammuz (Muzi) Frankel, my parents Sara and Yair Frankel,
my sister Varda Mann, and her family. I dedicate this book to my parents as a to-
ken of my gratitude. At the University of California at Berkeley three advisors,
Sheldon Rothblatt, David Hollinger, and Catherine Gallagher, were generous
with their time, energy, and advice, all of which I have never ceased to avail my-
self. This project began as a research paper for a seminar I took with Sheldon dur-
ing my first year in graduate school. His enthusiasm, erudition, and good judg-
ment never failed me. David’s rigor, acuity, and encouragement enhanced my
work. Cathy graciously acquainted me with the joys and tribulations of literary
criticism. Our meetings twisted, bent, and reshaped my way of thinking.
Individuals who read or simply listened to my work over the years often asked
questions, made comments, and shared insights that have improved this book. I
am especially obliged to Eli Zaretsky, Philippa Levine, Tom Laqueur, Lisa Cody,
Ann Laura Stoler, Geoff Goldfarb, Kali Israel, Anne Humpherys, Michael
Warner, Seth Koven, and Hans Bak. At Berkeley I am also indebted to Nelson
Polsby, Paula Fass, Larry Levine, Waldo Martin Jr., and the late Michael Paul
Rogin, as well as to Anna Shtutina, Cornelia Sears, Stephen Cole, Jesse Berrett,
Andrea Roberts, and Marc Foster. At the University of Michigan I was fortunate
to receive a warm reception and valuable advice from James Boyd White, Re-
becca Scott, Bill Rosenberg, Paul Allen Anderson, Robert Self, John Carson, Geoff
Eley, Gina Morantz-Sanchez, Richard Candida-Smith, Tom Green, Todd Endel-
man, Jochen Hellbeck, Tiffany Holmes, and Carla Mazzio. Working in London,
England, Peter Mandler, Lawrence Goldman, Michael Thompson, and Anthony
Howe provided important assistance, while Dan White, Lara Kriegel, and Jea-
 x Acknowledgments

nette and Alex Byrd provided camaraderie. My colleagues at the New School for
Social Research and Lang College have been exceptionally kind. I wish I could
list them all. Special thanks are owed to Aristide Zolberg, Vera Zolberg, Arien
Mack, Bill Hirst, Claudio Lomnitz, Nancy Fraser, Vicky Hattam, David Plotke,
Jim Miller, Richard Bernstein, Jose Cassanova, Elaine Abelson, Andrew Arato,
Alice Crary, Orville Lee, Robin Blackburn, Courtney Jung, James Dodd, Will
Milberg, Ann Snitow, and Anwar Shaikh.
There is no scholarship without scholarships. At Berkeley, my work was
funded by the generosity of the Regents of the University of California, the
Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities (whose weekly meetings under
Randy Starn’s leadership were a source of inspiration), the Mabelle McLeod
Lewis Memorial Fund, and the Institute of International Studies (which granted
me the Reinhard Bendix Research Fellowship for Social and Political Thought,
the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award, and the John L. Simpson Memorial Research
Fellowship in International and Comparative Studies). Additional support in-
cluded a yearlong predoctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution, an
international dissertation research fellowship from the Social Science Research
Council, an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical So-
ciety, and an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship from the Huntington Library. A post-
doctoral appointment at the Michigan Society of Fellows and the University of
Michigan Department of History provided a nurturing environment for further
research and writing.
I am also indebted to the archivists, librarians, and staff of the Smithsonian
Institution Archives (especially Paul Theerman); the Library of Congress; the
National Archives and Records Administration at Washington, D.C., and College
Park, Md.; the Massachusetts Historical Society (especially Conrad Edick Wright
and Peter Drummey); the Boston Public Library; the Houghton Library at Har-
vard; the British Library; the Public Record Office, Kew; the Special Collections
Library at the University College, London; the London School of Economics; the
Doe Library at U.C. Berkeley (especially Phoebe Janes); the Elmer Holmes Bobst
Library at New York University; and the libraries of the New School. Finally, my
thanks are hereby tendered to the Johns Hopkins University Press, its editors,
staff, and readers.
States of Inquiry
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 Introduction

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the U.S. and British
governments asserted themselves—with great fanfare—in the arenas of knowl-
edge and print. A few of the instruments elaborated for that purpose are famil-
iar to us today, two of which stand at the center of this book: the function of the
state as an energetic gatherer of facts about (or investigator of ) social, economic,
and other aspects of national affairs, and the role of government as a prolific pub-
lisher of policy reports and official documents. In Britain, royal commissions of
inquiry, inspectorates, and parliamentary committees famously investigated
myriad social problems and sites, such as child labor, poverty, sanitary conditions
in urban slums, and the safety of mines. On the other side of the Atlantic, the
U.S. government surveyed Indian tribes (and, through expeditions and explo-
rations, the West in general) as well as the condition of the South during and af-
ter the Civil War. The two states also printed, bound, and circulated numerous
accounts about these and additional topics for the perusal of legislators, bureau-
crats, and ordinary citizens. The British study and depiction of the lesser regions
of society shared important features with the U.S. exploration and publication of
reports on the West and the South.
The nineteenth-century state justified its new informational tasks in diverse
terms. The list is long and includes policy making, transparency and account-
ability, public education, and even archive keeping and memorialization. This
book argues that investigations and reports in effect constituted a new form of
politics that interlaced communication with representation. Beyond declared
goals and the façade of “information,” legislatures and governments sought to
represent their citizens and the national (or, sometimes, imperial) sphere in ways
that exceeded conventional modes of political representation, namely, electoral
politics. They engaged in unprecedented scientific, literary, and aesthetic docu-
mentation of the country, its social circumstances, economy, and history as well
as its natural environment. Concurrently, the British and American states in-
 2 States of Inquiry

vested heavily in documenting and publicizing their own actions and delibera-
tions. In other words, official reportage facilitated the representation of the cen-
tralized, modern state to its publics and, in turn, the representation of the nation
by (and to) the government itself. One consequence was that investigations and
reports incorporated less powerful groups into the national conversation by ren-
dering them presentable and representable political subjects. This was the case
with American Indians and freed slaves in the United States and the working or
unemployed poor in Britain. Exchange of knowledge and texts thus operated
through multifarious paths, implicating governments and legislatures, the dis-
enfranchised populations—now the object of national attention—and diverse
communities of readers who recognized the state in its published documents.
Conversely, through fact-finding enterprises, the state conjured up its subjects,
publics, and spheres. It also fashioned itself a target of observation and scrutiny.
I term this field of communication between the state and its constituencies print
statism (following Benedict Anderson’s notion of print capitalism).
From the vantage point of the mid-nineteenth century, it became incumbent
upon governments to enhance their capacity to communicate, and tools were put
in place to enable the state to serve as its own medium. Individuals as well as
groups became vigorously involved in this new field as speakers and readers—
as informants and witnesses, on the one hand, and as interpreters, collectors, and
“poachers” of state-issued documents, on the other. Knowledge as well as tangi-
ble objects such as reports and books changed hands. The full dimensions of this
vibrant commerce are somewhat obscured today by the contemporary culture of
information and its preoccupation with matters of utility and facticity—the
quality, veracity, and comprehensiveness of state proclamations and official data.
These evaluative standards do not account for the dynamics and meanings of the
traffic in knowledge and its venues. Knowledge is not only a tool of government
but also a currency of explicit and tacit transactions between the state and its cit-
izens.
Governance may be intrinsically tied to some forms of knowledge and com-
munication, but the mediated exchange described in the following chapters is a
specifically historical phenomenon. It emerged before the modern regime of in-
formation reshaped, at the turn of the twentieth century, journalism, public sci-
ence, and politics. By the progressive era (in the United States), citizenship would
become intertwined with possessing information, as in the notion of the “in-
formed citizen.” The nineteenth-century state’s declared wish to enlighten law-
makers and citizens served often as a pretext to manage public debate and mas-
ter public perception. Official circulation of knowledge betrayed even greater
 Introduction 3

aspirations of power and regimentation: building state institutions, curbing so-

cial unrest, forging citizens, fostering a national spirit, and even spawning em-
pires. However, the trope of the state as a monolithic and ever-ascending entity,
whose knowledge brims with power and whose power always knows, is at best an
oversimplification. Too much of the recent scholarly discussion about knowledge
and the state has been haunted by the specter of the panopticon, the Foucauldian
paradigm for the coercive power of post-Enlightenment knowledge. My study
shifts attention instead to the place of the state/knowledge nexus within a larger
dynamic of exchange and substitution. This is neither to reject Michel Foucault’s
art of seeing—including his “insight” into the capacity of particular discourses
to mint subjectivities—nor to embrace the nineteenth century’s other appari-
tion, its public sphere (or “public opinion”) ideology that uncritically trumpeted
its own supposed inclusiveness and rationality. Governments and legislatures cer-
tainly capitalized on their capacity to launch investigations and publish reports.
Nevertheless, the specific political effects of this series of performances were un-
even and inconclusive. For one, chronic gaps existed between the sometimes fan-
tastical and totalizing ambitions of bureaucrats and legislators and the reality of
daily governance. Recall also that the nineteenth-century state was neither the
only receptacle of authority in society nor the sole author of imperious tax-
onomies and categories of knowledge. The relationship between state power and
knowledge is complex and in need of historicization. It is further complicated if
we turn our focus from abstract discourses and their hierarchy-making potentials
to the actual sites and scenes where the state and its constituencies encountered
each other for the ostensible purpose of producing and consuming knowledge.
As this book demonstrates, rather than simply empowering the modern state,
official publications and investigations facilitated unforeseen encounters and
dealings between governments and legislatures and their local interlocutors.
The state could not exercise full mastery over the process of inquiry, the be-
havior of its emissaries as investigators or authors, or the fate of its printed re-
ports once they were issued and promiscuously circulated. The contingent, inter-
personal nature of the exchange between official agents and studied populations
often determined investigative field experiences. While government occasionally
initiated inquiries at the behest of vulnerable communities, in other instances,
commissioners had to contend with acts of resistance such as demonstrations,
boycotts, attempts at counter-investigations, or witnesses who simply chose to
“talk back” rather than to answer questions. Massive social surveys also revealed
confusion over matters of discourse due in part to competition among systems of
measurement and observation; contests that involved different disciplines such
 4 States of Inquiry

as modern physiology and city planning, besides older protocols of deciding facts
that rested on judicial and legislative procedures. Irrespective of discourse, in the
locales of investigation, facts and knowledge proved elusive and occasionally un-
governable. Likewise, official reports were subjected to practices of critical re-
viewing and other elements of modern print culture that constricted the power
of government.
At times, it seemed that the American and British states were not ascending
as much as fumbling through the economy of facts, social and otherwise. Always
costly undertakings, investigations and publications required resources and skills
the state found difficult to muster. Inquiries often revealed friction among bu-
reaus and accentuated the fault lines between the executive and legislative
branches of government. Print culture afforded state officials and legislators the
cultural capital entailed by authorship—sometimes at the expense of the uni-
fied, commanding voice of the state. We still frequently label major govern-
mental and legislative reports after their nominal “authors” rather than the bod-
ies that actually craft them, and the state expresses itself through the voices of
individual officials.
Other questions of voice suffused the nineteenth-century project of policy in-
vestigation as well. In common parlance, having a voice subsumes the difference
between political agency (if only through entitlement to electoral franchise) and
the public articulation of opinion. We conceive of the lack of voice as signifying
endemic oppression. Consequently, Karl Marx’s often quoted assertion that
French peasants “cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” seems
symptomatic of the predisposition, even among nineteenth-century radicals, to
deny the other agency.1 Equating voice and power should not be taken for
granted. In the mid-nineteenth century culture of social inquiry, marginal pop-
ulations did speak and represent themselves rather frequently. The state, in fact,
invited them to make claims about their condition. Yes, government often sought
to commandeer these voices. Public inquiries modified indigenous voices by elic-
iting particular responses. Officials selected and edited self-representations and
on rare occasions even forged them, less by falsifying evidence than by counter-
feiting voice, by speaking for or instead of, by ventriloquizing the other. (Giving
voice to the voiceless—a recurrent refrain in modern historiography—is always
a suspect endeavor.) These investigative ventures were even less benign when
representation—a form of substitution or “standing in”—resulted in complete
occlusion or erasure. For instance, federal efforts to capture and commemorate
indigenous Indian life were integral to the policy of removing and “civilizing”
the Indian. The testimony committed to writing and print is already muffled,
 Introduction 5

“voice”-less. No longer aural and immediate, it becomes merely a simulacrum of

presence. This point however can be carried further, for the state itself was also
somehow left voiceless by official reportage. At the conclusion of the investiga-
tive sequence, when oral exchanges and other types of evidence were translated
into printed reports, not even the mighty state could speak for itself—its voice
had to be modulated and mediated; published documents subsumed the multi-
valent tasks of representation.
This book thus takes as its main topic, and documents in some detail, two fun-
damentals of modern public culture. First are the procedures of investigation,
meaning the set of tactics and performances developed to select the location and
timing of the encounter and then to acquire and authenticate information, par-
ticularly the experience of individual government envoys in the “field” of in-
vestigation and that of their interlocutors. Second is the factual report as a unique
type of text, its authorship, publication, distribution, and uses, which this study
situates within the entire print output of the state and the history of the book.
The full dimensions of the traffic between the state and its public (or publics)
become apparent only if we follow the thread of investigation throughout, to ex-
plore how the publication of reports completed, complemented (or undermined)
the aggregation of knowledge. The rest of this introduction briefly describes the
fields that the new medium of investigations and official reportage, “print sta-
tism,” linked and reconfigured: society, print culture, representation, and the
state.

Society
A panoply of circumstances prompted the early nineteenth-century concern
with “society”: novel methods and locations of production, urbanization, fresh
humanitarian discourses of care as well as new calculi developed to manage the
populace and to restructure government, such as utilitarianism. This engross-
ment with the social domain, still more by way of contemplation than extensive
inquiry and reform, originated in Britain and other European countries during
the concluding decades of the eighteenth century when a need arose for efficient
strategies to mobilize entire populations. Such efforts corresponded to the de-
mands of the new market regime but historically became imperative chiefly un-
der circumstances of war, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In the early
nineteenth-century United States, urbanization, new modes of organizing labor,
migration and immigration, and cycles of economic recessions inspired aware-
ness about the social sphere, or society. As significant were the presence of (and
 6 States of Inquiry

ongoing exposure to) distinct racial groups and, once again, the experience of
war, in this case the Civil War and the social turmoil that befell the country in
its wake.
Society was open to diverse interpretations as an autonomous system, an or-
ganic body, a realm of grouping and affiliation, or, alternatively, a site of great
vulnerability and strife, in need of intervention, assistance, or regimentation. For
the purpose of this discussion, the most important aspect of the newly rearranged
social scene was that distinct social blocks lived completely ignorant of each
other, or so argued some contemporary observers. The social sphere, spatially con-
ceived, had grown thoroughly divided between segments that were known and
familiar and those that were designated hidden. The social enters public con-
sciousness in times of crisis: war, riot, major accident, epidemic, or natural disas-
ter. Otherwise, it is highly factual and endemically elusive, requiring recurrent
explorations and discovery.
Social inquiries were consequently devised to uncover the circumstances or
“condition” of weaker or disenfranchised populations. During the early decades
of the nineteenth century, investigations came to define British political culture
as well as the frantic reform drives in the American Northeast. In Britain, gov-
ernment dispatched commissioners and inspectors to the mills and mines of the
industrializing Midlands and the North, while Parliament and numerous reform
societies, philanthropists, and journalists amassed testimonies and statistical data
on the impoverished. This information fed the grand debate over the social pre-
dicament of Britain, which Thomas Carlyle termed the “condition of England”
question. Cycles of legislation centralized poor relief and inaugurated state reg-
ulation of new industries by restricting child and female labor and imposing
safety and education measures upheld by periodic inspections. These early steps
overlapped with a protracted campaign that was given added impetus in the early
1830s to remake the British polity, its electoral system, local government, and an-
cient institutions such as the military, the Church of England, and the old En-
glish universities.
Critical reforms on a national level corresponded to the sensibilities of a mid-
dle class whose contours were now defined by a new franchise replacing an an-
tiquated mélange of urban voting privileges with a £10 yardstick (1832). This
class shared the investigative perspective according to which the condition of the
poor encompassed moral and physical dimensions. Paid agents of the popular
Statistical Associations, for example, frequented the houses of the poor, counted
the number of rooms and inhabitants (the habit of sharing beds always produced
anxieties about sexual permissiveness), tabulated the possession of books, re-
 Introduction 7

corded the command of skills such as knitting among women and mending fur-
niture among men, and even evaluated the competence of parents to sing a
“cheerful song” to their children. Other organizations dedicated their energies
to more immediate targets, for instance, the suppression of vice and vagrancy.
Such reforms and invasive philanthropy contributed to this new class’s self-
conception. However, the British middle classes did not escape public inspection
either. Reform campaigns and official inquiries targeted factories and mills that
were largely owned by newly arrived entrepreneurs. Proprietors protested what
they considered intolerable intrusions into their private affairs.
The United States had not yet experienced the Industrial Revolution in full.
Nevertheless, Boston, Philadelphia, and especially New York were among the
fastest growing urban centers in the world, contending with tenements, squalor,
prostitution, crime, and abandoned children. Antebellum reformers emphasized
the perfectibility of the individual (a concern manifested, for instance, by tem-
perance and hygiene campaigns), but that goal, of course, always had social di-
mensions as well. Prisons and asylums were sites of experimentation. Observers
from Europe visited the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia and other innova-
tive institutions. A burgeoning literature on penal practices followed the great
controversy brewing around the “silent” versus the “separate” prison systems of
Pennsylvania and New York. State governments, organizations such as the Boston
Discipline Society, and reform crusaders like Dorothea Dix—celebrated as a
“voice for the mad”—published research about incarceration and confinement.
The 1830s heralded a watershed for American reform. The decade witnessed an
unprecedented drive for the abolition of slavery and the proliferation of reform
organizations. One consequence of this ferment was the creation of state-sup-
ported public school systems, beginning with Massachusetts.
The conflict over slavery in the United States shared significant properties
with the debate over the social crisis in Britain. Abolition, with other modes of
early nineteenth-century social investigation, attempted to penetrate isolated, in-
accessible sites—the factory, the prison, the workhouse, the plantation—in an
effort to learn the true situation of their inhabitants. To give one example, the
publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) inspired Fred-
erick Law Olmsted to launch a one-man commission of inquiry into the South’s
social and economic arrangements. With the Civil War and Reconstruction, the
federal state replaced abolitionists in rendering the South an object of numerous
fact-finding enterprises. Another field of social inquiry that was uniquely Amer-
ican addressed the condition of the Indian tribes. Before the Civil War, native na-
tions were the only social group directly cared for by the federal government, per-
 8 States of Inquiry

haps with the minor exception of federal attempts to ensure healthy conditions
aboard immigrant ships. Indian policy, namely, the policy of removal west of the
Mississippi, triggered national controversy that spawned reports and counterre-
ports. The federal government accumulated information about the tribes within
(and sometimes outside) its territorial confines and launched research projects
into Indian culture and history.

Print Statism
Rather than exploring these landmarks of early nineteenth-century social
history in the familiar contexts of reform, policy, history of scientific discourse,
or “government growth,” this book pursues a different tack. Society was con-
ceived to be autonomous but its discovery took place in the public sphere and the
realm of politics. After all, conventions of accumulating and diffusing knowledge
did not necessarily emanate from the social crises they addressed. They were pri-
marily rooted in expanding electorates of voter-readers, the bureaucratization of
public life exemplified in the proverbially gray world of commissions and com-
mittees, the rise of professional authors, and the symbiosis between politics and
printed texts through, for instance, party platforms or (in the United States) party
newspapers. During the first three decades of the century, the last hurdles to uni-
versal white male suffrage in America, usually property requirements, were re-
moved. Research into immigrant neighborhoods or female and child laborers of-
ten targeted those outside the voting citizenry. Inquiries that focused on African
Americans during the Civil War and Reconstruction and Native Americans ad-
dressed the prospects of their inclusion in the polity. In Britain, where the pop-
ulace consisted of subjects rather than citizens, Parliament and the ministry con-
ducted intensive social studies under the penumbra of discord over the expansion
of the electorate, from the early 1830s conflicts over the Reform Bill to the 1840s
threat of violence leveled by the Chartist movement. Particularly in Britain,
early nineteenth-century social inquiries appeared to expand the representative
functions of government beyond the franchise. In the United States, the elec-
torate was proportionally much larger and the gap between voters and nonvoters
even more pronounced.
The history of print and literary culture provides another context for print
statism, especially the growing literacy rates, the burgeoning daily press (the
American penny press furnishes the best example), popular magazines, and the
technological breakthroughs that enabled cheap mass printing and distribution
of documents. The quantity of state publications was soaring at the same time
 Introduction 9

that stereotyping, electrotyping, the steam press, and the rolling press—the most
notable cluster of innovations in print technology since the invention of move-
able type in the fifteenth century—further mechanized the print shop. This
study highlights the contribution of state reports as well as other state-published
ephemera to the culture of print. Social reports have been often studied as plat-
forms for the inculcation of ideas and transmission of information, as vehicles of
policy and propaganda. The medium itself—its physical properties, its aesthetic
signification, and the consequences of its unhampered circulation—has been
overlooked. The entire course of investigation was geared toward the publication
of factual documents. Bureaucrats and lawmakers deeply engaged in the prepa-
ration of reports, their content, design, and production as artifacts and, conse-
quently, allocated immense resources for that goal. The state interjected itself
into the literary marketplace by distributing and even selling documents and by
paying attention to the reading habits of its citizens. In this regard, print capi-
talism often served as a template for the manner in which print statism circu-
lated texts in society.
Government manufactured its papers with an eye to literary genres, as well
as to the formats of review or scholarly journals. They shared with them not just
sensibilities and language but also publishing strategies, such as serialization. Re-
cently, there has been a lively critical interest in the embodiment of social and
political discourses in nineteenth-century literary texts. My analysis contributes
to this discussion by addressing the textual quality of official documents and their
ossification into identifiable, self-referring genres. The textuality of government
itself is highly significant in this regard, not just its susceptibility to multiple in-
terpretations but its public presence in tangible printed documents and the pos-
sibilities it offered for mass reading.
One historical genealogy connects print statism dialectically with the permu-
tations of the eighteenth-century political discourse that demanded government
accountability, open debate, and public scrutiny of the affairs of the state.
Michael Warner recently demonstrated how American colonial print culture sus-
tained an imaginary public sphere whose discursive rules fused citizenship and
democratic action with the reading and writing of printed texts. Print culture
and republicanism became mutually constitutive. The voluntary networks of the
American “republic of letters” or the kind of intellectual milieu of critical dis-
cussion that thrived in late eighteenth-century London—both long gone by the
mid-nineteenth century—left decisive imprints (pun intended) on modern pub-
lic sphere ideologies. Still, we should not regard nineteenth-century state re-
portage merely as an embodiment of the Enlightenment desire for political and
 10 States of Inquiry

social transparency. As we shall see, print statism flourished in a new cultural or-
der and served differently conceived states, publics, authors, and readers. It is nev-
ertheless of some importance that the early Victorian and Early Republic gov-
ernments appropriated and further expanded the function or the posture that had
been initially codified in the previous century to critique the British ancien
regime at home and in the colonies. Public inquiries opened a space for the mod-
ern state’s self-invention and self-reflection, however limited.
Viewed another way, the state’s print output comprised a vast archive, an
archive in print. The archive designation here has literal and figurative conno-
tations: the archive as a comprehensive repository that is classified, catalogued,
and periodically updated; the archive as a body of knowledge the state generates,
aggregates, and sustains; and the archive as a place, a site of registration and re-
trieval or memory. Over the last 150 years, social historians and social commen-
tators have repeatedly visited parliamentary papers. Among the first to do so, Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels scanned this treasure trove for their own purposes. It
remains one of the chief sources for nineteenth-century British historiography.
In some ways, however, the print archive functioned as a counterarchive, for un-
like historical state repositories it was not shielded and kept in a concrete inte-
rior space. Rather, it was exteriorized, reproduced, and circulated for general
commentary. The state could not retain the exclusive power of perusing its own
record, and the print archive could be made to divulge more than one sort of
truth. But even with its celebrated openness and publicity, the state print archive
was sporadically a volatile place, raising suspicions of concealment (if not within
its own confines, then elsewhere, in other, better-guarded state archives) and de-
ception. In addition, its existence raised the problem of consignment: what
should be published and what should remain secret, private, or merely unpub-
lished, and, by implication, whether the state or its officers have a protected
sphere of private writing. The print archive also became symptomatic of the
state’s “inner” truth, betraying its appetite for the printed page, its gluttonous
consumption of paper, its compulsion in creating the archive.
Large-scale research projects did not merely archive but also “made” history.
Major public hearings and other forms of official investigation often amounted
to remarkably visible, dramatic, attention-grabbing events and occasionally en-
gendered momentous (hence, historic) turning points in policy, legislation, and
public perception. This historical movement followed two different trajectories.
While reform was predicated on notions of progress and historical linearity, the
concept of social discovery—at the heart of reform and investigation—entailed
repetition and circularity. The persistent urge to open previously enclosed spaces
 Introduction 11

or other locales of perceived violation and abuse for inspection required (then
and ever since) the recurring identification of old regimes and horrifying
Bastilles. Sequences of discovery and rediscovery have been inscribed into post-
Enlightenment public discourse. It has been therefore one element in the cul-
tural work of social investigations to literally and figuratively write history. At
the same time, they have sustained the ghost of the unreformed order of things.
The print archive was an archive of facts. The following analysis describes sev-
eral techniques employed to verify information and to represent reality (social
and other) on the printed page. In the early decades of the nineteenth century,
facts were expected to be “authentic” rather than “objective.” These concepts
support somewhat different notions of factuality. Objectivity became a predom-
inant quality, as in “objective journalism,” only later in the century. (At the turn
of the twentieth century, the role of “objectivity” in the fields of social knowl-
edge—social work, social science, reform—was in fact contested as it would be
again by the end of the century.) Social observers incessantly employed the ad-
jectival modifier authentic to describe factual matter. In addition, they toiled hard
to convince readers that they were presenting facts in their immaculate form,
precisely as they were uprooted from their original soil—as if smidges of earth
were still hanging from them as a measure of authenticity. Nineteenth-century
social inquiries were formalized in a culture that had already been conditioned
to associate print with the rendering of facts, either in journalism, science, or, as
importantly, the law.
From its inception, modern science was inseparable from the printing press.
This intimacy is evident whether one subscribes to the argument that the inven-
tion and spread of movable type during the Renaissance stabilized scientific in-
tercourse by affording what Elisabeth Eisenstein termed typographical fixity, or
to the more historically textured approach according to which only in the seven-
teenth century and later—when the state regulated the book market and institu-
tions such as the Royal Society established publishing procedures—could a cul-
ture of credit rather than a technology of print guarantee truth in the scientific
text, as Adrian Johns recently contended in The Nature of the Book (1998). Johns’s
view that in order to become a successful author of scientific tracts in the early
modern period one had to be savvy about the machinery, the labor, and the pro-
fessions of print also might be applicable to the world of the Victorian social re-
porter and certainly to the work of the naturalist or western explorer. Nineteenth-
century social inquiries fueled public debates with printed texts of varying sizes
and authority; these were embellished by genres of representation categorized
as facts, among them statistical charts, testimonials, social maps, personal jour-
 12 States of Inquiry

nals, and illustrations. These reports, along with a freer and more vitriolic
press and new types of literary expression, battled and dialogued in an effort
to document social predicaments and, simultaneously, to argue for specific solu-
tions. The production of social facts took place in particular sites—factories,
slums, prisons, the South—each bolstering micro-economies of knowledge, a
textual wealth of journalistic reporting, travel accounts, fiction, and social in-
quiry.
An expansive notion of an economy of knowledge is necessary here. The
commerce of knowledge in society and of social knowledge followed diverse pro-
cedures. On occasion, it hinged on the rules of the marketplace itself, where in-
formation was bartered or sold as a commodity (as books and newspapers are
traded), but information changed hands by other means as well. It could be ob-
tained by authority, deception, appropriation, surveillance, or sheer theft. A few
of these methods might be rather innocuous, for instance, the custom of news-
papers to excerpt each other or to lift passages of government documents with-
out the need for permission. Legislatures and governments (as well as political
parties, especially in the United States) assumed primary roles in the configura-
tion of this new public culture. The state was certainly not the only agent traf-
ficking in social facts or seeking reading constituencies. Indeed, government en-
tered into a few fields of knowledge quite late. Regardless of timing, it always
had to compete with enterprising reform associations or individual philan-
thropists and journalists who churned out countless treatises and annual reports
on the underprivileged. Voluntary public associations, which proliferated after
1830, had at their disposal an impressive publishing apparatus. In the United
States, this means of public education had emerged in previous decades as waves
of revivals, known as the Second Great Awakening, propped up a book-making
infrastructure driven by demand for Bibles and religious tracts.
Nevertheless, by the 1830s, the British state sponsored the most comprehen-
sive social surveys, and in the United States, state and local governments began
to engage in social policy. Many reform causes sought legislation or state spon-
sorship of one kind or another. Reform associations took upon themselves the
task of representing the poor and their circumstances—an assignment that
sooner or later, directly or vicariously, the state itself assumed. Also bear in mind
that the state regulated the circulation of printed matter. One way or another, the
social report always had the state on its horizon and, vice versa, the state had so-
ciety (or policy) on its horizon.
Patterns of investigation and publication in Britain and the United States re-
flected the temper of these representative governments and typified public are-
 Introduction 13

nas nurtured by a series of tense conflicts that were devised as discursive ex-
changes or debates. After the turn of the twentieth century, peppering public de-
liberation with factual matter became an even more essential task for the state
but increasingly was done under the signs of science, information, and expertise.
While one way to evaluate the historical importance of the practices described
in this book might be to regard them as precursors of the modern, knowledge-
laden public sphere, there were significant breaks between the nineteenth-
century and the twenty-first century informational states. In the middle of the
nineteenth century, for example, the production of knowledge was not domi-
nated by a strong, institutionalized, social science. In fact, the difference between
social science proper and the kind of investigative work performed by govern-
ment agencies, presidential task forces, royal commissions, or legislatures en-
dured into the twentieth century. I maintain that state-sponsored social and pol-
icy reportage constitutes a distinctive political-discursive form that predates and
coexists with professional social science. This distinction rests, in part, on the rep-
resentational capacities of official investigations and their affinity with tradi-
tional legislative inquests, the type of inquiries performed by congressional or
parliamentary committees as part of oversight responsibilities. These procedures
are closer to common law methods of determining facts than to the modalities
of modern science. Many official investigations, regardless of subject matter,
adopt courtlike practices in line with parliamentary or congressional traditions.
This study also highlights aspects of public life that became less visible with
the additional systemization of knowledge production but never really disap-
peared, for instance, the modern state’s predilection to enhance its extraparlia-
mentary representational faculties in times of crisis. New Deal documentary
projects of the 1930s spring to mind. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration
sponsored these efforts to depict Depression-stricken social groups and to record
and commemorate authentic regional culture.

Representation
Print statism was central to the new politics of representation. But what is
“representation,” and how is it tied to exchange, communication, and substitu-
tion? At the outset of her classic study The Concept of Representation (1967)
Hanna Pitkin maintains that despite its elusiveness, the concept of representa-
tion in politics and in the arts, “taken generally, means the making present in
some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact . . .
in representation something not literally present is considered as present in a
 14 States of Inquiry

nonliteral sense.”2 Three applications in Pitkin’s typology of representational

functions are especially relevant to our discussion. First, the notion that repre-
sentation is (or should) be descriptive; a person or thing stands for others by be-
ing acceptably like them, and therefore the absent is made present by “resem-
blance or reflection as in a mirror or in art.” In politics, this approach conceives
of the legislature as a miniature version of the people. In the name of achieving
a more precise likeness, its proponents frequently call for proportional represen-
tation. Second is the idea of symbolic representation or representation through
symbols where no resemblance or reflection is required, as in the manner by
which the king or other leaders represent the nation or a flag represents the state.
Both approaches regard representation in terms of “standing for” something
else. Third is the application of representation in the sense of “acting for,” per-
forming duties and functions on behalf of somebody else. This notion fore-
grounds the function of representative bodies in making law or policy for the peo-
ple rather than merely operating as a mouthpiece for the unmediated wishes of
voters. (Pitkin’s classification is pertinent even if, unlike her, we accept that the
process of representation partakes in constituting subjects rather than simply
substituting for them.)
Explicit and implicit aspects of representation were manifest at every stage of
investigation and reportage in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States.
Commissioned individuals who conducted social surveys acted for government as
its delegates—usually equipped with a detailed list of instructions—but in the
field they also stood for the state. They symbolized the state and even attempted
to deliver government messages or to explain its measures and policies to their
local counterparts. Conversely, investigators represented investigated populations
or environments, either by producing accounts that depicted these groups or
places as part of their commission, by taking upon themselves to speak on behalf
of the downtrodden, or, more rarely, by cultivating strong resemblance to the
societies under investigation either as a means to acquire information or because
of a deep-seated identification. In the field (slums, factories, Indian reservations,
the conquered South), investigators were also on the lookout for representative
witnesses. Here too we may recognize diverse modes of representation. First, the
“representative” stood for the typical or average. Her ordinariness could be
vouched for by the randomness of the encounter (as in sampling), or she might
be the composite persona conjured through the power of statistical representa-
tion. Second, inquiries attempted to engage the actual leaders or representatives
of the local population (as in trade union leadership or Indian chiefs). The third
understanding invokes the conception elaborated in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s es-
 Introduction 15

say Representative Men (1850): inspiring models of self-sufficiency, self-making,

heroism, and social climbing, or, the representative man’s double, an individual
who could attest to particularly extreme forms of suffering and deprivation.
A plethora of representational tasks surrounded the official report and its dis-
tribution. Reports described in great minutia the social strata or the institutions
under inspection. State publications in general were also expected to repre-
sent government descriptively (by detailing the course of the investigation) or
symbolically (for instance, in the physical attributes of reports as books). Circu-
lating these tomes, government offices and legislators endeavored to satisfy the
demand for accountability—another dimension of political representation. As
mentioned earlier, the project of social investigation itself was sometimes con-
ceived of in terms that imply virtual representation, giving voice to those other-
wise not politically represented. Recurrent public allegations of misrepresen-
tation were another telltale sign of representational work. On occasion, these
charges were leveled at government accounts. In other instances, the cry of “mis-
representation” prompted formal investigation.
Wide expectations that state-initiated reportage, print statism, would repre-
sent local society became evident when such an endeavor failed to deliver. An ex-
treme example involves the infamous 1847 Commission on Education in Wales.
Its report portrayed Welsh society in derogatory terms and blamed the Welsh lan-
guage in particular for hindering progress. These insults coming from the pens
of English (and Anglican) commissioners and from the printing press of gov-
ernment in London incensed Welsh public opinion. The report became known
as the “treachery of blue books” and lingered in Welsh popular memory as an
atrocious violation, akin to Cromwell’s seventeenth-century massacres in Irish
national imagination. For the purpose of this discussion, the most striking aspect
of this episode is that before the nineteenth century such comparison between
mass slaughter and a slighting official report would not have made much sense.
One of the report’s staunchest critics, Henry Richard, opined in 1868, more than
twenty years after the fact, that the real Welsh nation was comprised of those
who had not been heard by the commission and consequently remained without
a voice.3 The commission thus did not misrecognize or misrepresent the modern
Welsh nation as much as inadvertently call it into being.
These and other intertwined and multivalent representational tasks, accents,
expectations, and ambitions were greatly shaped by the strong involvement of
representative legislatures in unleashing investigations or supervising the publi-
cation of official documents. It is also of some importance that a few of the most
influential political thinkers of the period conceived of democracy in terms of
 16 States of Inquiry

descriptive representation. Writers required that the legislature be a mirror of

the nation, that it reflect the people, the state of public consciousness, or the
transformation of social and economical forces in the nation. In John Stuart
Mill’s view, in addition to watching and controlling the government, Parliament
is also the state’s “Congress of Opinion, an arena in which not only the general
opinion of the nation, but that of every section of it, and as far as possible of every
eminent individual whom it contains, can produce itself in full light and chal-
lenge discussion; where every person in the country may count upon finding
somebody who speaks his mind.”4 Other visions about the mirroring function of
government were articulated in the United States. For instance, John Adams ar-
gued that a legislative body ought to be “an exact portrait, in miniature, of the
people at large, as it should think, feel, reason and act like them.”5 The essence
of proportional representation (which was not the principle of representation in
the two polities) is the idea of being present through one’s voice.
Regardless of specific theories of representation or the particularities of na-
tional institutions, the representative work of representative regimes (and argu-
ably of other regimes as well) should be recognized to be multifaceted and histor-
ically contingent. The politics of representation described in this book collapses
the difference between political and aesthetic representation. Curiously, the term
representation itself rarely surfaced in nineteenth-century discourse in conjunc-
tion with the state’s informational mission. How might we account for this ab-
sence? One point to consider is contemporary public sphere ideology and its
tendency to emphasize presence. The key concept of “public opinion” served to
efface political mediation, to fill the gap between the public and its substitutes—
elected representatives—by supposedly endowing all citizens of an opinion-
based polity with a voice in national decision making. Likewise, the analogy that
was sometimes established in Britain between official social investigations and
the summoning of the entire public to partake in parliamentary-style grand de-
bate sidestepped the difference between representative and direct democracies.
In this spirit, government reports were crafted to be transparent to both the
field of inquiry and to the process of political decision making. The claim of
transparency was buttressed by the employment of various representational
techniques, including novel ones like high-quality lithography and, later, pho-
tography. Authenticity of facts denotes presence, while the notion of objectiv-
ity—usually associated with the ethos that guides the institutions and individu-
als that present those facts—acknowledges mediation. (Similarly, the mirror
metaphor itself indicates presence rather than mediation or representation.) This
ambivalence about political representation was not necessarily propelled by a
 Introduction 17

strong democratic impulse. In fact, it often typified great concerns about electoral
politics and majoritarianism. Early Victorian Britain grappled with unrest over
the Chartist demand for universal suffrage. Antebellum reformers in the United
States often grumbled about the excess of Jacksonian politics and its leveling
effects. By the 1850s, many reformers held the rowdy, conspicuously corrupt,
party politics in utter contempt. Social reportage was therefore sometimes a way
to supplant electoral politics rather than merely supplement it.
Investigative activities and publications intermediated between government
and the citizenry (understood as the reading public) but also between the “cen-
ter” and the “periphery,” between the state, expansively understood, and un-
known or remote regions and people—making present what was, or appeared to
be, absent—government and the nation’s extremities. Mediation operated in a
polity that appeared more cohesive (or even more democratic), while society, pro-
gressively shaped by the marketplace, became more differentiated and frag-
mented. Through the range of printed matter it offered the public, the state an-
ticipated the reading subject to be a citizen—voter, lawmaker, or participant in
national conversation—but also an actor in the marketplace, further bridging
the gap between itself and “civil society.” Ultimately, the state performances de-
scribed here constituted only one form of communication in modernizing soci-
eties in which communication in general became increasingly mediated.
The new communicative field was replete with ambiguities. First, the state
assumed contradictory positions as both subject and object of representation and
investigation. Its dual role as a social reporter and a topic of reporting became
at times a double-mirror entrapment. The investigated populations were also
caught in seemingly opposing positions as subjects and objects. Social investiga-
tions in both countries questioned the subjectivity of the dependent population,
their autonomy as individuals, their ability to make decisions, to sustain them-
selves in the market, to render an opinion, to be citizens. But specific investiga-
tive procedures often presupposed or even ensured this subjectivity. Thus, for in-
stance, the U.S. Civil War investigation (see chapter 6), which looked into
whether the newly emancipated freedmen could be full members in society and
the polity, already guaranteed in a way their political subjectivity by allowing
slaves and former slaves to give full public testimony, hitherto forbidden to them.
Similarly, the project of social investigation in Britain (state-sponsored and oth-
erwise) worked through the friction between the panoptic desire to forge or re-
form subjects according to middle-class models, and foundational middle-class
assumptions about the autonomy of the subject or the notion of noninterference
that guided the marketplace, where subjectivity was a priori assumed. Racial dif-
 18 States of Inquiry

ferences in the United States complicated both the wish to make the other and
assumptions about his or her market suitability.
Beyond (and sometimes, instead of) the subjectivity of individuals, nineteenth-
century social investigations recognized and even reinforced the collectivity of
social groups. This was a collateral of the inquiry’s representational work mani-
fested in efforts to classify communities or to create typical or comprehensive de-
scriptions of conditions and views. The drive to incorporate indigenous organi-
zations and leaders into the investigations also acknowledged the group as a
group. The representation of populations, regions, and communities in social re-
ports paralleled the function of constituencies in electoral politics. As political
theorist Melissa Williams observes, regardless of the current emphasis on the
principle of one-man-one-vote (a relatively recent phenomenon), historically,
doctrines of representation have been based on assumptions concerning groups
and, therefore, “in most senses in which we use the term, political representation
means the representation of a constituency, an aggregation or collection of citi-
zens.”6 A third realm of ambiguities involved the very ambition to make the ab-
sent present. The project of social research was attached to the notion of discov-
ery, of making known, present, or visible (as in bringing light to) previously
hidden or suppressed social realities. As we shall see, common techniques of in-
vestigation and reporting militated against this sensibility by estranging or oth-
ering the field of inquiry and consequently sustaining it at some distance.
Notwithstanding its expansionist tendencies, the state enjoyed great author-
ity but had limited power over this medium of mediation and exchange. It was
ensnared, as much as its citizens and dependents, by these efforts at representa-
tion (i.e., rendered a subject and questioned as a subject). Many of the investiga-
tive projects and publication schemes described in this book resulted in failure or
at least fell victim to the law of unintended consequences. There was much that
was unpredicted, unplanned, and out of control in the state’s accumulation and
distribution of knowledge, projects that were often governed more by the polit-
ical/bureaucratic unconscious than by well-articulated policies. To give an ex-
ample, because of its new task as a social researcher and its decision to sell its offi-
cial documents in the open market—the British state confronted in the late 1830s
a liable suit (Stockdale v. Hansard) instigated by a casual remark made in a “blue
book” on the condition of Newgate prison. The suit pitted Parliament against
the courts, threatening a constitutional crisis. In the wake of this episode, the
state was forced to reposition itself with respect to what Roger Chartier labels the
“order of books,” the legal/cultural system that governs the making, selling, and
reading of books and prescribes, among other things, the range of rights and li-
 Introduction 19

abilities that are associated with authorship. Parliament had to reassert by law
its speaking and publishing privileges.

Structure
The comparative component of this book serves as a form of organization and
interpretation. It points to developments that exceeded national particularities,
and yet the two cases are presented in some detail to avoid losing local flavor as
well as the contingencies and intermittencies that are essential features of the
historical record. The material is not forced into unbending variables, however.
Exhibiting the American and the British experiences side by side allows them to
serve as each other’s context or frame. Thus, for example, the concurrence of the
U.S. case highlights the conspicuous nation-building, or even patriotic aspects
that were somewhat muffled in the British project of domestic social exploration.
(The fissures described in this project were clearer in the British domestic sphere
than in the colonial context. Royal commissions worked in the empire, but the
national focus in the 1830s and the 1840s was much closer to home.) At the same
time, the British state’s systematic role in documenting society assists us in find-
ing greater coherence within otherwise seemingly disparate projects on the
American scene. In the realm of similitude, the comparison demonstrates, for in-
stance, the unsurpassable importance of legislatures in shaping public culture in
self-described democracies. In the contemporary scholarly focus on state forma-
tion, bureaucracies take center stage while the continuing effects of parliamen-
tary or congressional culture often go unnoticed.
Although unequal in their size and reach, the British and American govern-
ments were rather weak relative to state institutions in continental Europe. Nei-
ther nation had a very large or strong bureaucracy or any other organization that
could generate widely acceptable knowledge about society. There were, however,
important differences between the objects of inquiry and between the manners
in which government documents traveled in the two nations, a dissimilitude that
yields insights into divergent systems of power. The British government offered
its papers for sale and thus, inadvertently, limited their actual circulation, rely-
ing on the press to disperse much of the information included in blue books and
other such products. In the United States, for much of the period, the distribu-
tion of official documents was integrated into the relationships between law-
makers and their constituents. Massive numbers of officially published books and
reports were sent gratis directly to voters.
The comparative approach is an analytical tool as well as a feature of the his-
 20 States of Inquiry

torical narrative. Social knowledge in the nineteenth century was garnered and
generated in comparative contexts. Comparing groups, institutions, regions, and
countries was a common strategy for gauging and categorizing social phenom-
ena. The comparative style rhetorically placed public issues within particular
frames of reference and sometimes borrowed from the vocabularies of other so-
cieties, for example, the notion that the American racial hierarchy was akin to
the caste system in India. There was a lively interchange of reports and social ex-
plorers between the United States and Britain in addition to other strong profes-
sional and personal ties, especially between the coterie of Boston reformers and
their British counterparts. In the fields of print and publication, the British Par-
liament and the U.S. Congress were not merely aware of each other’s contribu-
tions but, in an ironic twist, took each other as role models.

Since print culture undergirded the new politics of representation, the first
part of the book focuses on the operation of governments as publishers. Here so-
cial reports are discussed among remarkably diverse print products. Chapter 1 ex-
plores Parliament’s enormous publishing output on the social arena as well as on
trade, law, administration, and other aspects of British public life. The chapter
follows efforts made at the beginning of the nineteenth century to overhaul and
rationalize the British knowledge policy and the subsequent schemes proposed
to find readers for official papers. Chapter 2 analyzes large-scale publishing proj-
ects supported by the U.S. Congress and congressional disputes concerning the
state’s informational mission. Chapter 3 examines the publication of expedition
accounts during the 1840s and 1850s. Through a discussion of select case studies,
I show the development of a particular sense of authorship among government
officials, the emergence of generic rules in western reporting, and finally (using
a collection of close to a thousand applications for volumes of the 1850s Pacific
Railroad expeditions) the great public desire to acquire or even collect state doc-
uments. All three chapters engage the relationship between governments, au-
thors, and readers.
The second and third parts of the book examine more closely the work of so-
cial investigators in the field and at their writing desks. Chapter 4 focuses on a
uniquely British institution, the royal commission of inquiry, and its relation to
other types of official probes, namely, the workings of inspectorates, which were
established to supervise new laws regarding poor relief, child labor, and mine
safety, as well as parliamentary investigations conducted by select committees.
The chapter delineates the course of action taken by a host of commissions, in
particular the exertions of petty officials who populated the lower rungs of the
 Introduction 21

new bodies. It describes the techniques devised to elicit cooperation, and the com-
plicity or resistance exhibited by the lower classes, the object of official attention.
Investigative practices offered the investigated communities numerous possibil-
ities of mimicry and parody, but investigators could also use imitation or imper-
sonation to obtain or to authenticate information. Field investigators in both
countries occasionally assumed a precarious position as mediators between the
scenes of social malady (or remote peoples and lands) and respectable society.
Chapter 5 considers the making and the diffusion of the literary products of
British officials, their “bureaucratic poetics.” It follows the process of crafting
official reports, including the interaction among officials/writers of what were
in effect multiauthored documents. Whereas chapter 2 scrutinizes the state’s pre-
occupation with readers and reading, this discussion details strategies exploited
by readers to intercept and appropriate official publications. Here, as in the pre-
vious chapter, I examine in what ways the investigation as a practice and the re-
port as a text functioned to incorporate the investigated population into society,
and under what terms.
Chapter 6 focuses on a single case study of social investigation. The American
Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission was a three-man board appointed in March
1863 by the Secretary of War to explore the condition of and future policy to-
ward former slaves. The Freedmen’s Commission traveled to the South and
Canada to examine in different settings the “aptitude” and wish of former slaves
to live under freedom. A profound ambiguity concerning the status of these
freedmen as either racial others or products of slavery (the free market’s other)
dominated, in fact, overwhelmed the commission’s work. This chapter describes
these and other conceptual and practical conundrums that emanated from the
decision to define the freedmen question as a problem of knowledge under offi-
cial state investigation. My case study exemplifies the tension between govern-
ment’s desire to master social knowledge and knowledge’s endemic ungovern-
mentability.
The third part of the book explores a few 1840s and 1850s studies of Ameri-
can Indian tribes, research that was conducted during a time of great public dis-
pute over the federal removal policy, the future of the native peoples, and even
the status of the aboriginal as fully human. Chapter 7 examines Henry Rowe
Schoolcraft’s two state-sponsored projects, first his study of the Iroquois nations
on behalf of the state of New York, a survey that coupled a census with ethno-
graphical work, and second, his mammoth work for Congress on the Indian tribes
of America. Schoolcraft’s work demonstrates how the preservation and repre-
sentation of aboriginal culture turned into a state mission, justified either as a
 22 States of Inquiry

duty for the Indian or as an effort to create a new American identity. Chapter 8
analyzes Lewis Henry Morgan’s own pioneering research of the Iroquois, some
of which he conducted under the auspices of New York State. The chapter fol-
lows Morgan’s membership in the New League of the Iroquois—a group of
young professionals who “played Indians” as a pastime—to explore the rela-
tionship between racial masquerade and social investigation.
As for the period selected, the origins of the investigative routines described
here may be traced to the end of the eighteenth century, if not earlier. Never-
theless, during the 1830s this new political culture received its fullest expression
following the Reform Act in Britain and the emergence of the two-party system
in the United States. This study focuses on the middle decades of the century
through the late 1850s in Britain and the early 1870s in the United States. The
concluding third of the nineteenth century was characterized by increased focus
on the results of industrialization and labor disputes (in the United States) and
the colonial world (in Britain), a succession of political reforms in Britain (with
additional expansions of the national electorate in 1867 and 1884– 85), and a
more controlled production and growing transmission of information with the
rise of expert institutions.
This book is based on archival research and draws upon current theoretical
debates over knowledge, print culture, and the state, as well as over the nature
and the history of the “public sphere.” In addition to state reports and other
official papers, sources include private and official correspondence, unpublished
papers of governmental departments or congressional committees, records of
congressional and parliamentary debates, and review magazines (or daily news-
papers) where many reports were excerpted and critiqued. Some informational
projects are not included in this study; arguably, the most important are the am-
bitious national censuses both governments conducted. This topic has already re-
ceived ample scholarly attention. Furthermore, the census seems closer in nature
to conventional forms of representational politics rather than the politics of rep-
resentation described in this book. The census came into being as a device to or-
ganize and maintain the electoral system. This was certainly the case in the
United States, which inaugurated its national census in 1790, a decade before
Britain. Heads were counted in order to outline electoral districts, and although
not every individual enumerated was entitled to vote (e.g., women, minors, and
particular minorities), they were, through some means, represented in national
institutions. The census and social investigations therefore involve somewhat
different elicitation of voice. Census enumeration is conducted under conditions
of anonymity. The identity of individuals is kept from public view and is largely
 Introduction 23

irrelevant to the purposes of this undertaking, but the census leads to the ex-
pression of the aggregate political voice of the nation through the ballot. Both
modern techniques of voting and the census schedule are linked to periodicity,
anonymity, and result in “bounded totals.”7 In contrast, in public investigations
where the inquiry itself was expected to produce representations, voice and rep-
resentation collided.
A word about terminology: this study calls attention to the institutional di-
versity of the state, especially the division between the legislative and the exec-
utive branches. In most cases, I circumvent the confusion inherent in the concept
of government that connotes either the executive branch or a comprehensive po-
litical system, which includes the executive branch, by assigning the term gov-
ernment to the administration in the United States or to the “ministry” in
Britain.
This page intentionally left blank
 pa rt i

monuments in print
The State as a Publisher

The first report of the Royal Commission on the Employment of Chil-

dren (1842) prompted outrage. Its depiction of child labor cruelties in
mines and collieries shocked Britain. In the United States, John Charles
Frémont’s accounts on his first two expeditions to the Rocky Mountains
and to California (1842–44) dazzled the public mind and heralded the
age of the “Great Reconnaissance.” Free of copyright restrictions, the
two documents were reprinted by private publishers looking for a quick
profit and then circulated in more than ten thousand copies each. Emi-
grants riding on the trails to the American West had copies of Frémont’s
reports in their wagons. In Britain, the Employment of Children re-
port—probably the most widely read document of its kind—created a
sensation, in part because it featured illustrations of half-naked females
laboring in dire conditions. As alarming, the document alleged that work
encouraged promiscuity and illegitimacy among women, rendering them
dangerously unfit for their domestic duties as wives and mothers.
Social investigations and expeditions had much in common, and their
similarities did not escape contemporaries. Edwin Chadwick, the famous
Victorian reformer, saw in the mines investigation the unearthing of pre-
viously unknown human tribes in remote lands. In the Quarterly Review,
he enthused that “modes of existence” were revealed to the reading pub-
lic “as strange and as new as the wildest dreams of fiction.”1 But these dis-
tinct enterprises on opposite sides of the Atlantic—western expeditions
and social investigations—were even more alike than most Victorian ob-
servers realized, and shared much beyond the affinity between natural
history and the nascent social sciences. Both projects featured central gov-
ernments dispatching commissioned investigators to visit lesser-known
locales. Both supposedly deployed modern tools with which to devise pol-
 26 Monuments in Print

icy but were actually driven by comparable and rather straightforward po-
litical purposes. Through investigation of the employment of children
and similar inquiries, the British state defined social problems and spe-
cific groups of people as under its national jurisdiction. Extension of a
somewhat different kind propelled Frémont’s expeditions. The U.S. gov-
ernment endeavored to study and consequently to Americanize the West,
its rocks, mountains, and native peoples. Frémont’s explorations were in
fact a ploy of the Democratic Party led by Frémont’s father-in-law, Sen-
ator Thomas Hart Benton from Missouri, to justify further expansion an-
chored in “manifest destiny.” In Britain, a Tory member of parliament,
Lord Ashley (later, the Seventh Earl Shaftesbury), initiated the mines in-
quiry not so much to accumulate new information as to promote the short
workday by restricting child labor in industries not covered by previous
factory legislation.
Both projects were invested in concurrently discovering and estrang-
ing their respective subject matters, rendering them familiar, almost
tangible, and at the same time removed and in need of representation.
They correspondingly betrayed a sensibility of being on the edge of
something formidable. In one of the best-known passages of his first ex-
pedition narrative, Frémont described himself standing next to an Amer-
ican flag he had just hoisted on what he mistakenly thought to be the
tallest summit in the Rockies. There, he contemplated the sublime while
peering over the majestic yet terrifying abyss. The silence was inter-
rupted only by a single bumblebee, which was duly captured and put into
a book otherwise used to dry botanic specimens.2 The British royal com-
missioners crawled in damp tunnels deep into the belly of the earth, risk-
ing their own health, gathering chilling stories of little children labor-
ing alone in the abiding darkness of narrow mine shafts. These reports
also shared a style that coupled scientific measurements (meteorology,
botany, zoology, and geology in one case; pediatric medicine, morphol-
ogy, and geology, in the other) with anecdotal, on-the-spot experiences of
investigators retold in the languages of marvel, terror, and disbelief. Sta-
tistics and spectacle worked side by side in these texts. The British report
contained unprecedented illustrations of mining procedures and child
laborers. Frémont’s accounts featured engravings of novel landscapes and
of fossils, plants, and animals. Although Frémont’s main narrative pro-
ceeded chronologically, while the mine report was edited thematically,
the two documents recorded a continuum of men and environment:
 Monuments in Print 27

John C. Frémont plants the American flag on top of the Rockies during his 1842 expedition. This
heroic rendition of an episode documented in his enormously popular official report appeared in
an 1856 campaign biography of Frémont by John Bigelow. That year the soldier-explorer became
the nascent Republican Party’s first presidential candidate.

miners’ bodies deformed by life in the pit, and people hardened by life
in the West. The latter featured Frémont’s colorful entourage, most no-
tably that paradigmatic Rocky Mountain rough Christopher “Kit” Car-
son (another “discovery” of Frémont’s expeditions) as well as indigenous
peoples.
For our discussion, the most significant aspect of these two ventures is
that both yielded documents produced by officials assuming the mantle
 28 Monuments in Print

of authorship and by states that sponsored protracted publishing pro-

cesses. The publication of official documents became part of governance
in the nineteenth-century United States and Britain. Publication consti-
tuted an arena of action in which the state could demonstrate its might
or, alternatively, as we shall see, expose its incompetence. Reporting pro-
tocols were essential to the dynamics of commissioning. They completed
the field execution of investigation or exploration. Nonetheless, there
was never a simple linearity between government actions and the vol-
ume or design of its publications. In Britain, the proliferation of blue
books certainly exemplified legislative activism and the collateral short
bursts of bureaucratic growth. But even there, debates over the publica-
tion of official reports displayed a panoply of views concerning the role
of the state in the market of information, expectations that exceeded the
simple task of official reportage. The comparison between the two na-
tional cases further accentuates the point. Despite its steadily growing
tasks the federal apparatus remained, until the Civil War and beyond,
small and largely nonintrusive in matters of social policy. Yet, the U.S.
government invested in lavish publishing projects incommensurable
with its size and scope. Compared with Parliament’s dreary and cheaply
bound blue books, some of the great exploration reports were excep-
tionally well-crafted volumes featuring dozens of vividly colored litho-
graphs and woodcuts beside expedition narratives, statistics, and scien-
tific monographs. (In the United States, the term blue book was reserved
for registers of government officials.)

The first part of this book explores the intersection of print culture
and political culture. The British state (in the early modern period, pre-
dominantly the crown) had been involved with printing ever since Cax-
ton set up his press at Westminster in 1476. By the end of the eighteenth
century, government sponsored extensive legislation that regulated the
work of printers as well as stationers, booksellers, and authors. In the early
modern period, the British state maintained as its prerogative the right
to issue authorized translations of the Bible, Acts of Parliament, the Book
of Common Prayer, almanacs, and more—all profitable workhorses of
the book industry that were dispensed by patents and grants to a Byzan-
tine universe of privileged printers. In antebellum America, public print-
ing also became a notorious domain of political patronage. Our discus-
sion, however, presents the state in a new role, not merely as a dispenser
 Monuments in Print 29

of printing assignments or a regulator of print culture but as an actual

publisher responsible for much of the document’s life cycle: production,
including printing, binding, and sometimes embossing, engraving, and
lithographing; promotion; and circulation. The British and American
states published printed documents that were often packaged as books
and peddled as news or information, in line with other vehicles such as
newspapers, magazines, and political pamphlets.
The state’s reinvigorated presence in the arena of books and infor-
mation was in part due to the entrepreneurial spirit of government offi-
cials. But the production itself was largely controlled by the legislature
at least until late in the century. Blue books occupied a niche in the vast
array of parliamentary documents, and Congress initiated and super-
vised most federal publications. This is particularly important since in
the two countries the labor of the legislature (floor debates as well as
committee work) molded public discourse in terms of content and modes
of conversation. Communicating details about, and arguing over, parlia-
mentary exchange constituted a key element of the print-based public
sphere in Britain. The press assumed much of this task and habitually
used state publications as its source. In the United States, a wide diffu-
sion of political information, including news about congressional debates,
relied on the privileges Congress conferred on newspapers, supplemented
(in the early decades of the century) by circular letters congressmen sent
back to their home districts.
The vast distribution of Frémont’s and the Employment of Children’s
reports beyond a small group of decision makers served strong evangel-
ical (rather than merely utilitarian) agendas, whether the aim was to draw
public attention to the grandeur and promise of the soon-to-be-conquered
territories or to the misery of mine work. Circulation of official reports
had other objectives as well. In the case of explorations, the conventions
of science required publication. Moreover, the printed document, or its
consumption, simulated or reproduced the act of discovery itself. Whereas
Chadwick compared the effect of factual reports to the power of fiction,
Senator Benton made an analogy between the explorer and the reader.
In yet another rendition of the archaic “book of nature” metaphor, he
wrote that Frémont was anxious to investigate the large terrain between
Salt Lake and the Sierra; it was “a sealed book, which he longed to open
and read.”3
A few congressional publishing projects had explicit patriotic ratio-
 30 Monuments in Print

nales. These included the “founding fathers’” papers and, by the late
1840s, reports of explorations of western routes, nature, and peoples. Na-
tional aspirations underlay the desire to record and to appropriate Indian
culture as an expression of a distinct American identity. Such motivation
was paramount in congressional support for Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s
six volumes on the Indian tribes of America (1851–57) or, to give another
example, in the particular details of the American flag that Frémont em-
ployed in the Rockies, which featured at the center of its circle of stars
an Indian peace pipe. Britain seemed keener on building the state than
defining the nation. But the latter task was implicit, ostensibly an effect
rather than a driving force in investigative enterprises, and always ap-
peared in some equilibrium with the meticulous effort to contemplate
and register the social sphere. In comparison with congressional print
products, parliamentary papers were more uniformly executed albeit less
elaborate documents. Still, in their enormous size and scope these publi-
cations provided a medium of representation as monumental as the fa-
mously ostentatious congressional publishing enterprises.
We should also keep in mind that by the nineteenth century print cul-
ture was inextricably tied to national cultures. In the eighteenth century,
culture emerged as a connecting tissue between the state and its citizens.
The idea of an indigenous literature rooted in national languages epito-
mized this function. By the mid-nineteenth century, the state itself be-
came a cultural force, producing official literature that, in turn, shaped
genres of fiction and nonfiction. One example was the affinities between
characters and plots that appeared in official blue books and in Victorian
novels, especially the genre of the industrial novel, which documented
the social upheaval brought about by the new industrial regime. About
the now largely forgotten author Charles Reade, it was said rather dis-
missively that his great gift was to convert parliamentary reports into
works of fiction. “No man but he can make a blue-book live and yet, be
a blue-book still.”4 Subgenres of print statism thus resonated particularly
well with recognizable discourses of national expressions: social novels
and political economy in Britain, and the frontier novel and later the
“western” in the United States. Similarly, Schoolcraft’s Indian project in-
spired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s enormously popular The Song of
Hiawatha (1855), while bits of Charles Wilkes’s Narrative of the United
States Exploring Expedition (1844) found their way into Herman Mel-
ville’s Moby Dick, or, The Whale (1851). It was not a coincidence that the
 Monuments in Print 31

federal government’s accelerated production of books and reports oc-

curred during the mid-1840s through the late 1850s, which historian Wil-
liam Charvart labeled “America’s first great literary boom.”5
The steady outpouring of state-originated documentary reports could
bolster or configure national sentiment, either by their content, their ma-
teriality, or by the virtue of their repetition. This is analogous to the im-
plicit distinction in Benedict Anderson’s analysis in Imagined Communi-
ties between the imaginary function directly tied to the discursive
particularity of a text, an institution, or a ritual—a specific novel, for in-
stance—and the imaginary work performed by the regularity or repeti-
tiveness of publishing a text or performing a ritual. The paradigm for
the latter is the newspaper, which fosters a community of readers by fa-
cilitating an affiliation that is renewed each and every day in a manner
independent of the content of the paper—but not independent of the
boundaries of its circulation, language, format, and readership. Fré-
mont’s report could thus partake in nation building through the cele-
bration of specific views about the American empire in an official report
published concurrently by the House of Representative and the Senate
and dispatched from the national Capitol to constituents across the land.
In addition, it inaugurated a long chain of similar efforts to explore and
report the West in what became a defining project for the national gov-
ernment.
The imaginary work of the state’s official print output, however, was
polyvalent rather than merely propping up a unified nation as a site of
identification. Ironically, making the American West an object of impe-
rial desire awakened sectional rather than national sentiments and ex-
pedited the disintegration of the Union. The census, which Anderson
regards as emblematic of national self-imagination for its claims to
represent the nation as a whole and as one, also fueled the sectional con-
flict between North and South (especially the controversial 1840 census).
Moreover, can anyone claim that the enumeration of African American
slaves according to the infamous three-fourths formula could possibly se-
cure them a place in the American national consciousness? In Britain, the
documentation of society did not obscure but accentuated and normal-
ized class differences and class hierarchies. In both countries, production
of official reports was symptomatic of an increasingly segmented and
belligerent political arena. Perhaps, therefore, the community that print
statism helped cement was that of its reading public, or the “public
 32 Monuments in Print

sphere” itself, which was now nationalized to a degree (but otherwise

comprised of multiple communities or publics) and yet was neither a na-
tional “imagined community” of the kind theorized by Anderson, nor
the classical bourgeois public sphere depicted by Jürgen Habermas. Dis-
pensing information was also entangled with strong didacticism, which
nineteenth-century governments embraced. In the United States, the
pedagogical drive paralleled the emergence of the public school system,
also supported by the states. In Britain, the notion of instructing the pop-
ulace had a stronger paternalistic timbre, separating those who could
partake in the national decision-making process, including the franchise,
from those who were deemed deficient in this regard. In both countries,
the complexity of issues that modern legislatures faced necessitated tu-
toring their members about topics such as the advanced machinery of
production in cotton mills or the techniques of building railroads in the
West.
The British and American states paid incessant tributes to the infor-
mative value of their publications, whether the knowledge released was
expected to guide the decision-making process in the national legislature
or the choices individual citizens had to make in the marketplace. But
the modern concept of information was new to mid-nineteenth-century
public discourse. What is information? How should we understand its as-
sociation with print culture? (Turn of the twenty-first century anxieties
over the demise of print culture in the digital bowels of cyberspace ap-
pear to invest these questions with novel poignancy.) The linguist
Geoffrey Nunberg recently pointed to the role of the state in what he oth-
erwise calls the “phenomenology of information.” Nunberg’s critique of
information emphasizes its historicity and, as significantly, its material-
ity. Information is an impression, an effect that is experienced at the
confluence of a routinized form such as the page of a newspaper, its rec-
ognizable authoring institutions (e.g., the New York Times), and other en-
coded daily practices like buying or subscribing to a newspaper. “The ma-
terial properties of information, then—its morselization, its uniformity,
its quantifiability—are the reifications material properties of the docu-
ments that inscribe it—their layout, their boundedness, the collective
presence that establishes them as fixed places. By contrast the semantic
properties that we ascribe to information—its objectivity and auton-
omy—are the reflexes of the institutions and practices that surround the
use of these documents.”6
 Monuments in Print 33

Institutions and artifacts such as libraries, museums, daily newspa-

pers, and card catalogues impose a specific matrix of registration on their
content and concurrently strive for self-effacement. One aspect in the cre-
ation of such informational genres was therefore the suppression of ex-
plicit authorship in the document (and the suppression of the subject in
the language of the document) and its subsequent replacement with in-
stitutional or phenomenal authorship. Many of the informational gen-
res recognizable to us today appeared or were radically refashioned in the
nineteenth century. Debates over official production and diffusion of doc-
uments alluded to information as a guiding principle, although the word
information was employed at times in its old sense, to denote education,
instruction, or bildung rather than in the ethereal, objective, and ubiq-
uitous sense of the late-twentieth-century, fully blossomed “age of in-
formation.” Nevertheless, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the
concept of information in its modern use became a feature of public dis-
course.
The modern state indeed purposefully created important apparatuses
to provide mass, uniform, transparent, and authorless facts. Most of the
state’s textual output, however, could not generate corresponding mate-
rial and semantic properties to enable bodiless “information” as charac-
terized by Nunberg. For one, in numerous documents knowledge was
not and could not be arranged in any morselized, uniform, and easily ac-
cessible template (for instance, long transcripts of interviews). The
form/authority nexus fell apart for other reasons as well. The material-
ity of public documents never ceased to attract notice. Likewise, govern-
ment sponsorship of texts could never fully suppress either a personal au-
thorship in the document or overt subjective language in the text. In this
point the two national cases differ somewhat. The production of knowl-
edge in blue books assumed the consistency of a standardized state proj-
ect. By contrast, U.S. institutional authorship was weaker and the in-
dividuality of authors more pronounced. Observers in both counties
contended that individuals exploited the power of the state to fulfill their
personal ambitions. At certain moments, the state appeared to dissolve
into the subjectivity of office holders and lawmakers, who simply could
not resist the opportunity to be authors.
These and other dissonances and cracks in the state’s informational
performances occupy the following discussion. Such disjunctures demon-
strate that the state’s informational duties were often overwhelmed by its
 34 Monuments in Print

representational ambitions; in other words, the commitment to provide

usable, accessible, and governable knowledge often proved incompatible
with the state’s desire to represent the populace or the national space, as
well as with the penchant of national institutions and public officials to
sustain vast public archives in print. As the next three chapters demon-
strate, the value and utility of government-made knowledge as informa-
tion and the separate question of the merit of official publications as books
were persistently at issue in Britain and the United States. Early on and
before the actual onset of the age of information, there was a lingering
impression that state-sponsored knowledge was multiplying at a Malthu-
sian pace, threatening to deluge its consumers. In both countries, official
printing was deemed excessive in terms that foreshadowed twentieth-
century fears about information explosion.
The problematic of double authorship—one associated with corpo-
rate institutions and the other attached to individual subjects—unfolded
somewhat differently in distinct branches of government. Individual
lawmakers wrote and signed documents (and famously lent their names
to reports and pieces of legislation), but as the two episodes with which
we began this introduction exemplify, the state official, whether a royal
commissioner, inspector, or an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, had
a particular claim to authorship that was closer to the emerging nineteenth-
century market understanding of this construct, albeit not similarly pro-
tected by law. The state official frequently wrote about his tasks and per-
formance and, by implication, about himself. The degree of independence
he enjoyed in the field, where the power of the central government was
not entrenched, translated into a measure of autonomy he exercised in
crafting a document. Furthermore, the power of the field investigator as
an author seemed to parallel his authority as an intermediary between so-
ciety and its margins.
Authorship as a social, political, and historical construct is among the
insights my analysis borrows from the rich scholarship on the history and
sociology of the book. The following discussion is also attentive to addi-
tional methods and emphases that guide contemporary studies of print
culture: first, an awareness of the tangible dimensions of printed texts and
how physical attributes generate and occlude meaning (sometimes in cor-
respondence with, in other times in opposition to, the range of meanings
that flow from the contents of texts); second, a holistic view of print cul-
ture that situates books within circuits of transmission in which authors
 Monuments in Print 35

and readers occupy various links in larger networks of production and

consumption; third, a nuanced approach to the practices of actualizing
texts (including the rituals and sites of reading) as well as other uses to
which books are put, including collecting, recycling, and discarding.
As a subgenre in the history of the book, the report merits extended
commentary here. Despite the indiscriminate application of the label re-
port to designate diverse types of collated information, accounts, news,
or even gossip, the act of reporting within a hierarchy marks or even de-
termines its asymmetrical structure and the reporter’s position within it.
Paradoxically, then, the subjectivity of the official author was to a great
extent an effect of his rather modest place in government, that is, his rel-
ative lack of authority and the consequent demand that he report to his
superiors. Beyond the responsibility and vulnerability shared by all au-
thors of texts, the government emissary’s dual role as a reporter and an
author indicated subjugation (reporting to authority) and control (over
the text). These incongruent positions became harder to maintain when
a report broke the chain of reporting and was interjected into public dis-
course where authorship was held in high esteem. The public career of
Chadwick and Frémont as officials, authors, and official authors evi-
denced these contradictory paths.
The report, by its very nature, is always already in some kind of move-
ment, changing hands. It was cited on its way to some department, sent
to Congress, or presented in the House of Commons where bills were of-
ten reported and therefore were in their “report-stage.” (Reporting is
also commonly employed in parliamentary parlance to denote an account
or a bill made by a segment of the whole, a committee to the entire cham-
ber.) It is not surprising, therefore, that many reports were phrased or
framed as letters. The epistolary feature brings the reporter closer to a
genre of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political pamphlets that
were crafted as open letters. It also separates the report from modern in-
formational genres. In contrast to the common understanding of infor-
mation as a multitude of details that reside in inanimate receptacles in-
dependent of human exchange, for instance, computers—a perception,
which is sustained today by content-blind Information Theory—infor-
mative reports, as a genre, are always addressed to institutional or indi-
vidual recipients. The obligation of an administration or a ministry to
report to the legislature was part of intricate power relations between the
two branches of government. A prime minister could be caught report-
 36 Monuments in Print

ing, too, although the monarch presented documents to the Commons

“by command” and the president was often expected to send a “mes-
sage.” (The president’s annual message epitomized the duty of the head
of the executive to report routinely to the legislature and the people.)
When a report concluded its travels in the corridors of power, it was mov-
ing again, integrated into the relationship between government (i.e.,
lawmakers and officials) and a host of social institutions, constituents,
and the reading public. It was only when it no longer circulated—be-
coming more like yesterday’s paper rather than the unsold book to which
it was often compared—that the report lost most of its value. It was then
that the print archive was consigned to the brick-and-mortar archive.
Although this study identifies the report as a form of mediated com-
munication, in a few of its uses report denotes presence, as an officer is
ordered to “report for duty,” or employees are expected to “report them-
selves,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as, “to make known
to some authority that one has arrived or is present at a certain place.” In
one way or another, the report has retained a certain oral surplus. Rather
than solely a manifestation of an emerging print culture, it is arguably a
vehicle of orature. Orature—a term I borrow from postcolonial aesthetic
theory—is a hybrid category that transcends the dichotomy between lit-
erature and orality. “[Orature] acknowledges that these modes of com-
munication have produced one another interactively over time and that
their historic operations may be usefully examined under the rubric per-
formance.”7 The report is enveloped by a set of performances. The cer-
emonial air with which major policy reports are submitted to their ini-
tiating authority (a president, a secretary, a prime minister, the security
council) is familiar today. Importantly, the transmission of the text is now
usually accompanied by the presentation of the report to the public, of-
ten through the venue of a “press conference” where the authors of the
report summarize their findings and recommendations and respond to
questions. Presentation of reports included, at times, the public reading
of the document or of specific segments. Here we may recognize the en-
during influence of parliamentary practices on the culture of official re-
portage. Regardless of the fusion of print culture and politics, so much
of the operation and so many of the traditions of Congress and Parlia-
ment had evolved around the spoken word. In the early nineteenth cen-
tury, political culture on both sides of the Atlantic celebrated eloquence
and oratorical flair, albeit in a somewhat different manner. (The British
 Monuments in Print 37

Parliament’s emphasis on orality has been so complete that it all but pro-
hibited reading from prepared notes on its floor.)
Lastly, the centrality of “voice” to the political process and the po-
tential of print statism to serve as a platform of opinion further tied oral
expression and print culture. John Stuart Mill’s famous testimony dur-
ing an 1852 House of Lord’s select committee hearing on India seems to
embody the reliance of modern governments on technologies of record
keeping. Mill boasted that the East India Company ruled India benevo-
lently through an unsurpassed system of writing and reportage, for “no
other [government] probably has a system of recordation so complete.”8
However, for Mill this modern apparatus of writing separated the colo-
nial world from domestic governance. It was merely a necessary but
flawed substitute for the kind of open and inherently oral and aural ex-
change that generated, in his conception, a regime of general public in-
terest and public opinion back home in Britain.
This page intentionally left blank
 chapter one

Blue Books and the Market

of Information

The poor-law investigation (1832– 34) ushered in one of the most drastic so-
cial reforms of nineteenth-century Britain. It also inaugurated or perfected
modes of public persuasion that coupled the employment of a royal commission
of inquiry with a massive circulation of printed texts. The publication of the Poor
Law Commission’s material began in late 1833, long before the investigation was
completed. For the price of four shillings, the public could purchase a compila-
tion of titillating “exemplifications” culled from assistant commissioners’ note-
books. In that spirit, Commissioner Nassau Senior strategized, “We should make
a gradual attack in public opinion. First, [publish] our instructions and queries.
Then, the specimens of our evidence. Then, 6 weeks after, the full evidence.
Then, two months after, the report, and then, measures could be prepared dur-
ing the vacation and brought in at the beginning of next session.”1 After ten
thousand copies of the report were sent to the parishes gratuitously, between four
and five thousand copies of the abridged version and between nine and ten thou-
sand copies of the report itself were sold to the public. Looking for even more
compelling narratives, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK),
one of the most prolific publishers of the 1830s and 1840s, commissioned Har-
riet Martineau to write four stories on the operation of the old poor law. Each
tale in her Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated (1833) corresponded to one of the
four main questions that guided the commission’s investigation. The tales pur-
ported to demonstrate the supposed abuses and corrupting effects of parish relief
and the benefits of reform.
The collaboration of government with reform organizations, private book-
sellers (especially the commission’s publisher Charles Knight, who also worked
for the SDUK), parliamentary printers, and a novelist yielded an impressive spec-
trum of texts, from the thirteen-volume encyclopedic and impenetrable official
 40 Monuments in Print

report, to abridgments and pamphlets as well as popular fiction, all claiming to

represent social reality. When criticized by SDUK members for the explicit na-
ture of a murder scene in one of her narratives, Martineau invoked the official
report. “It is singular that the incidents and expressions which [are] marked by
my critics as questionable, are precisely those which are taken without alteration
from the Poor Law Evidence, & from real life.”2 The diverse documents spawned
by the poor-law investigation targeted different constituencies in what was—be-
yond an attempt to promote a particular reform—an effort at mass education,
propagating the principles of political economy for the benefit of the entire na-
tion, including Westminster lawmakers, poor-rates payers, and the laboring or
nonworking poor.
A decade later, the Employment of Children investigation would also initiate
massive distribution of an official report, which private publishers seized and
reissued in edited versions. From the beginning of the century, booksellers often
produced octavo editions of the most popular official documents, for instance, the
Bullion Report of 1810 and the Mendicity and Vagrancy Report of 1815. Such
market appropriations of official publications were permitted or even encour-
aged, for it was argued that Parliament published these documents for the sake
of their wide diffusion. The policy of a sweeping permit to reproduce govern-
ment reports, which usually were not shielded by copyright, was altered only at
the end of the century when a private printing of Army Regulations caused pub-
lic embarrassment.3
Regardless of their actual influence, large-scale, spectacular propaganda cam-
paigns became staples of nineteenth-century political culture. Several of these
episodes are stories often retold to demonstrate the manipulative character of
Victorian reform and the Victorian palate for printed matter. For future genera-
tions, the poor-law crusade and its later renditions enhanced the (somewhat in-
accurate) perception of a utilitarian takeover, most succinctly articulated in S. E.
Finer’s concept of “suscitation” to describe Jeremy Bentham’s disciples’ gift for
exploiting public tools to peddle their ideas. The suspicion that official investi-
gations are relentlessly exploited to market preconceived schemes also dates back
to the nineteenth century. Still, in the Victorian mind, especially its liberal and
utilitarian lobes, state knowledge had an intrinsic value beyond its immediate
application. Victorians had great pride in the scope and apparent growing scien-
tificity of the public record. Domestic and foreign observers noticed that the ac-
cumulation of social knowledge was an endeavor in which the British excelled,
or a project that was particularly British.4
Known as command papers because they were presented to Parliament at the
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 41

command of the monarch, royal commissions’ reports were the most conspicu-
ous in what became by the mid-nineteenth century an enormous production of
parliamentary papers. Select committees of both houses also examined aspects
of British society and issued blue books appended by long transcripts of hearings
and additional documents. In comparison with the pomp of royal commissions,
parliamentary inquiries constituted a rather mundane investigative pattern. Still,
they attracted much attention. As in the case of royal commissions, the publica-
tion of select committees’ reports turned, at times, into a public event.
This chapter surveys early nineteenth-century campaigns to reshape the Bri-
tish state’s publishing apparatus. Reform targeted the production of blue books
and other parliamentary papers as well as their promotion and dissemination.
Market principles such as efficiency, value, competition, and frugality guided
these perennial efforts. Most importantly, reformers reconceived of the British
public sphere as a system of exchange commensurable with the dynamics of the
marketplace and often took the commercial press as their paradigm for circulat-
ing knowledge. Beyond facilitating publicity, they vied to rearrange state knowl-
edge itself, its accumulation and modes of registration. They envisioned a uni-
versally accessible great body of knowledge that would address every facet of
British public life, a representative mirror image of the nation.
By the early 1850s, after more than two decades of hectic debate and reform,
the celebratory view of knowledge-based legislation seemed to be fully in place
and so were the technologies of gathering and disseminating information. In
1852, Benjamin Disraeli, then the chancellor of the exchequer, maintained that
blue books attested to the intellectual development of the era. “If we looked to
manners, if we looked to the means of Government not only in this country but
its dependencies, and indeed, to all those subjects which ought to afford the ma-
terials whence the true history of a country was drawn, we should find that in
the Parliamentary literature, which had grown into importance within the last
half-century, resources were placed in the hands of the public writers, such as
never had been before possessed in any time or country.”5
The historian, Disraeli suggested, would judge the age not just by its known
achievements but also by the thoroughness of the official record that was in-
scribed and left behind. Nevertheless, despite self-congratulatory declarations of
the kind Disraeli offered and the appearance of normalcy in the production of
official knowledge, there was a lingering confusion and division among law-
makers and state officials over parliamentary publications.6 Recurrent debates
concerning seemingly technical issues—number of documents to be printed,
their size, and cost—betrayed greater dissatisfactions enhanced by the public’s
 42 Monuments in Print

uneven response. Government and Parliament were (desperately) seeking read-

ers for their publications.
Many of the clefts in what otherwise appeared to be an article of Victorian
faith were linked to a dissonance between the ideology and the actuality of “in-
formation.” This chapter demonstrates that the increased expectation that state
knowledge preserved in blue books would be regimented, transparent, and au-
tonomous was disrupted by the diversity of purposes implicit in official reports,
their material dimensions, and the symbolic weight of printed texts. After all,
Parliament was not just gathering and dispensing information but, in reality, was
producing printed documents that were often labeled books (as in blue books,
named so for their blue paper covers). In the professional parlance of printing,
the publication of commissions’ and committees’ reports was known as “book-
work” while that of printing ledgers and other forms was known as “job-work.”7
The printed medium—bulky, expensive to print, and difficult to utilize—had a
significant presence that sometimes obscured and even subsumed its content.
Tension emerged between clashing representational assignments. Victorian
lawmakers’ and bureaucrats’ ambition to provide useful information and to com-
municate with the public coexisted uncomfortably with their insistence on reg-
istering in great minutiae all aspects of British society and the governing process.
The concept of usable information denoted succinct, naked, out-of-context facts.
At the same time, officials deemed it necessary to render visible for observation
the process of accumulating information. In the liberal state, procedures of in-
vestigation, as other dimensions of government, were to be exposed to public
gaze. For example, reports of select committees’ hearings had to include the en-
tire course of witnesses’ questioning, regardless of utility or readability. This re-
sulted in a growing distance between the notion that information was vital for
political actors, lawmakers, and voters alike, and, as we shall see, the perception
that government was manufacturing reams of purposeless, or worse, self-indul-
gent printed matter. For some, government had become an incontinent printer.

Policy of Knowledge
Extensive deployment of royal commissions of inquiry was one element in a
new set of practices and institutions that shaped the modalities of the British
public sphere from the very beginning of the nineteenth century. This process
assumed a clearer form after 1830, when aristocratic Whigs, with their middle
class, utilitarian “fellow travelers,” gained power. These innovations constituted
a comprehensive yet tacit policy of knowledge. For instance, reformers vied to
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 43

further open Parliament to press coverage and to unburden newspapers of the

stamp duties that restricted their circulation and were now deemed “taxes on
knowledge.” (In 1836, the Stamp Tax was reduced to one penny, and in 1855 it
was eliminated.) Another host of initiatives aimed at improving the accuracy and
volume of state knowledge. An effort that was initially prompted by the exigen-
cies and turmoil of the Napoleonic wars resulted in the creation of new tools to
measure social and commercial phenomena through the census and the Board of
Trade’s statistical department. Parliamentary printing was a third domain of re-
form initiatives fueled by similar aspirations, the desire for more exact, compre-
hensive, and better-circulated information, dispensed by the cheapest and most
efficient forms. One indication of the unifying principles underlying these efforts
was that they were sponsored by the same small coterie, among them Edward
Bulwer, Thomas Spring Rice, Joseph Hume, and Lord Brougham.
Two trends characterized this vortex of reform: first, the gradual consolida-
tion of social research by central government in London at the expense of the
periphery where such information had been previously accumulated by clergy-
men, magistrates, physicians and other local observers; second, the eventual
guarantee of an unhampered diffusion of information to the largest number of
readers by way of the press. The liberal state engaged in projects that, while they
seemed to enhance each other, were contradictory. It assured the free flow of
knowledge (in accordance with the principles of what Jürgen Habermas termed
the bourgeois public sphere), while, at the same time, it was eager to control the
quality and production of some of its most important fields. Disguised by the ab-
sence of a full separation of government branches, the new policy of knowledge
intruded into the traditional methods of parliamentary inquest. The poor-law
reform furnished an excellent example of how the Whig government resorted
to extraparliamentary methods (a royal commission instead of a select commit-
tee, a private publisher instead of the official parliamentary printer) to promote
its particular interest in Parliament. A year later (1833), a royal commission was
instituted to modify the far-reaching child labor reform that had been charted
by a select committee headed by the cabinet’s foe, the Tory M.P. Michael Thomas
Sadler. Contemporaries construed the Sadler Report and the Factory Commis-
sion’s report as foot soldiers in a political battle.
The dynamics of parliamentary culture can empower individual members.
Introduction of petitions, requests for particular information (or Returns), initi-
ation of select committees, and participation in debates have been methods for
the promulgation of views and promotion of causes beyond their actual weight
in terms of political representation. Such practices, at times employed to shift at-
 44 Monuments in Print

tention to the margins of society, were somewhat restrained by 1830s reforms. It

may not be surprising that two of the most vociferous critics of royal commis-
sions of inquiry were, at one time or another, reporters of parliamentary delib-
erations: William Cobbett and J. Toumlin Smith. Cobbett saw in the entire pro-
cess that yielded the new poor law—from investigation to publication—a
deviation from accepted and proper practices. “These commissioners sit in Lon-
don, it seems, and send forth roving deputy-commissioners to collect information
about the country. These rovers give in written accounts of the result of their in-
quiries. A parcel of extracts from these accounts have been collected together,
printed in the form of an octavo book, and sold at price four shillings, “published
by authority”; and, the members of the House of Commons have each then
been furnished with a copy of this book. This is a new way of doing the nation’s
business.”8
Never before had members of a public board turned into authors and sold
their books. A few months earlier, Cobbett quipped that the purpose of the com-
mission was “to muster up a parcel of stories from the people, picked out for the
purpose, to justify more severe measures against the working people.”9 Cobbett’s
concerns, it appears, lay less with the purity of the print marketplace and more
with the autonomy of the radical public sphere (of which he was a prominent
citizen) now threatened by an avalanche of cheap, manipulative literature.
Smith, who offered the harshest attack on the ascendancy of fixed and inves-
tigative commissions, further developed this critique. Commissions not only in-
fringed upon old freedoms by assuming functions that were historically per-
formed by local authorities but also departed from accepted modes of inquiry by
eradicating the adversarial dimension that was at the core of the parliamentary
hearing. The access of commissioners to the printing press was therefore partic-
ularly worrisome since “all evidence is taken in secret; and so much published as,
and when, they like; and with such an accompanying gloss as they please to give
it.”10 Manning an inquiry with like-minded individuals skewed the results by ac-
centuating similarities in the body of evidence marshaled in front of the com-
mission, while neglecting disagreements (dissimilitude). Smith invoked Bacon’s
warning against “anticipation,” in other words, preference for similitude. Polit-
ical rivalry in Parliament guaranteed that committees confronted contrasting ev-
idence. According to Smith, the outcome of frequently appointed royal commis-
sions was mass indoctrination, or, the “dwarfing of the minds of the people and
reducing them to that state of only half-development that they shall be unable
to know the difference between a sham and a reality, between truth and false-
hood.”11
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 45

The Matter of Facts

In the realm of parliamentary printing, reform offered yet another challenge
to the inefficiencies and small corruptions of the old regime. It especially tar-
geted Luke Hansard (and, after his death in 1828, his descendants), the official
printer of the House of Commons. Hansard was the most important among a
host of printers who, according to a decidedly antiquated system, controlled
different shares of the printing tasks commissioned by the two houses of Parlia-
ment and the monarchy. However understood by rivals and reformers, Hansard’s
role in parliamentary printing was not a symptom of the British ancien regime
but a response to the needs of the modern state. As did other innovations of the
Victorian period, it dated back to the emergencies of the late eighteenth century
and was the fruit of collaboration between Hansard and the future House of
Commons’ speaker Charles Abbot (1802–17).12
The papers on the abolition of the slave trade, East India Papers, and reports
on finance and on the commercial intercourse in Ireland were among the most
sought-after documents of the 1790s. The political crisis of the decade also made
it necessary to improve communication between London and its provinces. In
1797, Abbot, then an M.P., initiated a plan for the dissemination of the statutes,
assuring that a printed copy of every new act of Parliament would be sent to the
courts of justice and public offices as soon as the legislation was completed. Pre-
viously, local justices of the peace had to rely on incomplete, and in many cases
dated, private collections. Interestingly, Abbot’s committee noted that with the
advent of print new legislation received less publicity. The ancient mode of in-
forming the public of new laws through sheriff ’s proclamation—in other words,
through the local crier—had been discontinued, and the printed copies of the
acts were confined to a limited number of individuals. Abbot was also involved
in a committee to inquire into the state of the national record (1800) and, in the
same year, introduced the bill that led to the first census. With the first Union
Parliament in 1801, parliamentary printing accelerated. Despite efforts to re-
strain what seemed even then to be an avalanche, the printing capacities of the
legislature and government only increased. By the 1820s, twenty-five commit-
tees might be working concurrently in the Commons. Sessional papers (without
the bills, votes, and journals) amounted to more than twenty-five folio volumes.
In 1799, the expense of printing the journals, votes, and all other papers was
£8,000; in 1827 it rose to £46,184, exclusive of the journal, and by the 1850s it
would more than double to £100,000 a year.13
 46 Monuments in Print

Carrying printing proofs under his arm, Luke Hansard became a fixture in
the halls of Parliament. Abbot considered his knowledge of printing, in its in-
tricacies still very much a craft rather than a modern industry, indispensable.
Hansard was also responsible for preserving and storing official documents and
dispensing advice to the speaker on every aspect of publication. In the 1790s, the
printer introduced a new template of printing, inaugurating the use of side an-
notations that led the reader to particular questions in the appendix or to previ-
ous acts, reports, and other official documents. He added indices, created his own
system of abbreviates, and made decisions concerning the size of type, margins,
and division of the page. These efforts set standards where there had not been
much precedent. The disparate handwritten documents that arrived at his print-
ing plant did not conform to any regular layout. Hansard selected a title for each
manuscript. Then he drew a table of contents and added information in the mar-
gin. The printer was thus the de facto editor of parliamentary papers, even if he
did not alter a single word in the body of the original texts. He gave parliamen-
tary publications uniformity and the material appearance of a serial publishing
project. Hansard was quite proud of the form parliamentary papers assumed,
maintaining that they were printed “to the complete satisfaction of the Mem-
bers who rejoiced at seeing unintelligible broadsheets brought into convenient
reading pages.”14
Previously, printers of official documents toiled hard to provide printed fac-
similes of the original text. The Poor Returns of 1787, for instance, were
printed page after page on wide sheets of paper that required folding. Printers
were not allowed to deviate from the form or even the size of the manuscript.
Hansard forsook the hopelessly clumsy attempt to simulate the authentic doc-
ument, substituting one principle of fact rendering (fidelity to original form)
for another (the claim of parliamentary documents to a corporate, command-
ing authorship). Official documents thereafter derived their authority in re-
lation to each other and from their consistent adherence to a standard of print-
ing. Embedded in the new materiality were assumptions about these docu-
ments’ prospective use as reading material. Hansard avoided layouts that ob-
structed fluent reading, such as printing long lines across two pages.15 Late
eighteenth-century Encyclopedia-inspired ventures may have been his inspi-
ration. He certainly did not take as a model the condensed page and small font
of early nineteenth-century newspapers. Fonts were large and the page un-
cluttered. It was easy to read and, despite efforts to economize, expensive to
print.
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 47

Reform
In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, parliamentary printing attracted hostile
attention. The call for greater equity, efficiency, and economy had a particular
resonance when the legislature was busy overhauling old institutions, including
the poor-law apparatus, military appointments, and the Anglican Church. When
it came to parliamentary literature, reform was self-referential and exemplary.
The entire system of official printing, with its convoluted procedures and privi-
leges, was an invitation for a reformist probe.16 For example, sessional papers ap-
peared in bound volumes and in appendices to journals. Some documents were
printed concurrently by both houses (usually as “communicated papers,” a custom
that was finally abolished in 1886).
Patronage, sinecures, and fees were to be eradicated. Reformers now de-
manded competitive contracts in public printing. As revealed by repeated inves-
tigations, a few unelected officials of the Commons accepted copies of printed
material for their personal gain. The custom of copy money was an equally un-
acceptable residue of the old system. The clerk of the Commons was entitled to
a certain fee for all copies of papers ordered from his office. Every M.P. could re-
ceive an entire set of all the journals of both houses, more than 120 folio volumes.
Many of these tomes resurfaced at local booksellers. The important 1835 Com-
mittee on Printed Papers recommended that M.P.s receive journals only for the
years they served in Parliament.17
Lawmakers were joined by government officials who were habitually anxious
about monitoring and restricting public expenditure (Treasury) or who simply
wished to extend their authority over parliamentary printing (Stationery Office).
Eyeing that most lucrative field of public printing, Hansard’s commercial rivals
also pushed for reform. In a long succession of select committees, M.P.s received
lectures on the technical details and jargon of printing. They explored new print-
ing patents and immersed themselves in the nitty-gritty of pica, columns, paper
weight, and typesetting. Between 1831 and 1835, five committees explored every
dimension of public printing. Heralding a new era of governmental takeover, the
Treasury decided in 1831 that the Stationery Office would supply the paper used
by parliamentary printers. There were also schemes to save money by introduc-
ing alterations to the layout of parliamentary reports by compressing the print
and using double columns. Many lawmakers, however, became fond of Hansard’s
signatory page design. The printing status quo was perhaps harder to undermine
 48 Monuments in Print

when the speaker regarded many reform ideas as incursions into his power. Even
after the appointment of a printing committee in the mid-1830s, the order of
print remained with the speaker. Still, the Hansards had to be constantly on the
defensive. In 1825, they responded to criticism about the long delays in printing
by citing the enormous evidence taken on the question of Catholic emancipation,
the large volume of copies printed, and the difficulty of hiring help in a busy in-
dustry. New types of information necessitated distinct printing skills. Many type-
setters refused to handle statistical tables, finding this particular task too perplex-
ing. In some publishing projects, individuals employed in arranging statistical
tables had to be paid double.18
The controversies over the mechanism of printing and the disputes over the
method of inquiry (royal commissions versus select committees) pitted the ex-
ecutive departments (Treasury, Stationery Office) against the Commons. (Han-
sard was supported by the Speaker’s Office.) From 1791 until 1835, the House of
Commons printer was responsible for everything except the votes. After that,
many of the command papers, including the reports of the royal commissions
(perhaps the most profitable of parliamentary printing) were executed by spe-
cial contracts under the immediate supervision of the Stationery Office. In 1886,
select committee reports were contracted out and in 1890 the journals.
Another dimension of reform addressed the growing recognition that parlia-
mentary papers provided rich but inconsistent, patchy, and difficult-to-access
knowledge. In 1833, a select committee alleged, “It has long been a matter of
complaint with those who wished to become acquainted with the Statistics of the
British Empire, that information was not given in Public Documents with the
regularity and perspicuity which are indispensable in all inquiries of this na-
ture.”19 Much of the statistical information was gathered as a response to private
initiatives in the Commons. These returns corresponded to the queries and some-
times to the views of the individuals who had requested them. A Treasury offi-
cial testified that a particular return on corn requested by an M.P. for the bene-
fit of a single constituent took four clerks six weeks to prepare. Its printing cost
no less than five or six hundred pounds, and, “when the Return was produced, I
would defy any one to make one single practical point from it.”20
John Marshall, a publisher of a statistical compilation, criticized the accounts
provided for the House of Commons as truncated and puzzling. Parliamentary
documents covered incommensurable periods and inconsistently blended figures
from Britain and Ireland.21 In assuming responsibility for the accumulation of
complete and accurate statistical knowledge, government was engaged in a de-
cidedly national project. It was also emulating a few continental countries that
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 49

had already created advanced institutions with similar aims. For several reform-
ers, abandoning such a vital task to private entrepreneurs was a stigma on the
British state. The indefatigable radical Joseph Hume argued that in any other
country government would undertake a project such as Marshall’s compilations.
Nicknamed by Harriet Martineau “the plodder of Parliament,” Hume spear-
headed the reform campaign and chaired four committees on printing. He was
an avid supporter of the freedom of the press and fought for the repeal of the
tax on newspapers and against government prosecution of pamphleteers.
A minute but typical element of the new knowledge policy was the decision
to curtail the number of petitions slated for printing. The formal pretext was the
unbridled proliferation of petitions sent to Parliament. Their number had risen
from 880 in 1787 to 4,498 in 1815 and 24,492 in 1831.22 Other calculations crept
in as well. The clerk of the Commons argued that petitions became a way to dis-
seminate views rather than merely call for legislative action: “There are many
cases of Petitions which are more like Pamphlets than Petitions.”23 Indeed,
William Cobbett urged his readers to pester Parliament with petitions in order
to secure free publicity: “If you would have anything generally known, or any
principle generally discussed, you cannot do better than embody it in a petition
to Parliament. This is the only effectual way of drawing attention to it.”24
In 1833, a select committee was appointed to classify petitions and arbitrate
the merit of their publication, which was to be done mostly in the form of ab-
stracts. The number of printed petitions declined sharply. The new regulations
exemplified a trend to restrict public access to the exchange that took place in-
side and through Parliament. Parliament denied any intention of restraining the
expression of public opinion. “The House ought to refrain from printing, at the
public expense, such Petitions of individuals as are more in the nature of gen-
eral disquisitions upon subjects of controversy, which ought rather, in their opin-
ion to be given to the Public through the medium of the Press at the expense of
the Author.”25 Unsolicited opinion had to comply with the rules of the market.
The value of information and opinion could be signified, although not fully mea-
sured, by monetary exchange. It was the function of newspapers to represent
public opinion. Importantly, it would also become the mission of state publica-
tions.
Another contemporaneous reform addressed the country’s past rather than
current record and led to the creation of the Public Record Office (1837). The
PRO replaced the Commission of Records, which since the beginning of the cen-
tury had been entrusted with preserving, indexing, and publishing historical doc-
uments. A cardinal charge against the commission was that only a small fraction
 50 Monuments in Print

of the money that poured into the project, more than £600,000, was dedicated to
the actual conservation of records. Lavish publishing projects drained much of
the rest. There were signs of mismanagement, and the commission was £20,000
in debt. The public record campaign demonstrated, in a field other than parlia-
mentary printing, how a large publication project could be associated with the
vagaries of an unreformed state rather than with the information and mnemonic
technologies of modernity.
Charles Buller described in graphic detail how ancient documents rotted, scat-
tered in damp vaults—one of which was reported to grow a stalactite—among
the remains of rats and skeletons of dead cats, while the commission translated
into a host of continental languages a document that acknowledged all commis-
sioners by their full titles. Holding the Portuguese version, Buller mocked the
commission (some of its members were present) for making their names known
from Lisbon to Hamburg. “Even the Secretary to the Commission is immortal-
ized in the printed proceedings as ‘Viro illustri, excellentissimo, clarissimo, doc-
tissimo C. P. Coopero equiti Anglo.’”26 Other commission-sanctioned printing en-
deavors were riddled with horrendous typographical errors, duplications, and
omissions. As it turned out, the commission sponsored the publication of mod-
ern essays and not just ancient documents. Meanwhile, the condition of the state’s
historical documents was truly appalling. Some of them were stolen and sold in
local curiosity shops. The public record, contended Buller, was enormously valu-
able for ascertaining private property such as grants, leases, and conveyances by
the crown to individuals and corporate bodies, and as a reliable source for history
writing. Buller consequently chaired a select committee that proposed the cre-
ation of a centralized body to protect valuable documents, arrange them me-
thodically, and render them easily available for public use, mainly for judicial and
property purposes.
The familiar principles of efficiency and frugality determined both public
record and parliamentary printing reforms. The establishment of a national re-
pository indicated a preference for maintaining a collection of irreplaceable ob-
jects as facts for special consultation over a policy of mass reproduction of origi-
nal documents. As we shall see, despite attempts to apply similar criteria to their
preparation, blue books remained archival in their individual and collective com-
prehensiveness, detail, and immensity, as well as in their capacity to stand for or
represent an era to posterity. In addition, they were archivelike because of the
propensity to reproduce within them smaller papers, transcripts, notes, and other
documents verbatim and to present these objects side by side in long appendices.
The print archive functioned as its own literal archive, in the sense that once com-
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 51

mitted to print there was no incentive to retain the particular documents that had
comprised it, for example, subcommissioners’ notes. In many respects, the
printed form was even more retentive than the repository archive. Much of what
was consigned to it would have probably been otherwise discarded.

Marketplace
One of the most radical novelties of the new knowledge policy was the sale
of parliamentary papers to the public at large, thus expanding and formalizing
a custom previously applied mainly for parliamentary votes. The decision to sell
the entire yield of the Commons’ printer was proclaimed to be part of the new
knowledge-saturated, censure-free public sphere. Previously, there was no clear
policy for distributing parliamentary papers. M.P.s and privileged officeholders
received a certain number of papers. Others had to apply. Hume envisaged a ra-
tional system unencumbered by the remnants of old privilege lists or official fa-
vors. Moreover, in contrast to early nineteenth-century circumstances, there was
no crisis-born exigency that mandated the free-of-charge diffusion of statutes or
other documents. Statutes too were to be sold. In August 1835, the Commons re-
solved, “Parliamentary Papers and Reports printed for the use of The House
should be rendered accessible to the public, by purchase, at the lowest price they
can be furnished; and that a sufficient number of extra copies shall be printed
for that purpose.”27 Besides an attempt to ameliorate an unsatisfactory mode of
dispensation, the decision to sell papers was embraced with an eye to limiting ex-
penses.
The immediate result of the new policy (supposedly devised to increase the
flow of information to the public) was to curb the volume of publication. Ac-
cording to one calculation, there was an immediate reduction of 5 percent in the
number of copies printed. By the late 1830s, a typical run—previously between
1,000 and 4,000—shrank to between 1,000 and 1,250 copies and rarely exceeded
1,500.28 It was argued that beforehand individual members could hardly exer-
cise any judgment in the distribution of papers. They were pressured to respond
to demands from their respective districts regardless of their actual merit. The
new regulations avoided ineffectual examination of applications and made the
documents accessible to everybody. They guaranteed that those in need of
specific information indeed received it. This argument hinted at a gap between
considerations of public knowledge that emphasized maximization of informa-
tion, and an efficiency calculus that attached certain information to particular
functions and agents in society. Ultimately, it seems that the prospective con-
 52 Monuments in Print

sumer was presumed to be a middle-class individual for whom the benefit from
government information, legal, political or commercial, could be immediate and
material.
Selling documents may have prevented a nuisance for members who had had
to respond to tedious requests, but the sale policy reduced the power of individ-
ual M.P.s by completely seizing the allocation of documents from their hands.
Not all legislators were satisfied with the novel arrangement that required them
to pay for copies of every printed report or bill exceeding the single copy allot-
ted to each of them. In early 1836, William Tooke, an M.P. from Truro, vented
his frustrations after he had applied in vain for two copies of the Accidents in the
Mines Report, which he thought his constituents in Cornwall should have. He
intended to dispatch the report to two libraries in his district but was told that
the documents had to be purchased. Tooke remarked wryly that it was easier for
Hume, who represented Middlesex, to send his constituents to the shops where
documents were sold, but when requests came from the country, only a few mem-
bers would have the nerve to do the same. M.P.s should not be put to the expense
of purchasing papers vital for their districts. He further complained that there
was no place in the Commons to buy documents and members had to go to shops
and ask for them as would any other customer. In response, the speaker, J. Aber-
cromby, trumpeted the fairness argument. If these reports were to be granted to
libraries in Cornwall, other institutions in all parts of the country would make
similar requests. Libraries were among the establishments most likely to become
extensive purchasers of documents, as they should. These papers, he reminded,
were sold for only a halfpenny a sheet.29 This was not the only incidence in which
M.P.s expressed their anger at Hume and his crusade. Hansard’s son, Luke Graves
Hansard, whose diary detailed his painstaking efforts to maintain the family hold
on the Commons’ printing, saw in the new set of policies the spirit of cheap pub-
lic projects. “There seems too much of the ‘Diffusion of Knowledge’ new scheme
in this,” he remarked.30
Nevertheless, the sale of parliamentary papers was initially celebrated as a
success and was broadly advertised. Hansard had two London offices for the pur-
pose of the sale, one close to the Inns of Court. Offices were set up in Dublin and
Edinburgh as well. During the first years, the public purchased 29,715 copies of
bills, reports, and accounts. While Hume planned to introduce into parliamen-
tary business what were seemingly free-market principles (e.g., open competi-
tion), with the sale of documents, Parliament itself became a participant in the
marketplace as a publisher of blue books and other printed ephemera, indis-
criminately (although nonprofitably) offered. The Commons’ involvement in the
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 53

economy of printing was already evident in other aspects of the trade. The vol-
ume of official printing burdened the market for paper as early as the 1820s.
Hansard, in fact, became a paper merchant, maintaining a £20,000 inventory to
eliminate sharp trends in the market following sudden demands for parliamen-
tary printing. The presence of Parliament in the marketplace also had some un-
expected consequences. In January 1837, a mapmaker, James Wyld the Younger,
threatened to pursue legal action for damages due to piracy. A map of Australia
he had prepared appeared in an August 1836 report on transportation, a docu-
ment that was printed and sold. Hansard had purchased and published the map
by the order of the committee on printing. Wyld’s silence was procured for £105,
paid through Hansard.31
The most damaging repercussion of the decision to disseminate public docu-
ments was a constitutional crisis instigated by the Stockdale versus Hansard lit-
igation. The affair began when prison inspectors William Crawford and the Rev.
Whitworth Russell claimed, in their 1836 report on the state of discipline in New-
gate prison, to have found in one of the cells (which they meticulously scanned
and inventoried) a pornographic publication “of a most disgusting nature, and
the plates are obscene and indecent in the extreme.” The volume was nominally
a medical book on human anatomy, titled Robinson’s Account of the Structure and
Diseases of the Generative System (1827). Subsequently, John Joseph Stockdale,
the book’s small-time publisher, sued Hansard for libel and found a sympathetic
ear in the courts.
Selling the inspectors’ report to the public was not the sole basis for the legal
action. Nonetheless, in his suit Stockdale described himself specifically purchas-
ing the libelous document in a bookstore, implying that the public sale of par-
liamentary papers rendered Hansard susceptible to his legal challenge. This
affair developed into a constitutional blunder that lasted for more than three
years and featured at its height a somewhat comic grandstanding between the
House of Commons and Lord Denman, the Lord Chief Justice of the King’s
Bench. Less amusing was the plight inflicted upon the two national institutions’
proxies: eleven of Hansard’s presses were confiscated by the sheriffs of Middle-
sex, who carried out Lord Denman’s orders only to be put in Newgate by the
Commons’ Sergeant of Arms. Stockdale himself was committed to prison for
contempt.
The House of Commons’ printer did not write the report or sanction its con-
tent, but the litigation ascribed him the responsibility commonly associated with
authorship. Ultimately, it was the state that was entrapped on the web of autho-
rial liabilities that are at the foundation of modern print culture, a culture the
 54 Monuments in Print

state had created and inscribed in law. This suit threatened to impair Parlia-
ment’s (and the ministry’s) ability to publish material that features strong criti-
cism of individuals or corporations, directly challenging the function of the leg-
islature as a body of inquest and deliberation. Any parliamentary publication and
possibly any utterance made by lawmakers or public officers could prompt sim-
ilar suits against printers, shorthand writers, and clerks. To disentangle itself,
Parliament had to adopt new legislation designed to reassert its speech and print
privileges.32
The Stockdale case highlighted and problematized the new functions of the
legislature in a time of hectic social reform when the Commons and the nascent
bureaucracy were frantically engaged in scrutinizing institutional wrongdoing.
Significantly, the offending remark was made by prison inspectors (representing
government in a new capacity) ostensibly evaluating the moral condition of in-
mates but primarily passing judgment on the performance of the warden and
guards. An 1837 committee determined that if put to the same critical scrutiny,
much of what had been published by parliamentary committees and commis-
sioners on treatment of slaves, charities, poor law, and municipal corporations, or
even what had been asserted in bills presented in the Commons, could be simi-
larly termed defamatory.33 The affair prompted much debate on the floor and in
committees established to address the consequences of the convoluted legal
events. While Hume’s committee had supposedly opened a new era by bringing
parliamentary documents to the public, select committees, defending the ancient
privileges of Parliament as the “Grand Inquest of the Nation,” presented his-
torical evidence to demonstrate that diffusion of printed documents was an in-
tegral part of the Commons’ operation for the previous two centuries.
Despite the anchoring of parliamentary privilege in new legislation, the
House of Commons resolved to arrest the seeping of incriminatory material into
its published record and in the process subjected its members to greater disci-
pline. An 1840 committee was especially concerned with the printing of the min-
utes and proceedings of select committees. Since committees inquired into
abuses, a certain latitude was inevitable. “It is essential to the due performance
of the functions of The House that criminatory evidence should be admitted,”
determined the committee, “but it is no less incumbent on the Committees . . .
to examine the evidence so taken, and sift it of all that appear wantonly mali-
cious or even needlessly offensive to the feelings of individuals.”34 A few alter-
ations had to be introduced into the format of committees’ reports. For the first
time, minutes of evidence included before each and every question the name of
the member who asked it. Each day’s attendance was registered, as well as the
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 55

name of members in every split vote. The Stockdale case also occasioned further
restrictions on the printing of petitions to Parliament. It was observed that peti-
tions featured “much incriminatory matter.”
A measure of self-censorship was already in place prior to the eruption of the
affair. It guided the prison inspectors’ decision to omit in their unfortunate ac-
count the title of the controversial publication and to substitute it with two
blanks. This was a common practice. At the same time, the two officials named
the publisher and specified the year of publication and the number of plates fea-
tured in the book. Lord Denman criticized what he referred to as “mysterious
blanks.” Apparently, their use contributed to his decision to side with the plain-
tiff. He wondered why the inspectors mentioned any book or the publisher’s
name when the aim of this passage was to indicate that jailers allowed prisoners
to read questionable material. The gratuitous blanks conveyed even a worse im-
pression than the actual title. The episode demonstrated, therefore, not merely
the potential consequences of governmental reportage but also the meaning in-
vested in conventions of official printing. It was not the power of the printed
word but the insinuations generated by its absence, signified by two straight lines,
which made Parliament vulnerable to a libel suit.
Other policies instituted in the late 1830s further assured the accuracy of the
printed record and its fidelity to the oral exchange in committee rooms. Sir
Robert Peel challenged the practice of allowing witnesses to go over their testi-
mony after it had been given to a committee and before it was sent to the printer.
Apparently, witnesses were permitted to revise their evidence. Some took im-
proper liberties with the shorthand copy under the pretext of a legitimate cor-
rection. In one incident, a witness not only altered his original answers but also
inserted guiding questions that created the impression that his responses were
solicited by likeminded parliamentarians. In another case, a witness claimed to
have lost the copy of his testimony, which he had received for revision. The re-
port had to be printed without it. Peel maintained that correcting minor errors
or grammatical mistakes was fine, but the privilege tended to undermine the
public’s confidence in the parliamentary record: “The undoubted superiority of
parol over written evidence in eliciting the truth was destroyed by the system of
deliberate alteration, and the spirit of a witness’s verbal testimony, when thus re-
touched and reconstructed, could be traced no longer.”35
In Peel’s view, the precise reproduction of the oral exchange was of greater
value than any attempt to assure the accuracy of witnesses’ testimonies. Efforts
to smooth the rough edges of the record compromised the reader’s access to the
procedure. Charles Buller proposed to prevent altogether the correction of evi-
 56 Monuments in Print

dence, and, “whenever an unguarded word was let fall, allowance would be made
for the imperfection of unstudied style.”36 William Wynn concurred but thought
it was unfair to deprive witnesses of the opportunity to rectify errors. Mistakes
were made, and witnesses “misrepresented.” By the early 1840s, modifications of
the official record were severely restricted. Whatever small corrections were al-
lowed always took place after the evidence was already in printed form.37

Octavo Versus Folio

While some official documents were enormously popular with the public,
much of parliamentary literature was not in great demand. Interested citizens
satisfied themselves with press reports and pamphlets. The apparent apathy of
the public towards informative publications puzzled officials. There were doubts
about their use. Should they be easier to inspect? Were they readable at all? Was
reading their proper function? Edwin Chadwick’s actions exemplified this un-
certainty. An aide of Bentham who launched his public career by authoring the
poor-law report, Chadwick believed that his reports made for great reading. In
1860, he sent the ailing Florence Nightingale a copy of his rural constabulary in-
vestigation (1839). Chadwick wrote: “Observing from your . . . attack on the writ-
ers of novels that you do read such things, it occurs to me that you want amus-
ing reading occasionally . . . Murray, the bookseller, told me that he thought [the
constabulary report] as interesting as a novel and he proposed to republish it. In
it you would find the history of the adventures of young thieves as recounted by
themselves.”38 Chadwick further advised Nightingale to publish an abridged pri-
vate edition of her royal commission report on sanitation in the army so it would
be more widely read. He even took the liberty of contacting a publisher of cheap
“railway books”—Routledge—on her behalf.39
At the same time, implicit in Chadwick’s dissemination of his own reports was
the expectation that some or many of their recipients would never bother to pe-
ruse them. He therefore habitually recommended to his interlocutors to read a
small number of passages (which he indicated by page numbers) and, in addi-
tion, summarized the most important points of his reports. In contrast, J. Toum-
lin Smith argued that royal commissions’ reports were deliberately devised to be
read only in part. “The pictures of horror artfully put together in the pages of
blue books are greedily devoured, and serve as food for the sentimental philan-
thropy of the reader; while the reports themselves are accepted as infallible
gospel.”40 Government designed blue books for the lazy reader, who consumed
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 57

the easy-to-digest part but, deterred by its enormity, never bothered with the rest
of the report.
By the end of the 1840s, it became evident that the public at large remained
rather indifferent to the opportunity of purchasing parliamentary documents.
Speaking in the Commons, Thomas Emerson Headlam complained that even
those who could afford these papers did not know how to get them. Booksellers
were not interested in their sale because there was no profit for them in the trans-
action. In addition, official printers—there were five by the mid 1850s—also
printed state documents for private profit in a slightly different design, circum-
venting the official sale of papers. The Queen’s Printer, for instance, produced an
octavo edition of the acts of Parliament in addition to the folio and quarto forms
which he printed for government.41 Hume found himself defending the policy
he had sponsored some twenty years earlier. He pointed to the meager charge for
the papers (by then, a penny a sheet). He maintained that still the best way to
guarantee more publicity was the removal of the tax on newspapers, explaining
that “he was willing to give information cheaply, but not to throw it away; for
things given away were too often regarded as of no value.”42
Hume’s 1830s vision was of individuals purchasing official papers out of in-
terest and therefore paying for them as they would for other platforms of infor-
mation, like newspapers. The new argument, however, militated against his ini-
tial belief in the inherent value of parliamentary papers, as their worth seemed
now to be derived, at least in part, from the fee charged. There was a didactic el-
ement in selling documents to the people. Beyond exposing them to knowledge,
it taught them (as children are told) that objects that cost money were valuable
and therefore should be respected. Indeed, if in the 1830s the question was how
to give a rising middle class access to official papers, debates in the 1850s touched
upon the allocation of papers to local officials for the performance of their du-
ties and to the public, especially working-class readers, as a means to facilitate
self-improvement.
Several reformers argued it was incumbent upon government not merely to
satisfy demand but also to ensure that important information would reach its des-
tination. As authors, officials also betrayed an urge to see the documents they pro-
duced widely circulated. They became impatient when the dispensation of their
blue books in the literary marketplace seemed sluggish. By the late 1840s, the
communication know-how of members of the Board of Health, including Lord
Ashley and Chadwick, converged with the urgency of instructing local authori-
ties and the public in the details of the cause célèbre of the decade, sanitation.
 58 Monuments in Print

Claiming emergency—outbreaks of cholera seemed to justify the claim—the

board had its reports printed and reprinted by the thousands in the smaller oc-
tavo format. Members of the board regarded the circulation of their reports part
of their public duty. Once the board (and a few other departments) was able to
publish in the smaller format, they wished to transform government publishing
altogether. The board launched a campaign to print all parliamentary documents
in the octavo rather than in the large folio size, promising a savings of 20 percent
in printing expense. As important was the argument that the octavo page was far
more convenient. The board maintained that reading a folio page induced fa-
tigue. The lines were too long to follow, and the volume had to be read flat on a
table or set up on a stand. Due to the size and weight of folio documents, read-
ers could not hold them close to the eye. Reading statistical tables was also best
done in a compact form. The board anticipated great advantages for the busy law-
makers who could “carry copies with them, and read them in their carriages or
in railway traveling.” “Parliament, by permitting the continuance of the print-
ing of Reports in the expensive, cumbrous, and comparatively useless form, lim-
its injuriously the extent of its own influence.”43 In their zeal for the octavo size,
Chadwick, Ashley, and their colleagues went as far as arguing, quite seriously,
that excessive public printing was encouraged by the value of folio as wastepa-
per. Since it could easily wrap up large commodities, it could always be resold.
Printing in an octavo format made for worthless packing material, which, they
reasoned, would deter large inventories of government documents. What is strik-
ing about this petition beyond Chadwick’s insistence on blue books’ textuality (in
the sense that they constitute reading material and should be restyled accord-
ingly) is that he conceives of the citizen reader as an embodied individual with
vulnerable eyes and posture. There is little here of the abstract, bodiless ratio-
nality that the Enlightenment associated with print culture, knowledge, and
opinion.
The Board of Health’s proposal was followed by a long, slightly nasty, corre-
spondence between the board, the Treasury, and the Stationery Office, in which
the latter attempted to refute in great technical detail all arguments about the
great savings of printing in the octavo. As for the convenience of reading, the Sta-
tionery Office claimed it was dependent on the function of particular books. Ref-
erence works like Bayle’s Dictionary, Thurloe’s State Papers, and the Encyclope-
dia Britannica were more desirable in the folio or quarto size, while magazines
such as the Spectator, Tatler, and works of literature like Scott’s novels or Pope’s
poems were more suited to the octavo size. The Stationery Office regarded par-
liamentary literature as closer to the first than the second category. “In a Folio,
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 59

the eye can take in a much larger space at once. There is a greater facility of com-
paring one passage with another, and of making annotations. His would be a pe-
culiar taste who should prefer having the Times done upon in an Octavo pam-
phlet.”44 The office conceded that for very popular reports, the octavo would be
more adequate, then added that those were quite rare. Octavo publications would
be easier to hold and read but much of parliamentary printing consisted of rel-
atively small numbers of pages.
The octavo panacea was repeatedly invoked in debates on the floor and in com-
mittees’ hearings. Sir George Grey argued in the Commons that the octavo-size
sanitary report was less bulky, more portable, and easily sent by post. He pre-
dicted that it would boost circulation.45 Another supporter argued, “A person
wishing to write upon, or read up to a particular subject, might like to take a Blue
Book with him into the country, or abroad. At present that must be out of the
question.”46 There seemed to be a correspondence between the desire to make
blue books more transportable and the movement inherent to the phenomenol-
ogy of the “report.” Chadwick’s bureaucratic reveries put blue books in constant
transit. When the Commons did not show strong enthusiasm, Chadwick tried to
recruit Brougham’s help in the Lords, reminding him that under his leadership
in the early 1830s, abridged poor-law reports were issued in octavo. He main-
tained that the compact size of the document was responsible for its popularity.
Conveniently, Charles Knight, the publisher of the Poor Law Commission, be-
came in the 1840s the Board of Health publisher.47
Despite the experimentation with the octavo, the folio remained the standard
size for most parliamentary literature. The speaker maintained that when
reprinted in octavo, reports ran into too many volumes. It was impractical to de-
liver the daily evidence to committee members in that format, and they object-
ed to the small type used in the octavo page. Richard Monckton Milnes com-
plained, “The good old large orthodox folio had been abolished, and a little, thick,
dumpy volume substituted, which was far less convenient, for by turning over a
folio page you could see at a glance whether there was anything in it which you
wanted to read, while in a small volume you took twice the time in finding it
out.”48

Finding Readers
Many schemes were floated to find readers for state publications. Edward
Morton, a journalist and shorthand writer, argued that the public learned about
parliamentary debates in the morning papers but knew very little about com-
 60 Monuments in Print

mittee hearings where some of the more interesting “statistics on health,

crime . . . and facts and opinions on the social condition of important classes”
were divulged.49 This information arrived in the public domain only at the end
of the session and in a cumbersome, hard to read, form. Committees should be
opened to the public through the press by allowing the publication of frequent
reports on their dealings. Under the present system, Morton poeticized, “Parlia-
ment dams up its water until the dry season is over, and then lets them out in a
flood which inundates, not fertilises.”50 Parliament was thus encouraged to man-
age the temporal release of information to satisfy a fleeting collective interest
and to indulge specific public appetites. This material would be of interest to
commercial people and professional men, and would have a devoted readership
in the colonies, in particular India, Australia, and Canada. It would set people’s
minds’ to work, enthused Morton, and the Commons might get in response facts
or suggestions on the subjects under discussion. Information begets information.
Morton’s proposal had a precedent in parliamentary practice. In a few cases,
committee chairmen decided to release their transcripts piecemeal while inves-
tigations were still taking place. The Select Committee on Combination Laws
(1824) was a model for such publication strategy, unprecedentedly issuing fre-
quent accounts that occupied many columns in the press and fueled public de-
bate. (The committee’s work concluded with a wide consensus over the repeal of
the acts.) Numbering fifty-two M.P.s, a decade before committees were limited
to fifteen members, this select committee functioned as a miniature Parliament
or a national court. The publication of the weekly evidence opened the process
to public rebuttal.51
Morton thought that for the collective edition of committee hearings a book
the size of the Edinburgh Review would be the most pleasant to read. Individual
documents might follow the format of the Economist or the Spectator and be
printed in double columns. He thus proposed to emulate another genre that was
literary and informational, the periodical review. As to the style of the reports,
Morton thought them readable as they were without radical editing. “I am in-
clined to think that on subjects of interest the public would not be content with
the substance, and that the form of dialogue is not unpopular; it gives a dramatic
interest to the evidence; the only objection is, that the examination is sometimes
conducted in too discursive a style; there is a want of continuous interest, from
one subject not being followed up and exhausted before another is started.”52
From the 1830s to the 1850s, the concept of information gradually replaced
the term knowledge—for instance, “taxes on knowledge” or the “Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge”—as a designation for the type of intelligence
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 61

purveyed by newspapers and government publications. There were also more fre-
quent allusions to reference (as in the later expression reference work) to describe
the function of those documents. This understanding evoked a tightly registered
body of facts whose usefulness depended on organization. At the same time, there
was a continuing concern over the readability of the parliamentary record, a con-
cern that informed Hansard at the beginning of the century, and Chadwick, Mor-
ton, and others in midcentury. Allusions to literary and journalistic genres in the
attempt to gauge the possible use of blue books were typical of the debate over
parliamentary papers. These documents (blue books in particular) were the sub-
ject of multiple inscriptions as archives, records, and books in a cultural order
where reading was ubiquitous but “information retrieval” had not yet become a
formalized practice. Once they were crafted and marketed as books or pamphlets,
it was presumed that blue books would be similarly consumed.
Morton’s testimony was given to a committee that deliberated over a plan,
which gained some popularity at the time, to allocate parliamentary documents
to the burgeoning Mechanics’ Institutions. Indeed, the spirit of the SDUK lin-
gered on. Henry Tufnell, the M.P. who sponsored the scheme, reported that the
230 or so Mechanics Institutions throughout the country were a great tool for the
“mental improvements” of their membership, estimated at between sixty and
seventy thousand. In order not to overwhelm the institutions with massive quan-
tities of papers, Tufnell suggested selecting the most important documents on
finance, colonization, and other great subjects of national concern so that “full
information” would be placed in the hands of the people. Lawmakers appeared
familiar with the reading sensibilities of the laboring classes. Another M.P. re-
marked that it was commonly understood from the decline in the circulation of
Chambers’s Journal, the Penny Magazine, and similar publications that the
working class had altered its reading tastes and now preferred political material.
If this was the case, they should receive the best political literature, the docu-
mentary legacy of Parliament.
The dispersion of these papers had a purpose beyond educating or informing
the populace. “They would show . . . that the representatives of the people, be-
sides their attendance and debates in that House, were arduously engaged
throughout the Session in the development of information essential to the pub-
lic service.”53 John William Fortescue concurred that “more was done in the
House than mere talking and debating, and the information contained in [par-
liamentary papers] would tend to correct many crude and mischievous ideas.”
There was a degree of defensiveness in this and similar statements. Witnesses al-
leged that working people were dismissive of the gentlemanly debating-club
 62 Monuments in Print

character of the parliamentary exchange, and lawmakers opined that they

should better represent their labor to the people. Joseph Brotherton was con-
vinced that laborers were fully able to appreciate the information conveyed to
them. “If the people were seeking political power it was important that they
should have the best political education.”54 This idea could be articulated more
comfortably a few years after the collapse of Chartism, when the incorporation
of workers into the political classes was unlikely to be done abruptly, violently, or
immediately.
The initial sign that the members of Mechanics’ Institutions in fact coveted
parliamentary papers was given at a conference held at the office of the Society
of Arts in May 1852. Eventually, 272 petitions containing 15,281 signatures ar-
rived in Westminster. The select committee concluded that its witnesses uni-
formly agreed that diffusion of the “most interesting and instructive” documents
would dispel ignorance, correct misrepresentations, and enable “the mass of the
people to form for themselves a just opinion upon subjects of legislation and other
important questions of the day.”55 Witnesses recommended that in choosing ma-
terial regional interests should be addressed, citing diverse reading preferences
in agricultural and industrial areas, maritime towns, and inland districts. Re-
portedly, workers were particularly interested in the report of the Committee of
the Privy Council on Education as well as the accounts of the Board of Health,
Department of Practical Arts, and the Government School of Mines. Despite the
select committee’s recommendations and comparable schemes that resurfaced
throughout the 1850s, these ambitious ideas did not yield legislation. While re-
trenchment was certainly an important factor in the plan’s failure, another ma-
jor obstacle was the Commons’ inability to agree on the mechanism of selecting
specific segments of the enormous printed record for distribution. Profoundly re-
luctant to make such choices, M.P.s claimed that reducing the size of the record
impaired its capacity to represent fully the range of opinion and information
brought before Parliament.56
Lord Stanley (M.P. for King’s Lynn) promoted another scheme: allocating im-
portant blue books to newspapers, popular journals, and magazines. In a pamphlet
titled, “What Shall We Do with Our Blue Books? Parliament the National School
Master” (1854), he agreed that the annual sixty or seventy volumes of parliamen-
tary papers were the most important tools for adult education, especially in remote
regions, but opined that the work of digesting and diffusing official knowledge
should be left to the press. In his view, the provincial editor functioned as a school-
master of sorts. Stanley had little concern about bias. Journalistic bias was not rad-
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 63

ically different from the way opinion shaped parliamentary exchange and the pub-
lic arena in general. Besides, “opposite exaggerations elicit truth.”57 He even pre-
dicted that press reports would encourage individual readers to purchase blue books
and thus increase revenues from the sale of parliamentary papers.

In the Maze
The paternalistic benevolence of lawmakers wishing to employ blue books as
schoolhouse textbooks and the ambition of diligent public servants encountered
a skeptical and ever more frugal bureaucratic culture, best represented by the
comptroller of the Stationery Office, the political economist John Ramsay McCul-
loch. With wit and sarcasm that preceded the author of Parkinson’s Law by a cen-
tury, McCulloch mocked the zeal of commissioners and other officials to keep the
printing machines running amok. As a prime example of “an abuse of printing,”
he gave a report by a committee on wine duties that contained 231 pages on the
“Vatting of Wine in the different Docks . . . There is not, I believe, a sane person
in the empire who ever read one line of it or ever will.”58 Only a small number
of documents, such as the one on marriage with a deceased wife’s sister, were
widely purchased by a curious public.59 McCulloch dismissed the customary al-
location of complimentary government reports as wasteful and unfair. Why
should government give documents to some and not to others? He pointed to the
mounds of papers that languished in government warehouses. The Stationery
Office had instituted a policy of selling printing surplus as wastepaper to recover
at least some of the expense. Asked about Mechanics’ Institutions’ requests, he
quipped, “If you could get a Sir Isaac Newton to cull out of the million of pages
of trash, the 5 or 10 per cent of good that there is in them, and circulate that
through the country, it might be useful; but as it is, it would merely involve an
enormous additional expense.”60 He was willing to sell at cost but not to supply
wastepaper gratis. McCulloch believed that parliamentary papers could be made
more interesting to the public but only by severe editing.
As early as the 1820s, lawmakers complained that official publications con-
tained excessive material of dubious utility. In an 1828 debate in the House, one
participant pointed to the appendix of a slavery report that featured nothing but
the names of slaves and their masters and mistresses together with evaluations
of the slave owners’ moral qualities. The select committee on printing similarly
criticized the wastefulness of documenting individuals by name.61 The second
report on education in Ireland featured 1,331 pages, nearly all filled with the
 64 Monuments in Print

names of schoolmasters. Papers relating to the slave trade included 938 pages
populated with the names and character evaluations of slaves. Appendices to a
report from the Chancery Commission featured 600 pages of suitors’ names.
These were among the first instances in which the effort to print every detail
in the state’s record was subjected to overt ridicule. Massive registration of per-
sonal names and assessments of individuals’ moral rectitude possibly indicated
the controlling drives behind accumulating social knowledge. However, the pub-
lication of such minutia in a national document printed in London was consid-
ered excessive, perhaps improper or even ludicrous. This knowledge was removed
from its locality (where it was first gathered and collated) and the context of
dominance and subordination outside of which proper names were all but mean-
ingless. The mindless reproduction of such details brought to absurdity the Ba-
conian imperative for aggregation of facts. This is not to say that government
could not exercise social control by publishing individual names. For example,
the official Police Gazette that in the late 1820s replaced the older Hue and Cry
was expected to arrest crime by prevention rather than punishment. Its origina-
tors maintained that the Achilles heel of policing society was the lack of effec-
tive means of communication and publicity. The new publication was an un-
stamped, franked publication and therefore accessibly to many. It featured
information about military deserters, runaway apprentices, and “parish abscon-
ders,” as well horse thieves and other offenders. It was argued that if hung in
public houses the Police Gazette “would afford amusement and instruction to two
millions of readers.”62
By midcentury, public officials competed in telling anecdotes and coining
metaphors for the seemingly rampant production of printed matter. One critic
defied any busy M.P. to even try to turn the leaves of all the papers printed for the
Commons. Royal commissions of inquiry were ripe targets for such criticism. Par-
liamentarians complained about the unlimited printing power given to royal com-
missioners. “Upon the appointment of a Commission by the Crown, the Presses
of a Government Printer are placed at its disposal.”63 In an attempt to slash ex-
penses, officials proposed that instead of printing mammoth appendices to com-
missions’ reports, the raw evidence in manuscript form would be deposited in the
library of the House of Commons or in the Home Office. In other words, the ev-
idence’s appropriate place was the repository archive rather than the print archive.
Sir George Cornewall Lewis remarked that members of both houses and the pub-
lic did read reports but rarely consulted appendices.64 However, while the speaker
and the printing committee kept the run of ordinary documents low, public board
and commission reports varied from 1,750 to 5,000 and even 10,000 copies.65
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 65

Commissioners were accused of printing long documents for their own edifi-
cation. To the frustration of M.P.s, the printing committee had no clear jurisdic-
tion over the publication of royal commission reports in matters of content, qual-
ity of production, or number of copies. McCulloch also objected to the glut of
minutia in reports from the poor-law, prison, and other inspectorates. Government
issued elaborate statements on the poor of every parish that repeated themselves
every year. This material should be published every five or ten years, he opined.
Sardonic statements from public officials betrayed a measure of sobriety in the
midst of the Victorian cult of the fact. Thomas Vardon, the secretary of the print-
ing committee, thought that select committees’ reports were also burdened by the
“dead weight of that which the public would not even desire to know.”66
Lawmakers became accustomed to describe themselves as being swarmed
with printed matter without recourse. They even seemed ambivalent regarding
the importance of blue books for the parliamentary process. When a delegation
of Chartists enters Charles Egremont’s library in Disraeli’s novel Sybil, they no-
tice on a side table his arranged parliamentary papers and piles of blue books, a
detail that attested to the young statesman’s dedication and sincerity.67 The
statesmen in Anthony Trollope’s parliamentary novels, known as the Palliser se-
ries, also devour blue books into the early hours of the morning to educate them-
selves about matters of the world or, alternatively, to escape its woes. Thus, in The
Eustace Diamonds, “Lord Fawn has suffered a disappointment in love, but he had
consoled himself with blue-books.”68 (Trollope’s heroines read novels, of course.)
Mr. Gradgrind’s library in Dickens’s Hard Times is crammed with blue books (a
manifestation of this tyrannical schoolmaster’s belief in the superiority of facts
over sentiments). The volumes are so numerous that the profusion of blue re-
minds the narrator of Bluebeard’s infamous den and by implication suggests,
tongue in cheek, that this repository of government reports is in fact a chamber
of utilitarian horror.
In contrast, the libraries of actual (rather than literary) parliamentarians, ac-
cording to a few depictions, were hopelessly cluttered with blue books. Members
such as V. Scully, remonstrated against getting lost in the labyrinth of their own
textual production. “[I] object to having tons of papers which are never opened
sent to my lodgings. [I have] been out of town for a few weeks, and on my return,
instead of being able to go to “The Derby” . . . had to wade through a mass of
Parliamentary papers. [I] put away 1 lb and threw away 2 cwt. [I] could not sell
the residue; . . . could not exchange them for books, for that would be selling
them; . . . could not burn them, for that would be voted a nuisance. Why should
these tons of paper be thrust on unwilling members?”69
 66 Monuments in Print

“A duti-ful subject, or, ‘The man wot never interferes in any business over which he has no
control.’” The Duke of Wellington is surrounded by mounds of state papers and parliamentary
reports (mostly in loose sheets) on every conceivable topic of domestic and imperial affairs. John
Doyle drew the caricature shortly after the aging Wellington, then a member of Robert Peel’s
cabinet, added the army commander in chief to his duties. By the mid-nineteenth century,
the labor of bureaucrats, legislators, and statesmen became synonymous with the perusal of
parliamentary papers or “blue books.” (H. B. [John Doyle], July 27, 1843, the Tabley collection at
the University of Manchester.)

William Ewart declared in another debate, “It had rained blue-books—Pe-

lion had been piled on Ossa, and Ossa on Olympus. It had been sarcastically re-
marked that if you wanted to hide a question the best plan was to bury it in a
blue-book—you might then defy anybody to excavate it.”70 (The print archive
could therefore also be a place of concealment.) For the benefit of M.P.s and the
public, Ewart suggested two sets of blue books, one in full, another in digest. He
thought that the statistical department of the Board of Trade should prepare this
carefully abridged and condensed edition. Since they had done so stupendously,
presenting valuable volumes of figures in the Statistical Abstract, they should be
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 67

able to do the same with other types of facts. Joseph Warner Henley contended
that even for the purpose of a digest information had to be printed in full. Be-
sides, committees and commissions could not be trusted to select evidence with-
out introducing their own opinions and biases. Because M.P.s sought information
simultaneously in diverse directions, full-scale blue books brimming with details
were essential. Ewart’s proposal thus faced an insurmountable chicken-and-egg
problem, and the motion was withdrawn. Once again, lawmakers felt they could
not compromise the completeness of their published record.
They also guarded jealously their blue book privileges. Before the late 1850s,
all papers were delivered to every member, but it was decided that certain papers
would be left in the Votes Office and dispatched only upon request. Members
grumbled. When he did not receive a document concerning the prevention of
smallpox, Sir John Pakington determined, “If there was one thing of more im-
portance than another in the performance of their functions as Members of that
House, it was that all possible information should be accessible to them on all oc-
casions.”71 Members also complained that the commercial press received official
reports before they did.
Despite somewhat quixotic efforts and even temporary successes, reducing the
overall size of parliamentary printing proved to be, in the long run, all but im-
possible. The same was true of the length of royal commissions’ reports. There
was some correspondence between the gentlemanly status of commissioners and
their publication privileges. It was tacitly assumed that reining in those who
made such an effort at collecting and sifting evidence without pay would en-
counter much resistance. One of a commissioner’s few tangible rewards was to
see his entire work in print regardless of utility. Some M.P.s were concerned that
removing the evidence from printed reports would eliminate the basis for eval-
uating commissioners’ work and recommendations. Commissions of inquiry re-
ports would continue to provoke derision for their size, as the commissioners
themselves would be mocked for their absurdly long tenure, for, it was popularly
remarked, royal commissions, “take minutes and last for years.” The Globe
sneered at the 1833 Factory Commission, complaining that “it was not necessary
that 12 gentlemen should be sent on a voyage of inquiry and produce . . . a large
blue book 14 inches by 9 and weighing about 9 lb.” Lytton Strachey would write
that royal commissions “achieve nothing but a very fat blue-book on a very high
shelf.”72 The trail of heavy volumes, a feast for historians, became for contem-
poraries an allegory for the aimlessness of bureaucratic rituals. The tension be-
tween blue books’ cumbersome, overbearing, and yet measurable physicality and
their alleged uselessness as reading material (or as a basis for policy making) was
 68 Monuments in Print

endlessly employed for poking fun at government. Under the title “The Book of
the Month,” a 1930 caricature in the Evening Standard depicts a Gandhi sup-
porter in national garb attempting to purchase the Simon Report on colonial pol-
icy in India, a report that Indian nationalists had soundly rejected. The clerk ex-
claims, “A million copies, Sir? Certainly, Sir! Excellent reading, Sir!” “Oh! I don’t
want them to read—Just to throw at policemen.”73
Despite that such ridicule became a leitmotif in British public life, royal com-
mission reports did not get shorter. The 1894 report of the Labour Commission
was sixty-seven volumes. The 1909 Royal Commission on Poor Law would wrap
its findings in merely fifty-three. By then the term blue book inspired expressions
such as bluebooky, bluebookish, and bluebookishness, to denote dry, tediously fac-
tual texts and individuals.

Further into the nineteenth century, blue books became increasingly self-
referential, featuring more and more details extracted from other parliamentary
papers and covering previous investigations and resolutions, in effect delineating
the historical trajectories of policies, institutions, and social predicaments. Offi-
cial publications served thus as a comprehensive memory receptacle. The British
state could now be conceived of as a historically determined unified “subject”
propped by institutionalized memory. This apparent stability, continuity, and vis-
ibility emerged, at times, as a liability rather than a source of power. Parliament
and government became entangled in their own self-representations, as was ev-
ident in the Stockdale affair. A similar form of entrapment involved the new pub-
lication Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates. With this reliable record, M.P.s had at
their disposal yet another archive that created coherent subjects—themselves.
Members who abandoned old positions too obviously were confronted in floor de-
bates with their own previous utterances, which had been faithfully registered.
By the end of the nineteenth century this practice would become a verb, to
hansardize. Hansard vouched for continuity but somewhat curbed the free-
flowing exchange in parliamentary debates.74
The official print output was concurrently a source of pride and embarrass-
ment. In authoring and printing blue books, Parliament and the ministry
launched a medium for their own self-representation. Reports of commissions,
committees, and inspectorates were particularly important in Victorian political
culture for their discursive and physical commemoration and celebration of re-
form and the new bureaucracy. The obliteration of secret procedures in politics
and administration (which obviously was never to be fully achieved) related to
the ideal of a democratic public sphere. The shift from the old regime to the mod-
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 69

ern state involved the opening up of the state’s hidden sphere of decision making.
However, elephantine government reports also testified to the compulsiveness of
the state (as well as of individual bureaucrats) to write about itself. Official re-
ports—the state’s diaries—were construed in terms compatible with grapho-
mania, megalomania, or other bureaucratic and personal pathologies. Uncom-
monly large documents (Iraq’s 12,000 page 2002 report on its unconventional
weapons or—to give a radically different example—Hillary Rodham Clinton’s
1993 Health Reform Report, which was derided for occupying 4,000 pages) un-
less clearly organized as information (e.g., the OED, Encyclopedia Britannica),
can leave an impression of excess, impropriety, and even cover-up. These mam-
moth documents subvert the demand for transparency by complying with it ex-
cessively. The state is supposedly telling us everything it can in order to deceive
us not by lying but by divulging the truth in its unreadable entirety. (Of course,
it also tells actual lies and omits material, as critics of royal commissions in the
1830s and beyond alleged.) Calling attention to either symptoms of bureaucratic
lack of self-control or tricks of deception, this impression emanated from an ap-
parent misplacement of the state’s archive outside its proper interior space. In
this reading, the distinction between the state’s repository archive and its print
archive was analogous to contemporaneous notions of “private” versus “public”
spheres.
The efforts to create alternative modes for representing the nation descriptively
(which also featured the representation of opinion) was bound to collide with tra-
ditional parliamentary and extraparliamentary forms of political representation.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Victorian state was sweeping away most of the
old constraints on the circulation of knowledge (and opinion) through the press.
Concurrently, government and Parliament attempted to intrude upon this free-
dom by, for instance, assuming a pedagogical posture that was previously the do-
main of free associations such as the SDUK. Moreover, at this historical moment,
the state collaborated with private publishers in various campaigns to sway pub-
lic opinion, and Parliament entered the market by selling off its printed docu-
ments. Macaulay wrote that “a government can interfere in discussion, only by
making it less free than it would otherwise be . . . Government can bring nothing
but the influence of hopes and fears to support its doctrines. It carries on contro-
versy not with reasons, but with threats and bribes.”75 Whiggish thundering
proclamations about the freedom of the press all but ignored the Whig govern-
ments’ own conspicuous and intrusive “contributions” to public discussions.
In our times, Habermas’s work rather than lingering Whiggism perpetuates
the veneration of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century British public culture. In
 70 Monuments in Print

Habermas’s early writings, the state was largely ignored in favor of an ideal of
bourgeois liberation and rational exchange that reached its apex with the first
election platform, Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto of 1834. In this view, the
model bourgeois public sphere began to unravel toward the later part of the
nineteenth century, a transformation closely linked to economic differentiation
manifested in the emergence of large industrial and financial conglomerates,
governmental regulation of the market, the rise of consumerism, and the conse-
quent emphasis on the advertising capacity of the press at the expense of a
learned, rational debate.76 However, the lines between the public theater of dis-
cussion and the state began melting much earlier. This transformation was
largely due to the state’s increasingly aggressive role in generating and distrib-
uting knowledge as well as in representing public opinion. By instituting the sale
policy in the name of greater accessibility, the early Victorian state collapsed the
difference between the Enlightenment demand for an unimpeded circulation of
ideas and the dynamics of the marketplace. It further restricted access by curb-
ing the range of “authors” that were allowed admission to print statism (e.g.,
writers of petitions) and giving power to bureaucrats—rather than legislators—
in allocating official publications. Most importantly, the state emulated the clas-
sical public sphere by partaking vigorously in the critical review of itself and, as
we shall see, became a model of appropriation by working-class organizations
that mounted their own social investigations. In contrast to Habermas’s rather
monolithic view of the public sphere, his critics have demonstrated the plural-
ity of communities of exchange (including oppositional counterpublics) in early
nineteenth-century Britain and elsewhere. The state endeavored concurrently
and indiscriminately to colonize them all, as was evident to Cobbett and others.
To some extent print statism indeed contributed to the convergence of these di-
vergent publics.
Finally, the episodes described here epitomized not just the publishing ambi-
tions of the modern state but also its great desire to communicate, to be read. By
the middle of the twentieth century, the state ventured into more popular
branches of publishing. The Stationery Office (HMSO) ran its own chain of
stores, where it has displayed books, leaflets, periodicals, maps, folders, wall
charts, transparencies, and microfilms on almost every conceivable topic, includ-
ing war history, social history, archaeology, English art, museums and galleries,
photography, and technology, in addition to the immense output of government
departments and parliamentary papers. Publishers watched, with much concern,
HMSO shops offering fancy Christmas cards and titles such as The ABC of Cook-
ing (1954) or The History of Light Cars (1958). More traditional staples such as
 Blue Books and the Market of Information 71

The Rents Act and You (1957) sold 1.3 million copies. By the early 1960s, there
were forty thousand titles in print and about six thousand new titles every year.
One of the most celebrated best sellers, Sir Ernest Gowers’s Plain Words (1948),
sold more than 1.25 million copies worldwide and was published as a paperback
by Penguin. The question of the archive’s readability was circumvented. The bu-
reaucracy, at the height of its twentieth-century self-confidence, produced books
that were crafted and circulated as any other commercial books. Once again, as
in the days of William Cobbett, government undersold the competition. In 1962,
the Council of the Publishers Association protested what it considered to be
government’s invasion into a commercial field. Two years earlier, Cyril North-
cote Parkinson famously remarked, “Continents are being de-forested, pulping-
machines worn out and paper-makers kept working night and day to keep up
with this appalling output of literature.”77 As our survey demonstrates, the abil-
ity to arouse interest, awe, or scorn has accompanied official publications since
the early decades of the nineteenth century.
 chapter two

The Battle of the Books

Citizens as Readers

With some ambivalence, Victorian lawmakers looked to the European conti-

nent for models of stupendous elaboration of state knowledge through statistical
bureaus and other scholarly institutions. As for publication projects, examples of
state abundance increasingly came from across the Atlantic. Parliamentary de-
bates about official publications often referred to the United States. Thus, mem-
bers of the 1853 select committee on allocation of parliamentary papers to pub-
lic institutions heard, with a touch of envy, the testimony of Henry Stevens Jr.,
an agent for the Smithsonian Institution in London. This position also put him
in charge of negotiating the exchange of official printed documents between the
two countries.
In the early 1850s, the federal government issued each of its papers in 1,500
copies, but in every session, Stevens told the committee, about ten to twenty doc-
uments received publicity unmatched by any parliamentary literature. Printed
in large editions of between 5,000 and 100,000 copies, they were allocated
through congressional representatives and senators to hundreds of libraries,
learned associations, and athenaeums. As a matter of law, Washington sent some
of its most lavish print productions to state governments, colleges, and incorpo-
rated literary institutions, mostly historical societies. Government made no de-
mand upon these institutions. Only the Statutes at Large, published by Little and
Brown, was designated government property. An act of Congress required that
office holders transmit those copies to their successors. The federal legislature
also funded, fully or partially, books on historical or scientific topics. Congress
usually owned the manuscripts and subscribed for perhaps one or two thousand
copies. The publisher could sell as many additional volumes as he chose at the
price paid by Congress.1 British parliamentarians heard that their counterparts
in Washington regularly received multiple copies of the reports on congressional
 The Battle of the Books 73

debates prepared by the privately owned and federally sponsored Congressional

Globe. Interest in the Westminster committee room rose even higher when it
turned out that in the beginning of every legislative session, U.S. lawmakers were
entitled to thirty dollars worth of subscriptions to periodicals and newspapers of
their choosing, including foreign publications. (The witness claimed that many
selected the London Times.)
A few states engaged in massive publishing enterprises of their own. In 1842,
the New York legislature launched a natural history survey. It issued fifteen vol-
umes in more than twenty thousand copies, which were either granted to public
institutions or sold for a subsidized price of one dollar per volume. In order to
prevent this publication from becoming the object of booksellers’ speculations,
the state obtained a copyright, and individual purchasers had to guarantee their
good faith. The New York legislature issued about ten or twelve volumes of offi-
cial papers a year (as much as half of roughly twenty-five volumes produced by
Congress), with the exception of unique undertakings such as the Natural His-
tory Survey or the Atlas of the State of New York, and special reports on schools,
canals, and other public undertakings. Members of Parliament noticed that some
of the controversies that haunted British blue book production were absent from
the U.S. scene. For instance, congressional select committees seldom printed their
proceedings in full, doing so mostly in cases of great controversy such as election
disputes. Many committees conducted their business without a stenographer.
They did not print evidence daily for the use of committee members. Legislators
publicized their disagreements by authoring minority reports, not through a full
transcript of the proceedings. Stevens claimed that he had never heard com-
plaints about the partial nature of the printed record. “The system pursued there
is quite different from the system pursued here; our reports are very much fuller
being more like an essay upon the subject; the authorities are frequently fully
quoted but the evidence is not given in full.”2
In its report, the select committee cited federal and state governments as par-
adigms of liberal diffusion of knowledge. Even the ever-frugal Hume did not re-
coil at the idea of a massive gratis distribution of official documents. “Public pa-
pers of America circulate information much better than we do, and a deal of
information is communicated to distant parts, and of those distributed by order
of the Congress, many of them are well taken care of.”3 This somewhat unex-
pected appreciation was guided by the impression that, rather than gratifying
political needs, the United States was building a comprehensive educational ap-
paratus in which the distribution of documents was only a single element, sup-
plemented by vast public school systems and official support to libraries and aca-
 74 Monuments in Print

demic institutions. In this respect, the state of New York in particular drew the
parliamentarians’ admiration. It also occurred to them that in enterprises such
as the natural history survey, the New York legislature had taken upon itself tasks
that in continental Europe were reserved for national governments.
Stevens’s testimony, however, prettified the reality of congressional printing.
True, there was a degree of openhandedness in the production and dissemina-
tion of official papers, and sponsorship of books, all of which were justified in
endless tributes made to the spirit of republican education, democracy, and use-
ful knowledge. Nevertheless, it was also evident that many of the textual prod-
ucts prepared or funded by Congress served concrete political needs and that, be-
sides allocating important documents to learned institutions, members of the
two houses dispatched them to loyal constituents. Moreover, at the turn of the
1850s—while British lawmakers were debating the fate of their official publi-
cations—the Senate and, to a lesser degree, the House of Representatives were
holding heated debates over similar concerns. Charges of excess and abuse sur-
faced. The entire field of printing was, until the establishment of the Govern-
ment Printing Office in 1861, one of the most notorious arenas for party pat-
ronage.
Recurring questions concerned the duty of government to provide its citizens
with information and the type of knowledge that lent itself for such circulation.
Since Congress was often sponsoring actual books rather than blue books (a term
used in U.S. bureaucratic parlance for lists of office holders), doubts over federal
involvement in the business of publishing were even more acute than in Britain.
Was congressional largess indulging a cadre of authors by funding their private
ambitions? Befitting the republican ethos, this concern was articulated in terms
not of a danger to the purity of the free market but of a threat posed to individ-
uals’ autonomy by an overbearing authority. Congressmen often simply asked
whether a particular document was what their constituents wanted to read or to
own, making the desires of the population the leading criterion. While in times
of economic depression the notion of retrenchment gained popularity, propo-
nents of restraint in official publications were not as victorious (or as sincere) as
were British reformers. The Jacksonian revolution that was lauded as an attempt
at retrenchment (more a campaign to curb privilege than to save money) seemed
only to intensify federal splurging on public printing.4 Political exigencies and
the absence of an emerging bureaucratic ethos—together with the inherent for-
eignness of utilitarianism to antebellum political culture—insured that in com-
parison with Britain the production and circulation of knowledge in the United
States would be less systematized or constricted.
 The Battle of the Books 75

The following discussion first situates federal publications within the contours
of the American “knowledge policy.” Through a range of congressional debates
over specific publishing ventures, it explores congressmen’s response to the read-
ing preferences of the electorate and how the Jacksonian politics of representa-
tion (rather than merely party politics) converged with the publishing capacities
of Congress and the executive. This chapter also examines publishing initiatives
that were grounded in uniquely American circumstances: debates over offering
official documents in foreign languages (especially Spanish) for the benefit of
non-English-speaking residents and citizens, and the efforts to commit to print
the works of “founding fathers.”

State Culture
There was an apparent incongruity between the relatively small tasks of the
antebellum federal government and Congress’s engagement in large-scale pub-
lishing projects. Clearly, official printing was not a collateral of any grand ad-
ministrative expansion, or an indication of rampant legislative activism. Certain
publications, however, did suggest growth in the pale of government. For in-
stance, the practice of Indian removal became during the Jacksonian period a
matter of highly publicized and hotly debated public policy. The administration
used the annual reports of the commissioner of Indian affairs to justify and pro-
mote the removal schemes. Westward expansion in the 1840s, the war with Mex-
ico, and the addition of Texas and California to the Union involved federal ac-
tion and surges of public contention, exploration, and publication.
In the 1850s and 1860s, Congress intensified its fact-finding initiatives. In
1856, a full congressional inquiry examined the Kansas crisis, and in 1859, a Sen-
ate committee investigated John Brown’s raid in Harper’s Ferry. The onset of the
Civil War triggered an unprecedented burst of investigative projects for Congress
and the administration. With Reconstruction, the two branches of government
found themselves feuding, and the later years of Andrew Johnson’s administra-
tion amounted (at least according to Woodrow Wilson’s interpretation) to “con-
gressional government.” Indeed, the aftermath of the war occasioned massive
congressional inquiries into the South, including examining events such as the
race riots in Memphis (1866) and New Orleans (1866), and culminating in 1872
with a comprehensive investigation into the condition of the “former insurrec-
tionary states.” While congressional investigations drew national attention, their
reports grew in size and included lengthy appendices populated with documents
and strings of interviews. The Kansas Committee, the Memphis riots Commit-
 76 Monuments in Print

tee, and the Doolittle Committee, which examined the condition of the Indian
tribes (1865–66), featured fieldwork performed by senators and representatives.
In the absence of an institution comparable to the British royal commissions of
inquiry, Congress retained a hold on large-scale fact-finding missions.
Beyond investigations, the publication of documents occasioned struggles be-
tween Congress and the executive, as was famously demonstrated in the De-
cember 1865 congressional decision to publish Carl Schurz’s report (as well as a
shorter document by Ulysses Grant) on the situation in the South. President
Johnson had dispatched Schurz to tour the former Confederate states. (Radical
republicans also assisted. Senator Charles Sumner arranged for his friends to pay
the high premium for Schurz’s life insurance.) But concerned about his emis-
sary’s apparent support of massive reconstruction, Johnson later advised Schurz
against publishing his report. The Senate insisted that Johnson submit the report
and subsequently printed and circulated tens of thousands of copies. This was
not the first time that Congress snatched a publication project from the hands of
the executive. In the 1840s, it had taken charge over the publication of the re-
sults of the ground breaking naval exploring expedition to the Pacific (1838– 42).
The two-party system and later the worsening sectional rift also accelerated
the production of printed matter. Western expansion articulated national senti-
ments, and official expedition reports served as vehicles for imperial as well as
empirical aspirations. Allusions to American grandeur were easy to provoke and
did not necessitate either momentous events or extraordinary undertakings.
They reappeared in mundane congressional debates over, for instance, the qual-
ity of the paper and binding of official publications. A particular dimension of
the craving to demonstrate American competence was the concern over the states’
image abroad. Like Chekhov’s characters, antebellum statesmen and intellectu-
als constantly asked themselves: what would “they” think of us? But instead of
worrying about future generations, these Americans were preoccupied with the
gaze from the east, from the capitals of Europe.
Federal publishing schemes also point to a comparatively more intimate re-
lationship between state and culture. British reflections on culture and the state
largely aimed at implicating the latter in an effort to educate disenfranchised
populations. Later in the century, Matthew Arnold and others would introduce
“culture” as a mechanism for controlling the encroaching threat of mass society.
Allocating federal documents to libraries, literary societies, and colleges may be
construed as a pedagogical mission consistent with the individual states’ initia-
tion of public school systems.5 There was, however, little resemblance between
the political education (or, more precisely, market education) of the kind the
 The Battle of the Books 77

British Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) sponsored and the
American notion of “republican education.” Congressional debates revealed am-
bivalence about the pedagogic predilections of the state. The usefulness of “use-
ful knowledge” had a more immediate and egalitarian resonance on the Ameri-
can side. Our understanding of culture here should not be confined to education.
The book-making federal government directly engaged in aesthetic production
long before the New Deal or the advent of the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This aspect was
particularly discernable in the official literature about the West and Indian tribes,
which habitually and consciously featured aesthetic surpluses manifested in ei-
ther visual depictions or narrative structures. The subject matter as well as its
complex relations to the United States, required representational strategies of a
different order than those employed to describe child laborers and the poor in
Britain.
The antebellum period witnessed the concurrent flourishing of print and oral
culture. The spoken word was central to the localized public sphere that evolved
around town meetings, public assemblies, and stump speeches. Political antag-
onists often confronted each other in the public arena. The famous Lincoln-
Douglas debates of 1857 come to mind. Politics was marked by a remarkable
oratorical quality, from Henry Clay and Daniel Webster’s Senate floor rhetoric to
the elegant yet accessible “Saxon eloquence” of Abraham Lincoln. One of the
unique aspects of congressional debate was that some printed reports (such as
Schurz’s and Grant’s) were read aloud, simply for effect. Yet, while rhetorical
force seemed an essential aspect of the democratic polity, print culture invaded
the U.S. political process in far more radical ways than in Britain. The size of the
electorate and the enormity of the country necessitated a large-scale system to
disperse information. From the late 1830s on, every national election was ac-
companied by hectic production of ad hoc party papers, official biographies of
candidates, and bric-a-brac print matter, including party almanacs, handbills,
pamphlets, caricatures, and even congressional publications recruited for direct
political purposes. Participatory political culture, freedom of expression, and
high literacy rates further encouraged the relentless diffusion of political litera-
ture.
Government propped an intricate network of communication. Untaxed, cheap,
and constitutionally protected newspapers flourished everywhere. Beyond their
primary local function, they served as a mighty infrastructure, utilized in im-
plicit and explicit ways to circulate information emanating from Washington.
The arbitrary relocation of the federal Capitol at the turn of the nineteenth cen-
 78 Monuments in Print

tury necessitated new vehicles of information. While in Britain the presence of

the state in the provinces was assured by itinerant government officials (tax col-
lectors in the eighteenth century, commissioners and inspectors in the nine-
teenth), in the United States the congressional representative was most likely the
only person in his district to travel with any regularity to Washington, D.C. Un-
til communication improved during the second and third decades of the century,
congressmen (especially from remote districts in the South and the West) dis-
patched to individual constituents and local newspapers hundreds of copies of
printed circular letters in which they summarized federal news largely excerpted
from government documents. Much of the information came from officially pub-
lished documents such as presidential messages (the first of which was printed in
1803) and reports from cabinet members, especially the secretary of the Treasury.
The state extended invaluable support to the press that amounted to a subsidy.
Newspapers enjoyed especially low postal rates. Postmasters collected subscrip-
tions. Publishers could exchange newspapers for free and used this privilege to
traffic in news reports. A significant portion of the news segment of antebellum
papers was comprised of excerpts lifted from other papers around the country.6
Selected newspapers close to the administration were given direct official assis-
tance and particular printing tasks, including the production of executive and
legislative documents ordered by Congress. Beginning in 1789, the State De-
partment, custodian of the acts of Congress, assigned the publication of “au-
thentic copies” of laws and resolutions to newspapers in every state and territory.
In the following decades, government further extended the promulgation of the
laws through papers, which it assigned to political friends. By the 1870s, the num-
ber of designated newspapers reached a few hundred. Congress utilized other
means besides newspapers to transfer information from the Capitol. The “frank-
ing” privilege of representatives and senators permitted them to send mail with-
out charge. This advantage endowed federal lawmakers with a centrifugal might
and facilitated the dispensation of an enormous mass of printed matter from
Washington to the rest of the country.
The dissemination of federal laws and the publicity of congressional pro-
ceedings occupied the legislature early on. An 1822 House committee declared,
“The Government of the United States being a Government which essentially
depends upon public opinion, it is a consideration of the first importance that the
course pursued by the immediate representatives of the people in Congress
should be impartially presented to public view.”7 Congress and the executive
sought to advertise legislation and government action, but, most importantly, the
arteries of the nineteenth-century information superhighway would remain
 The Battle of the Books 79

wide open in order to maintain the contact between congressmen and their dis-
tricts, senators and their states, and parties and their voters.
The Constitution prescribed that each house keep a journal of its proceedings
and publish it occasionally. In 1789, Congress decided to print six hundred copies
of the congressional acts and seven hundred copies of its journals. By the early
years of the nineteenth century, the newly established National Intelligencer,
edited by Samuel H. Smith, positioned itself as the public organ of the adminis-
tration. Smith was allotted State Department law patronage and was asked to
print 350 copies of evidence in Aaron Burr’s trial at Richmond. Joseph Gales Jr.
and William W. Seaton soon overtook the Intelligencer, arguably the first national
paper. It published abbreviated reports of congressional proceedings, usually
weeks after they had taken place. In 1794, the Senate had opened its debates,
hitherto conducted behind closed doors, for press reporting. Gales and Seaton
would become important public figures in Washington, D.C., and both served as
mayor.
Beginning in 1817, Congress launched a serial publication of bound volumes,
largely in the octavo format, that featured congressional papers and reports, pres-
idential communications, accounts by executive departments, and other official
and nongovernmental documents (including, later, annual reports by the Boy and
Girl Scouts, the American Historical Association, the Daughters of the Ameri-
can Revolution, and additional, similarly charted, civic organizations). This on-
going series would become known as the Congressional Serial Set, or, until the
turn of the twentieth century, the Sheep Set, for the expensive sheep skin that
bound individual volumes.8
Early in the century, both houses established a system of contracting out print-
ing to the lowest bidder. Congressional printing expanded but was notoriously
inaccurate and slow. Important documents were not printed, and occasionally
they simply got lost. In late 1818, a joint committee visited printers in New York
and Philadelphia and eventually rejected the lower bidding system. Despite its
ostensible economy, the pressure to underbid competition incurred cheap, low-
quality productions. The committee reminded Congress that documents were
sent to Europe and “are executed in such an inelegant and incorrect manner, as
must bring disgrace and ridicule on the literature, and the press of our country.”9
In order to achieve promptitude, uniformity, accuracy, and even elegance, it was
recommended that a national printing office be established. Another forty years
passed before government implemented the idea. Meanwhile, in 1819, Congress
decided to institute a fixed schedule of prices. Each house was to elect a printer.
Congress thus reversed the trajectory of free market ascendancy by terminating
 80 Monuments in Print

an open contract system. Fixed rates made official printing especially profitable,
and it became even more so when the introduction of new technologies consid-
erably lowered expenses. Gales and Seaton were the first to enjoy the largess of
the new arrangement.
Printing would become emblematic of Jacksonian patronage. Even before the
1828 elections, the Jacksonians were strong enough to assist their paper, Duff
Green’s United States Telegraph. In late 1827, the Senate selected Green as its
printer. On the eve of the elections, supporters of Jackson in Congress far sur-
passed their foes’ efforts by a massive franking of forty thousand copies of Green’s
paper. Simultaneously, they attacked previous forms of patronage. An 1826 com-
mittee headed by Senator Thomas Hart Benton charged, “The Government
press is, to all intents and purposes, effectually established . . . for the purpose of
purchasing the joint and harmonious action of one hundred papers, in the un-
compromising vindication of those in power, and in the unsparing abuse of those
who are not.”10 This campaign seemed to echo anti–ancien regime sentiments
from the other side of the ocean but also appropriated rhetorical strategies from
America’s revolutionary past. Ultimately, the Jacksonian solution to the problem
of patronage was not its abolition but its redistribution in accordance with the
political will of the people as manifested in election results. Soon after the new
administration assumed office, it replaced 70 percent of the newspapers on the
list. When the Whigs came to power in 1841, they followed the same pattern.
Jackson’s ultimate break with the Telegraph introduced a new organ, Francis P.
Blair’s Congressional Globe. When Jackson decided to remove government de-
posits from the Bank of the United States, he gave a statement of his reasons to
the Globe for publication five days before issuing the official order of removal.
In the next two decades, Gales and Seaton, Force, Green, and Blair and Rives
played musical chairs in the world of congressional printing. Throughout the pe-
riod, congressional committees scrutinized printing profits and abuses while par-
ties and factions negotiated the selection of printers for both houses. Printers
were obviously exploiting congressmen’s ignorance of their craft. It was also al-
leged that they funneled money to help elect friendly representatives. Hosts of
incremental reforms led eventually to the resumption of the contract system in
1846. Each house appointed a committee on printing and subsequently formed a
joint committee on printing. Once again, the bidding system failed. Fierce com-
petition eliminated revenue, and in the early 1850s Congress returned to the
practice of electing House and Senate printers under rates fixed by laws. A su-
perintendent of public printing was appointed.
During President Franklin Pierce’s tenure, government printing exploded.
 The Battle of the Books 81

For printing, binding, papers, and related processing, the Thirty-third and Thirty-
fourth Congresses paid $3,899,000, more than the total cost for all the previous
sessions since 1819. Select committees exposed new abuses, including printers
subcontracting to others for a substantial profit. The House 1860 investigation of
public printing became a Republication campaign document. Extracts were pub-
lished as a pamphlet called “The Ruin of the Democratic Party.”11 In 1860, three
committees began hearings that would lead to the creation of the Government
Printing Office, preceding the British Stationery Office’s takeover of printing as-
signments by at least half a century (but behind the French Impremerie National
by two centuries). Lincoln’s administration also signaled the end of a single pres-
idential paper in Washington. Printing became a government function, but Re-
construction would demonstrate that Congress retained much of its control over
the domains of publication and knowledge production.

Citizens and Readers

The public-funded printing press was recruited for political purposes in di-
verse ways that exceeded patronage to printers and newspapers. For example,
Congressman Abraham Lincoln wrote in May 1848 to a constituent, “I will place
your name on my book, and send you such documents as you desire, when I can
get them. The entire [Mexican] War correspondence is in course of printing, and
will be the best electioneering document, when completed. I will then send you
a copy of it.”12 Senator Sumner from Massachusetts corresponded regularly with
numerous Boston-area reformers, many of who habitually asked for and duly re-
ceived public documents and reports. In February 1860, Sumner informed a C. F.
Smith in Boston that he had forwarded him the eighth and ninth volumes of the
Pacific Railroad Surveys under his frank. Since there was reason to believe that
the valuable reports were often stolen from the post office, he asked him to con-
firm that the volume indeed arrived. At the end of that year, Sumner wrote to a
constituent that he could not obtain the first volume of the Pacific Railroad re-
port although it was available in the bookstores. However, “I have great pleasure
in sending you the others. In the distribution of this valuable work I act as a
trustee for the good of science, to which you tell me you are devoted. I congrat-
ulate you upon the career of study before you.”13
Sumner provided many congressional papers to the abolitionist Theodore
Parker, including documents on Cuba and Haiti and other material concerning
the slave trade. This exchange took place shortly after the publication of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, when Parker was assisting Harriet Beecher Stowe in collecting
 82 Monuments in Print

anecdotes to defend the veracity of claims made in her novel, an effort that led
to the factual Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853).14 Samuel Gridley Howe, a long-
time friend of Sumner, was particularly keen on amassing government publica-
tions. He often asked Sumner to supply him particular volumes and concurrently
requested other Massachusetts members of Congress to complete the missing
parts of the series. Responding to such requests was part of a lawmaker’s daily
routine, and not only political friends solicited for documents. A representative
from Virginia received a letter from a Harper’s Ferry resident who somewhat
apologetically (describing himself “a stranger and a Whig”) asked for a copy of
David Dale Owen’s geological survey and promised to reciprocate the favor if the
congressmen would ever visit his area.15
A fall 1850 Senate debate on the purchase of a compilation known as Hickey’s
edition of the Constitution demonstrated the senators’ attentiveness to con-
stituents’ reading tastes. The resolution called for purchasing ten thousand copies
of Hickey’s primer, which, in addition to the Constitution, featured George Wash-
ington’s inaugural and farewell addresses and some statistical matter, “illustrative
of the genius of the American Government, and the development of its princi-
ples.” Congress had ordered this work before in thousands of copies. To those who
questioned the legislative aim of the purchase, Senator George E. Badger, from
North Carolina, replied that the object was simply wide distribution. “I know of
no books which either House of Congress has at any time circulated which is so
valuable, and so generally acceptable, and so much desired by our constituents as
this very book.”16 David Rice Atchison (Missouri) contended that the Constitu-
tion was more diffused and more easily obtained than any other document. It
served as the preface of every state constitution and appeared in numerous digests
of laws. The Constitution could be purchased in every bookstore across the land.
“Who will get these books?” he asked. Only a few among 20 million people.
Atchison’s skepticism did not dominate the discussion. Thomas Jefferson Rusk
(Texas) argued that Congress paid much more for inferior documents. “If con-
gress never goes into extravagance till it does it in circulating the Constitution of
the United States among the people, we shall be a very economical Government,
indeed.”17 Senator M. Gwin from California suggested that if Atchison had tired
of franking his books, then he was willing to take charge of the extra share.
Gwin’s county (San Francisco) had not received the compilations last time they
were given away, and his constituents certainly wanted their due allowance. Isaac
P. Walker (Wisconsin) reported receiving letters from those in favor of the abo-
lition of the franking privilege who, nevertheless, still wished the government
to put Hickey’s book in the hands of every U.S. citizen. “I believe I can say that
 The Battle of the Books 83

in Wisconsin it has had a good effect on the sentiments and political opinions of
the people, and has introduced a high feeling of patriotism wherever it has been
read.”18 The resolution was accepted twenty-two to nineteen.
The most popular nineteenth-century official publication was arguably the
Agriculture Report of the Patent Office. In 1849, the commissioner of patent is-
sued the first report as part of his annual communication. Congress printed more
copies of this report than any other official document, and congressmen sent it
to voters, especially during campaigns. It was an illustrated volume featuring a
medley of articles and correspondences on field cultivation and animal hus-
bandry, better seeds, improved grafts, and other such useful or simply interest-
ing details. The 1858 report, to give one example, was a 552-page octavo affair
that opened with a series of woodcuts, the first of which was a large drawing of
the Tibetan yak. A rather inconspicuous essay contemplated the introduction of
the yak to the Great Plains as a mean to improve the condition of the Indian
tribes and to expedite their civilization, “for the possession of property is a strong
bond of society.”19 The decision to display the yak at the beginning of the report
had less to do, it seems, with the gravity of the proposal than with the illustra-
tion of the impressive humped mammal.
In addition, the reader could find a potpourri of practical and not so practical
information: an article on farming and education, agricultural statistics, a piece
on the classification of Midwestern weasels, a discussion of new brands of grapes
and apples, and more than a hundred pages dedicated to short descriptions of lo-
cal agricultural societies. The volume featured a continent-long list, exceeding
1,700 items, of statistical queries for readers who would like to volunteer infor-
mation. The questionnaire (a commonly used device) was an invitation for an
exchange of information between government and its readers, a nineteenth-
century form of interactive media. The Patent Office also declared that it initiated
the importation of seeds from foreign countries (an agent was sent to bring tea-
shrub seeds from China) and the gathering of farming knowledge in Europe. The
binding displayed an intricate design of a female figure (probably Cornucopia
herself) sitting on a plow shaft by a head of wheat and a mound of fruits, hold-
ing a sickle in one hand and a shorter head of wheat in the other.
In March 1850, Congressman William McWillie (Mississippi) presented a
resolution on behalf of the House printing committee to issue thirty thousand
copies of the mechanical portion of the Patent Office report and seventy thou-
sand of the agriculture report. There were more farmers than mechanics, he ex-
plained, and since the document was too long for a single volume, there had to
be a corresponding difference in the number of printed copies.20 Some were un-
 84 Monuments in Print

easy about the need to choose among constituents. For instance, Robert McLane,
a Democrat from Maryland, calculated that one hundred thousand copies of the
two parts of the report would give four or five hundred to each member for dis-
tribution. Constituents would be aware of that and congressmen could not limit
the allocation only to institutions. After all, members received private requests
for these books daily. Robert A. Toombs (Georgia) questioned whether it was
Congress’s business to teach the people what their interest was. The purpose of
public printing was to inform the people of the actions of their government and
legislature. In a constituency of twenty thousand only one in every forty would
receive the report, the cost of which would ultimately be paid by everyone. David
K. Cartter (Ohio) countered that regardless of distribution rates government
owed information to the people. There was in his argument a trace of regional
animosity. “West of the mountains, the people got nothing from the Government
but intelligence. Of the $30,000,000 which were annually taken from the peo-
ple, to supply the Treasury, why should they not be permitted to receive back five
mills on the dollar, in the way of information?”21 Government established the
Patent Office to guarantee the fruits of inventive genius and to inform the peo-
ple of the latest inventions and mechanical improvements
But another Democrat, Albert Gallatin Brown (Mississippi), argued that if the
reason for printing was informing the people, why wasn’t the representative from
Ohio suggesting printing the House journal in tens of thousands of copies? The
real target was evident. “We all know very well what an effect might be some-
times produced by sending a book to some particular constituent, in a doubtful
part of the district, in securing his exertions in favor of the member who had sent
it.”22 Despite these and other reservations, the number of printed copies of the
agriculture report grew dramatically. By 1877, orders rose to 300,000 with
224,000 to the House, 56,000 to the Senate, and 20,000 for the Department of
Agriculture. The 1884 edition had 400,000 copies. In 1894, the report was re-
placed by the Agriculture Yearbook, which survived well into the twentieth cen-
tury. In 1880, the commissioner of agriculture complained that while the num-
ber of copies was larger than that of any annual book ever published, it was not
yet half large enough to meet the “reasonable and pressing demand.”23

Binding and Boundlessness

In another congressional debate, the House considered producing an extra ten
thousand copies of a report from the Treasury on statistics of commerce and nav-
igation. Representative John A. McLernand, a Democrat from Illinois, suggested
 The Battle of the Books 85

reducing the number of copies by half. The report, he explained, was probably a
valuable document but as a source of practical information it best suited the in-
terests of navigators, merchants, and boards of trade. “It was such a document
as the mass of the people would neither have leisure nor taste to trace into its
arithmetic details.”24 Moreover, he saw political motivation behind the printing
proposal. Purporting to be the patrons of internal improvement and commerce,
Whigs promoted the report. In the same spirit, Congressman Jacob Thompson,
a fellow Democrat from Mississippi, remarked that the report would be particu-
larly valued in the districts along the seacoast, where the shipping interest was
strong, but less so in the interior among farmers. Since none of his constituents
had ever asked him for the document, he assumed that they were not concerned
with the details of trade and were satisfied with “aggregates.” “Some to whom
I might send it, when they find it only a book of figures, might take up the con-
ception that I only sent it to them to puzzle their brains.”25 The Globe’s stenog-
rapher heard someone in the hall exclaiming, “Perhaps your constituents cannot
read?”26
John Houston, a Delaware Whig, was surprised to hear that constituents took
no interest in this account. From what other source would Mississippi farmers
derive information about the export of their greatest staple, cotton? The report
was important for the South. Another representative computed that the proposal
would leave about three hundred copies for each of the thirty-four states and ter-
ritories, five copies per county. His colleagues from Mississippi would surely find
five interested persons in each county of his district. It was Thompson’s duty to
encourage them to get interested in these figures and to make “a wise and patri-
otic use of them.”27 Eventually, the House decided to authorize publication. Be-
yond its panoply of sectional and political considerations, this debate offered two
market-driven approaches to the diffusion of state knowledge; one emphasized
constituents’ stated needs, and the other saw a role for the representative in elic-
iting grassroots demand.
At times it seemed that the task of sending official publications back home
overwhelmed American lawmakers. On the last day of 1850, the House busied
itself with the question of whether to issue the president’s annual message in one
or two volumes. The document stretched over almost one thousand pages. Rep-
resenting the Printing Committee, Thomas J. D. Fuller argued that the larger
number of volumes would mean they could be sent to many more constituents.
Alas, some congressmen saw in the endlessly multiplying volumes too much of a
good thing. Dividing the reports would make it difficult to follow their exact dis-
tribution. Congressmen would have to keep a list and send the second part to all
 86 Monuments in Print

of those who received the first, otherwise they would face disgruntled voters.
Congressman John Wentworth confirmed that in the previous year, when the
message was bound in three parts, he got into trouble, for he sent different parts
to different people and was subsequently deluged by requests for the two miss-
ing volumes. The amendment to print only one volume passed.28
The debate over the president’s message took place while a new practice was
rendering governmental publications ever closer to actual books. Large executive
reports (over 250 pages) in the octavo Congressional Series were to be bound with
hard cover as a matter of policy anchored in renewable legislation. Representa-
tive McWillie obtained for the inspection of the House specimens of alternative
bindings. We could bind for less, he explained on the floor, but the committee
figured that if congressional documents were to be properly treated, the work
would better be performed in half-morocco style. That December a resolution
was proposed to bind in a “superior manner” the forthcoming three thousand
copies of the “Reconnaissances of Routes from San Antonio to El Paso.” The es-
timated cost was thirty cents a copy, more than double the ordinary binding ex-
pense. Senator Solon Borland (Arkansas) explained that these reports were brim-
ming “with a large number of beautifully executed plates; and the committee
deem them of sufficient excellence and value to have them bound in better style
than such documents have been bound heretofore.”29 Senator Hannibal Hamlin
(Maine) likewise praised the document. “It is indeed an ornament, and adorned
with some of the finest specimens of engravings that I have ever witnessed.”30
Lawmakers wished, therefore, that official documents could be judged by their
covers. Endowing reports with a booklike exterior opened a new expanse for aes-
thetic signification. Several senators noticed, however, that with the clamor over
binding, congressional committees became entrapped in commercial activities.
Senators Badger and Benton declared that committees should not engage in the
business of trading, dealing, and making bargains.
Once again, official publications tempted a legislature to become an agent in
the marketplace, not through legislation, policy supervision, or patronage but as
a consumer or producer. By binding its documents, Congress was transcending its
own boundaries. Commissioning its printing tasks, Congress either set the price
or offered the job to the lowest bidder. In the case of binding, it appeared that
congressmen were negotiating special deals with merchants and literally bring-
ing the marketplace to the floor by presenting there various commercial prod-
ucts. Benton thought that the Senate’s administrative staff should handle those
matters. But his remarks demonstrated how preoccupied senators were with the
minute details of printed documents, for he argued that if binding was to im-
 The Battle of the Books 87

prove, stitching should be taken into consideration as well. Books fell to pieces
while their bindings stayed intact. He predicted future abuses driven by jealousy
and competition among governmental departments to get their reports bound in
the “superior” style.
In tedious debates over binding, lawmakers increasingly sounded like book-
sellers, comparing the value of muslin to other forms of binding and bickering
over the best methods of preserving books that were destined to make long jour-
neys in postal bags. Countering the presumption that without binding the docu-
ments would be useless, Senator John P. Hale, representing an increasing public
sarcasm toward congressional publications, could not resist the opposite idea that
the binding was their only valuable part. “Now, if it is worth while to print these
documents to send to our friends, it is certainly worth while to put upon them
this ninepenny binding; for instead of tearing them up, as they would inevitably
do if they were not bound, they allow them a place on the shelves of their li-
braries, there to remain, sir, like many of our documents here, never to be opened
and read again.”31 In contrast, Alexander Evans (Maryland) complained that, with
all the attention given to binding, congressmen overlooked the production qual-
ity of the texts. The paper was inferior, “being such as was used in the grocer’s
shops for ordinary wrapping, full of blurs, blemishes, and impurities.”32 State
printing done in Virginia, South Carolina, and, above all, Massachusetts and New
York was far superior. Better still, he suggested his colleague examine the papers
produced for the British House of Commons. They would blush with embar-
rassment at the poor quality of the documents Congress dispatched in exchange.
“Mr. Speaker . . . it does not become a great and prosperous nation, interested in
preserving the records of its greatness, and its prosperity, and in imparting to the
people the fullest degree of information in the most durable and imperishable
form, to submit any longer to the present style of public printing.”33

Americanization
The American scheme that was closest to the British plan to prepare work-
ingmen for participation in the polity by encouraging them to read parliamen-
tary literature involved the prospect of nationalization rather than the question
of enfranchisement. In December 1850, the Senate deliberated over printing two
thousand copies of the president’s message in Spanish. Senator Gwin presented
the motion as a measure to instruct the Spanish-speaking population in his new
state of California as well as those residing in New Mexico territory.34 The en-
suing debate centered on government obligations toward specific cultural com-
 88 Monuments in Print

munities and the means available to the state to insure the assimilation of for-
eigners into the United States. Predictably, several senators warned, if Congress
were to agree to translate a document into a foreign language, it would eventu-
ally have to underwrite many other translations. Senator Badger demurred. This
was not a precedent-setting gesture. The United States had acquired, partly by
the sword and partly by treaty, a large piece of land inhabited by Spanish-speak-
ing people. “We have brought them into the Union, and I think that, under such
circumstances, it is wise and just and reasonable to present them this document
in their own language.”35
James W. Bradbury (Maine) reminded the chamber that the acquisition of
Louisiana with its French-speaking population, or Spanish-speaking Florida,
had not prompted a similar initiative. All American citizens should be induced
to speak one language, he asserted. Senator Henry S. Foote (Mississippi) claimed
to be mortified by this reasoning. Refusing to translate was comparable to the be-
havior of the Roman tyrant who hanged his edicts so high that the citizens might
not be able to read them. “I thought we had determined to do all we could speed-
ily to Americanize those persons . . . I thought we were all disposed to supply, in
the most liberal manner, facilities to those people to acquire a knowledge of our
institutions and the modus operandi of our Government, and to acquit themselves
honorably in all respects, as doubtless they are ambitious of doing, in the dis-
charge of their duties as American citizens.”36 In order to defeat the proposal,
Senator Walker motioned to print a similar number of documents in German
and Norwegian. There were about ninety thousand immigrants in Wisconsin
who spoke little else, but they did not expect such a gesture from government
and instead had established presses of their own. “They [the Spanish-speaking
Californians] are now a portion of our fellow-citizens; their destiny is ours; and
it is their vital interest to speak the common language of the country.”37
In response, Senator Gwin raised a new set of arguments. There was no pa-
per in the Spanish language printed in California at that moment. The new cit-
izens did not have the same facilities to obtain this message as did the constituents
of the senator from Wisconsin. The Mexican population was concentrated in the
southern part of the state, isolated from the English speakers of the North. They
were “natives of the soil,” brought under this government without either their
knowledge or consent, unlike the immigrants in Wisconsin, who had come pur-
posefully to enjoy the institutions of this country. This prompted Augustus
Dodge from Iowa to suggest that Congress should not make distinctions between
immigrants and those who became Americans by territorial expansion, but if
special treatment was warranted, then immigrants from Europe had greater
 The Battle of the Books 89

claims, for they had left their homes and traveled far to become “a part and par-
cel of our people.”38 Another midwesterner, Salmon P. Chase from Ohio, thought
that many Germans would probably welcome a German version of the presi-
dent’s message. Each case should, however, be decided on its own merit. If there
was a large enough group that wished for a translation, it should be offered. Sim-
ilarly, Senator Badger allowed that government should engage in a legislation
that would “fuse” foreigners as quickly as possible but considered the newly an-
nexed population of the Southwest a special case. They were secluded, “shut out
from all the ordinary benefits which those who can read these public documents
can attain.”39 The resolution was tabled and not discussed further. Still, this
debate is significant not merely for the way it prefigured major themes in late
twentieth-century controversies over bilingualism in education, but for the un-
challenged conviction that reading the president’s annual message regardless of
language would have an “Americanizing” effect. In all of these cases, proponents
spoke in terms of pedagogical (or assimilatory) efficacy and fairness (towards
“accidental Americans” or children); foes objected to government-sponsored cul-
tural heterogeneity and saw the English language, rather than the polity or ed-
ucation, as the medium of integration.
Two years later, New Yorker Eugene Plunkett offered Congress a Spanish-
language compilation of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Wash-
ington’s farewell address, and additional documents of similar stature. In his
memorial, Plunkett reiterated arguments made in the Senate debate in favor of
translating foundational documents for the benefit of Spanish-speaking citizens.
Other immigrants could scatter among the masses “and speedily imbibe from as-
sociation not only a knowledge of American principles but a sympathy with
American feelings.”40 The annexed Spanish population remained immobile and
retained its social fabric and contacts. Congress therefore had to intervene (liter-
ally compensating for lack of social intercourse) and enlighten the new popula-
tion “with a thorough knowledge of the rights and privileges they enjoy under
our government.” The committee endorsed the proposal but no further action
was taken.41

Archives in Print
One conspicuous class of private initiative that did receive federal support was
serial compilations of historical documents, a popular undertaking among con-
gressmen. The first systematic attempt to gather such documents was recorded
as far back as the War of Independence, when Ebenezer Hazard sent a memor-
 90 Monuments in Print

ial to the president of the Continental Congress soliciting official patronage for
a collection of state papers in order to document the country’s birth. The Conti-
nental Congress granted its approval and provided one thousand dollars as an ad-
vance. Hazard privately published two volumes. There were comparable ventures
following the war of 1812. In January 1816, the firm of Thomas B. Wait and Sons
requested Congress to extend its patronage to the second edition of its State Pa-
pers and Public Documents, eight volumes of which had been already issued. The
publishers promised an enlarged edition that would include previously con-
fidential papers. Consequently, Congress passed a law authorizing the secretary
of state to subscribe for five hundred copies of the improved edition. Two year
later, Congress sanctioned the publication of the Diplomatic Correspondence of
the American Revolution and the Journal of the Constitutional Convention of
1787. Jared Sparks conducted the former project. By 1829, he completed ten vol-
umes of diplomatic exchange.42
In later decades, such projects would become more ambitious and costly. Gales
and Seaton initiated the largest of the antebellum documentary projects, the
American State Papers, which Congress financed in its entirety. After losing their
congressional printing contract to Green in 1829, they contemplated alternative
projects that would keep their press working. In March 1831, after two years of
intensive lobbying, they finally succeeded by a narrow vote. Gales and Seaton
claimed that manuscript copies of state papers were subject to mutilation from
overuse and constant reference, and that beyond their utility for the statesman
and the student, state papers should be saved by print “as a monument of the
past, and beacons of the future. A proper National pride demands that they shall
be rescued from oblivion.”43 The role of the British government (in the days be-
fore the public record reform) in preserving documents by publishing not merely
printed versions but actual facsimiles of historical records was invoked as an ex-
ample of a nation committed to salvaging and preserving its documentary her-
itage. The enterprising duo emphasized that written law and doctrine were of
greater consequence in the United States than in Britain. The American State Pa-
pers stretched over thirty-eight folio volumes that required thirty years to com-
plete (1861). The work was divided thematically into ten series (e.g., Finance, In-
dian Affairs, Public Lands), and included documents from 1789 up to 1832. It was
the first consistent attempt to publish documentary history according to a rigor-
ous plan. The clerk of the House and the secretary of the Senate assumed a role
in selecting the documents.
Another historical project that Gales and Seaton launched in 1834 was the An-
nals of Congress, which they were soon forced to abandon but then resumed in
 The Battle of the Books 91

the mid-1850s. Its forty-two volumes included debates, proceedings, and other
documents from 1789 to 1824. It was devised to complement the Register of De-
bates in Congress, a venture born in 1824 as the first publication entirely devoted
to transcripts of congressional debates. The scramble to publish the records of
Congress in full was thus to move simultaneously forward and backward in time.
Gales and Seaton also conceived and promoted the Register as an effort at history
writing. In the preface of their first volume, they proclaimed, “It is a History
which cannot deceive, because it reflects, in the faithful mirror of Truth, not only
the motives of public acts, but also the grounds on which those acts were opposed.
Its impartiality may defy the most fastidious scrutiny.”44 Twenty-seven volumes
were issued until the Register was eclipsed by the Congressional Globe and finally
lost support in 1837. What started as a commercial venture received official sub-
sidy when each house subscribed for five hundred copies. In their attempts to re-
vive the Annals of Congress in the early 1840s, Gales and Seaton extolled the im-
portance of print in preserving history. It was the only device to arrest national
amnesia. “Already, hardly any traces of the doings of the early Congresses are to
be found except in the skeleton remains which the Journals of the two Houses
have preserved from decay. . . . Unless immediate means be taken to perpetuate
it, the History of Congress will come to be almost as little known as that of the
World before the flood.”45
The historical knowledge the printers were so keen on preserving was the
original intent of the union’s founders. Securing this wealth of political knowl-
edge would enable the present generation to comprehend constitutional theory
as expounded by its framers. By an act of March 1833, the secretary of state con-
tracted another printer and entrepreneur, Peter Force, and the former clerk of
the House of Commons Matthew St. Clair Clarke for the publication of The Doc-
umentary History of the American Revolution. The planned twenty volumes
were projected to cost half a million dollars. The series, eventually titled the
American Archives, was fraught with difficulties from its inception. Nine vol-
umes appeared, but in the 1850s, for reasons that remain unclear, the project fell
out of favor with the administration and was practically terminated.46 From the
1820s on, there were also efforts in the South and New England to collect docu-
ments and prepare state histories. North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina,
Rhode Island, and the American Antiquarian Society each attempted to secure
access to British repositories in London in search of relevant historical docu-
ments. Collecting Americana became a hobby of sorts among the well-to-do.
Henry Stevens, Jr. (with whose testimony in the House of Common we began
this chapter) arrived in London in 1845 as a representative of a group of affluent
 92 Monuments in Print

New England collectors like John Carter Brown of Providence and Governor
William Slade of Vermont.47
Contemporary reviewers considered the republication of historical papers the
best method for archiving history. Gales and Seaton’s lobbying effort also indi-
cated the emergence of a cultural field dedicated to the interpretation of the Con-
stitution and nurtured by judicial review and recurrent public discord over the
proper reading of the constitutional. As Michael Warner has remarked, the U.S.
Constitution and the hermeneutics it inspired bonded public life and print cul-
ture in America in novel ways. Importantly, the U.S. documentary legacy, as na-
tional memory itself, was to be arranged around the symbolic presence of the na-
tion’s founders. The veneration of founding fathers—the American version of
hero worship—was prompted, in part, by the demise of the 1776 generation, so
powerfully symbolized by the death of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on In-
dependence Day 1826. Regardless of their commercial underpinnings, historical
publishing projects should be understood in the context of this particular gener-
ational shift, which coincided with the rise of Jacksonian politics to generate a
collective perception of a historic watershed.
Congress decided (1846) to purchase the papers of James Madison from his
widow, with the tacit understanding that by doing so the federal government
would also be giving her an informal pension. A select committee of the House
reported, “It is a natural and commendable desire [to procure and publish these
documents], considering the agency which Mr. Madison had in the formation of
the Constitution which binds together these States in one great and powerful con-
federacy.”48 The committee predicted that any legal challenge to Congress’s en-
gagement in such publishing schemes would fail. Congress had established a li-
brary that held printed work and manuscript collections. In the same year,
Elizabeth Hamilton petitioned Congress to sponsor the publication of her late
husband’s papers. “The subjects contained in the proposed publication are inti-
mately blended with the vital interests and permanent prosperity of the Amer-
ican people, presenting the conduct and character of General Hamilton, on all
national questions.”49 Since she did not have the means to publish the work her-
self, she asked Congress to purchase one thousand copies of the planned five vol-
umes, Alexander Hamilton’s Works, with the understanding that the original cor-
respondence, documents, and papers would be deposited in the library as a
national property. The Senate accepted the offer.
Three years later, Congress received a petition from Samuel L. Gouverneur, the
executor of James Monroe’s will. The petitioner promoted Monroe’s correspon-
dence and papers during the war with Britain as “explanatory of [the war’s] ori-
 The Battle of the Books 93

gin, progress, and termination, [and] would afford efficient aid in the future eluci-
dation of its history, and a fair distribution of justice among those who took part
therein.” The petitioner had been busy selecting material and organizing docu-
ments for the publication. “The History of the Life of James Monroe would be, if
executed on a proper scale, for that period of time, a history, essentially, of the coun-
try which gave him birth.”50 He made another interesting bid for the purchase. Con-
gress already lent its support to similar endeavors. The published papers of other
presidents addressed many of the issues that occupied Monroe. Some of the most
important letters of the time were exchanged among Monroe, Jefferson, and Madi-
son. If other presidential paper projects would be executed rightly, the commercial
value of the independent publication of Monroe’s papers would inevitably decline.
Financially unfeasible, the project would not find private support. Congress, he im-
plied, was morally responsible for the public consequences of its intervention in the
business of publishing. Support was therefore not just a matter of national mem-
ory but an issue of fairness as well. (While the printed form of monument build-
ing became a routine, the capital city endured the ungainly sight of the unfinished
Washington Monument. For more than two decades after its cornerstone was
placed (1848), that obelisk stood unfinished—a decaying stump among the herds
of sheep and cows that roamed what is known today as the National Mall.)

The Battle of the Books

As we have seen, 1850 was a frantic year for congressional printers and bind-
ers. That summer, Senator Foote proposed in the name of the Foreign Relations
Committee that the Senate assist the publication of a study by Aaron H. Palmer
entitled “A Comprehensive View of the Principal Independent Maritime Coun-
tries of the East.” Foote notified the chamber that the work was warmly recom-
mended by the secretary of state.51 Like Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who a few
years earlier convinced Congress to support his Indian project, Palmer was an in-
tellectual entrepreneur. He had already lobbied and petitioned for other simi-
larly oriented projects and had been temporarily hired to examine the diplomatic
correspondence on China and the East. The former administration had unsuc-
cessfully pressured for an appropriation of ten thousand dollars to dispatch
Palmer to conduct research in Asia. Foote’s proposal prompted one of the most
thunderous Senate debates over the role of the federal state in sponsoring the
publication of books.
The motion specified three thousand copies to be purchased by the Senate,
each to cost no more than two dollars and include no less than five hundred oc-
 94 Monuments in Print

tavo pages. Congress expected a measurable return for its money. Anticipating a
strong partisan sentiment, Senator Hamlin argued for a political quid pro quo.
He recalled that during that session, Congress ordered ten thousand extra copies
of a report of the secretary of the Treasury on American industry although they
were obviously tracts for protectionism, a doctrine favored by “the other side of
the chamber.” Nevertheless, he had supported that publication “on the ground
that error may be promulgated where truth is left freed to combat it.” Now, when
a different kind of document serving commercial interests was offered, should
not these views and information be spread as well before the people, and for the
sake of commerce? Senator William Dayton, another of Palmer’s supporters,
maintained that Congress already sponsored the project. For all purposes, Palmer
was a congressional employee, and the remaining question was how to present
his manuscript to the public. If the aim is “to make it readable, if I may be al-
lowed the expression, or attractive to the public mind, it is necessary to give some
aid in this form to the attempt to secure the benefits of those labors.”52 Senator
Pierre Soulé (Louisiana) concurred. He read the book and thought its value
would more than compensate for the expense. He also noticed reviews in the
French press praising the research. The United States was “in the dark” regard-
ing prospective relations with Asian countries.
Apparently, the untiring Palmer had already presented an early version of the
new manuscript to the library committee under the title “The Geography and
History of the Unknown Countries of the East.”53 Jefferson Davis quoted St.
John as saying that the world could not contain all the books that might be writ-
ten. If Congress were to publish all the books deemed beneficial to the country,
the Capitol would not be able to contain them. Only original research conducted
by individuals engaged directly by Congress ought to be published. Senator Rusk
declared that theirs was “the age of books and the age of discovery.” If a prece-
dent were established, every similar book on phrenology, mesmerism, biology,
and other topics that might attract the attention of the European reviewers
would be deemed to merit the Senate’s subscription.
Despite caustic remarks, Palmer’s supporters appeared initially to garner
enough support. In late August, however, after two floor discussions on Palmer’s
book, Senator Benton made his harshest assault to date. In the late 1840s, Ben-
ton emerged as the most vitriolic opponent of lavish publication projects. He al-
leged that the abuse of public money by supplying senators with books com-
menced seventeen years earlier, when Congress consented to publish Peter
Force’s Documentary History of the American Revolution. The books obtained
ever since were useless, or worse, dangerous. As an example, he furnished Robert
 The Battle of the Books 95

Greenhow’s History of Oregon and California (1844). Congress had purchased

the book a few years earlier under the pretext that senators needed information
to form their opinion on the dispute with Britain. It was better to seek advice in
a fountainhead, he quipped. Senators had at their disposal all the necessary doc-
uments on the history of the negotiations between the two countries, as well as
plenty of books on western explorations. He was now convinced that because of
abridgments and omissions of important aspects of the historical negotiations be-
tween Albert Gallatin and the British government over Oregon, the book almost
brought the United States and Britain to the brink of war. Instead of guiding the
federal legislature, it misled lawmakers on issues of cardinal importance in a
time of international tension. The omissions, he implied, were intentional and
served a purpose.54 Benton’s illustration provides another instance of a legisla-
ture entangled in its own print product as well as a warning against history books
that purport to replace actual archives.
Palmer’s project did not address any prospective legislation. Moreover, the res-
olution granted Palmer his own copyright. Since when did Congress award copy-
rights? Why was the text, merely a humble paper, dignified by the resolution as
an official “document”? Palmer’s paper turned into a document by a process of
“filtration,” Benton sneered.

This “document” after having been spun and wove by Mr. Palmer, not out of his
own bowels, like the spider’s web, but out of other people’s brains and books, was
carried to the Department of State and asked house room. There are a great many
good men in this world, and many of them have been Secretaries of State. Many
things have been carried and left there, and kindly cared for. The bantling is left
and, and when it is wanted, he who put it there knows where to find it. As the boys
say in the street, the fox is the finder; and in this case, I presume there was a de-
posit of this paper with the Secretary of State, and that Aaron H. Palmer was the
finder . . . Well, members of Congress get their feelings excited, and call for the pa-
per. It comes down with great dignity. It comes down from the Secretary of State,
stopping in at the President’s for his private secretary to bring it up to Congress.
Hence it must be dignified; it must be deemed very respectable. It comes upon us
imposingly. It is then referred to a committee. The committee brings it back to the
House. By then it has ripened into “a document,” and not only ripened into a doc-
ument, but it has undergone so many filtrations and received so many imprima-
tures that its value can scarcely be calculated.55

There was a vicious streak in Benton’s remarks but also, arguably, an insight
into the nature of authority and authorship. In his reading, Palmer’s authorship
 96 Monuments in Print

was dubious, for he merely hauled bits and pieces from others’ work. The man-
uscript needed a surrogate author, which was found in the form of the State De-
partment. Never really lost, it was rendered a document by the virtue of its fic-
titious retrieval, which set the text in endless motion. Once “found,” it went
“down” and “up,” and was then “referred” and brought “back.” Endowed with
a deconstructive edge, Benton’s critique addressed not just Palmer’s manipula-
tions but also the easily excitable, ignorant behavior of official power. The his-
tory of the document as document could be easily culled from “the face of the
paper” by reading its title, which swelled considerably, accumulating parts at all
the stops made by the paper along the way. By the conclusion of Benton’s speech,
the author of the study on the “unknown” countries of the East appeared to be
the worst of conspirators. “He is here; he is levant, couchant, and cormorant here.
And he undertakes to make a book for us without our leave.” Benton believed
merchants did not wait for Congress to tell them where to look for trade. He even
quoted Christophe, the emperor of Haiti, who reportedly said, “hang up a bag of
coffee in hell, a Yankee would go and bring it down without being singed.”56
Benton’s satire was echoed in others’ comments on congressional publications.
A few years later, during the debate over the printing of John Bartlett’s report
(see chapter 3), Senator Hamlin charged that every person who had the wish to
publish a book attached himself to some expedition or survey. By doing so, he
had an opportunity to report to the department that had dispatched him and thus
was guaranteed a book at the expense of Congress. In other words, once an indi-
vidual subjected himself to the official hierarchy, what seemed an imposition to
report on his assignments in fact enabled him to rise as a writer. It was not that
government commissioned individuals to perform tasks, but individuals har-
nessed government to help them achieve their personal ambitions. Senator Rob-
ert Hunter (Virginia) saw in the printing of books at government expense two
hazardous desires: the craving of private authors for personal fame, and the con-
sequent demand of the public to have books for nothing, an appetite that gov-
ernment would never be able to satisfy.
Taking its cues from Benton’s rhetoric, the Washington press labeled the dis-
pute over Palmer’s manuscript “The Battle of the Books,” following Jonathan
Swift’s famous satire. Swift’s story featured a war between two camps of adver-
sarial books ensconced in the King’s library. The battle reenacted the conflict be-
tween modern experimental science and classical scholarship, a rivalry that
found Swift firmly on the side of the “Antients.” Benton’s attempt to conjure the
image of the spider alluded to one of the most repulsive “Modern” characters in
Swift’s piece. Offended by the manner in which his friend Palmer was maligned
 The Battle of the Books 97

and ridiculed, Senator Foote read on the Senate floor long passages from Swift.
Palmer, he protested, was not the offending spider but his bitter enemy, the dili-
gent honey-producing bee. The tone of the exchange became unmistakably per-
sonal. Admittedly, the hatred between the two Democratic senators may have
predetermined the course of the debate. A few months earlier, in the heat of an
argument over the “Compromise of 1850,” Foote, responding to a threat, drew a
pistol on Benton; others intervened before he could shoot.
Foote quoted at length Swift’s description of the deity called Criticism, whom
the Moderns enlisted for their cause, along with her decaying father (and hus-
band) Ignorance; her mother Pride, dressed in scraps of paper; her sister Opin-
ion, headstrong yet giddy; and her equally unattractive children, Noise, Impu-
dence, Dullness, Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-manners. But Foote had a
stronger weapon than Swift’s acid pen. He recalled Benton’s enthusiastic support
for the printing, lithographing, and binding of his son-in-law John Charles Fré-
mont’s reports. Benton vehemently denied the comparison, ignoring his own po-
litical maneuvers in the early 1840s. Frémont was an officer in the topographical
engineers. He had nothing to do with congressional decisions on the printing of
his account and nothing to gain from it. Senator James A. Pearce joined with the
project’s foes and announced he would vote against publication. “There is a great
disposition throughout the country to depend too much upon the Government,”
he warned. This inclination was not confined to any class. Government patron-
age of books was so often sought after that unless checked Congress would be-
come “a great publishing establishment, that authors and editors may avoid the
risk of trade.”57 A weary Senate decided eventually to postpone the debate on the
topic indefinitely.

The Traffic in Books

The exchange between authors and government was not the only fictitious
transaction in the traffic in congressional books. By the early 1850s, congressmen
enriched with official documents not just select group of constituents but them-
selves as well. After all, the entire practice of purchasing privately published
books thrived under the pretext of assisting lawmakers in their duties. In each
session, new representatives and senators received a package of official books at
least as large as the one voted for in the previous session. In the case of an ongo-
ing series (such as the American State Papers), lawmakers were entitled to receive
their share for years after they left Washington, as long as there were still new
volumes. When in December 1847 the Senate decided to furnish books to new
 98 Monuments in Print

members, one senator remarked that his colleagues were ostensibly voting them-
selves a seven or eight hundred dollar pay increase. However, lawmakers in both
chambers found it difficult to abandon this practice, which was steadily becom-
ing costlier. The monetary value of these books rose so much that letters arrived
from deceased congressmen’s widows and children requesting the remaining vol-
umes of various publishing projects as their due.58
In late 1848, the clerk of the House of Representatives, Thomas Campbell,
had to exercise ingenuity in providing those volumes because the House had de-
cided not to commission expensive new printing but instead to obtain existing
copies. The Clerk was forced to orchestrate a somewhat strange series of ex-
changes. He commissioned booksellers to purchase official publications from cur-
rent and previous congressmen so other members could receive them. For ex-
ample, William Morrison, a merchant from New York, was engaged to furnish
the House with more than one hundred copies of the American State Papers,
Diplomatic Correspondence, and American Archives in “a clean unmutilated and
perfect condition.”59 Morrison wrote to Thomas Stall in North Carolina offering
him $160 cash for papers that he was entitled to as a member for the Twenty-
third Congress, provided Stall would transfer to him his right to all documents
still owed. The clerk himself received letters from former representatives who
offered (sometimes through proxies) their books.60 The congressman’s library for
that session comprised a mixture of legal, historical, and reference works: Con-
gressional Globe, Revised Statutes, Register of Debates, Contested Elections, W.
Hickey’s Constitution, Senate Land Laws, Peter Force’s American Archives, Gales
and Seaton’s American State Papers, and Blair Rives’s Diplomatic Correspon-
dence.61 Six years later, the expense for supplying the new 154 members of the
Thirty-third Congress with books and documents rose to $151,949.87; the value
of each individual package climbed to $1,043.85. Besides old staples such as
American Archives, members were now entitled to Annals of Congress (forty vol-
umes at $200), as well as Hamilton’s Works and President John Adams’s Works.62
This circulation of books, as absurd as it was, rested on the multiple roles of
legislators as publishers, book peddlers, and readers. In addition, the idea that
every lawmaker should have his own reference library corresponded with the ac-
knowledgment of authorship in federal documents, for both relied on notions of
individuation and privacy. For Benton, however, this routine brought the abuse
of the book-buying system to its preposterous apex. “It is a fact beating fancy-
furnishing books backwards, retrospectively, retroactively, to the dead, and to the
moved-away, and to the left-out of Congress. It is like pensioning members—
pensioning with books, transmuted into money.”63 The framers of the Constitu-
 The Battle of the Books 99

tion never expected senators, men over thirty, to need “horn-books” to instruct
them in their duties. Benton assumed in these congressional debates the role that
John Ramsay McCulloch, the comptroller of the Stationery Office had in Brit-
ain—gadfly against federal graphomania and frivolous allocation of books.

In the Labyrinth
In 1858, the New York Herald declared, “The government printer and his
claque in both Houses of Congress are always ready to appropriate money for the
‘dissemination of intelligence amongst the people’ in the shape of ponderous and
costly books.”64 A Senate report blamed printers’ greed. For instance, the Pacific
Railroad report was originally ordered in an octavo form. The practiced eye of
the printer allegedly saw the profit potential in enlarging the format. Under the
pretext that it would be easier to fold maps into quarto volumes, the octavo books,
already presented to senators, were withdrawn, and the quarto saga commenced.
The establishment of the Government Printing Office eradicated numerous
printing abuses. In 1873, the process of centralizing public printing and federal
information accelerated following the decision to replace commercial reporters
of congressional debates with government employees and to establish the offi-
cial Congressional Record. Neither development resulted in a reduction of the
volume of printing, which had also greatly increased because of the Civil War.
Reconstruction demonstrated the political advantage of publication privileges.
Congress seized from the administration the newspaper patronage. An 1869 com-
mittee headed by Senator Henry B. Anthony, a Rhode Island Republican, pro-
posed to cease publishing laws in the papers, which cost $100,000 annually. He
claimed that it was “questionable whether the dominant political party should
thus aid those newspapers which only reflect its partisan views instead of being
mirrors of public opinion.”65 The practice was finally abolished in 1875.
Anthony became the most ardent voice for rationality and frugality in gov-
ernment printing. He argued that heads of bureaus had become aspiring “book
makers.” They kept clerks working year-round obtaining material with which to
inflate their annual accounts to the heads of their departments. These commu-
nications, originally merely memoranda to assist secretaries in compiling reports
to the president, became more substantial than the documents to which they
were appended. “It is not essential that the public should be informed how many
books of manuscript are filled, how many letters are received or written, or how
many cases examined in a bureau, nor can those numbers give a definite idea of
the actual labor performed. Neither should the head of a bureau utterly disre-
 100 Monuments in Print

gard the specific province of his labors, and invade other subjects entirely foreign
to those committed to his charge, in quest of material wherewith to form a pon-
derous report.”66
Thus, report critique in Washington increasingly resembled the charges lev-
eled against blue books in Westminster. The committee complained about use-
less details that presented obstacles for those searching for specific information.
Congress should consider, it asserted, discontinuing the distribution of all public
documents, except the register of congressional debates and the report of the
commissioner of agriculture. Anthony was certainly looking to Britain as a
model. “For a quarter of a dollar one can purchase a folio ‘Blue Book’ of a hun-
dred pages or more, containing diplomatic or parliamentary information of the
most valuable character.”67 Indeed, in June 1864 Congress launched the sale of
public documents by authorizing the superintendent of public printing to sell at
cost documents printed at the Government Printing Office. However, early at-
tempts to sell public documents yielded disappointing results, and official publi-
cations were still allotted to representatives and senators in large numbers.68
Poking fun at the pointless splendor of public documents remained a theme
in congressional floor debates in the postwar years. In January 1872, Senator John
Sherman estimated the cost of each volume of Professor Hayden’s geological re-
port to be twenty-five dollars and remonstrated that Congress was not consulted
in printing a book, “which is only useful to be shown occasionally for the pictures
in it.”69 By then, however, the sheer size of official printing became an object of
mockery. In Washington: Outside and Inside (1873), George Townsend, the Wash-
ington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, portrayed in great detail the
mounds of printed matter stored in the bowels of Capitol Hill. Under the super-
vision of the doorkeeper of Congress, a one-hundred-member staff filed and dis-
tributed books, reports, and memorials from a series of twenty-six rooms in the
cellars of the old Capitol building called the Folding Room. Townsend observed
layers of books twelve deep, “the fall of a pile of which would crush a man to
death.”70 (This was yet another rendition of the theme that government publi-
cations might present a danger.) Just the 260,000 copies of annual agriculture re-
ports would take, he calculated, 225 double-horse wagons to move. Each mem-
ber of Congress could dispatch up to one thousand volumes of the report to
“corner grocers and gin-mill proprietors.”71 Boys packed the reports in sturdy,
two-bushel canvas bags. “It is a busy scene in the depths of the old Capitol build-
ing, to see wagons come filled with documents, long rows of boys sealing en-
velopes, and others working with twine, and the custodians and directors of the
work are generally free to admit that here is much unnecessary printing done,
 The Battle of the Books 101

and that many of the books printed are stored away and forgotten, in the vaults
of the mighty labyrinth.”72
These passages evoked a subterranean universe of waste and corruption.
Townsend’s gothic portrayal was also reminiscent of contemporary depictions
of oppressive night labor in factories and mills. Meanwhile, in a different set of
rooms called the Document Room, Congress stored 2 million annual copies of
bills and documents for the daily use of members. Townsend further computed
that the $180,000 spent on the agriculture report every year were enough to pay
the combined annual salary of the president, vice president, the cabinet secre-
taries, the speaker of the House, and two-thirds of the high-ranking diplomats.
All of this splurging occurred while 800,000 copies of reports from previous
years were lying in the vaults of the Patent Office, a “decaying mass of agricul-
tural knowledge, manuring the ground instead of the yeoman intellect.”73
Townsend also paid a visit to the Government Printing Office; in the bindery he
found four thousand Russian leather skins, 760 packs of gold leaves, and nearly
twenty thousand dollars worth of twine.
Another target of Townsend’s scorn was the industrious commissioner of the
Land Office, Joseph Wilson, who each year prepared a voluminous report on the
condition of the public domain, new surveys, and accounts on topics that extended
far beyond his call of duty, from the history of gold to, as Townsend wrote, “other
problems of empire and extension.”74 Despite reform, the publication appetite of
officials and politicians died hard, if it can be said to have ever perished. In 1870
another publishing dispute erupted on the Senate floor, this time over the Land
Office annual report. The Senate addressed a proposal to issue an extra eight thou-
sand copies beyond the usual run for domestic purposes, and an additional five
thousand copies in German, Swedish, or French for dispensation through the State
Department.75 The controversy focused on the printing of new maps prepared
specifically for the report. The printing committee suggested using an already en-
graved U.S. map, but Senator James Harlan objected to the omission of the new
maps, which demarcated surveyed public lands. Whatever cost they incurred
would be a “drop in the bucket” in comparison with their service. “It is a great
advertising medium. A wholesale merchant would spend that much in advertis-
ing his goods. There is not a railroad having a land grant in the whole country that
would hesitate a moment in thus advertising the lands it had for sale.”76 Harlan
was conceiving of the federal government as a full actor in the marketplace and
thus in need of market techniques to promote its merchandise. However, in this
document there was a measure of grandiosity that belied any possible utility, for
the most expensive map appended was that of the entire globe.77
 102 Monuments in Print

Townsend formulated two opposing arguments concerning such publication.

One was that the land commissioner’s diligence should be greatly appreciated.
“The nation rejoices to see itself in the light of its rivals, and to see the century
in the light of the past . . . the Federal State ought to waste no expense to under-
stand and properly represent itself, both before its own citizens and the world.”
The opposing argument was that economy should take precedent, and “the Re-
public is not a high school, and a Land Commissioner is not a Professor of His-
tory.”78 Townsend, of course, took the latter position. Government should leave
the people alone to make their own maps and produce their own books. The
state did have a role, however. It should create the market conditions for author-
ship rather than assume this function itself. How? By signing an international
copyright law, which would not cost a cent but “will at once raise authorship to
a profession here, and out of authorship will come maps, facts, excursions, dis-
coveries.”79

Regardless of his specific prescription, Townsend, it seems, properly grasped

one of the main drives behind federal publication efforts: self-representation. Be-
yond the vast possibilities of reading, official publications offered multifaceted
monument-making opportunities evident in their content as well as in their ma-
teriality: engraving, embossing, printing, and binding. Representational needs
intersected with another institutional dimension of representation—dispatch-
ing delegates to represent the people and the states in Washington. Senator Ben-
ton wrote to Frémont before he embarked on his western journey that it was cru-
cial that the person in command of the expedition appeared to the Indians as the
representative of Washington, not as the officer of a bureau. “To them he repre-
sents the government, and as such he must make presents, or bring both himself
and his government into contempt . . . All savages expect them: they even de-
mand them; and they feel contempt & resentment if disappointed.”80 A some-
what similar observation could have been made on the traffic in public docu-
ments. In this respect, congressmen were not only the representatives of their
districts and states in the nation’s capital. They represented the federal govern-
ment to the periphery and in doing so had to dispatch small printed trinkets, to-
kens, back home. Viewed through the lens of the history of the book, gratis cir-
culation of reports harked back to (and yet inverted) early modern modes of
disseminating books as gifts of knowledge, often from the writer to a ruler in ex-
change for patronage.
The last grand federal enterprise of publication in the nineteenth century was
the enormous project War of the Rebellion, which commemorated the Civil War.
 The Battle of the Books 103

Congress made the initial decisions in 1864. Seventeen years later, after a long
hiatus, the first of seventy archival volumes appeared. The last installment of the
$2,858,000 undertaking was issued in 1901. It was early on decided not to limit
the project to official military reports but to publish the entire military record,
“verbatim and literatim copies, arranged in chronological order, of every report,
dispatch, letter, and other documentary paper relating to the rebellion on file.”81
The idea of publishing an entire archive caused some concern. One senator asked
whether the project should publicize embarrassing items, such as courts-martial
and records on deserters. Even Sumner, the relentless supporter of large-scale
scholarly projects, advised caution. Once again, citing the experience of imperial
Europe, Sumner recommended taking notice of the work conducted in France
under Louis Bonaparte to publish all the writings of his uncle Napoleon—mil-
itary, diplomatic, and personal—an effort that had reached fourteen or fifteen
volumes.
The volumes of the War of the Rebellion were devised as receptacles of col-
lective memory for the perusal of army veterans and their families in particular.
The publication was compatible with the public culture that thrived from the
mid-1870s over the commemoration of the war. Perhaps its most important work
was not so much to signify the conflict as celebrate the Union or the “birth of a
nation” at the conclusion of bloody fratricide, for the series incorporated the
documents of the defeated Confederacy. The War Department even employed
former Confederate general Marcus J. Wright to collect documents and hired
other former Confederates for the editorial staff. In its content and scene of com-
pilation, the seventy-volume series symbolized and reenacted national reconcil-
iation.
Despite the persistent critique of the state’s publishing excess and the cyni-
cism of Townsend and Benton, among others, the volume of federal government
printing increased during the remainder of the nineteenth century. Production
of government-sponsored publications would greatly intensify in the 1930s. The
Depression prompted the self-inspection and self-documentation of the Amer-
ican past, culture, and regional differences, manifested most notably in the fa-
mous output of the Federal Writers’ Project. During the same decade, govern-
ment deluged the public with official advice guides, such as Infant Care, of which
1,735,066 copies were sold and 8,233,558 given away, or Keeping Fit (by the Pub-
lic Health Service), a fifteen-page affair that sold 572,119 copies. These publica-
tions were symptomatic of the rise of social service experts under state auspices.
 chapter three

The Bee in the Book

Expeditions and Explorations

During the two decades that preceded the Civil War, government support for
expeditions, explorations, and comparable scientific enterprises amounted to be-
tween one-fourth and one-third of the total federal budget.1 This astounding in-
vestment epitomized the transformation of antebellum public life (to borrow a
famous title by historian John Higham) “from boundlessness to consolidation,”
but American scientific curiosity was boundary-less and went far beyond the
West, encompassing projects in Latin America, the Pacific Ocean, the Arctic re-
gions, and even the Jordan River. Official assistance also coincided with the elab-
oration of American science from a gentlemanly club pursuit to an increasingly
institutionalized undertaking. This shift manifested itself, for example, in the
scholarly leadership assumed by the Smithsonian Institution almost immedi-
ately after its establishment in 1846. A small scientific cadre emerged. Academ-
ically trained and narrowly specialized, it emulated the ethos of the European
scientific establishment and shared an obligatory contempt for whatever it con-
sidered speculative and amateurish. Indeed, one subplot of the story of explo-
rations and expeditions was the rise of the eastern seaboard expert whose au-
thority superseded that of field explorers. This tiny coterie of scientists—for
example, Asa Gray, John Torrey, and Spencer Baird—were often assigned to the
arrangement, classification, and presentation of specimens that they had not col-
lected themselves. As a venue for the promotion and display of scientific find-
ings, natural history projects facilitated the creation of an intellectual hierarchy,
notwithstanding recurrent tributes to republican, accessible, useful science. Sci-
ence, however, was only one motive, at times a pretext, among a plethora of in-
terests. The guiding forces behind expeditions included commerce, farming,
whaling, emigration, and national expansion, which was the subject of consid-
erable controversy.
 The Bee in the Book 105

These drives also converged in the printing and publication process. The pub-
lication of exploration reports and other scientific texts (the Patent Office annual
report comes to mind) satisfied the communication exigencies of science (artic-
ulated in the “diffusion of knowledge” slogan of the Smithsonian), the farmer’s
need to be acquainted with the latest agricultural techniques and meteorological
knowledge, the seaman’s and the emigrant’s wish for better maps, and sometimes
even the statesman’s attempt to make policy. Yet, publication was not merely a
completion of government action in the market of information. Once again,
breaks occurred between the ideology and actuality of information. First, rather
than simply being the concluding phase or the realization of expeditions in print,
the publications of a few famous reports became expeditions in their own right.
Publication was a complicated and somewhat risky assignment that demanded
great financial resources and manpower, an endeavor that could go awry, or sim-
ply subvert the conventional equilibrium between action and reportage. It some-
times seemed easier, let alone cheaper, to send ships to remote oceans or a unit of
soldiers to uncharted deserts rather than to publish a book describing those ven-
tures. The preparation of Charles Wilkes’s exploring expedition reports stretched
over more than thirty years after the conclusion of the famous four-year voyage.
The publication of the Pacific Railroad surveys was reported to cost at least twice
as much as conducting the expeditions themselves. Political wrangling, bureau-
cratic inexperience, the incredible number of specimens that were truly impos-
sible to classify in a short time, and the enormity of the printing volume con-
tributed to what seemed occasionally to be ineptitude.
One way or another, publication exposed government to observation and crit-
icism. The Pacific Railroad Report, for example, exhibited another malfunction
of the bureaucratic digestive system, an inability to edit, summarize, and sepa-
rate the important from the trivial. Government ran the risk of going astray in
its home-brewed books. At the same time, the trajectory from explorations to the
world of print accentuated the patriotic signification of expeditions and explo-
rations. This sentiment was articulated in the tangible dimension of government
documents. National grandeur could be measured in type of binding, size of font,
and quality of engravings. These books were roving monuments dispatched
across the nation (and, as importantly, to Europe) for inspection and admiration.
Accordingly, they were sometimes collected merely for their aesthetic value.
Here we examine the publication of expedition reports through four case
studies: John C. Frémont’s 1840s accounts on his travels to California, documents
that became paradigmatic in terms of content and production; the perennial
printing project of Charles Wilkes’s Exploring Expedition to the Pacific (1838–
 106 Monuments in Print

42); the debate over the publication of John R. Bartlett’s report on his journeys
as head of the Mexican Boundary Commission in the late 1840s; and the dis-
semination of the bulky reports of the 1850s transcontinental railroad survey.
The tension between national and personal ambitions connects these episodes.
Explorers—army officers and civilians—shared a particularly enhanced percep-
tion of themselves as authors. They understood authorship as a duty and as a pri-
vilege that emanated from the state’s commission. The state was often considered
to have an obligation to publish the accounts of its emissaries and to document
their respective areas of study. Besides discussing issues of authorship—social
status, commercial and political aspects, and the development of recogniz-
able writing styles—this chapter gauges a range of public responses to explo-
ration reports, most importantly through hundreds of applications—many of
which written by ordinary citizens—for volumes of the transcontinental rail-
road report.

Scene of Writing
In October 1842, at the conclusion of his travels in the West, Frémont returned
home to his wife Jessie in Washington, D.C. Introducing another gesture into this
already symbolically burdened odyssey, he soon presented her with the Ameri-
can flag that he had hoisted on a summit in the Rockies. In the following weeks,
he faced the seemingly uncomplicated task of producing an official account of
his expedition. As prescribed by convention, the report was to be organized
chronologically according to the expedition’s itinerary. In the middle decades of
the nineteenth century, much of the West was perceived via the trails that cut
through it. Together with the appended maps, detailed descriptions of western
routes rendered reconnaissance and exploration narratives doubly useful as
guidebooks for prospective emigrants en route to the Pacific coast. Correspond-
ingly, expedition reports were often illustrated with not-to-be-missed orifice-like
passes at crucial points along the way.
Preparing such a document was a collaborative work that involved, in this
case, Charles Preuss, the expedition’s cartographer, and John Torrey, the pio-
neering botanist who was entrusted with the botanical and zoological specimens.
Frémont was responsible for the narrative segment, but the task of translating
his personal journal into an official record proved taxing. Three strenuous days
of work yielded only a tremendous headache and a nosebleed. At this point, his
wife entered the scene of report writing. Jessie Benton Frémont, Senator Thomas
Hart Benton’s daughter, volunteered to sit by the desk to record her husband’s
 The Bee in the Book 107

words. Initially dictating from his notes, Frémont soon moved into a more con-
versational tone, reportedly “forgetting himself ” in his oral retelling. According
to one of Jessie’s biographers, “freed from all self-consciousness, unhampered by
the nagging thought of the mechanics of writing, [he] happily recounted the
story of his adventures to the woman he loved. In answers to her eager and adroit
questions, he simplified, clarified, and dramatized his experience.”2 This account
of the making of the narrative suggests a notion of transparency different from
that offered by the maintenance of daily field journals. It was the safety and
warmth of the domestic sphere that allowed Frémont to be “himself,” a natural
raconteur rather than a writer, and to communicate the supposedly unadorned
yet engaging narration of his travels. (This and other versions of Frémont’s
homecoming were part of the cultural work that Frémont’s travels performed in
nineteenth-century America as enterprises and texts that triangulated the mod-
ern self, nature, and American nationalism.) Future scholars would disagree
about the respective contributions of the husband-and-wife team. Jessie Frémont
was apparently an avid reader in the classics and familiar with famous expedi-
tions’ accounts. Although in later decades she would write and publish under her
own name, she regarded this particular collaboration as her “life’s work.”3 As im-
portant was Frémont’s wish to produce a popular, readable document. His polit-
ical backers and the press expected no less of him.
Beyond its patriotic and sentimental tone, Frémont’s first report has been noted
for the narrative’s visual properties, vividness, and power to conjure images, which
was enhanced by the illustrations. Following Alexander von Humboldt’s wish for
“truth in representing nature,” Frémont also took a camera on his first two expe-
ditions, hoping to make daguerreotypes, but he was never able to use the new tech-
nology successfully. When the first report was presented to Congress, Senator
Lewis F. Linn, another Missourian, moved to print an extra thousand copies. The
War Department was supremely content. Col. John James Abert, the command-
ing officer of the Topographical Corps of Engineers, wrote Frémont, “I should ex-
press my great personal as well as official satisfaction with your report which has
now been printed, reflecting credit alike upon your good taste as well as intelli-
gence.”4 Following the second expedition, the two reports were coupled with a
general map and printed in more than ten thousand copies by Gales and Seaton
and Blair and Rives for the Senate and the House, respectively. They also printed
lengthy extracts of the report (to which they had early access) in their National
Intelligencer and Congressional Globe. The second report completed the first in
delineating the route beyond the Rockies to Walla Walla and then California. The
combined document made Frémont a national celebrity.
 108 Monuments in Print

These reports were so coveted that a controversy brewed over whether mem-
bers of the previous Congress, if not reelected, could still receive their share. Pub-
lishers issued different versions for profit, at times omitting the maps or the il-
lustrations. Excerpts from the narrative would be liberally used for the campaign
biographies of 1856, when Frémont ran as the first Republican Party presiden-
tial candidate. Several diaries and autobiographies of emigrants to the West cited
the text, and it was widely read abroad. There were, however, critics. Ralph
Waldo Emerson noticed that Frémont was busy glorifying his place in nature and
in history while the expedition was still taking place. For Emerson this tendency
signified that “Our secondary feeling, our passion for seeming, must be highly
inflamed” for all the famine, depravation, and terror of facing a vast, hostile land
“could not repress the eternal vanity of how we must look! ” Historian Bernard
De Voto, a twentieth-century observer, would label the reports “adventure books”
and “charters for manifest destiny.”5 Frémont’s subsequent assignments were
even more controversial. His next mission, which ended unexpectedly in Cali-
fornia, has been often considered among the causes for the Bear Flag Revolt and
the war with Mexico. A dispute with Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny led to a court
martial for charges of mutiny. Afterward, despite a presidential pardon, Frémont
decided to resign his military post. A select committee established in 1848 to look
into the publication of Frémont’s report on his third expedition to California and
Oregon offered an analogy between his momentous tasks and Lewis and Clarke’s
earlier explorations. “Reason tells a nation, as it does an individual, that when it
has acquired a new and distant possession, the first thing to be done is, to learn
its value, and the means of getting to it.”6 Of course, in Frémont’s case, this tra-
jectory was reversed, first exploration and only then acquisition.7
Frémont’s early reports became templates for the expeditions of the next two
decades. In the aftermath of the war with Mexico, the genre grew more patri-
otic, inspiring documents such as Lt. Col. William Emory, Lt. James W. Abert,
and Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke’s “Notes of Military Reconnaissance from
Fort Leavenworth in Missouri to San Diego in California” (1848). (The House
authorized the printing of 10,000 copies of these reports, out of which 250 copies
were granted gratis to each of the authors.) The particular narrative strategies
of these texts are certainly beyond the scope of this discussion, but the creation
of stylistic continuity under the auspices of Congress and government is not. This
fidelity of style was not exhausted by the characteristics that are typically asso-
ciated with Frémont’s reports, namely, chauvinistic emotionalism and detailed,
graphic descriptions. More intriguing was subsequent documents’ tendency to re-
produce uncanny moments of the kind that brought together Frémont and the
 The Bee in the Book 109

wandering bee on the top of the Rockies (see introduction to part I). Without di-
rectly alluding to the concept, Frémont’s account on his ascent to the top of the
Rockies is a rather conventional rendition of the sublime motif in nineteenth-
century literature, employing one of the sublime’s most common tropes, an in-
dividual overlooking a magnificent, almost transcendent and yet deeply threat-
ening scenery from a mountain’s top. Peril was signified by the danger to his
person posed by climbing enormous rocks and by the topography of the Rockies,
which evoked a mightier force. Arriving at the peak, Frémont encountered ab-
solute stillness and silence, no trace of animated life. The strange (indeed un-
canny) appearance of the buzzing bee prompted ambivalence; a sense of identi-
fication with the path-breaking insect, which was probably “the first of his
species to cross the mountain barrier, a solitary pioneer foretells the advance of
civilization.” Nevertheless, the bee provoked a burst of aggression. “I believe that
a moment’s thought would have made us let him continue his way unharmed,
but we carried out the law of this country, where all animated nature seems at
war.”8 The bee’s demise was inevitable. It found itself between the leaves of the
book that held Frémont’s flora collection.
Emory’s journal began in August 2, 1846, when he described himself stand-
ing alone looking at the direction of Bent’s Fort. While watching an enormous
American flag flapping forcefully, he noticed that it was waving against the di-
rection of the wind, threatening to break the ash pole on which it was hoisted.
“The mystery was soon revealed by a column of dust to the east, advancing with
about the velocity of a fast walking horse—it was ‘the Army of the West.’ I or-
dered my horses to be hitched up and, as the column passed, took my place with
the staff.”9 Lt. Abert’s narrative commenced with his arrival at Bent’s Fort, the
author ill and suffering from fever and hallucinations. “At this time, my disease
had obtained such an influence over my senses, that days and nights were passed
in delirium and a mental struggle to ascertain whether the impressions my mind
received were true or false. Even my sight was affected, and when I gazed on
Bent’s Fort, the building seemed completely metamorphosed, new towers had
been erected, the walls heightened, and, as I then thought, everything put in
readiness to resist an attack of the New Mexicans.”10
The proclivity of physical objects in Bent’s Fort to defy the rules of nature
when military scouts (as the nation they represented) were stupefied, restless,
or feverish, further developed Frémont’s estrangement motif. The misplaced
bee on the mountain is substituted here with strangely animated buildings and
a flag. All three moments seemed to displace onto the natural and man-made
world the anxiety originating from the presence of expeditions in the alien vis-
 110 Monuments in Print

tas of the West. Strangest of all was that these anecdotes found their way into
official military accounts. Nevertheless, the moment of capturing the bee in the
book, the bee that Frémont regarded a competitor as well as a reflection of him-
self, was also to be the point in time when the West was “won” and rendered
American.

Production
Frémont’s explorations were perhaps a “national work,” but, as his mentor
Senator Benton indicated in his memoirs, the federal executive had little to do
with them. Government was unquestionably innocent of the first expedition’s
“conception,” he wrote, merely permitting it to take place and “therefore, not
entitled to the credit of its authorship.”11 In general, congressional committees
and staff, as well as the authors themselves, supervised the publication of expe-
dition reports. The little that has survived from early nineteenth-century con-
gressional manuscript record reveals how complex was the production of these
elaborate books, a process that necessitated an army of printers, engravers, map
makers, and binders in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York.
During the 1840s, the secretary of the Senate and the clerk of the House of Rep-
resentatives managed directly many of the publication projects. The making of
Frémont’s reports also demonstrated the extent to which western reporting cen-
tered on palpable objects: maps and illustrations of varying degrees of cost and
sophistication, ranging from woodcuts and lithographs to steel and hand-colored
copper engravings. In the report-making industry, these artifacts were the most
expensive and complicated to produce and the most sought-after objects. They
were considered to have great knowledge value, for they were labeled facts, ma-
terial facts that represented other tangible facts. This multifaceted designation
of value corresponded to the notion expressed by an 1848 select committee that
Frémont’s achievement culminated in a collection of employable objects that was
“brought home,” including minerals, birds’ plumage, and drawings of scenery.
Another dimension of the objectification of the West through official reports em-
anated directly from their particularities as books.
The narrative part of Frémont’s report was ready within two months of the
House’s decision to circulate the document, but the production of the entire re-
port was to become a long-term endeavor. When questions about delays arose the
following year, the somewhat apologetic clerk of the House informed represen-
tatives anxious to receive their copies that ten thousand sets of engravings would
 The Bee in the Book 111

not be completed for another three or four months. He claimed that Frémont had
made the contracts for engraving the plates and the large map with Endicott in
New York and Edward Weber and Co. of Baltimore without consulting him. To
make things worse, Rives, the House printer, reported that the five hundred sets
that he already had received for binding were all “imperfect.” Meanwhile, the
Committee on the Library of the Senate investigated rumors that congressional
staff was clandestinely selling copies instead of delivering them to senators. The
committee pointed to difficulties with printing the lithographs and the binder’s
broken embossing machine but exonerated the Senate’s employees.12
Secretary of the Senate Asbury Dickins assumed a special role in the world of
governmental printing, coordinating publishing efforts and demonstrating great
understanding of the intricacies of the numerous crafts involved. In one episode,
Dickins advised the Navy Lt. William Lynch to divide the map adjoining his re-
port on his travels to the Jordan River and the Dead Sea into sections to avoid the
difficulty of engraving a narrow but elongated map on a large plate. In late 1848,
he ordered twenty thousand copies of Frémont’s map of Oregon and California
on thin, tough paper so they could be folded and sent by mail. He asked for
roughly one thousand on a thick, strong paper easier to preserve in portfolios or
mount in frames to be hung on walls.13
A correspondence with Alexander Dallas Bache of the Coast Survey showed
the secretary again preoccupied with the production of executive reports. He
pressured Bache to produce the introduction to his report on the magnetic ob-
servation of Girard College, admonishing him that the delay had already caused
embarrassment since many senators and representatives had made inquiries
about the report “as necessary to complete their series of documents.”14 Dickins
also arbitrated in questions such as the design of the title page of the annual re-
port of the Smithsonian Institution, and the use of copper rather than other types
of plates for engraving the 4,800 maps of the territories between the Mississippi
and the Pacific.15 All of these admittedly trifling matters give us a glimpse into
Congress’s involvement in managing large-scale, chronically behind schedule,
publishing projects. Some of the decisions Dickins and other congressional staff
made were more editorial than technical. In the case of Gales and Seaton’s Amer-
ican State Papers and other documentary projects, the clerk and the secretary
were given explicit editorial discretion. Beginning in the early 1850s, the execu-
tive departments gradually assumed some of these functions. The navy and the
Department of the Interior supervised expedition reports while the War De-
partment was in charge of printing the Pacific Railroad surveys.
 112 Monuments in Print

Expedition Lost
The U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838 – 42) was the first naval operation of its
kind. Roaming the Pacific, it established the existence of Antarctica as a conti-
nent, charted almost three hundred islands, conducted ethnological observations,
discovered hundreds of new species of flora and fauna, and accumulated mea-
surements on navigation, meteorology, and magnetism. The changing political
scene at the turn of the 1840s greatly determined the path of the report’s publi-
cation. Lt. Charles Wilkes, the famously short-tempered commander of the ex-
pedition, was a Democrat and a Van Buren appointee. When he returned to
Washington in June 1842, the Whigs were in power and seemed to want either
to entrust the expedition’s results to someone else or not publish it. Wilkes found
an ally in a fellow Democrat, Senator Benjamin Tappan from Ohio, setting a pat-
tern by which an agile Congress occasionally snatched a publication project from
the hands of a reluctant administration. Tappan and Wilkes peddled the publi-
cation as a national undertaking and an expression of naval pride. Wilkes popu-
larized his expedition in a series of lectures at the National Museum in the city.
He wrote privately, “the reputation of our country is at stake.” Unless the work
was finished, “all will be ruined and we shall become the laughing stock of Eu-
rope and all the praise that has been lavished on our Government for its noble
undertaking prove but satire in disguise.”16 Some were doubtful about the fed-
eral government’s ability to handle a project of such magnitude. The naturalist
John James Audubon commented to his protégé Spencer Baird (later the second
secretary of the Smithsonian) that government probably could not dispense with
the half million dollars he thought were necessary. It would take the wealth of
the Russian emperor or the French king, he opined, associating the prospective
project with the opulence of monarchical power. If only he could, he would “ad-
dress the Congress of our Country, ask of them to throw open these stores of Na-
tional Curiosities, and Comply with mine every wish to publish, and to Give
Away Copies of the invaluable Works thus produced to every Scientific Institu-
tion throughout our Country, and throughout the World.”17
Wilkes’s greatest achievement was probably his success in convincing Congress
to employ in the publication effort the individuals who participated in the expe-
dition. He similarly established a continuum between his command on the high
seas and the administration of the publication project, a principle based on a no-
tion of deservedness that linked field exertions with the rewards of authorship.
Wilkes was to write the narrative history of the voyage. According to the law en-
 The Bee in the Book 113

acted in August 1842, this illustrated account would follow in form the report of
the voyage of the Astrolabe that France had just issued. For the American Jour-
nal of Science and Art, the French example was the proper choice. “France has
outstripped England in the liberality with which her expeditions have been fit-
ted out, and in the magnificence of her publications. The many folio volumes of
plates, published as the result of the voyages of Freycinet, Duperey, and D’Ur-
ville, and those of Napoleon’s expedition into Egypt, are among the most splen-
did productions of the age. They are a noble gift of France to the world.”18 The
article implied it was a matter of fairness, if not justice, that government should
not keep the knowledge accumulated in the voyage for the few but share it with
the public at large, for the people bore the expense of the journey. Likewise, mem-
bers of the expedition should control publication. “Each will prepare his own re-
port, reap his own honors, and be held responsible for his own facts.”19 (In a sim-
ilar fashion, Frémont’s supporters would argue in the late 1840s that government
owed Frémont the opportunity of publishing the report on his third journey to
California for his expeditions “only want the finishing hand of their author to
erect a monument of honor to himself and of utility to his country.”20)
These notions of popular science seemed incongruent with Congress’s some-
what atypical decision to issue the reports in a minuscule edition of one hundred.
The State Department distributed the volumes among the states and foreign
countries. Ultimately, despite their publicity, actual public access to the volumes
was severely limited. The Library Committee decided to permit each author to
print from the typeset 100 to 150 copies for three-fifths of the contract cost, pro-
vided the writers would sell them at a low price. All authors except Wilkes de-
clined. Booksellers, who received the offer next, seemed as reluctant, but for Lea
and Blanchard, who paid for copies of two volumes.21 Eventually, most volumes
appeared in some form in unofficial and rather small editions. Only the popular
(and less scientific) Wilkes’s Narrative was republished under various commer-
cial guises, the last issued in 1858. Reviewing the volumes on the ethnology and
zoophytes reports in 1846, C. C. Felton and Asa Gray wrote in the North Ameri-
can Review that unless Congress decided to expand the edition, the books would
become “forbidden fruit” to those interested in science in the United States and
in Europe. “Such niggardly publication is only tantalizing the votaries of science.
It is moreover, particularly unjust to the authors of these works.”22 In this case,
authors masquerading as reviewers purported to speak for readers (the “votaries
of science”), for Gray was to be one of the scientists employed to write on the ex-
pedition’s results. Petitions to Congress from the Georgia Historical Society and
the president of Amherst College failed to increase the number of printed copies.
 114 Monuments in Print

Charles Wilkes was criticized for publishing his Narrative of the United States Exploring
Expedition in the years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842 (1844) in a private edition and for issuing a
copyright for an account that was ostensibly a public document. The open volume of this
sumptuous edition shows an engraving of the USS Vincennes in Disappointment Bay, Antarctica,
following Wilkes’s own illustration. Wilkes led a squadron of six ships, 346 seamen, and a team of
nine scientists and artists in the milestone expedition, which among other feats proved that
Antarctica was a continent. (Smithsonian Institution Collections)

Tappan and Wilkes developed a small publishing apparatus under the super-
vision of the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress. At first, it was esti-
mated that the publication would take merely a year. The committee appointed
Tappan as its agent, responsible for setting the criteria for contracting and
proofing as well as the general layout of the volumes. The project would be of-
ten disrupted by tension and scandal. In some respects, this was merely a con-
tinuation of rifts that occurred first aboard the ships in the Pacific. There were
also persistent rumors that shells and other specimens surfaced in private collec-
tions. Matters got worse, and in the spring of 1846, the committee ordered Tap-
pan to stop the departure of specimens and cease making contracts. His subse-
quent resignation was accepted.
Wilkes completed publishing his five narrative volumes in January 1844. Pub-
lic reactions were mixed. The Southern Literary Messenger noted that Wilkes
 The Bee in the Book 115

was often wrong in quoting Spanish words. In the North American Review,
Charles Davis remarked that much of the Narrative was acquired in the library
and not in the Pacific. “It would be ridiculous to deny, that a large portion of this
work was prepared by Captain Wilkes, or his friends, in the closet at home,—
that, in short, it is to a certain extent a compilation.”23 Wilkes’s habit of copying
material from general histories and lifting passages from journals of crewmem-
bers endeared him to neither reviewers nor his men. Government officially
claimed all notes taken by participants during the expedition. This had been
common practice since the eighteenth century (for instance, Captain Cooke’s
journey in the Pacific) but seemed unfair to American sensibilities. In fact, offi-
cers were obliged to keep daily journals and to record even trivial incidents on
board ship or on shore that “tend to illustrate any transaction or occurrence
which may take place, or afford any information in regard to the manners, habits,
or customs of natives and the position and characters of such places as may be
visited.”24 Wilkes had at his disposal his subordinates’ work, which he relent-
lessly mined.
Further infuriating his critics, he issued a copyright on his own name for fu-
ture commercial editions of the project. He explained that the Narrative was not
the original report he had sent to the Navy Department but a distinct document
written specifically at the request of the library committee. Ostensibly a reward
for a naval officer conducting extra work, he chose to explain the unusual copy-
right for a government publication in terms of personal integrity. “My object in
so doing was to protect my reputation, being unwilling that a garbled edition
should be printed by others.”25 The committee had an ambiguous role in the
copyright matter. Initially, it supported congressional legislation that would give
Wilkes the privilege. When Congress did not pass such legislation and Wilkes is-
sued a copyright through the usual procedure, the committee opined that this
copyright might not stand a court challenge. Ordinarily, individuals could not is-
sue copyright on government publications. The court denied copyright to one of
the artists in Commodore Perry’s expedition, holding that by publishing the
drawings for the benefit of the public at large, Congress had given it to the pub-
lic. Wilkes also notified the committee that because of his “desire to diffuse a full
knowledge of the result of the expedition,” he was about to publish a complete
edition of the work without many of the illustrations and at a reduced price.26
In the ten years following Tappan’s resignation, Wilkes was in charge of the
contracts with authors. Joseph Drayton, one of the expedition’s artists, supervised
the material aspects of the production, and John S. Meehan, the congressional li-
brarian, provided administrative services. They contracted more than one hun-
 116 Monuments in Print

dred authors, artists, illustrators, and engravers. Wilkes wrote, “the country is
greatly indebted to [Drayton] for the style and beauty of the publication.”27
Drayton lived most of the time in Philadelphia, where the printing and binding
were done. His role in executing the production and setting the format exempli-
fied the importance of the material aspect of the work and the absence of other
editorial authorities. Surviving proofs of colored engravings display his pedantic
dissatisfaction with unrealistic shades of color in the depiction of animals and
plants, to the point that, in one case, he preferred to abandon color altogether for
it called attention to itself rather than to the actual animal. Arguably, hand-
colored plates—not early photography—were the ultimate mid-nineteenth-
century technology with which to represent reality in nature. The zoology and
many of the botany plates were to be colored “to represent the objects in life.”28
Drayton had to overcome a shortage of engravers prompted, in part, by frantic
official printing activities. Scarcity engendered competition with other publish-
ing projects—such as Schoolcraft’s, also printed in Philadelphia, Amos Binney’s
natural history project, and the Pennsylvania State Survey—as well as with a
thriving magazine business in New York. Abiding by the library committee’s de-
termination to keep the project in the United States, Drayton refused to consider
sending work to Europe, although it could be performed there for a moderate
cost. In 1856 the committee’s chair Senator James Pearce was eager to replace
Wilkes, who did not cooperate with his retrenchment policies. Drayton was his
obvious choice. Soon after, however, Drayton passed away.
Meanwhile, a battle was brewing between Wilkes’s crew and a hostile scien-
tific community. James Dwight Dana wrote three official reports, but he was the
only participant in the voyage to acquire a reputation as an important scientist.
Others were not considered up to the task. Key publications were eventually
taken away from expedition members and given to acknowledged experts. One
of the first controversies evolved around the volume on shells. Wilkes fought with
Joseph P. Couthouy, the naturalist originally in charge of shells, over his expedi-
tion journals and drawings. He wanted another, Drayton, to write the conchology
volume instead, but it was an outsider, Augustus Addison Gould, who was com-
missioned. In the preface to his volume, Gould acknowledged the difficulties of
classifying somebody else’s collections. Some of the original notes, made by
Couthouy, simply got lost, “repeated searches had failed to discover them among
the masses of documents pertaining to the Expedition.”29
Titian Ramsay Peale, an expedition artist and son of the famous museum
founder in Philadelphia, decided against scientific convention to record in his re-
port observations on already known animal species, arguing that the spread of
 The Bee in the Book 117

animals was as important as the discovery of new species. But it was the bel-
ligerent introduction he wrote for his report on birds and insects that earned
him Wilkes’s ire. Peale criticized and labeled as young and inexperienced the
expedition’s naval officers, and Wilkes retaliated. In 1848, Peale’s zoology report
was renamed Mammalia and Ornithology and published without the introduc-
tion, while the author never completed the adjoining atlas. The Philadelphia
ornithologist John Cassin rewrote the entire project. Asa Gray agreed to take
charge of the publication of the botanical material only after he was guaran-
teed a trip to Europe at government expense and a five-year contract at $120 a
month.30
Since the early 1850s, Senator Pearce was pressuring Wilkes to end the chaotic
project. By 1859, $279,131 had been spent.31 Senators lost patience. Senator
Clement J. Clay from Alabama charged that Wilkes had become rich at the gov-
ernment’s expense. John P. Hale from New Hampshire alluded to Dickens’s Bleak
House, comparing Wilkes’s enterprise to the infamous, everlasting Chancery suit.
“I think, really, that Wilkes’s exploring expedition has performed a thing of ro-
mance that will tax credulity vastly more than Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce.” Senator
Robert Toombs of Georgia suggested simply throwing the entire project into the
Potomac River.32 This was not the first time that animosity toward the project
assumed an antiscientific (or anti-intellectual) flavor. Six years earlier, when Sen-
ator Pearce explained to a less than sympathetic chamber that the project did not
exceed norms established in similar endeavors sponsored by other countries, Hale
quipped, “What, sir, do you suppose that these exploring expeditions do? These
explorers take a great oyster-rake; they take the bottom of the ocean, and bring
some bugs, shells, plants, and creeping things of all sorts, and then enlist the lit-
erary and scientific recherche all over the country to pour them over and explain
and analyze them to the public and make picture-books.”33
In 1862, another modest appropriation was made for archiving the archive:
preserving the plates of the exploring expedition and the collection that was de-
posited in the Smithsonian as well as other Washington institutions.34 Until
Wilkes’s death in 1877, there would be additional small appropriations for the
preservation of the collections and for publication. The project ceased for the du-
ration of the Civil War when Wilkes’s recklessness almost brought the United
States and Britain into battle. In 1876 Senator Timothy O. Howe, chairman of
the joint committee, rejected Wilkes’s appeal to proceed with the publication
effort. He viewed the continuation as unjustified political patronage. Overall,
Congress issued eighteen volumes and twelve accompanying atlases; a few more
were prepared but never printed.
 118 Monuments in Print

The Royal Geographical Society of London awarded Wilkes its Founder’s

Medal in 1847 for his Antarctic achievements. He never received a similar honor
from the U.S. government. Senator Pearce defended the publication as an enter-
prise with no parallel in the United States or Europe, a “great work” that honored
American science. Louis Agassiz saw the expedition’s reports as “surpass[ing] in
scientific importance the publications of all the exploring expeditions issued by
European government taken separately.”35 While the majority of these volumes
were produced between 1842 and the Civil War, there were fourteen other naval
expeditions, partly in response to maritime commercial interests and the whal-
ing industry, which demanded accurate nautical charts. Still, one should bear in
mind what the English botanist Joseph Hooker wrote to Gray in 1861: “Who on
earth is to keep in their heads or quote such a medley of books—double-paged,
double-titled, and half finished as your Government vomits periodically into the
great ocean of Scientific bibliography.”36

Boundary Demarcation
The exploring expedition investigated the west of the West, traveling, at one
point, along the soon to become U.S. Pacific coastline, gazing eastward. (Fré-
mont’s second expedition to Oregon and California was formally intended to
complete Wilkes’s project from the continent’s direction.) To the South, the Mex-
ican Boundary expedition demarcated the new postwar borderline following the
1848 peace treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It presented an opportunity for the
Army Corps of Topographical Engineers to launch an unprecedently large sur-
vey of the trans-Mississippi Southwest. The controversy over the publication of
a report by the third commissioner of the survey, John Russell Bartlett (1850–
53), foregrounded, once again, the question of authorship in official documents.
In 1850, President John Tyler’s administration was looking for a candidate to
fill the recently vacated position of boundary commissioner. Bartlett, an ethnol-
ogist, publisher, and a Whig from Providence, Rhode Island, stumbled upon the
appointment while in Washington, D.C. (He had wished to be nominated min-
ister to Denmark.) Bartlett had limited knowledge of the West and no previous
experience in this kind of operation. His tenure was marred by raucous rela-
tionships with hostile military subordinates, all southern Democrats. Accusations
concerning mismanagement of supply and general incompetence were not en-
tirely unfounded. Quarrels over food, pay, and instances of sabotage by disgrun-
tled former employees abounded. The expedition’s first astronomer, Lt. Col. John
 The Bee in the Book 119

McClellan, claimed that George Bartlett, the commissioner’s brother who was in
charge of purchasing supply, was busy defrauding the government.
Nevertheless, the dispute that eventually terminated Bartlett’s appointment
touched directly upon the marking of the border. The U.S. and Mexican survey-
ors who collaborated in the effort faced a hurdle of a legal as well as of a curi-
ously representational nature. Which element in the treaty’s map, known as Dis-
truntell’s Map, should take precedent: its description of geographical features
and their actual location on the terrain, or, the map’s delineation of imagined
parallel and meridian coordinates that turned out to be misplaced by half a de-
gree to the south and two degrees to the west? The Mexicans demanded to fol-
low the faulty coordinates in selecting the survey’s Archimedean point; the
Americans preferred to employ the actual location of tiny El Paso, which, as the
treaty stipulated, was to be eight miles south of the border. Bartlett was willing
to compromise with the Mexican general Pedro Garcia Condé’s position. Ac-
cording to his foes in Congress, this amounted to a betrayal of U.S. interests. (The
difference between Gray’s interpretation of the treaty and Bartlett-Condé’s com-
promise was a territory 35 miles wide and 175 long, or six thousand square miles,
that became known as the Mesilla Strip.) The commission’s surveyor, Andrew
Gray, who refused to sign the Bartlett-Condé agreement, was summarily dis-
missed.
At stake was not just a piece of desert and some cacti, as Bartlett alleged, but
a cause that became dear to the hearts of southern senators. They hoped that the
future railroad to the Pacific would pass through Texas to south California along
the thirty-second parallel. For two years, Whigs and expansionist Democrats de-
bated the issue in Washington while Bartlett was feuding with his men in the
field. Eventually, a new treaty and a land deal had to be concocted between Mex-
ico and the United States (General Gadsden’s Purchase of December 1853), af-
ter which the current boundary was agreed upon and much of southern Arizona
became a U.S. territory. But before that the commission’s work was suspended,
and Bartlett and William Emory, who replaced Gray and Col. James D. Graham
(the commission’s chief scientist who was also demoted after a row with Bartlett),
were recalled back East.
Arriving in Washington in early 1853, Bartlett faced a hostile Senate and a
new Democratic administration that soon revoked his appointment. Bartlett sub-
mitted a report on his expeditions to his superiors in the Department of the In-
terior. However, he still entertained the ambition of authoring a grand report,
which he hoped would combine his journal with scientific findings and be
 120 Monuments in Print

adorned with the illustrations of the expedition’s artist, Henry Pratt. In April of
that year, Senator Sam Houston (Texas) proposed on the floor that Bartlett and
Gray “be authorized to furnish a report . . . on the topography, geography, and
natural history of these regions adjacent to the line, with such information as
was collected relative to the Indian tribes through Texas, California and New
Mexico.”37 Demonstrating the degree of discretion senators enjoyed in the pro-
duction of executive reports, Houston offered editorial guidelines. He proposed
that the presentation of the aboriginal subject matter would follow the example
set by Schoolcraft’s Indian volumes, and the natural history part would take as a
model an account that had become an exemplar of the genre, David Dale Owen’s
Report on the Geology of Lake Superior. He further suggested limiting the length
of the report to two volumes and a thousand pages, and to pay for it from the con-
tingency fund. Houston’s support of the publication raised a few eyebrows. As
had many southern senators, he had been critical of Bartlett’s position on the
boundary question.
The ensuing debate featured the customary attacks on congressional printing.
Senators alleged that official publications were exorbitant and that their scien-
tific or informational value was inexcusably low. Subsidized books were resold at
D.C. stores, or, worse, their leaves were torn out to wrap loaves of bread. It did
not escape participants that the proposed publication circumvented the funda-
mental rationale of reporting, for evidently the Department of the Interior, its
addressee, was quite uninterested in such a document. Senator Solon Borland re-
minded his colleagues that the publication of the first three volumes of School-
craft’s project cost a staggering $100,000. Only Owen’s geological report was rel-
atively cheap to produce (less than four dollars a volume as against twenty-five
for Schoolcraft’s). Still, $30,000 were spent on its printing.
Senator James Mason (Virginia), one of Bartlett’s chief enemies, maintained
that Bartlett had deliberately chosen routes that deviated from the vicinity of the
border. “The commissioner—God knows where—[was] exploring the interior
of Mexico, perhaps, and collecting material for a book.”38 Senators complained
that they were asked to edit a book whose contents were unfamiliar to anyone
and its authors were as yet unknown. The Senate should not do it without en-
dorsements from “some literary persons.” Defensively, Houston resorted to cir-
cular reasoning. To those who maintained they should not publish a book about
which they knew nothing, he answered that that was exactly why the book should
be printed—so they could learn something about it. “He may give us a very en-
tertaining lecture upon the manners, customs, and peculiar habits of Mexico.”
This rather fragile argument relied, once again, on the ambiguity of the Senate’s
 The Bee in the Book 121

role as producer and consumer of books and the further conflation between law-
makers, voters, and readers.
Houston claimed the entire country between California and the Atlantic was
interested in the report. In the wide distribution of Owen’s geological account,
many of the volumes did not reach their destinations because they were stolen
right out of the mailbags. The Texan’s allegation prompted chuckles in the
chamber. For Houston, however, the reported thefts demonstrated “the great
value of the work and the great desire of the people for intelligence, and is a co-
gent reason for an urgent necessity of having the supply of books increased.” In
order to guard his own shipment he claimed to have spent hundreds of dollars
protecting them in boxes, at least until they reached Texas. “I am not afraid of
the mails being robbed in Texas,” he proclaimed over another round of laughter.
Senator Butler from South Carolina defended the good name of his state and its
neighbors but jokingly allowed, “there may be a greater literary mania upon the
route than in the state of Texas itself. How that is I do not know.”39
Despite his folksy Texanisms (or because of them) Houston was not the most
persuasive advocate for Bartlett’s report, for the senator ultimately conceded that
the only book published by Congress he had ever read was the Patent Office re-
port, and from that only the agricultural volume. He had no great desire to read
any other documents. Things did not improve when he further confessed that he
supported the publication in part because of Gray, a fellow Texan, who, he felt,
had been dismissed unfairly. Senator Borland may have hammered the last nail
into the project’s coffin when he said that after talking with Bartlett, it became
evident that the manuscript was incomplete. Bartlett probably sought to secure
a contract for his publishing venture.40 The Senate decided not to pursue the pro-
posal. This was due partly to Houston’s mannerism and, in larger part, to Dem-
ocratic animosity towards Bartlett.
Bartlett had to satisfy himself with a commercial publisher. His two-volume
account Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico,
California, Sonora, and Chihuahua (1854) would be among the more popular and
certainly among the most readable expedition reports to come out of the Great
Reconnaissance. Perhaps this quality was the serendipitous result of the imposi-
tion that prevented him from publishing an official document. Rather than em-
ulating Schoolcraft or Owen, he apparently took as his model his friend John
Lloyd Stephen’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan
(1841). The narrative was accompanied by ninety-four woodcuts and sixteen lith-
ographs but no metal engravings. A somewhat diffused notion of an American
border emanated from the book. This was partly due to the social heterogeneity
 122 Monuments in Print

it featured through multiple actors: German settlers, Mormons, Mexican vil-

lagers, Indian warriors, Bartlett’s own troublesome unit, miners, ranchers, gov-
ernors, and officials of the Mexican government. Bartlett regarded General
Condé and his staff as peers. Rather than the marked and re-marked border be-
tween Mexico and the United States, the nondemarcated and receding western
frontier emerged as a deeper divide. In the tradition of travel writing, the road
itself was rendered foreign. Despite the great empathy Bartlett harbored for In-
dians, his encounters revealed a tension between his East Coast ethnographic ex-
pectations and native people’s actual customs.
Ultimately, in Bartlett’s travels there was yet another expansionist desire not
to draw but to eliminate or cross the border, although in a different manner from
that of his Democratic adversaries. In June 1851, Bartlett came upon and released
a kidnapped adolescent named Inez Gonzales. She was held by three men who
had purchased her from Piñol Indians in Mexico and were about to resell her in
Santa Fe. Extending U.S. protection over Inez and her innocence, and safely re-
turning her to her parents, became a peculiar preoccupation that would draw
Bartlett deep into Mexico, where he traveled and convalesced much of the fol-
lowing year. With General Condé’s blessing, he arrived in Santa Cruz in Septem-
ber. Returning the girl guaranteed her purity and the integrity of her family.
Once he found the Gonzales family, Bartlett discovered these Mexican villagers
in their full humanity. “Tears of joy burst from all; and the sun-burnt and brawny
men, in whom the finer feelings of our nature are wrongly supposed not to exist
wept like children, as they looked with astonishment on the rescued girl.”41
Bartlett continued traveling as far as Acapulco (one thousand miles south of
the border) where in February 1852 he took a boat back to San Diego, California.
A few months later, and to his great disappointment, he found Inez in Tubac
(south of Tucson) cohabiting with a Mexican officer far away from her parents.
In another episode, Bartlett released Mexican children from Apache captivity.
The Apache were angered, and Bartlett explained to them at length that he was
merely following the treaty between the two countries that made each govern-
ment responsible for acts of depredation committed across the border. The
United States was now obliged to protect its Mexican friends and could not re-
nege on her promises. There was a didactic “Americanizing” dimension to these
incidents. At the same time, liberating enslaved children could have implicitly
drawn the most important borderline of Bartlett’s commission, that between his
northeastern, middle-class sensibilities and those of his southern foes.
The publication heralded a new round of controversy. The National Intelli-
gencer expressed its wish to see Congress present the geographical, mineralogi-
 The Bee in the Book 123

cal, zoological, and ethnographical dimensions of the commission’s work to the

public in “a suitable manner.”42 The Union objected. Bartlett elected “to embark
it in the chances of ‘the trade;’ and if a failure in the anticipated profits, or any
other cause, should now make it convenient to saddle Congress with the venture,
we respectfully suggest that it is too late.”43 The article claimed that according
to “the best authority,” there was not a single contribution in the book to science,
the mapping of the country, or the illustration of its physical geography. Bartlett
rebutted that upon returning to Washington he looked for the collections gath-
ered by the army officers. To his dismay, the specimens had been sent to New
York, Boston, and elsewhere for examination and possibly publication as well. He
issued an order to members of the expedition to prevent the appropriation of gov-
ernment property. But the secretary of the interior, Robert McClelland (who hap-
pened to be the brother of one of Bartlett’s chief rivals in the expedition) inval-
idated his instructions and soon afterward, Bartlett was out of office. “No public
officer has ever before met with the treatment that I have.” All reports of Amer-
ican surveys and explorations, whether domestic or otherwise (including expe-
ditions to the Amazon), were officially published and distributed without charge.
The public should judge who was wronged, government or him.44 Colonel
Emory (his successor and great rival) rejoined in the Union that despite Bartlett’s
disclaimers, the former commissioner was still in possession of government prop-
erty, including sketches made by the commission’s artist. Unlike objects of nat-
ural history, which interested few, these illustrations were property that had
“both intrinsic and mercantile value-property . . . property easily transferable,
and convertible into money.”45
The title “Personal Narrative” did not hide the fact that Bartlett’s book was
an account of an official assignment. Still, the New York Quarterly Review re-
garded it mostly as a travel book and the best of its kind. “The style of this work
is a model of descriptive writing, simple, unambitious, quiet and in racy, id-
iomatic terms, it presents a lucid and animated narrative.”46 The New York
Times joined the chorus. It would have been to the credit of any government to
present these facts to the world. “How differs this from sowing freely and reap-
ing sparingly?—appropriating liberally for the prosecution of the work, yet, by
refusing appropriations for publishing, reaping no other fruits rather than the
Commissioner’s Personal Narrative.”47 The Times expressed its hope that the
commission’s post-Bartlett finding would not languish in governmental “dusty
closets” or be left to private enterprise. “Next to the folly of keeping [explo-
rations’ results] entirely out of the popular reach, is the folly of postponing their
publication until all the novelty of the enterprise has worn off, and the story be-
 124 Monuments in Print

comes an old one before it is ever told.”48 The Churchman recommended the
book as excellent summer reading for those vacationers who, “while enjoying the
easy luxuries of Saratoga, West Point, or Newport, would enhance their satisfac-
tion by the survey of distant portions of their widely-extended country, traveled
over under less agreeable circumstances.”49 This was probably the most telling
statement on the function of the book. For much of its eastern readership, it
served as a form of entertainment and food for the occidentalist imagination.
Congressman Benjamin Babcock Thurston from Bartlett’s home state of Rhode
Island asked that ten thousand copies of his books be published for the use of the
House, but his request was in vain.
The Boundary Commission supplied its own version of the “Battle of the
Books.” The dispute between Emory and Bartlett resumed when Emory’s report
came out in 1857. In a reversal of roles, the Herald, a Bartlett supporter, attacked
the first volume of Emory’s account as one of the Congress-sponsored extrava-
gant print projects that instead of providing useful information were meant to
glorify their authors. It was duly labeled “a ponderous volume,” brimming with
more expensive illustrations than any similar government work—no less than
ninety-nine steel, copper, and stone engravings and twenty woodcuts. “Never
have we seen so many illustrations presenting so few features of interest, sixty-
four of them being views of the desert directly on the western portion of the
boundary, and consequently offering little variety.”50 The article poked fun at
Emory’s arrogance in calling a mountain near the Rio Grande after himself. The
mountain was illustrated in the report and on its binding. By embossing on the
cover the mountain he had named after himself, Emory was able to sign his re-
port twice. The fact that the document could be read from its exterior further en-
hanced its capacity as a monument, although its national signification was clearly
threatened or dwarfed by Emory’s own sense of grandeur.
The Herald added sardonically that America had a Mount Washington in the
East and a Mount Emory on its southwestern border. “How slight is the step from
the sublime to the ridiculous.” (The article reported that the cost of printing
Emory’s reports was $233,000, while the expenses for the scientific crew were es-
timated to be only $70,000.) Should we expect next to find Emory Toads and
Emory Vipers? By inserting into his official reports remarks on his dispute with
Bartlett, Emory became even more vulnerable to criticism about wasting public
money for personal purposes. Another burst of open letters between Bartlett and
Emory rehashed accusations of neglect and self-aggrandizement. One newspa-
per compared the high cost of Emory’s report and its moderate “literary or sci-
entific” value with Congress’s refusal to print Bartlett’s account in the simplest
 The Bee in the Book 125

form.51 It was an illustration of the military influence on government. If Bartlett

had been a colonel, his report would have featured enough engravings “to make
a whole picture gallery.” The writer did not neglect to mention that the engrav-
ings for the Emory report were executed in Paris and that foreign artists were
preferred to Americans in rendering this service. “Possibly the French may beat
us in the toads and lizards, but we do not believe that anything is gained by send-
ing away the engraving of the botanical illustrations.”52
Northwestern papers’ support of Bartlett should not come as a surprise. He
was a member of various learned societies and well connected with the Yankee
intellectual establishment. Those reviews, however, gave ample evidence to
prevalent notions concerning the duty of government in providing the public
fresh information, scientific and otherwise. Bartlett’s campaign for the publica-
tion of his report demonstrated contested notions of ownership that pitted gov-
ernment against individuals over texts, specimens, and knowledge. In addition,
it betrayed the weakness of the antebellum state. Government was not simply
speaking from the pens of its commissioned officers but was occasionally eclipsed
by their individual voices registered in exuberant documents.
Bartlett’s book was so extensively used that there are no known copies of the
original text without missing pages. One is left speculating whether removing
pages of expeditions’ accounts (perhaps for an illustration or for a particular de-
tail on a part of the route) was a common practice. The report also received some
vicarious official recognition. When the postmaster general chose the southern
route to San Francisco (the Butterfield Mail), his decision, he claimed, was based
on three documents: Captain Randolph Marcy’s Reconnaissances, Bartlett’s Nar-
rative, and the Pacific Railroad Reports.53

“Very Desirous to Complete My Set”

It is difficult to measure actual readers’ response to government publications.
Press reviews of explorations and legislative reports tended to reflect predictable
views of contending literary, scientific, and political cliques. However, in the
records of the Department of the Interior there are roughly one thousand re-
quests for volumes of the Pacific Railroad surveys.54 They were received between
1854 and 1861 from newspapermen, businessmen, army officers, government
officials, educators, amateur scientists, civil engineers, and ordinary citizens who
were simply collecting government documents. This is admittedly a rather crude
gauge with which to assess who was interested in government documents and for
what purposes. Those who wrote thought that because of their public status, per-
 126 Monuments in Print

sonal interest, friends in high places, or actual need, they stood a better chance
to receive them. In all likelihood, many more requests were directed at individ-
ual members of the two houses. What this repository does reveal is the range of
interest and curiosity. Requests came from all over the country, including regions
far removed from the West. The single largest group was that of officials or other
individuals close to the administration. Other petitions evidenced the grassroots
reach of science in the antebellum United States (as also manifested by the co-
operation the Smithsonian achieved in enlisting private citizens across the nation
to participate in its meteorological and natural history projects).
The Pacific Railroad surveys (1853 –54) were a cluster of expeditions con-
ducted to identify the most practical route for the transcontinental railroad.
Ostensibly introducing a scientific approach to policy making, Congress and the
administration were seeking a way to detour what was in effect an uncircum-
ventable political hurdle. Every possible route (usually variations of about eight
alternatives) had a loyal group of politicians, developers, promoters, and specu-
lators who were puffing its merit. Jefferson Davis, then the secretary of war in
the Pierce administration, together with a group of Deep South and Texan con-
gressmen, wanted the route to pass along the already-surveyed Mexican border.
Many of the leading officers of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, like Abert
and Emory, were also fiercely devoted to the far southern route. A few of them
harbored strong southern loyalties; others succumbed to a growing institutional
attachment to an area that had been repeatedly observed and examined. The
Army Corps of Engineers’ gaze was fixed on the Southwest and refused to be di-
verted.55 The surveys initially evolved around four main expeditions, for which
Congress appropriated $150,000. Despite enormous efforts, there was no conclu-
sive answer to the question presented to the explorers. The competition only in-
tensified when it turned out (to the genuine surprise of Davis and others) there
were several fine alternatives for the transcontinental route. Lack of rigorous
standards and somewhat dubious calculations also made it all but impossible to
compare with any precision assertions about economy and practicality. Davis and
Captain Andrew Humphreys, Chief of the Bureau of Western Explorations
and Surveys, who was put in charge of a small apparatus in the War Department
to supervise the project, produced controversial summary evaluations of the
surveys.
These expeditions, with their mixture of sectional politics and engineers’ cal-
culations of curves and heights, engendered another enterprise that took years
and great resources to accomplish. It was the ultimate product of pre–Civil War
U.S. imperial aspirations: twelve volumes featuring expedition narratives and
 The Bee in the Book 127

writings on geology, zoology, botany, and ethnology. A century later, the Pacific
Railroad surveyors still impressed historian William Goetzmann as the largest
congregation of scientists and technicians to go on a national campaign of ex-
ploration and conquest since Napoleon entered Egypt (an imperial project that
was also followed by a lavish publication). More than a hundred scientifically
trained men in the field and in the East participated in the effort of collecting,
classifying, and publishing. Leading antebellum scientists Torrey, Gray, and es-
pecially Baird at the Smithsonian cast a long shadow over the expeditions, se-
lecting field scientists and then supervising and authoring many of the reports.
The national project was typically wrapped in universalistic scientific language.
Another boundary-defying gesture was the use of North America rather than the
United States in the titles of volumes such as Mammals of North America or Birds
of North America. Moreover, the scientific team was cosmopolitan and included
Europeans such as Baron F. W. von Egloffstein, a Prussian illustrator; Frederick
Creuzefeldt, a botanist who lost his life in the Gunnison massacre; and Jules Mar-
cou, a French naturalist. Marcou somewhat spoiled the semblance of an inter-
national cooperation under the American flag. Claiming illness at the conclusion
of his labors, he attempted to leave the country with his geological specimens
and without submitting a report. Forced to produce an account, he eventually re-
turned to Paris, where he composed a private document and completed a geo-
logical map of the United States, further incensing his American colleagues. The
race between exploration leaders and their underlings for the printing press was
a feature of these enterprises. It happened first in the aftermath of Lewis and
Clark’s homecoming, when to Meriwether Lewis’s great annoyance and alarm,
Sergeant Patrick Gass, a member of the “Corps of Discovery,” was quick to pub-
lish his journals, prompting Lewis to assault in the press “unauthorized . . . spu-
rious publications.”56
Government issued the reports in two editions. A three-volume octavo ac-
companied by a folio of maps was published in 1855 before a few of the last
surveys were entirely completed.57 The second edition was a luxurious twelve-
volume (in thirteen parts) quarto that represented the apex of the genre: ency-
clopedic and in disarray, populated by authorial fancies (in one case a long lec-
ture, provided by a junior military officer, over the importance of government
involvement in setting a network of railroads), and retentive. A commemorative
volume summarized western explorations since Lewis and Clark and included
twenty-four maps and profiles, plus four older maps pointing to historical dis-
coveries.58 The prospect of publication was so tempting that collections made
outside the surveys were appropriated, including the private aggregation of cacti
 128 Monuments in Print

The annual allocation of goods to the Assiniboine Indians by government officials at Fort Union
(North Dakota) was illustrated by John Mix Stanley, who accompanied the 1855 exploration of
the prospective route for the transcontinental railroad from St. Paul to Puget Sound. A cluster of
such expeditions led to the thirteen volumes of Reports of Explorations and Surveys, to Ascertain
the Most Practicable and Economical Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific
Ocean (1855–61), the most comprehensive and lavish western reports of the antebellum period.
(Three-tone lithograph by Sarony, Major and Knapp after drawing by Stanley, c. 1855; additional
coloring was added later).

and rocks by Major H. Thomas at Fort Yuma featured in the eighth volume. Con-
gress authorized the printing of ten thousand copies of the reports, which were
issued simultaneously by the Senate (leatherbound) and the House (cloth).
One group of applicants for these volumes consisted of entrepreneurs who
wanted to participate in the rush to build a railroad to the Pacific or who con-
templated other real or fantastical business schemes. Several were particularly
anxious to promote the southern route. Edgar Conkling from the Railroad Rec-
ord, published in Cincinnati, reprinted government reports and other articles,
documents, and pamphlets in order to popularize the thirty-second parallel route.
He asked Jefferson Davis to send his synopsis of the surveys and maps as well as
duplicates of any other material on the topic. He promised to publish approxi-
mately twenty thousand copies of Jefferson’s synopsis for gratis circulation all
 The Bee in the Book 129

over the country.59 Dr. Levi Jones from New York also presented himself as a sup-
porter of the southern route, “the line of the 32 parallel is altogether the best
which can be taken from the interest of this Union or the world.” He had ob-
tained a charter in Texas for a railroad from Matagorda Bay to El Paso and was
trying to raise money for the project. Jones asked for a copy or two of the abridged
official report as well as for any information that would point to the advantage
of that route, such as the discovery of new artesian wells in the Rockies.60
Dr. Christian Raub developed a new type of “desert locomotive” specifically
for the railroad to the Pacific. The inventor wished to know the precise distances
between points of water and coal supplies to help him optimize the performance
of the machine. August Harvey, a civil engineer from Nebraska City, was plan-
ning to make a survey in the upper part of the territory early in the spring of
1857 and asked for the second volume of the project to use as a guide. A Kentucky
applicant intended to visit the Oregon and Washington territories and wanted
every detail pertaining to that part of the country. Another petitioner needed ex-
pedition reports for a literary work he was busy preparing.61
David Wyrick, an Ohioan, came up with a highly ambitious or outlandish pro-
ject, which he described as “a most admirable work of a Meteorological charac-
ter, of such feature as has not yet been attempted by any one.” His meteorologi-
cal guide, he claimed, would be valuable in settling new countries and solve some
of the severest problems facing American farmers. “I do most abominably hate to
beg, but my love for science and the impossibility to buy such works, excites me
to that I would not, were those explorations published for sale . . . The way they
are distributed (to ranting Politicians) they do not do the good intended—or
would do, if the right kind of persons got them—but I would pay something than
depend in this way and then lose them.”62 Exploration reports that were available
commercially, he added, were “garbled and mutilated.” Publishers did not bother
with the less commercially desirable scientific portions and eliminated them.
Requests from schools and libraries cited pedagogical purposes. The librarian
of Marion College in Missouri wrote that their senator supplied them with var-
ious documents, but they received only the second volume of the Explorations
and wished to have the first. “We have a high appreciation of the value of these
most interesting works and feel deeply the loss of the missing volume.”63 J. Gib-
son had a reading room in which he placed more than three hundred volumes of
his private library “for the benefit of the youth in this vicinity. Any aid you can
give me will be thankfully received.”64 An applicant from Weymouth, Massa-
chusetts, solicited installments of the report for the local Young Men’s Debating
Society.
 130 Monuments in Print

It is difficult to know with certainty which requests met with positive re-
sponses. Clerks inconsistently applied departmental markings on the letters. One
category of petitioners that appeared to be particularly successful were repre-
sentatives of the press. Charles Lanman from the National Intelligencer desired
two volumes for a review, which he hoped would please the department. Editors
and publishers were also responsible for numerous requests for maps, particularly
sought-after items. The scientist James D. Dana, by then editor of Silliman’s Jour-
nal, requested a map, which he planned to add to a thirty-page long abstract of
the reports. A publisher of school geography books was also among the appli-
cants. A St. Louis publisher who had received a map of the West wanted an ad-
ditional five hundred to one thousand copies for Germans who were expected to
migrate to Missouri. Somewhat arrogantly, he specified that he was interested in
the maps without their original titles but on the same kind of paper and with
eight-inch margins from every direction.65 The editor of the San Diego Herald
applied for general maps and reports. “This matter of the Pacific Rail Road is of
great importance to us here,” he wrote.66 A letter from Alexandria, Minnesota,
carried a request from Samuel Cowdney, who had seen Lieutenant Warren’s map
on his explorations of the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth parallels and wished to have
one so he and his neighbors might know where they stood as far as government
“improvements” were concerned. Finally, a correspondent from Philadelphia
asked for three of the latest maps of the surveys. “My object,” he explained can-
didly, “is to have them mounted and hung in my library for study or reference,
as I am reading.”67
Many applicants attempted to play the party card, albeit with varying degrees
of success. Party affiliation probably drove them initially to contact the adminis-
tration, which was Democratic throughout the decade. George M. Fowle from
New Haven concluded his request with “you would greatly oblige a good Ad-
ministration Democrat.”68 New Yorker Thomas M. Howell enclosed a letter of
introduction from Governor Seymour. A friend had given him the fifth volume
and suggested that he might be able to get the rest from the War Department.
“I urge no claim upon your kind consideration, in the matter, other than the fact,
that, I have been a Democrat all my life and have had the misfortune to reside
in a Whig region and have had no opportunity to procure the work through a
Democratic Representation.”69 Two residents of Mount Vernon, Ohio, com-
plained that the local Republicans got the sixth volume of the Pacific Railroad
report while they, good Democrats, were not able to get hold of it. An applicant
from Liberty, Virginia, simply promised Secretary Floyd that if granted two vol-
umes he would return the favor.70 Numerous requests included well-wishing
 The Bee in the Book 131

platitudes; others featured bits and pieces of local political gossip. The political
component of these solicitations, including distinct animosity toward the emerg-
ing Republican Party, only grew toward the conclusion of the 1850s.
Individuals involved with the expeditions or the preparation of the reports re-
garded their contributions worthy of gratis volumes. (In several expeditions, the
authors’ entitlement to a certain number of copies was prescribed by law.) The
War Department received a request from Torrey (through his Congressman W. B.
Maclay), who had written 250 pages on florae for the survey. Torrey, then the as-
sayer of the New York Port, complained that he could not receive the report be-
yond the second volume after his friend Governor Marcy (a former secretary of
war), had left office. Since he labored for the project for two or three years, he
thought he deserved an entire set. He also wished to supply copies to his col-
leagues in Europe. Asa Gray wanted one copy to sent to Sir William Hooker of
the Royal Botanical Garden and another to Professor Gandille of Geneva. Spen-
cer Baird of Smithsonian fame (and the leading non-field scientist of the expe-
dition) asked for spare copies of the second, third, and fourth volumes. He had a
full set of the entire project at home but wanted another one “for reference” at
the Institution.71
More often than not, those who asked for specific volumes already had others
in their possession. Many letters implied that completing the set was a worthy
enough cause to merit government cooperation. The ambition, or compulsion, to
complete the series was sometimes accompanied by an indiscriminate drive to
collect official reports. Thus, a pastor of the Baptist Church at Schulerville, New
York, gathered a library of public documents and applied for four volumes of the
Pacific Railroad project as well as any other text that would enrich his library.72
John Fitch wrote that “for years [I] have endeavored to compile a library of pub-
lic works and to a great measure have succeeded.”73 Another correspondent, J. W.
Cott, received all of the first five volumes and now was anxious to get the sixth.
Alas, his representative in Congress stopped answering his letters. Cott figured
that the congressman could not deliver anymore so he decided to apply directly
to the department.74 Fred E. Cannon declared he was “very desirous to complete
my set.”75
There was a tale in every request from ordinary people. Citizens (all men) told
government stories in an exchange for books. After declaring he had always been
not just a Democrat but a Buchanan Democrat, John McKiernan wrote about his
experience in the Mexican War. After serving as a volunteer under a famous com-
mander who died in battle, he crossed the plains to California. He acquired some
knowledge of the “countries” through which the prospective railroad would pass
 132 Monuments in Print

and was anxious, therefore, to read the report. McKiernan had already seen a part
and was eager to read them all.76
Several writers employed ingenious excuses to obtain volumes. Captain W. C.
Palmer received a circular that warned prospective readers that a segment of a
naval report was inserted by mistake into the first volume and promised copies
of the part that was omitted to recipients of defective reports. Palmer was not
entitled for the first volume but regarded the circular letter a pretext to solicit
for it.77 An applicant from Texas (describing himself as an old Mississippian)
wanted government-issued studies of the West. The writer had a large family of
boys, and the volumes would teach them the geography of that part of the coun-
try, information about which could not be acquired in any other way than
through reading about government explorations.78
The letters contained much flattery, not just of the personal or political kind
(including excessive name dropping) but also adulations of government action
and official generosity. A letter from Monterey indicated that the fifth volume
on California by Williamson and Blake “is received in our state with the highest
favor as it is the most valuable work yet published on California and is consid-
ered a great honor to the Government and its scientific officers.”79 A represen-
tative of the Polytechnic College of the State of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia
wrote, “We feel therefore that nowhere more than here will the influence of
Government in the publication of the Reports aforesaid be more fully appreci-
ated and the facts therein contained be more profitably studied.”80 H. W. Wood
declared himself Secretary Floyd’s political adherent and a member of a large
secret club in New York whose members were politically united. “The work I
should praise (as I am an amateur naturalist) for the scientific information it con-
tains, and which could never have been obtained but through the just apprecia-
tion of yourself of the needs of the scientific portion of the vast population of
our noble republic.” The writer wanted either a set or whatever was still in
print.81
Some were convinced that their great appreciation of scientific knowledge
was enough to guarantee a positive response. B. F. Stein from Easton, Pennsyl-
vania, wanted an entire set. For the previous fifteen years, he had been an edu-
cator in various institutions. Unfortunately, he had failed to submit his applica-
tion to his congressman on time. “Much of the information contained in those
volumes is of but little interest to the general reader and can only be appreciated
by those whose minds have been trained to scientific investigations.” His petition
was apparently denied.82 J. N. Hurd from Rochester had been on a seven-year
tour conducting missionary work at Madras, India. Home on a vacation, he had
 The Bee in the Book 133

the chance to examine the report and wrote, “The desire to possess a copy and to
take it back with me to Hindustan is very great . . . As an exposition of the ge-
ography and natural history of the western portion of the continent as well as an
illustration of the enterprise of our government and race it is extremely valu-
able.” Besides the information and the joy of reading it, Hurd saw a great op-
portunity in showing the volumes to officers of the British Army in Madras. “As
an American citizen separated by the nature of my pursuit from my countrymen,
the reading of works of this description afford me a degree of pleasure the resi-
dent would hardly experience.”83

The many applications for the volumes of the Pacific Railroad expeditions
confirm the great public appetite for official publications. In the citizens’ read-
ing preferences, the need for personal gain and self-aggrandizement (so much of
official print ephemera targeted commercial interests) coalesced with strong na-
tional sentiments. But commercial aspirations or nationalism did not always ac-
count for the drive to obtain, read, and collect books, a craving that the state vol-
unteered to satisfy or at times toiled hard to cultivate. The American “imperial
self” was voracious also as a reader. Moreover, the awareness of congressmen and
officials to the citizen-reader’s material, market-driven interests was not neces-
sarily rooted in the practices of laissez faire. The federal state had few qualms
about infringing upon the absolute freedom of the market, including the mar-
ket of information. It facilitated patronage for authors, dismantled the open bid
system in contracting for printing, and dispatched free books to public institu-
tions and individuals. Before Senator Anthony became so impressed by British
printing practices in the 1860s, the antebellum United States looked not so much
to penny-wise London as to continental Europe, especially France, for models of
generous state support of stupendously executed “national works.” (In Britain,
social inquiry featured less by way of nationalism and individualism.) Lawmak-
ers crafted a knowledge policy that rested on marketplace awareness of product
promotion and customers’ demands as well as on republican sensibilities, nation-
building aspirations, and the crude needs of the two-party system. Another fea-
ture of western explorations was a heightened sense of authorship. The project
of discovering the West involved specialized knowledge and unique skills. The
incessant expressions of subjectivity in expedition narratives, no less than the ex-
plicit authorial ambitions of explorers, were officially sanctioned and were em-
blematic of the culture that evolved around the conquering of the West.
Expeditions and explorations yielded a print archive that was predicated on a
strong sense of temporality, since the recorded world disappeared at the moment
 134 Monuments in Print

of registration. This effect was most clearly articulated in ethnological projects.

Collecting facts about native peoples rested on the assumption that the subject
matter was fated soon to disappear. As a latter-day version of the Zeno paradox,
the Indian was imminently vanishing and yet always still there, a living presence
and at times a threatening one. The western frontier, no less than the Indian sub-
ject, was a receding object in the American imagination and American reality as
well. The West would vanish as a consequence of its own discovery, as railroads,
settlers, and towns took over the land. Another impetus for western archivization
came directly from science and the logic of scientific discovery, especially in nat-
ural history, which in the middle of the nineteenth century still focused reli-
giously on description and classification of previously unknown plants and ani-
mals. When in the 1840s Congress decided to publish the exploring expedition’s
findings, it stipulated the reports engage only newly discovered species. Differ-
entiating between old and new became one of the points of contention between
the professional scientists and the expedition’s crew. Augustus Addison Gould, a
Boston physician who was put in charge of writing the mollusca and shells vol-
ume, acidly remarked that by new scientists meant not what was new to naval
officers and politicians in Washington, D.C., but what was new in Boston and for
scientists abroad. It was exceptionally important for him to expedite the printing
of his report for, as he alleged, “It is not the date of the discovery of an object
which gives precedence to it . . . but the date of the publication.”84 The cult of
the new designated the moment of publication as the moment of discovery and
its concurrent archivization. (In contrast, social inquiries, notwithstanding their
own logic of discovery, purported to represent the field of investigation in toto.)
Curiously, through these projects of investigation and publication the United
States was looking at itself, from its outskirts, from removed vantage points, from
its past, from its borders, and in the eyes of others as they read its textual prod-
ucts. As statements on the American nation or the federal government, these pro-
jects functioned allegorically or by extension. In contrast, parliamentary litera-
ture seemed to represent British society directly, almost as a mirror image. This
was not merely an expression of distinct national agendas. The United States
faced a grave social, constitutional, and moral crisis that would eventually tear it
asunder. But the factual literature that accompanied the rift between North and
South was predominantly written outside Washington. With a few important ex-
ceptions, such as the 1830s congressional debates over antislavery petitions and
the gag rule, the plight of slavery was a blind spot in the federal government’s
gaze. Admittedly, the British state’s preoccupation with the more titillating as-
pects of child labor or with environmental issues—sanitation reform, for in-
 The Bee in the Book 135

stance—could also be perceived as an effort at deflecting attention from the most

insidious aspects of the new industrial regime.85
There were substantial variances in the experiences of these two nations, the
issues under national discussion, and the relations between the executives and
the legislatures, lawmakers and voters. It is in light of these distinct national his-
tories and cultures that some of the similarities are so striking. Both regimes of
knowledge were fraught with contention and dissatisfaction. Questions concern-
ing the value, cost, and purposes of official documents were quite similar, and the
legislatures in both countries were central to the production of knowledge and
its circulation. Most importantly, to return to this discussion’s starting point, both
countries concurrently experienced the emergence of a print-based national
arena distinct from the eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere. An impor-
tant dimension of this development was the role of the state either as a producer
of knowledge, a publisher, a printer, a librarian, and an archivist, or, as facilita-
tor of the rapid movement of information through the press, either by active as-
sistance (through the postal services) or by removing obstacles such as “taxes on
knowledge.” Even the harshest critics of congressional publications after the
Civil War acknowledged that print had become an indispensable part of the po-
litical and legislative processes, “nearly the whole of the vast business of Con-
gress is done by aid of printing,—the bills, acts, etc., being on the desk of every
member at the moment of debating them.”86 Lawmakers and officials did not
just peddle printed matter but were inundated with it themselves.
This page intentionally left blank
 pa rt i i

t h e culture of the social fact

Emerging from the battles over the electoral Reform Act (1832), Earl
Grey’s Whig cabinet, hesitantly at first, initiated large-scale investiga-
tions into poor laws, child labor, and municipal governments. These were
formative experiences for the British state. Royal commissions of inquiry,
often laboring for years and producing massive documents and policy rec-
ommendations, became by the mid-nineteenth century a fixture, even a
cliché, of British politics. Chapter 4 examines commissioners’ fieldwork,
while chapter 5 follows officials through the process of producing and
disseminating their reports. Chapter 6 brings us to the Civil War labors
of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission. Dispatching individ-
uals to conduct surveys for the federal and state government was not for-
eign to the American experience but instituting a panel to devise major
federal policy raised overt criticism in Congress. The national govern-
ment did not have in its administrative arsenal any institution compara-
ble to royal commissions of inquiry. (In Britain, the modern function of
royal commissions was largely an early nineteenth-century invention.)
Indeed, the Freedmen’s Inquiry, sponsored by the secretary of war, rep-
resented an effort by members of Lincoln’s administration and the Re-
publican Party to appropriate British or French models of scientific fact
gathering in order to forge policy.
Part two of the book addresses therefore the culture of the social fact
and its institutionalization. By the early decades of the century, accumu-
lating social information, previously the largely voluntary preoccupation
of reformers, physicians, and clergymen, was assumed by a host of offi-
cial bodies, commissions, committees, panels, and inspectorates. While
commissioned work provided for many individuals a venue for author-
ship and a public career, these tiny outfits, the creation of bureaucratic
 138 The Culture of the Social Fact

culture dispatched to study society, were themselves riveted by social re-

lations, hierarchies, collaborations, and strong tensions. The following
discussions explore the work of these small units in the field and their
contributions to print statism.
These case studies suggest that while the U.S. government was busy
grappling with problems of race—What to do with the freedmen? How
to civilize the Indian?—the British government focused on matters of
class. This distinction should be qualified. First, British and American in-
vestigators arrived in their fields armed with a wide array of measuring
tools that included disciplines forged to assess racial and cultural differ-
ences as well as those that addressed the effects of industrialization. Thus,
while the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission vacillated between
labor and racial categories in its efforts to conceptualize the freedmen
question, British laborers were often the subject of ethnic taxonomies or
casual “racial” commentary. The mines investigation of the early 1840s
furnishes an excellent example. For instance, Subcommissioner Samuel
Swain Scriven, observing men working in remarkably small subterranean
crevices entirely in the nude, remarked, “Black and filthy as they are in
their low, dark, heated, and dismal chambers, they look like a race fallen
from the common stock.”1 Ethnography was at play in many social in-
vestigations, but the same is true of political economy and neighboring
disciplines. In the early Victorian languages of difference, race and class
where remarkably close idioms, imbricated, entwined—although not in-
terchangeable. At the same time, concepts of race and class were endowed
with neither the coherence nor the consistency they would acquire by the
end of the century, and there was nothing inevitable in the particular ways
in which these categories ultimately congealed.
Second, the race-class divide may be a product of the emphasis, on the
American side, on the exertions of the federal government. Otherwise,
state and local government, especially in the Northeast, became increas-
ingly involved in social policy and social research before the Civil War.
In Britain, issues of race were obviously more pronounced in imperial
contexts, but ethnic or cultural classifications did not necessarily rely on
imperial reference points. Society in the British Isles was often conceived
of through distinctions of region, language, culture, denomination, and
ethnos. Finally, in many of the investigative case studies explored here,
questions of representation and citizenship, autonomy and propriety,
subsumed the distinction between class and race.
 chapter four

Scenes of Commission

The triumphalist view deemed royal commissions’ work to be the embodi-

ment of science and impartial expertise in the service of policy making. Herman
Finer wrote about 1830s social investigations, “An apparatus of exploration was
invented for the social field, mightily influential in its sphere as the invention of
the microscope had been in physics and medicine.”1 Another admiring observer
remarked: “They touched with one hand the ancient machinery of forensic in-
quiry, with the other hand the new methods of inductive and experimental sci-
ence.”2 A more skeptical approach, originating in the period and further articu-
lated in the works of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, regarded royal commissions first
and foremost as a political tool. Commissions, they reminded us, were often ma-
nipulated to promote preconceived policies or to put thorny issues on the shelf,
peddling official passivity as action. As early as 1834 the Quarterly Review opined
that commissions of inquiry served two purposes: “First, that of gaining time—
which is everything to indolent or incapable men with a load of business before
them to which they feel themselves unequal—secondly, the creation of pleasant
and profitable jobs for a dozen or two of friends and retainers.”3 Either way, stu-
dents of royal commissions have been primarily interested in their contribution
to the extension of government and their role as vehicles for the dissemination
of discourse, utilitarian ideas in particular.
This chapter examines instead the practices of official investigation, starting
with the question of standpoint and proximity to the actual sites of labor and
poverty, and then proceeding to investigators’ travels, visits, and meetings with
witnesses and the populations under investigation (including these communities’
own attempts at counterinquiries). Special attention is given to the mundane ex-
periences of low-level bureaucrats entrusted with the routines of inspection and
interview. Their exertions have been neglected by the historical literature that
paid great attention to celebrity reformers, the Edwin Chadwicks, James Kay-
Shuttleworths, and Thomas Southwood Smiths of the Victorian world. Beyond
 140 The Culture of the Social Fact

their stated assignments, official emissaries engaged in rather complex repre-

sentational work, acting (and standing) for government, under the guise of the
crown, in various localities and concurrently representing the investigated pop-
ulation, predominantly but not exclusively through written reports. Another rep-
resentational aspect was embedded in the performances that characterized many
encounters between investigators and subjects, including acts of reenactment,
masquerade, substitution, and mediation.
Representational work often involves a strong ocular dimension, for—to follow
the conceptual underpinnings of representation—making visible is one way of
rendering the absent present. In Michel Foucault’s writings, observing a “popula-
tion” is one of the radical innovations of the Enlightenment, an expression of its
desire for social transparency. This visibility was symptomatic of the spatial re-
configuration of power along lines that separated the visible and the invisible, the
observed and the hidden. The panopticon was the quintessential product of the
new technologies of government. In this model prison, power was to be endemic
yet unverifiable; its gaze objectified and disciplined inmates, making them au-
tonomous “self-governed” subjects. The panopticon seems particularly pertinent
to our discussion for, in the early Victorian period, social research brought an am-
bitious state together with a few of Jeremy Bentham’s most diligent disciples.
However, as against the privileged status that Foucault bestowed on this utopian
model—the house that Jeremy envisaged but never built—state-sponsored in-
quiries afforded numerous opportunities for observation (and, importantly, con-
versation). These were conducted from different viewpoints and involved alter-
nating gestures of the eye, from close focus to panoramic view, from wondering
glance to temporary blindness—beyond the imperious gaze, that intense and fixed
look that controls and subjectifies. The complexity of these ocular strategies rested
on the un-panopticonlike exchange relationships between investigators and the in-
vestigated, the (rather verifiable) visibility of government itself, and the ways in
which the state had to internalize the gaze from below. The scene of inquiry was
saturated with actor-viewers beyond government and the poor. Social investiga-
tions featured parties that were powerful participants in the field of inquiry as well
as objects of investigation—mill owners and overseers, prison wardens, school-
masters, and local surgeons. At times, ocular power was a feature of scuffles among
a diverse group of poor-spotters themselves rather than a means to control the poor.
This chapter draws mainly on the experience of royal commissions that oper-
ated during the so-called angry 1830s and hungry 1840s, especially commissions
that addressed child (and female) labor, such as the Factory Commission (1833),
and the Employment of Children Commission (1840–43) (which focused on
 Scenes of Commission 141

mines and other branches of manufacturing not covered by previous child labor
legislation).4 The labor of royal commissions is examined here in tandem with
the investigative work of the inspectorates that supervised the implementation
of new policies and laws regarding factories, mines, and workhouses. In many
fundamental features, the inspectorates followed in the footsteps of royal com-
missions. There was a significant overlap of personnel between the two institu-
tions and, at times, a causal link between a particular investigation and the es-
tablishment of an inspection apparatus.

Royal Commissions
A few of the informational institutions that were launched in the early part
of the nineteenth century, such the Statistical Department of the Board of Trade,
do support the impression of increasingly scientific and centralized state mech-
anism (notwithstanding echoes of old historiographical Whiggism), of moder-
nity at play. In contrast, the royal commission of inquiry was a particularly and
peculiarly British institution. Instrumental in what may be described as a tacit
effort to dismantle or reform the British ancien regime—local government, the
military, the Church—this investigative body was itself a remnant of the old re-
gime. Its power rested, at least nominally, on the royal prerogative to delegate
power to a group of subjects, a practice that may be traced back as far as the
Doomsday Book of 1086. Participation on such a commission was ostensibly a
gentlemanly and mostly unpaid endeavor. In the eighteenth century, royal com-
missions were still associated with Stuart tyranny and rarely appointed, but by
the beginning of the nineteenth century, the exigencies born out of the French
wars eventuated their revival. Historically, royal commissions were often per-
ceived as a challenge to parliamentary power.
The early Victorian state remade royal commissions to accord with the im-
mensely important tool of parliamentary inquest, the select committee. For in-
stance, in their terms of reference, commissions were often equipped with the
authority to summon witnesses and to take evidence under oath. Both privileges
were, at the time, a figment of political imagination, an effort to appropriate the
legitimacy of parliamentary inquiry.5 Commissions were often installed to feed,
perhaps manage, public debates, but also allowed the liberal state to replicate and
expand its representational bodies, to make itself visible or observable, and, at
the same time, to disguise itself behind an antiquated, privileged, and seemingly
autonomous institution. Forty-five such royal commissions were appointed be-
tween 1830 and 1850 for England and Wales alone, out of which fully one-third
 142 The Culture of the Social Fact

dealt directly with social and urban problems. Others investigated administra-
tive, legal, and fiscal matters, as well as the army and navy.
The home secretary appointed royal commissions “to inquire and to report”
either by a letter patent under the Great Seal or by a warrant under the royal
Sign Manual, and following a decision by cabinet or Parliament. Historians
Hugh Clokie and Joseph Robinson maintained that the advantage of commis-
sions over parliamentary committees rested on their ability to carry out research
independently of the time constraints imposed by parliamentary sessions. Un-
like overpopulated parliamentary committees, commissions were led by small
groups of individuals who rather than merely interviewing witnesses could con-
duct or supervise fieldwork. An 1865 Daily Telegraph article asserted that in cases
of political dispute, parliamentary inquiry would be preferable for “eliciting the
truth in all of its national bearings,” but in ascertaining facts a royal commission
was advantageous. “Anybody who has compared the results of both systems of
inquiry must be convinced of the superiority of the commissions; the evidence
taken before them being always much more full of local colouring, more elabo-
rate, more exhaustive, and more minute.”6 Royal commissions and select com-
mittees were therefore complementary and rival ways to perform inquiries; fric-
tion between the legislature and government was a catalyst for investigation.
A mélange of (mostly titled) dignitaries headed royal commissions, but they
were also an important venue for the newly arrived, young, middle-class re-
formers (as well as other office seekers), who would make their careers march-
ing in and out of the corridors of government. This arrangement reflected the
changing composition of the British ruling elite. Commissions also mirrored so-
ciety, or at least its upper echelons, in their internal hierarchy of senior commis-
sioners who comprised a “Central Board” and a body of paid field workers, sub-
commissioners, or assistant commissioners.7 The two-tier structure (somewhat
different from the division between scientists and fact collectors that would dom-
inate western explorations) featured its own version of “social mobility,” as
demonstrated by Chadwick’s meteoric rise from the ranks of the English poor-
law assistant commissioners to a prominent place among the senior commis-
sioners as the author of the final report. (He later became the secretary of the
poor-law inspectorate, which was in effect a permanent commission).

Vantage Point
Dividing labor between those who procured information and those who “di-
gested” it accentuated the tension between native expertise and knowledge pro-
 Scenes of Commission 143

duced from afar by individuals unfamiliar with local peculiarities. A standard

criticism against government investigations was that “foreigners” in “roving
commissions” could not possibly grasp the condition of a locality. In the same
vein, Bishop Doyle challenged the economist Nassau Senior’s (a key participant
in reshaping English poor law) ability to devise social policy. “Is he, buried in the
dens of the inns of court or vending political economy to beardless youths at a
coterie in the ‘west end,’ or I, visiting the hovels and communing with the hearts
of the Irish Poor—is he or I the better judge?”8 Discounting such praise for the
immediate, up-close knowledge of the resident observer, subcommissioner Wil-
liam Rayner Wood, who traveled for the Employment of Children Commission
among the iron works of Bradford and Leeds, complained about the ignorance
among the local middle and higher classes about the actual condition of the min-
ing community. “Benevolent wishes and vague information are very common,
but of accurate and sound knowledge upon the subject the instances are very
rare.”9 As a “striking proof ” for his allegations, he cited a well-meaning propri-
etor who in the previous five years had been living among his employees. He ini-
tially stated to Wood that literacy was common among the poor in his neighbor-
hood, but when careful research demonstrated otherwise, he asked that his
testimony be stricken from the report.
The merits of detachment over close proximity were acknowledged in diverse
ways. During an early 1840s sanitation inquiry Chadwick sustained a physical as
well as symbolic distance from the scene of inquiry by interviewing his own sub-
commissioners and incorporating these exchanges into his report. Thus, he could
guarantee a semblance of an impartial remoteness and utilize his agents, quite
safely (and deceptively), as though they were authentic field witnesses. The com-
missioners of the Irish poor-law inquiry decided to abstain from touring the
countryside altogether. They obtained information exclusively by reading re-
ports from traveling assistant commissioners. If each member of the central
board would inspect specific districts, they reasoned, personal observations would
outweigh the results of inquiry in other regions. Working in pairs, assistant
commissioners were required to follow instructions rigorously and dispatch re-
ports to Dublin at the conclusion of each parish visit.10 The pressure to transmit
reports constantly was necessitated by the body-mind split between the facts
gatherers and their recommendations-framing superiors.
Social inquiries were immersed in similar acts of writing and reading. Many
decades later, Sidney and Beatrice Webb would maintain that only in the process
of perusing and reshuffling previously collected written evidence could actual
discoveries occur. The social investigator’s notes, not the slum or the factory, were
 144 The Culture of the Social Fact

comparable to the scientist’s laboratory, blowpipe, or test tube. It is the distance

from the fieldwork and the capacity to view the entire body of evidence concur-
rently that enables researchers to break up the mineral conglomerate (the Webbs
used a geological metaphor to describe society), “revealing new co-existences or
sequences . . . [that were] capable of literary or statistical expression.”11 This
commentary implies that while within eye’s range of the object of study, the fact
collector loses his sight.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, however, local observers were
among the most scientifically astute commentators on the social scene. The ri-
valry between local knowledge and state-produced knowledge was often articu-
lated in terms of competing vantage points rather than the epistemological su-
periority of science versus the limited, experiential knowledge of locals. Similar
tension was sometimes prompted by disciplinary rivalry defined in spatial terms.
G. Calvert Holland, a physician in the Sheffield General Infirmary and a social
observer, wrote in the early 1840s that a legislator could see only “the tendency
of the various springs which modify the elements of society.” His reasoning,
therefore, was “general rather than particular—comprehensive rather than ac-
curate.” The political economist was also ignorant of the actual process of man-
ufacturing. “He looks upon the busy field of industry from a distance, through
the medium of previous inquirers.” In contrast, Holland’s own attempts at social
exploration were based on “frequent intercourse with the artisan, [and] have
afforded many opportunities of penetrating to the foundation of evils, which are
altogether unnoticed by the political economist.”12 Royal commissions’ investi-
gations were preoccupied with capturing and defining the local. It was the field
investigators’ task to record indigenous knowledge. Alternatively, they could gen-
erate it themselves, substituting for local knowledge by relying on their own
physical and emotional field experiences, and in the process equipping the com-
mission with a bifocal gaze.
A wide, panoramic—rather than panoptic—view and the consequent ability
to compare and contrast were the advantage of the remote observer over the im-
mediate knowledge of the squire and the magistrate. Statistics, which in the
1830s were in great public vogue, endowed comparisons with a particularly vi-
sual tool. Perusing statistical tables, the reader’s eyes could instantaneously glide
over localities, trades, wages, and ages. The imperative to compare invaded every
facet of commission work. Even lesser field agents devised taxonomies of classi-
fication and comparison, sometimes excessively. Evidently, comparisons super-
imposed cognitive coordinates on the social terrain. Employment of Children
subcommissioners, to give one example, compared the size of children employed
 Scenes of Commission 145

in the pits and the collieries to those who worked in other occupations, a step that
seemingly corresponded to the purposes of the investigation. However, one agent
introduced a national and ethnic component into his comparative typology. He
reported that the Welsh stature did not reach the standard of the English and the
Scotch, which he explained by the “little intermixture of foreign blood.”13 The
Employment of Children report also demonstrated how pervasive the compari-
son between African slaves and British child laborers became in the British mind.
It was one of the main rhetorical assets of the Factory (or Short Time) Move-
ment, which sought the curtailment of child labor and a shorter workday. Mill
owners also suggested particular comparisons and contested others. They, for in-
stance, adamantly demanded that child laborers be examined side by side with
children who engaged in farm work rather than with middle-class children. “Do
not attempt to compare them with those from whom their situation is wholly
different, and ever must be different.”14
Outside the confines of official research, the comparative imagination occa-
sionally offered even more far-reaching (and far-fetched) parallels, introducing
stronger racial or sexual accents to social exploration. Some comparisons were
driven by a strong cultural propensity to employ estrangement as a strategy of
persuasion. For Peter Gaskell, for example, the working conditions in the mills
produced an equatorial breed of females in the middle sections of the British
Isles. In his 1833 book, Gaskell argued that the high temperature in the machine
halls, among other factors, resulted in early puberty and increased female sex-
ual activity. He even employed ethnological literature on the sexual promiscu-
ity of warm-climate tribal societies to demonstrate the increased sexual appetite
in the factories of Britain. Implicitly drawing another parallel between the an-
tislavery movement and the demand to reform the factory, Gaskell claimed that
mill owners encouraged and even abused this enhanced sexuality “calculated
for the gratification of their satyr-like feelings, and the baseness of their own
minds.”15
Social predicaments were to be defined comparatively, concurrently accentu-
ating the universality of social phenomena and their concrete local (or national)
manifestations. Investigators were looking sidelong at the social and legislative
experience of other countries. On their comparative pallet were, in addition, do-
mestic regional differences enhanced by the divergent legal systems, social strat-
ification, and policy traditions in Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales. Com-
missioners and inspectors traveled occasionally to the European continent and
even the United States to examine first-hand parallel developments in different
settings. When the four members of the Handloom Weavers Commission were
 146 The Culture of the Social Fact

permitted to appoint five additional assistant commissioners, they chose instead

to nominate only four and to use the rest of the money to meet the expenses of
sending two assistant commissioners to the continent.16 Delegates of laborers’ or-
ganizations visited the continent for similar purposes.
At home, the comparative drive served to expand the reach of investigative
projects beyond working men, women, and children to cover a less clearly defined
lower class population, and, consequently, to affirm this group’s status as under
national study. Partly to conciliate mill owners, factory commissioners instructed
their agents to include in their survey poor individuals outside the factory sys-
tem and to explore the possibility that the material conditions of the factory and
working-class neighborhoods—rather than long hours of working by ma-
chines—were at fault. This practice constituted an early attempt to divert at-
tention from labor relations to work and living environments. With the sanitary
campaigns of the 1840s, controversies over Chartism and the factory system were
displaced onto the physical squalor of slums, mills, and cemeteries. The sciences
of spatial organization, such as city planning, sewage engineering, and architec-
ture, focused on the lower class’s surroundings and habitat, not their place in the
polity or the economy. Likewise, social researchers trained their probing eyes to
wander from their subjects in order, ultimately, to judge them better, to gauge
their subjectivity. This sensibility yielded enormously detailed observations in
which the poor were seamlessly integrated into their immediate extensions (rags,
odor) and settings (tenements, prison cells). These descriptions were “thick,” al-
though decidedly not “thick descriptions.”
Another twofold strategy for measuring society pitted the “average” against
the “exceptional.” While statistics (and to a degree, literature) sought to repre-
sent a composite profile of society or capture what typified social reality (a sen-
sibility that gave birth to the everyman persona of John Doe), social imagination
and political rhetoric were propelled by the exceptional, the tantalizing, and the
scandalous in need of exposure and retelling. Working for the Employment of
Children Commission, Subcommissioner Wood acknowledged these as two dis-
tinct targets of his mission. “It appeared to me also very important to ascertain
the ordinary and general condition of the children rather than to search in the
first instance for any special or extraordinary cases of ill-treatment or suffering,
not neglecting, however, as a separate and subsequent branch of the investiga-
tion, to search for such special cases.”17 To access the ordinary together with the
extraordinary, Wood visited fewer coalpits (which he selected at random) than
he might have, but once there he interviewed in private every child on the prem-
ises and occasionally every adult as well.
 Scenes of Commission 147

Social Reenactments
Royal commissions functioned as small outfits, bureaucracies, or expeditions
moving in space and time. The Factory Commission completed its work in three
months. It took the Employment of Children Commission almost eighteen
months to submit its first report, and an additional nine months for the second
report—on collieries—to come out. Commissioners rented offices, hired stenog-
raphers, printed circulars, advertised in newspapers, and, equipped with a host
of maps, toured remote regions of the British Isles. Commissions’ expense lists
provide a glimpse into the scope of their labor. At the conclusion of the English
poor-law inquiry, the Treasury in London received bills for books, cleaning
charges, candles, a plumber, sewage rates, land tax, carpentry, rugs, bricklayers,
and even poor rates.18 These were rather expensive operations that did not al-
ways yield viable results. The Irish Poor Law Commission, whose recommenda-
tions were rejected by the cabinet after extensive surveys that stretched over two
and a half years, cost the British taxpayers £25,565. The Home Office then sent
George Nicholls, an English poor-law commissioner, to Ireland at a fraction of
the cost for a three-month tour that eventuated in the first poor-law legislation
for Ireland.19
Following the preparation of “heads of inquiry”—a set of themes and que-
ries—investigations were ordinarily launched with a massive circulation of
cumbersome questionnaires to local informants. Mill owners were asked to fill
out tables describing their employees’ well being. Sheriffs wrote back to London
about ways to curb crime. Clergymen answered questions on education. The Irish
Poor Law Commission mailed roughly 7,600 forms, of which about half were re-
turned.20 Most of the research for the rural constabulary inquiry of the late 1830s
relied on thousands of circular letters, which were complemented by a few in-
terviews and modest fieldwork, mostly conducted by a paid agent. Reflexively
utilized as a cheap and quick way to acquire basic preparatory information, ques-
tionnaires produced partial and dubious results. In most cases, field investigators
followed the trail of the printed questionnaires and conducted the bulk of the in-
quiry. In 1833, the Factory Commission inaugurated the custom of printing and
disseminating the inquiry’s foundational document, the instructions to the field
commissioners. Published instructions, another manifestation of the prevalence
of print culture in public investigations, also allowed government agents to in-
troduce themselves to potential interlocutors.
The factory commissioners’ decision to make its instructions public was part
 148 The Culture of the Social Fact

of a relentless campaign to combat suspicions that their inquiry was solely insti-
tuted to accommodate the masters’ interests by aborting popular child-labor leg-
islation. (In the previous year, a powerful report issued by a select committee
headed by Michael Thomas Sadler had supported the Ten Hours Bill.) Indeed,
Chadwick, who became one of the chief commissioners of this inquiry, would
maintain that the breathless six-week factory inquiry altered the “conditions of
the question” and provided new principles of administration that circumvented
previous plans. As a token of impartiality, the instructions stipulated that “it
should be distinctly understood that the Inquiry is in no respect to be narrowed
to the views of any class, or any party or interest.”21 But what was made visible
by the publication of the instructions was ultimately the commission’s proxim-
ity to power. By drawing attention to their instructions, commissioners accentu-
ated the essence of their labor as representatives of official authority.
The instructions specified that upon arriving in a new town, commissioners
would obtain a room for interviews and announce in the local papers “that all
communications addressed to His Majesty’s Commissioners, and left in the post-
office before [a certain date] will be met with attention.”22 In a transparent effort
to undermine Sadler’s investigation, commissioners attempted to reinterview
witnesses who had given testimony to his select committee, especially working-
class leaders. In Manchester, they also asked the laborers’ Short Time Commit-
tee to nominate three witnesses for each branch of manufacture: a current em-
ployee, a former laborer who had left for a better job, and another who had quit
for ill health. This principle of witness selection presupposed a certain typology
of experience and opinion. Employers, who were slanted to give evidence next,
were also required to provide “some public assurance or pledge that [laborers]
shall in no way be prejudiced by any evidence which they may give.”23 Com-
missioners questioned children unaccompanied by their employers or parents.
Every precaution was to be taken “to diminish the chances of inaccuracy of state-
ment, from timidity, or from the confusion to which children are subject when
spoken to by a stranger.”24 These instructions thus attempted to script not merely
the scene and the content of the investigation but also the sequence of interviews,
allowing the ostensibly more vulnerable party the right to testify first.
Despite these and other gestures to placate the working classes, laborers and
employers often spoke under different conditions and environments. Most im-
portantly, commissioners solicited the opinion of workingmen by addressing
them in large groups. The Employment of Children Commission’s investigators
either initiated or witnessed mass meetings of workers. One of the subcommis-
sioners was present at a gathering of more than 350 held in the courthouse at
 Scenes of Commission 149

Bransley. The miners’ resolutions, among which was a call for the abolition of fe-
male labor in the mines for moral reasons, were passed with only five dissenting
voices and were recorded in the report. Disparate interviewing circumstances
were predicated on the disproportionately large size of the laborers’ population
as well as on different notions of privacy and individuality. Subcommissioner
Charles Barham measured grades of education by asking a body of approxi-
mately four hundred miners to divide according to those who could sign their
names and those who could not. Contrary to this public display, much was done
to protect the commercial privacy of manufacturers and mine owners in ac-
knowledgment of market competition and proprietary industrial techniques.
Concerns that industrial intelligence might seep through inquiries prompted fac-
tory owners to bar inspectors from entering guarded areas, duly designated “se-
cret rooms.”25
Hugh Seymour Tremenheere, a mine inspector who in 1854 served as a one-
man commission of inquiry into extending the Factory Acts to bleaching works,
also employed dissimilar methods in collecting evidence from employers and em-
ployees. He often walked for an hour or so with a proprietor through his factory
asking for facts and opinions. At the conclusion of the tour, they sat together in
the manufacturer’s office where he put only the substance of his host’s testimony
in writing. Such clubhouse informality was absent from his dealings with the la-
boring men. When recording their testimony he had to read it back to them im-
mediately to seek their confirmation. “I did not think it necessary to do so with
a gentleman.”26 This statement was ever more striking, for Tremenheere’s in-
vestigation was accused of being, and probably was, biased toward the operatives.
For a small group of working-class individuals, testifying to one’s life experi-
ence could become a career path. William Dodd, an English laborer whose legs
were severely twisted after working in the cotton factories since early childhood,
was often designated a representative of the factory handicapped. He gave testi-
mony to parliamentary committees on child labor and safety in factories; besides
narrating his personal history he literally presented his body for inspection. Dodd
also wrote his memoirs and investigated the conditions in the factories himself
as an agent for the reformer-legislator Lord Ashley (later Earl of Shaftesbury)
but was finally removed from public view when severe doubts were raised as to
the veracity of his autobiography.
Another contingent of witnesses much sought after in the industrial regions
was the ostensibly disinterested bystanders, such as clergymen, magistrates, and
surgeons. Commissioners appropriated these interlocutors’ own attempts at
small-scale social reporting and at times incorporated them into their blue books.
 150 The Culture of the Social Fact

Their local standing allowed investigators to balance or triangulate competing

interests and to generate a full representation of local opinion in accordance with
the inquiry’s tasks. The commissioners of the Scottish poor-law inquiry (1843)
assured the readers of their report: “The witnesses whom we have examined may
be considered as representing every class of society. There will be found amongst
them Members of Parliament, Clergymen, Country Gentlemen, Lawyers, Med-
ical Practitioners, Farmers, Manufacturers, Tradesmen, Artisans, and Labourers,
differing in education, feeling, habits, and interests, and exhibiting, as will be
seen, a great variety of opinions.”27
The significant aspect of this otherwise unexceptional statement is the corre-
spondence it insinuated between, on the one hand, diversity of position and di-
versity of opinion regardless of their actual share in the general population and,
on the other hand, accuracy or comprehensiveness of representation. Class is typ-
ically understood here in terms of specific notches on a highly differentiated so-
cial incline rather than as a few monolithic social blocks.
Regional or local elites were at times themselves an object of investigation.
During the English poor-law inquiry, to give one example, government solicited
advice from provincial officials and allowed them a voice in shaping national pol-
icy while planning to snatch power from their hands by eliminating local control
of poor relief. This exchange, substituting knowledge for acknowledgment, char-
acterized the entire effort to aggregate facts and opinions about society. When
Chadwick urged Lord John Russell to establish a commission to look into the for-
mation of a rural constabulary (which, if instituted, would have clearly under-
mined the gentry’s control of the farming hinterland), he invoked the experience
of the English poor-law inquiry. “By sending circulars asking for opinions as well
as information,” he remarked, “a great proportion of the public were brought as
it were to a council and enlisted in support of measures which appeared to be,
and in some degree were, the results of their deliberations.”28 For the purpose of
inquiry, the entire social hierarchy had to be (at least symbolically) visited. Chad-
wick asked wardens and chaplains of prisons to interview inmates for the con-
stabulary inquest. In return, he received some of the most astonishing documents
of his career as a social investigator. One prisoner had written a lengthy model
study on vagrancy that featured colorful anecdotes on the practices of horse
thieves, pickpockets, and burglars and their lives on the margin of society. An-
other substantial document, “A History of a London Thief ’s Life in the Nine-
teenth Century,” was a prisoner’s effort to reconstruct a composite portrait of a
criminal compiled from numerous testimonies he collected in jail.29
Irish rural areas presented a greater challenge for research. Investigators
 Scenes of Commission 151

claimed to have found a destabilized society, fluctuating between mendicancy

and menial labor and lacking any substantial middle to serve as ballast. Only a
few landlords resided on their Irish estates. Unlike in England, tradesmen and
affluent farmers were scarce. Clergy of both denominations and landlords (when
in residence) were deeply divided over political issues or at odds with the work-
ing population. “In an inquiry about a population in which many of the ordinary
distinctions of society are commonly merged in the same individual, and in an
inquiry amongst a people the various classes of whom had long been at variance
with each other, it became a matter of fearful moment to determine respecting
whom the inquiry should be made, and from whom testimony could be received,
which would not merely be impartial, but which would be admitted by all to be
so.”30 Field investigators were ordered to conduct interviews in the presence of
a group of witnesses, comprising a microcosm of the parish community. Each
“grade in society,” religious persuasion, and political party would be represented.
Only statements that were not challenged by the entire group as improbable were
to be given any weight. Those tiny representative assemblies of rural communi-
ties numbered from four to more than twenty individuals. A few women, usually
widows and beggars, were present as well. In several groups, employers sat side
by side with one or two of their employees and squires with their servants.
The process of official inquiry, therefore, reassured and reenacted local hier-
archies. It also sanctioned laborers’ leadership and organizations, endowing
workers’ associations with a tincture of official recognition by allowing them, for
instance, to select their own representation and by seeking their approval of the
inquiry. Rather than insisting on individuation, state investigations often ac-
knowledged (or even enforced) the collectivity of workers and the integrity of
local communities.

In the Field
Entering the factory, descending into a mineshaft, or facing the stench of an
ill-drained street became essential to investigators’ claims to have penetrated and
exposed previously concealed sites. It gave them presence and rendered them vis-
ible. Walking into the slum or the foundry, encountering the poor, if only for a
brief moment and under controlled circumstances, became by the early nine-
teenth century, independent of any formal inquiry, a public ritual performed by
philanthropists and reformers. For social investigators who were not granted ac-
cess to the factories, a key moment of observation was the shift change when la-
borers were leaving the gate en mass. Gaskell, for example, recommended stand-
 152 The Culture of the Social Fact

ing at twelve o’clock at the cotton mill exit for a view of what he described as the
most hideous group of men, women, and children: pale, flat-footed, short, slen-
der, ungraceful, bow-legged, thinning hair for men, lower voices (caused by ex-
aggerated sexual drive) for women. At this instant, working people could be
stared at, compared, and assessed in the aggregate by an invisible onlooker. Vis-
iting the poor, a custom rooted in religious practices, expanded into philanthropic
tourism to prisons, special schools, and workhouses. The curious traveler of some
social standing could stop in one of the model factories of the Ashworth family
in Lancashire. Prince Albert associated the monarchy with these practices under
the influence of Lord Ashley, who wrote him in June 1842, “the people of this
country, who are sincerely attached to Monarchy as a principle, will love it still
more in the person of a Queen, who feels and expresses a real interest in their
welfare.”31
As a mode of investigation, the less trumpeted visits of government offi-
cials—ostensibly a tool to guarantee the authenticity of the investigator’s expe-
rience and the veracity of his report—were easy to manipulate. Once in town,
government agents were followed by the watchful eyes of laborers and masters
alike. There was ample evidence of the diligence with which proprietors pre-
pared mills for official inspections, ordering the floors cleaned, removing the sick,
sending children to wash and wear their Sunday clothes.32 John Hope, M.P. for
Okehampton and a member of the Sadler Committee on child labor, was unsat-
isfied with what he heard in the Westminster’s committee room and decided to
tour factories by himself. In late April 1832, he wrote to Lord Morpeth (both
were opposed to the proposed legislation for curtailing work hours) that when
visiting James Browne’s factory he found only a few children and a very clean,
well-regulated establishment. A worker later testified that Hope’s visit to his mill
was preceded by two weeks of preparations to guarantee that the visitor from
London would be exposed to “the most positive picture of life in a factory.”33 Fac-
tory inspectors would later develop tactics to assure that their visits would come
as a surprise. Factory commissioner-turned-inspector Leonard Horner told a se-
lect committee of the Commons that he had been often surprised how speedily
the news of his visit spread in the nearest mills. One of his subordinates had just
begun his visit to the first mill in the locality when a boy with “breathless haste”
burst in crying, “The inspector is in the town.”34
Attempts to limit government’s access to sequestered spaces were common to
the two distinct targets of early Victorian social investigation: old institutions that
had been catered to mostly by the county or the parish (prisons, asylums, work-
houses) and those erected by the forces of modernity, namely, factories. Propri-
 Scenes of Commission 153

etors of mills and wardens of prisons were wary of interventions from London
and guarded their property or sinecure with similar zeal. In the summer of 1845,
prison inspector Frederick Hill complained to London that a new governor at the
county prison at Morpeth, Northumbria, “politely but decidedly” refused to al-
low him to question prisoners in private. The warden argued that the law did not
warrant such a privilege, which would give the prisoners an opportunity to make
false accusations against him. Home Secretary Graham asked the visiting justices
of the prison to interfere, but they also turned down his request, as did the Court
of Session in Newcastle-on-Tyne.35
There was little in the experience of the British state bureaucracy that pre-
pared it for this undertaking. The English poor-law investigation commenced
with an experimental small-scale study in order to verify whether the scheme of
inquiry was in fact workable. Self-doubt was evident in the Irish Poor Law Com-
mission’s request to the readers of its official report to practically ignore the ma-
terial garnered in the large towns of Ireland. This segment represented one of
their earlier efforts before the system of inquiry matured. In a rare moment of
bureaucratic modesty, the commissioners admitted that their instructions to as-
sistant commissioners were too vague and general, and the manner of question-
ing and recording thus rendered that portion of the inquiry significantly less
valuable than the rest. Irish poor-law commissioners decided, nevertheless, to
publish material they considered inferior so they would not risk the accusation
that evidence was “suppressed or mutilated.”36
Only a few, if any, in Whitehall had any immediate knowledge of the new is-
sues under national consideration, ranging from poverty in Ireland, child labor
in the factories of Lancashire, or mining safety in Wales. The freshness of the
task was reflected in the somewhat chaotic manner in which earlier commissions
conducted their affairs. Similarly, there was no readily available cadre of experts
with which to man commissions and inspectorates. (This resulted in great over-
lap in the personnel of these inquiries. Edward Tufnell, for example, partook in
four different royal commissions.) The records of the Home Office reveal how
difficult it was to fill the new government positions with capable individuals. An
extreme example was that of factory superintendent James Webster, whom the
Home Office reprimanded for inaccurate registration, ignoring violations of the
law, and his offensive demeanor towards mill owners. On one occasion, standing
at the gate of a factory in Ironbridge, he reportedly told the manager that he in-
tended to enter the place in order to catch a bird for his dinner. It was also very
difficult to convince him to conduct inspection away from his residence in pic-
turesque Bath. His behavior did not improve after his superiors removed him to
 154 The Culture of the Social Fact

another district. It turned out that Webster was in the habit of receiving goods
from factories he inspected, flannel from one mill, carpeting from another,
woolen goods and calico shirting from a third and a fourth. He borrowed money
from mill owners and managers and, even worse, was arrested twice for debt.37
There was constant wrangling over compensation for extra labor performed
by the lower rungs of commissions and inspectorates. Plaintive requests for re-
muneration (beyond expenses or salaries) occupy much of the archival material
left behind by royal commissions and testify to the absence of bureaucratic prece-
dent and the meandering character of this institution of inquiry. The Irish poor-
law assistant commissioners, for example, were recruited for a few months but
in some cases were asked to stay on for more than two years. One aspect of the
professionalization of those bodies was the enhanced awareness of the lines sep-
arating duty from special effort and the rather detailed accounts of extra assign-
ments these minor officials kept. Like many of the laborers they interviewed,
low-level investigators felt that they were grossly underpaid and ill treated, al-
though this affinity did not necessarily generate much empathy toward their in-
terviewees.
In the field, improvisation was the rule. Factory commissioner Edward Tuf-
nell, reporting from Lancashire, devised a new shorthand method. “Questions
relating to the chief points of inquiry were prepared previous to the examina-
tion, and numbered. I then formed a list of all such words as were constantly oc-
curring, such as ‘factory,’ ‘children,’ ‘machinery,’ ‘cotton,’ etc., and denoted each
by a single stroke of the pen.”38 Also in Lancashire, John Cowell commissioned
a special weighing instrument that could simultaneously measure the height and
weight of children. One commissioner handled the scale, positioning the child
with his own hands; a second supervised the clerk who recorded data; and a third,
the medical commissioner, evaluated special cases. “Thus the results have a char-
acter of authenticity which does not often belong to statistical facts,” Cowell
proudly informed London. Employment of Children subcommissioner Scriven
could not haul a scale into the pit and therefore decided to study the strength of
the children by the circumference of their chests and height. He also developed
his own four-pronged measurement table: very muscular, muscular, at par, below
par. Alfred Power reporting to the Factory Commission from Leicester decided
to refrain from questioning children under oath, claiming that this was an unfa-
miliar ceremony that could only terrorize them.39
The investigators’ sense of independence rested, at times, on their allegiance
to political mentors rather than adherence to a bureaucratic ethos. Factory com-
 Scenes of Commission 155

missioner James Stuart found the recommendations of the central board, espe-
cially the proposal to limit child labor to eight hours to enable shifts or “relays,”
unacceptable. He accused the three senior commissioners of ignoring the results
of his investigation in Scotland. Whatever was the content of the dispute between
the field commissioner and the central board, it assumed the language of con-
tending standpoints. “The report of the factory commissioners is no more the re-
port of the twelve persons appointed to see things with their own eyes, and to re-
port their observations on them, than of any twelve gentlemen whom one may
by chance meet in St. Paul’s church-yard. It is the report of three gentlemen re-
siding in London, who for aught that appears in the report, never visited a cot-
ton factory, nor a flax-factory, in their lives.40
The correspondence only became more venomous when Stuart accused the
board of deliberately omitting parts of the evidence he had sent from the final
report because it did not concur with their prefabricated conclusions. He duly
published his acrimonious exchange with London in the press. The ensuing pub-
lic embarrassment—M.P.s already raised questions in the Commons—did not
prevent his later appointment as a factory inspector. In Manchester, Cowell was
also alarmed by the board’s relay plan, so utterly removed from his own personal
views and the opinions he gathered locally. But his greatest humiliation was to
discover in the last days of June 1833 that, unbeknownst to him and while he con-
tinued to conduct his inquiries at full speed, the investigation had been termi-
nated. There was no purpose to his labor. His colleague, Commissioner Tufnell,
took the commission’s seal and left for London without giving him prior notice
or paying his bills. Abandoned in Lancashire, Cowell remonstrated to the central
board in a long string of letters suffused with indignation and self-pity.41
Investigators were disposed to immerse themselves in local causes and inter-
ests. In time, this became a more pronounced feature of the permanent inspec-
torates. As a mine inspector for the Glasgow area, Tremenheere was confronted
in early 1845 for his participation in local debates over the establishment of a po-
lice force for Lanarkshire and the alteration of the law on withholding wages
from laborers. In his defense he explained, “The only excuse I have to offer . . . is
the anxiety I felt on behalf of the population whose condition I had been en-
gaged in investigating.”42 Two years earlier, John Heathcote, a superintendent
working in Manchester under Inspector Horner, was dismissed from his position
for writing an anonymous letter to a local M.P., signed “an overlooker,” in which
he objected to various clauses of a pending factory bill. In another incident, the
Home Office censured Superintendent Trimmer after he sent an open letter to
 156 The Culture of the Social Fact

the Stockport Advertizer in which he reflected on a magistrate’s decision against

a proprietor for employing children on Good Friday.43
Commissioners relished the opportunity of reporting on the harshness of
their field visits. The Employment of Children report indicated that the cold sea-
son and the conditions were so taxing “that nearly all of [the subcommissioners]
incurred serious indisposition.” One agent was forced to give up his assignment
and another could not recover throughout his tenure. A third suffered from un-
usual fatigue. “Nor will this amount of illness occasion surprise to any one who
knows the toilsome nature of the duty of inspecting mines.”44 From Kirkaldy, a
factory commissioner reported, “All of us, owing to the necessity of speaking loud
in the working-rooms . . . and owing to the flax-dust floating in the rooms, have
become hoarse. Sir David Barry and I have had our lungs sensibly affected.”45
These side remarks embedded in official reports indicate that social investigators
did not necessarily conceive of their efforts in terms of disembodied, abstract ob-
servation. Returning from a sanitary inspection in 1843, Chadwick wrote to a
friend: “Dr. Playfair has been knocked up by it and has been seriously ill. Mr.
Smith has had a little dysentery. Sir Henry de la Bache was obliged in Bristol to
stand at the end of alleys and vomit whilst Dr. Playfair was investigating over-
flowing privies. Sir Henry was obliged to give it up.”46 Itinerant officials’ private
ordeals echoed the plight they discovered. Sometimes the sights and sounds of
human misery proved too painful to observe and register. “The state which fe-
males are in after pulling like horses through these holes . . . is painful in the ex-
treme to witness,” imparted an Employment of Children subcommissioner. This
social investigator, it seems, did not deploy a “disciplining gaze” so much as a sen-
timental teary eye.47 Mine visits provided a means to simulate the miners’ expe-
rience or recreate their vantage point. Rather than merely interviewing wit-
nesses, several government agents turned to their own impressions and feelings.
Subcommissioner Scriven, reporting from the West Riding, also realized that
his arrival in the region was well known but little understood. He consequently de-
cided not to conduct interviews in the cabins at the pits’ mouth, as he had planned,
but instead acquired the apparel of a miner—a flannel dress, clogs, and knee-
caps—and descended into the pits himself. He felt that taking the depositions of
children on the spot was the only viable method to arrive at their true condition.
“And now that I have surmounted the dangers common to all whose duties or av-
ocations require to do so,” he wrote in his report, “I have reason to congratulate
myself upon my resolve, because I feel that I have become more familiarized with
their habits, practices, wants, and sufferings, can more faithfully describe them,
 Scenes of Commission 157

and better stand the test of any future examination that may be considered neces-
sary, than would have been otherwise possible.”48 Government officials anticipated
they would be reviewed or questioned by parliamentary inquiry or the press. This
awareness prompted a certain caution and even defensiveness.
However, John Roby Leifchild, another subcommissioner, resisted the temp-
tation to employ himself as a measuring device. “My sensations during the de-
scent and ascent of the upcast shafts enabled me to appreciate the complaints of
the witnesses in reference to them,” he wrote. Yet, “I am unwilling to record the
unfavorable impressions produced upon me during my descent into, and peram-
bulations through these Cimmerian regions, inasmuch as it is possible that more
might be due to novelty than I could be aware of.”49 In his lingering doubt over
the capacity of any subjective bodily experience to represent reality, Liefchild
was more in tune with the cultivated aloofness of Chadwick and other senior
commissioners than with the ethos of his own emerging class of fact collectors.
Similarly, the subcommissioner remarked that the curious indifference of some
young miners regarding the excruciating nature of pit labor should be qualified
by the fact that they lived a sequestered life and had no standard against which
to gauge their toil. His disclaimers notwithstanding, Leifchild’s understated
commentary testified quite clearly as to the nature of his experience in the bot-
tom of the mine. Standardized scientific procedure could possibly claim the man-
tle of objective measuring apparatus, but, as the Employment of Children Com-
mission demonstrated, the investigator’s subjectivity (rather than partiality) was
an important element of inquiry and reporting.
For related reasons, each field team in the Irish poor-law inquiry was com-
prised of an Englishman and an Irishman. Coupling investigators in this way ac-
knowledged that Irish society was irreconcilably divided into “politico-religious
parties” and that personal divestment from bias, or the even appearance of im-
partiality, was all but impossible. Nevertheless, leaving the investigation to for-
eigners ignorant of Irish social constructions, habits, and “the peculiar idioms of
[their] language” would alienate prospective witnesses. A partnership was the
“only mode of combining the national knowledge possessed by the one, with
the impartiality almost certain by the other.”50 Thus, a standard of complete
impartiality was relinquished for the hope that opposing biases (or perspec-
tives) would compensate for each other. The affinity between investigators and
Irish society arrived at an ironic conclusion when several of the Irish assistant-
commissioners complained at the completion of their tasks that their English
counterparts received better pay for the same extra work.51
 158 The Culture of the Social Fact

Strangers in the Mine

Chadwick famously remarked on the 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of
the Labouring Population of Great Britain that its findings “have been received
with surprise by persons of the wealthier classes living in the immediate vicin-
ity, to whom the facts were as strange as if they related to foreigners or the na-
tives of unknown country.”52 The act of inquiry sought to ameliorate this alleged
abdication of responsibility manifested in ignorance, another version of the “two
nations” metaphor made famous by Benjamin Disraeli. Social discovery was con-
ditioned on this ignorance. It presupposed that the weak populations were lost,
abandoned, unknown, and therefore in need of retrieval and representation. The
1840s rendition of the social discovery idiom featured tantalizing evocations of
images unbelievable (“stranger than fiction”) yet true, making the near at once
familiar and foreign. The mine investigation exemplified the status of the royal
commissioner as a discoverer and an intermediary. No other inquiry generated
so eerie and yet grand a sense of estrangement, documenting the subterranean
world of the pits and in the process unearthing what was considered literally a
distinct human race endowed with centaurlike bodies, half stunted, half colos-
sal. Conversely, the investigator-as-intermediary represented government to its
provinces, sometimes imparting knowledge rather then collecting information.
Subcommissioners, for instance, were asked to inform miners about the impor-
tance of childhood to the growth and maturity of the human body.53
Thomas Southwood Smith, a known physician and a senior commissioner in
the Employment of Children inquiry, intermediated between the sites of social
malady and a group of statesmen and literary celebrities. In 1838, he took the
Marquess of Normanby, secretary of state for the Home Office, on a tour of two
of the most notorious Victorian slums, East London’s Whitechapel and Bethnal
Green. Southwood Smith cherished in particular his friendship with Charles
Dickens, to whom he sent a few of his reports, including the instructions for the
Employment of Children Commission. (Chadwick too courted the novelist but
never received much attention.) In 1842, Dickens requested the doctor’s help.
“Can you tell me of your own knowledge, or through the information of any of
the Mining Sub-Commissioners, what is the next best bleak and barren part? And
can you, furthermore, while I am in those regions, help me down a mine?” South-
wood Smith offered a few localities and, in addition, referred him to subcom-
missioner Dr. Charles Barham, who was “thoroughly acquainted with every nook
in Cornwall and known to every mine.”54
 Scenes of Commission 159

Communicating with miners and factory laborers was a different assignment

altogether. While official investigations facilitated negotiations and compromises
among the powerful, accumulating information depended on vertical negotia-
tions between investigators and their local interlocutors. Their collaboration was
essential. At stake was not just policy but also the proper representation of child
laborers, miners, poorhouse inmates, and prisoners, as well as their habits, envi-
ronments, and opinions. Government officials were often expected to observe the
poorer population and to reproduce its “voice.” In an implicit transaction of
knowledge, working and nonworking men, women, and children gave testimony
but at the same time were measured and enumerated.
The much-desired cooperation faced obstacles large and minute. To give one
example—while conducting a public health inquiry in Dundee and Edinburgh,
Hector Gavin, the English sanitary pioneer, complained that it was unfortunate
that the survey was chiefly carried out by visiting Englishmen “to whom Scot-
tish women will not readily confess the existence of diarrhea.”55 It was therefore
not enough that government attempted, sometimes unsuccessfully, to protect the
laboring witnesses from retributions. (For instance, six of the laborers who testi-
fied before Sadler’s committee were sacked.)56 Officials were to acquire the min-
imal language skills that would allow them to converse with locals. On these
grounds, the Employment of Children investigation in Wales had to be delayed.
“No information collected under this Commission being considered satisfactory
unless derived, in part at least, from a personal examination of the Children and
Young Persons themselves.”57 At times, some affinity had to be established be-
tween the population and the investigators, as in the decision to pair Irish and
English agents. Conducting an inquiry in the company of a small group that rep-
resented (or mirrored) local society was familiar to other investigative endeavors.
Dr. Mitchel inspected Shropshire’s collieries escorted by the ground-bailiff, two
charter masters (i.e., work contractors), and “a labouring collier.”58
Language frequently was as much a barrier between government officials and
their interlocutors as the asylum or factory walls. Blue book descriptions of min-
ing procedures, for example, were peppered with technical as well as colloquial
terms ordinarily employed by pitmen and owners alike. The reader, as the inves-
tigator, had to acquaint himself with that vocabulary. (Commissioners incorpo-
rated local terminology and dialect into their accounts as a mark of authenticity
or as a tool of discovery and estrangement.) Peculiarities of language were proof
of utter seclusion, a metaphor for the otherworldliness of the pit. The British took
a seemingly benign and humorous approach toward the poor man’s language, as-
sociating it, as other forms of eccentricity, with national distinctiveness. As a re-
 160 The Culture of the Social Fact

viewer of Oliver Twist opined, the lower classes’ “hitherto unknown tongue . . . in
the present phasis of society and politics, seems likely to become the idiom of En-
gland.”59 In the case of the urban demimonde and countryside vagabonds, how-
ever, linguistic creativity was an attribute of a separate culture that thrived sub-
versively on the margins of civilized society. Inaccessible slang and other distinct
features of speech were conceived to be a mask donned to conceal zones of ille-
gitimacy and criminality from the outside world. Henry Mayhew most fully ar-
ticulated this notion in his famous reports on the life in the lower regions of soci-
ety in the metropolis but similar ideas guided official inquiries as well.
The notorious 1847 Commission into the State of Education in Wales (led by
three Englishmen who relied on fieldwork conducted by Welsh assistant-com-
missioners) went a step further, making the basis of its recommendations the
eradication of the indigenous language whose lingering use it blamed for the de-
graded state of Welsh society. Following the Rebecca riots (1839 – 43) against toll-
gates and workhouses and the Chartist agitation, the commissioners regarded the
Welsh language a hindrance for social mobility and education. Wales had to be
anglicized. “His language keeps [the Welsh] under the hatches, being one in
which he can neither acquire nor communicate the necessary information.”60
Language could function as a hidden place for proprietors. Recalling mill
owners’ resistance to factory legislation, Inspector Horner reminisced: “They
spoke with the confidence of superior knowledge and experience; used technical
terms, unintelligible, and, therefore, having a somewhat mystical import to those
they were addressing; and the legislators, with a very natural timidity and cau-
tion, did not venture to disregard altogether remonstrances so strongly made.”61
Language barriers were minor in comparison with the visceral reluctance of the
poor to answer questions about their condition. Poor-law officials were advised
that while interviewing paupers, pen and paper or other formalities should be
avoided so not to induce suspicion. Tact, experience, and probably more than one
exchange were imperative. The investigator (as the later detective) engaged in
interpretive work or mind reading, gazing at his interlocutors awry. “Incidental
remarks, casual, and unsought conversations will frequently discover more than
twenty formal examinations.” It was essential to overcome the “habitual suspi-
cion of the lower orders of whatever appears done with a design would at once
lock up their lips, or induce them to pervert the truth under the notion that their
confessions would be turned against them.”62 Investigators were told to prepare
themselves to encounter silent, sullen types, angry characters, and numerous sto-
rytellers who fabricate tales for their own protection.
Royal commissioners, however, had to resort for the most part to their note-
 Scenes of Commission 161

books if not to the more domineering trappings of official authority. Informants’

distrust was a challenge even during the Employment of Children inquiry, which
ignited an incredible uproar in favor of miners and reproduced with great fidelity
the unmodulated voices of working children and women. While Leifchild was
touring the Northumberland and North of Durham collieries, a jury validated a
work contract that had been signed by a minor. Miners were subsequently quite
hostile toward the stranger sent by government to ask questions concerning their
work and earnings and who, oddly enough, bothered to go into rarely frequented
pits and towns, recording their words. “It was in vain that I went in the evenings
from house to house, explained the objects of my mission, read to them my in-
structions, and combated their objections; vague suspicion still lurked in their
minds.”63 Leifchild found it almost impossible to interview young laborers while
they were in constant motion in the pits. It was as difficult to converse with them
outside, for they were not inclined to spend much time answering questions.
Their speech also seemed an obstacle. It was loaded with “numerous mining
technicalities, northern provincialism, peculiar intonations and accents, and
rapid and indistinct utterances.”64 Intensity and nuance of expression were hard
to follow. Lack of linguistic richness, he claimed, compelled informants to trans-
late superlatives or extreme anguish into homely expressions. Thus, “sore tired”
would mean extreme fatigue, and a boy claiming that he was “hurt in his arm”
had fractured the limb. This linguistic stoicism needed to be translated into more
exact or familiar terms; similarly, another agent alluded to the height of Lon-
don’s St. Paul Cathedral to indicate the depth of a mine.
Other interviewees wanted to ask Leifchild questions rather than respond to
his. “For a stranger to read the mind of a pitman,” he concluded, “a circuitous
approach and no small tact are requisite.”65 Based on his own account, it seems
that the pitmen, in fact, were eager to converse with the official emissary, but on
their own terms. Their answers were “so intermingled with extraneous remarks,
explanatory of their opinions upon politics and public and private affairs . . . that
it was essential that a large portion of it should be ‘laid out’ by a process analo-
gous to their own ‘separation.’”66 The subcommissioner did not have much pa-
tience or esteem for the owners or local professional men either. In an environ-
ment that was hostile and partisan, Leifchild saw no reason to concern himself
much with his informants’ objections to his mission. At the same time, he made
a great effort “not merely to allow but to create opportunities for the represen-
tation of the views of opponents.”67 A managed provocation of antagonistic
views corresponded with the ethos of the national “condition of England” de-
bate and with the notion of descriptive political representation.
 162 The Culture of the Social Fact

Class suspicion, a psychological barricade, prompted much commentary among

social observers. During the early 1830s debates over the new policies of infor-
mation, G. R. Porter of the Board of Trade predicted that reliable statistical re-
turns concerning “domestic employment and the condition of the people” would
be all but impossible to obtain, for the “avenues for this kind of knowledge are
guarded with jealousy.”68 Distrust of government and misconceptions of its aims
would prompt individuals and groups to keep the world in ignorance, he main-
tained. Beyond lower-class wariness, a persistent mistrust informed the relation-
ship between inspectors and proprietors and the relations among the proprietors
themselves. Investigators were told to disarm and penetrate this shield, but they
also exploited it. Inspector Horner reported to have had two venues to crosscheck
information. Jealousy and competition among the masters would lead them to
divulge information against another mill owner who habitually kept his factory
working behind the regular closing time. Lack of solidarity among the workers
offered similar opportunities to obtain or verify evidence. Those who did not
work overtime, he alleged, usually would tell on those who did.69 Serving as a
commissioner of the education in Wales investigation, Jelinger C. Symons re-
sorted to a rather crude method to overcome witnesses’ hesitations. He promised
a pence to Welsh children who would answer his questions in the most prompt
and correct manner and even claimed that the children’s desire for the penny as-
sured that they would answer right or wrong and therefore guarantee the truth-
fulness of his overview. Symons thus brought the exchange relations between in-
vestigator and the investigated directly to the marketplace.

Cross Investigations
During the 1830s and 1840s, royal commissions faced charges of infringing
upon recognizable modes—parliamentary or judicial—of open inquiry. J. Toum-
lin Smith’s Government by Commissions: Illegal and Pernicious (1849) articulated
the persistent conviction that government was vying to control information and
eliminate traditional institutions. This and similar critiques presupposed that a
proper procedure should include the possibility of crossexamination and that the
investigator must assume a position of aloof neutrality, akin to that of a judge,
among the adversaries in the field of investigation. In fact, many officials con-
ceived of their duties precisely in these terms. The understanding of the official
inquest as an inherently judicial procedure only accentuated issues of represen-
tation. When Symons arrived in the south of Scotland as an assistant commis-
sioner of the handloom weaver investigation, he encountered considerable in-
 Scenes of Commission 163

terest in the subject of inquiry. “Feeling confident that the truth has nothing to
fear from publicity, I determined to hold open courts of inquiry in each of the
larger towns of weaving villages.”70 The mock court was usually presided over
by the provost or the local chief magistrate. Symons summoned employers di-
rectly. The weavers’ representation was mostly left to their own choosing. At the
beginning of his tour he allowed, as other commissioners in Scotland had, the
witnesses to be “cross-questioned” by the other party. However, the specter of in-
cessant interruptions and frequent altercations moved Symons to abandon this
course of action. After the first day or two, he prohibited any interruption to the
procedure. Witnesses were still allowed to refer to the testimony of former wit-
nesses. Despite elaborate efforts to stage a court of inquiry, Symons ultimately
claimed that he garnered the most valuable information about the actual condi-
tion of the “weaving body” from his surprise visits to their houses and workshops.
Assistant commissioner J. D. Harding, who conducted the handloom weavers
investigation in eastern Scotland, questioned the manufacturers or their agents
and only then approached the weavers, thus providing them the right of response
rather than the privilege of speaking first. After it became apparent that wit-
nesses were reluctant to express their views in public, he administrated the oath.
In the smaller towns and villages, he resorted to another procedure, selecting wit-
nesses himself on the spot and at very short notice. In contrast, William Augustus
Miles, an assistant commissioner working in the southwest of England, decided
to avoid the public ritual since, “by assembling persons representing all the in-
terests concerned in this subject at the same time and place, a great deal of irri-
tation was produced, and very little information obtained.”71 He consequently
held separate meetings for different parties.
As a single investigator in the commission on the bleaching industry, Tremen-
heere commenced his research with summoning groups of about ten laborers to
Bolton. “Since they were, as it were, plaintiffs in the inquiry, I thought it not
more than right and proper that I should hear their case first.”72 Tremenheere
asked one of the laborers to represent their views and tell him their story in
“plain words” and then corroborated the statement by asking the others to con-
cur. He also made a point of visiting bleach works that the laborers requested
him to inspect. Tremenheere then had the testimony of the workers printed and
given to J. H. Ainsworth, who headed the committee of the masters. “I do not
think that I could have adopted any fairer course to both parties; and I may say,
in my own justification, that during the examination of those working men, I did
not put a single leading question to them, but endeavoured to draw out of them
as well as I could, what they meant to say. Of course, I put down what they did
 164 The Culture of the Social Fact

mean to say in better language than they could have used themselves; but my be-
lief is that I only communicated to the public the substance of their own obser-
vation and complaints.”73
Tremenheere received from the masters their own list of works to examine.
He ultimately called on twenty-seven plants selected from both sides’ lists. Re-
ported in the local newspapers, his visits generated much excitement from all
sides. There was a certain randomness to his work, which he thought was bene-
ficial. “I took the evidence very much as it came, and I thought that by taking
people whom I had never seen before . . . I was justified in assuming that the story
I had heard from the committee-men was true.”74 Tremenheere reflected on the
course of action he had taken as a royal commissioner during a select committee
hearing. The committee responded quite sympathetically to allegations made by
owners against his behavior in the field. (This was the Commons’ own way of re-
viewing or repeating investigation, another form of cross-examination.) A pa-
rade of disgruntled manufacturers marched into the committee room to argue
that Tremenheere was too eager to find fault in the mills and too vulnerable to
workers’ manipulations, which the employers painstakingly described.

Counterinvestigations
In the new urban landscape and inside factories, all sides seemed vigilant. Em-
ployers watched their operatives and recorded their performance in much-hated
logs. Inspectors scrutinized factory owners’ compliance with the new legislation,
and proprietors bemoaned their humiliation at the hands of government. Home
Office inspectors, easily discernible as strangers constantly in transit, were care-
fully observed wherever they went but became truly indignant when their supe-
riors in London insisted they fill out daily reports on their activities and where-
abouts.75 Mine inspector Joseph Dickinson was incensed. “I cannot divest myself
of the idea that calling upon me at this late period of my service to send a weekly
diary seems to imply mistrust,” he protested to home secretary Sir George Grey.
He reminded Grey that he had been “a convenient inspector” to handle delicate
missions such as inquiring into mine accidents in times of social turmoil and that
he was in frequent communication with London and lived in the middle of his
district “with many eyes upon me.”76 Proprietors also claimed to feel violated by
legislation that forced them to present their register books for inspection and
threatened to punish them as criminals should they fail to do so. In response to
the self-reporting duties, a pro-employers pamphlet declared, “This . . . is a nov-
elty in British legislation—to compel a man to provide a registry of his own
 Scenes of Commission 165

offences, upon which to procure convictions against himself contrary to every

principle of British Law; and we question the right of Parliament to enact such
a regulation and, I ask, are we, as Englishmen, bound to obey it?”77
Registers, ledgers, and record books were perhaps the most overbearing form
of surveillance, not because of their discreet observational powers but for their
ability to preserve memory, without which power was meaningless. (Practices of
registration were arguably the most panopticonlike element of the entire factory
system, for their threat did not rely on any single, continuous human agency.) In
the case of inspectors’ diaries, the demand for methodical self-reporting under-
mined one’s sense of autonomy and stood in contrast to the Victorian conception
of diaries as realms of privacy. It certainly undermined the gentlemanly ethos
that rested on trust—trust fully demonstrated by the absence of monitoring. In
the factory, the subjugation of the register to official scrutiny also challenged pro-
prietors’ autonomy. It was particularly poignant because the industrial regime as
a whole rested on record books of all sorts for its economy and its discipline. In
James Leach’s anonymously published and aptly named Facts from the Factories
(1844), the laborers found a way to exact their revenge on the punitive system
that prescribed excessive fines for every minor infraction, such as coming to work
a few minutes late. They set fire to the register book, the factory’s archive. As
Leach narrated the incident, a weaver was passing by the counter when he saw
the dreaded “bate book” lying unattended. He seized the book, and after the op-
eratives staged a “court martial” in which the book was found to contain forty
pounds of fines, the sentence was “to disgorge the plunder.”78 Leach further de-
tailed with undisguised joy how the book’s demise instigated a moment of true
panic among the factory managers. The master seemed struck as though he lost
his dearest friend.
Laborers in industrial regions were in the habit of accumulating information
about faulty production in factories, the lavish lifestyle of proprietors, and viola-
tions of the Factory Act. In the late 1830s, unemployed operatives in Glasgow
formed a shadow inspectorate. While these investigators were prohibited from
entering the mills, they still claimed to have better means to get to the truth than
government officials did. The short time committeemen interviewed the parents
of child laborers, examined the books of church organizations and other regis-
ters (to verify the age of the workers), and spoke to the adult operatives who were
the actual employers of children and exercised greater control over them than
their own parents or the masters.
With Sir William Erle’s Royal Commission on the Organization and Rules of
Trade Unions (1867– 69), the laborers had their own (albeit nonelected) repre-
 166 The Culture of the Social Fact

sentation among the commissioners, author and jurist Frederic Harrison. He

maintained close ties with the trade union movement. His minority report would
become the basis for the 1871 Trade Union Act. A proposal to appoint a work-
ingman for the commission was rejected, although union delegates were accepted
as formal observers of the proceedings. In the late 1860s, unions engaged in ex-
tensive work of investigation and publication, collecting evidence to refute em-
ployers’ claims and preparing witnesses. Concerns over the trade unions inquiry
prompted efforts to further organize the movement, leading to the first Trade
Union Congress in Manchester (1868) and later the creation of the Parliamen-
tary Committee (1871). Invigorated politically by the extension of the franchise
(1867) trade unions (as well as friendly societies) elaborated mechanisms to mon-
itor and lobby royal commissions and parliamentary committees.79
Masters too initiated counterinvestigations to rebuke unfavorable government
reports. In December 1850, a group of workers at Jarrow Pit in the north of En-
gland sent a memorial to the Home Office soliciting an inquiry into the safety of
the colliery. The consequent visit by the mine inspector, Mathias Dunn, exposed
serious faults. Alas, the manager of the pit, T. W. Jobling, decided to launch a
study of his own. He requested three “coal viewers” to examine the pits and re-
port on the method of ventilation and precautions taken against explosions. As
expected, the investigation cleared the manager. He subsequently demanded that
the Home Office present to him the original memorial, for he suspected that sig-
natures were either forged or made by miners not employed by him.80
On occasion, the ministry or Parliament launched an official investigation in
direct response to working-class demands. A delegation of the short time com-
mittees of Yorkshire thus arrived in London in October 1842 to urge Sir Robert
Peel and several key members of his new Tory cabinet to adopt factory legisla-
tion that would reduce the workday for young men to ten hours and radically cur-
tail female labor. The laborers’ representatives portrayed the factory system as a
world turned upside down in which children and women (factory labor rendered
the latter ignorant of their domestic duties) assumed the role of providers. Cre-
ating a mass of idle, uneducated, and emasculated men endangered the safety of
the state, the short time delegates warned. They conceded that the legislature
had discussed the ten-hours question endlessly. Enough information had surfaced
to substantiate their cause. Contradicting themselves, they requested that gov-
ernment initiate an inquiry under the pretext, “We have no facts to enable us to
deal with one of the most perplexing and important of the questions which press
upon our attention.”81 This delegation’s journey to London indicated that work-
ing-class leadership appropriated a few of the prevalent political idioms (in-
 Scenes of Commission 167

cluding gender and family ideologies), most importantly, the rhetorical associa-
tion of reform with the idea and practices of social investigation.
Solicitations for investigation were often phrased as pleas for state paternal-
ism. Such was a request sent in 1850 from a mining district in north Wales. The
miners sought official intervention against the oppressive “truck system” and
chose to address their highly deferential application to the queen. In a somewhat
less humble tone, the frame knitters of Leicester asked to include their trade in
the ongoing inquiry into the plight of the handloom weavers. The knitters
promised that once their request was granted, they were “prepared to offer a mass
of incontestable evidence which will evince that a state of physical suffering and
perhaps of moral degradation is now endured and prevailing which ought not to
exist in the nineteenth century in a country which boasts and justly boasts of its
superior wealth and intelligence.” The Handloom Weavers Commission and the
Framework Knitters Commission were instigated in response to requests from
laborers in these industries. The royal commissioner appointed in 1844 in re-
sponse to a petition of 25,000 knitters saw it as his “paramount duty” to conduct
the inquiry so the knitters would have “the fullest opportunity of making their
condition known, at the least possible sacrifice to them of time or labour.”82

Spectacle
Despite numerous displays of individual resistance, only rarely did commis-
sioners encounter organized opposition during their investigation. The New Poor
Law inquiry gained notoriety in working-class lore chiefly because of the policy
it inaugurated. The same is true of the commission on education in Wales, which
Welsh society initially welcomed. However, its report, known as “the treachery
of blue books,” with its condescending views of Welsh society and the Welsh lan-
guage spurred a fury that never fully subsided in Welsh national consciousness.
Reportedly, at the funeral of one of the assistant commissioners who died a few
years after the report’s publication, one attendee spat on his coffin and cried,
“Here is buried a traitor to his country.”83 The strongest class-based challenge to
official inquiry was leveled against the 1833 Factory Commission at the very be-
ginning of the royal commissions era. Animosity began with a heated parlia-
mentary debate that resulted in a single-vote margin in favor of the commission
and culminated in Lancashire and Yorkshire with the full arsenal of oppositional
politics, including the threat of violence. Fearful of the fate of the Factory Bill,
the short time committees called for demonstrations wherever the officials ap-
peared. A broadsheet warned commissioners more explicitly: “Have you all made
 168 The Culture of the Social Fact

your wills?”84 In Manchester, on May 4, 1833, child laborers, boys and girls, led
a procession, chanting rhymes in favor of Sadler’s Factory Bill. The crowd
marched through St. Peter’s Field, thus evoking memories of the infamous 1819
Peterloo massacre. The local short time committee declined the commissioners’
offer to appoint its representatives for a formal interview. In a move that was
probably meant to alarm London as to the possibility of violence (and so under-
mine their employees), Manchester mill owners appointed Colonel Show, the
military commander of the district, as their negotiator with the factory com-
mission. In Leeds, Commissioners Drinkwater and Power entered into pam-
phlet warfare with Sadler, who, following the Reform Act (1832), had lost his seat
in Parliament but still sought to represent the factory movement. Sadler con-
tended that royal commissions deviated from accepted rules of holding public
hearings. This commission refused to conduct interviews in the presence of a re-
porter or a stenographer, or to open the procedure to the public at large, and in-
sisted that there was no obligation to publish the entire exchange between them
and their witnesses. While government was determined to expose even the small-
est inaccuracies in the testimonies of operatives, he argued, the masters’ testi-
monies were exempt from similar scrutiny.85
Sadler questioned royal commissions’ ability to conduct a proper investigation
in the first place, for, as he claimed, they could not summon witnesses and com-
pel testimony. When the commissioners reminded him that judges also took
notes in shorthand, he replied that those were meant to help the judge’s mem-
ory or for occasional reference but their accuracy was guaranteed by the atten-
dance of the press and the public in the courtroom. “I confess that I have heard
of no judges who follow the course which you prescribe, but those, perhaps, of
the Inquisition.”86 He poked fun at the principle of “on the spot” investigation.
The commission did not have to leave London for a spring tour at all. It was suffi-
cient to examine mortality figures and other records where the victims of the
factory system “being dead yet speak.”87 Moreover, the commissioners arrived in
the manufacturing district in the wrong season. It was the winter that exposed
the laboring children to the harshest conditions. Sadler also challenged the com-
missioners’ personal qualifications. Social investigation, he claimed, demanded
talents, habits, and experience quite different from those required by legal in-
quiries. (Drinkwater was a legal counsel at the Home Office.)
In rebuttal, the two commissioners disputed Sadler’s claim to represent the
views of the laborers.88 Assuming a tone as indignant as their opponent’s, Power
and Drinkwater accused the former M.P. of malicious attacks on their good
names. They consented to allow one or two representatives of the short time com-
 Scenes of Commission 169

mittees (and a similar delegation on behalf of the masters) to attend the inter-
viewing room while the other side testified. These delegates could take notes in
order to assist them to follow the evidence, or even suggest topics of inquiry, un-
der the condition that nothing would be made public until the investigation con-
cluded. However, since the commissioners did not provide assurances that they
would permit full access at every single stage of the proceeding, the offer was
summarily rejected. The two commissioners argued that they were not autho-
rized to hold an open court, and, even if they were, such a course would have hin-
dered any investigation, especially in light of the notoriously raucous public style
of a few of the Ten Hours Bill’s advocates. Contrary to the short time commit-
tees’ stance, the laborers, they claimed, actually cooperated with their inquiry.89
Concluding their interviews in Leeds, Power and Drinkwater’s ordeal was not
over. The West Riding of Yorkshire was the heart of the Factory Movement and
the seat of its firebrand mentor, Richard Oastler, also known as the “factory
king.” Once the commissioners tried to leave Leeds, a comic game of hide-and-
seek began. Stating that they were continuing on to Huddersfield, the commis-
sioners left town followed by a horseman. In Bradford, where they were next
spotted, they faced two large demonstrations and, according to one report, were
driven away from a factory by children. The commissioners then asked to travel
to Keighley but altered course to Wakefield where they changed horses for Don-
caster, still followed by a short time agent. A few days later, Oastler described the
episode in vivid detail to a cheering crowd in Huddersfield. At two in the morn-
ing, the king’s commissioners and “King Richard’s” emissary, the story went,
found themselves warming by the same fire in a public house. The movement’s
man resisted the bid to push him away from the fireplace and sarcastically re-
marked, “I’ll tell you what, gentlemen, we have been a long time in getting to
Keighley; it is quite a new road, we ought to have gone the old road.”90 In Hud-
dersfield a reported fifteen thousand people participated in a night vigil that fea-
tured the burning in effigy of the three unfortunate district commissioners and
a local M.P. As constructed by Oastler, this was a story of an eye-level dual—the
king’s men encountering the “commissioners” of a mock king.
Oastler’s parody completes an intricate set of reenactments or masquerades,
including effigy burning, parody, countersurveillance, laborers’ own ventures
into methodical social inquiry, and conversely, the investigators’ moments of
cross-dressing on their way down to the bottom of the pit. These diverse perfor-
mances were differently motivated and yet all retain a measure of ambiguity.
Even the most sympathetic act of mimicry, propelled by compassion, as the phil-
anthropist’s wish to view the world from the workingman’s point of view—
The firebrand agitator Richard Oastler was a Tory radical and a mentor of the Factory Movement,
which advocated the ten-hour workday and strong restrictions on child labor. Oastler attempted to
manipulate several 1830s official social investigations in order to publicize the plight of factory
workers in Yorkshire. He is shown here in Fleet Street Prison, where he was put in 1840 for debt
incurred to his former employer. In jail, Oastler continued to circulate his views by publishing the
Fleet Papers, weekly pamphlets denouncing the emerging liberal marketplace and the evils of the
factory system. (Lithograph by [G. E.] Madeley, signed by Richard Oastler, December 9, 1840)
 Scenes of Commission 171

standing (literally) in his shoes—replaces and silences. Conversely, defiant acts

of impersonation were likely to further entrench power and its modalities. Par-
odying and mimicking government emissaries, working-class organizations im-
plicated themselves in the state. Regardless of the identity of actors and the con-
tent of ritual, these masquerades were stranded between communication and its
occlusion. Viewed in a larger setting, however, they comprised one type of ex-
pression in a richer domain typified by exchange.

In 1843, the American Brooklyn Eagle asserted that no government on earth

had made greater efforts to ascertain the condition of the working classes than
the British. “They are forever instituting commissions of inquiry, collecting sta-
tistics, and making luminous reports; but, unfortunately, their exertions do not
ordinarily extend beyond those points. They are apt to suppose that they have
performed their whole duty in ascertaining and exposing the injustice inflicted
by law and custom upon the laborious poor; and hence, while vast amounts of
philanthropy are displayed on paper, to the public gaze, the suffering masses plod
on in sullen despair.”91
The British government learned well the lessons of the French Revolution,
the article continued. It was not enough to intimidate the people with the gal-
lows. The “public gaze” was therefore not a form of surveillance and control but
a cunning technique of governance that substituted real philanthropy with a mi-
rage on the printed page. The American journalist’s insight notwithstanding, it
appears that the routines of documenting society were more efficacious than
merely soothing the public mind. These practices were constitutive of the social
equilibrium, or class system, that reigned in Britain by the end of the nineteenth
century. Inquiry and inspection affixed or confirmed gradations of social stand-
ing, class, gender, and age. Investigative practices thus complemented the taxo-
nomic work that was performed by the knowledge featured in the reports. Bear
in mind, however, that the legislative process itself produced and enhanced so-
cial categories or taxonomies that were not necessarily rooted in either prior in-
vestigation or science. The Factory Act of 1833 inscribed into law the distinction
between “young persons” (ages thirteen to eighteen) and children (nine to thir-
teen), but this typology was chiefly the result of political maneuvering.
Ultimately, the Victorian passion to police the lower classes was coextensive
with, not predicated on, the fact-finding ceremonies of official social inquiries.
The poor-law investigation, which was a paradigm for inquiries to come, gener-
ated two quite distinct tools to measure social veracity. The first was the infamous
workhouse test that separated the deserving from the undeserving poor. It first
 172 The Culture of the Social Fact

gauged the integrity of the individual pauper and then “rehabilitated” her. The
second was the massive social survey by a royal commission in which the panop-
tic ambition was only one motive and one motif. In the field of social investiga-
tion, actors, changing vantage points, observed and conversed, reenacted and
mimicked. This is not to postulate parity between investigators and the investi-
gated as much as to point to the possibility of reciprocity and the open-ended
quality of the encounter. In particular, the precarious position of the field inves-
tigator permitted this mutuality and play.
Unlike Foucault’s supposition that post-Enlightenment societies are those of
the panopticon and not of the spectacle, it appears that with public investigations
the visibility of the Victorian state and the visibility of the populace were indi-
visible, concurrent, and often spectacular. Besides, the shift from the field of in-
vestigation to the sphere of published texts further undermines the “gazing eye”
trope in favor of describing investigative fieldwork in terms of the “astute ear.”
This ear was not merely an organ of surveillance or a metaphor for the supposed
attentiveness of the state but a recording tool that enabled the transcription and
archiving of testimonies and other utterances by investigators and their inter-
locutors. Admittedly, in times of perceived domestic threat, government pres-
sured its local agents to become actual spies. To give an example, in the summer
of 1839, factory inspector James Stuart was secretly asked to provide the Home
Office with his occasional opinion of the “state of feeling among the working
classes.” His superintendents attended working-class meetings and recorded
their proceedings. His supervisors also questioned him about the state of the har-
vest, the condition of the handloom weavers, and other domains that were out-
side his formal jurisdiction. However, an 1841 select committee investigated what
was widely deemed improper use of public officials. Stuart claimed during the
hearings, somewhat apologetically, that after complying with London’s instruc-
tions for a while, he wrote the secretary of state that he saw no need to continue
the practice. These sporadic assignments (which were largely discontinued after
1841) only exemplified how weak was the British government’s surveillance
mechanism in comparison with continental regimes.92
 chapter five

Facts Speak for Themselves

Blue books constituted complex microcosms in which were assembled dis-

parate types of information, taxonomies, ideas, and voices, cloaked in the formal-
ities of bureaucratic traditions. The entire process of investigation was geared to-
ward their preparation. These modular tomes ordinarily opened with a shorter
compendium that summarized the course of investigation, categorized evidence,
and prescribed policy measures. Accompanied by substantial appendices, major
reports often provided historical overviews as well, thus welding, sometimes ten-
uously, background and foreground. In these constructions, historical survey led
to a synoptic view of contemporary circumstances and then leaped to future pol-
icy. Reports were calculated to satisfy the demand for hard, “authentic” facts but
were also produced with an eye to the reading habits and other cultural sensibil-
ities of the potential recipient. Officials toiled to render blue books accessible to
larger audiences beyond elected representatives and government officials. In sev-
eral instances, royal commission reports, occasionally in abridged forms, became
popular reading material. Other official accounts, spread over thousands of pages,
were practically impossible to read in full, instead offering the interested few an
index or the possibility of endless rummaging. Their sheer size and impenetra-
bility could signify official authority or, conversely, governmental excess.
Examining blue books’ trajectory takes us from various scenes of writing and
compilation into printing, dissemination, and consumption. Moving through
these sequences in the large chain of inquiry, this survey complements the dis-
cussion about the conduct of investigative fieldwork. It addresses in particular the
creation and meaning of the polyphony or heterogeneity that was a strong at-
tribute of nineteenth-century social reporting. Diversity of style, evidence, and
voices prevailed within and among specific documents. This was in part a prod-
uct of blue books’ multiple functions as books, records, and especially archives.
Another diversity-producing catalyst was the range of authors, personal and in-
stitutional, involved in the making of each document.
 174 The Culture of the Social Fact

Social reports’ heterogeneity also emanated from their representational as-

signments and their capacity to reproduce voice. First, the demand to represent
“public opinion” presupposed a multiplicity of views, an approach that corre-
sponded to the discursive rules of the hegemonic (in the Gramscian sense) “con-
dition of England” debate, which was constructed as an exchange requiring
many debaters. As significantly, detail and heterogeneity were primary tech-
niques to depict (or to elicit) social reality in the text. The printed text verified
the truthfulness and the representational efficacy of the evidence presented. The
most important principle of confirmation was “authenticity,” a yardstick that
was applied, at least rhetorically, even when specific evidence (for instance, sta-
tistics) did not lend itself to simple authentication. A more complicated assign-
ment was to demonstrate that beyond its veracity the knowledge procured was
indeed representative, in other words, that it either encompassed the field of in-
quiry or portrayed, from a recognizably disinterested vantage, what was the most
typical of the subject matter. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, so-
cial reporters provided as synoptic coverage of the field of inquiry as they could,
in accordance with the wish to capture all opinions and vantage points. Con-
versely, there were representational tasks that demanded a modicum of homo-
geneity in the official report, for example, the ambition to portray a unified gov-
ernment approach or action. As we noticed earlier, beyond matters of content,
the printing template of blue books and the appearance of a serial publishing
project conveyed the uniformity and authority of the state.
In the Victorian empirical culture, facts were also endowed with voice, and
their evidentiary might allowed them to “speak for themselves.” Connecting
facts with the power of articulation received many official and vernacular ren-
ditions. The following discussion explores environments that equipped facts with
speaking capacity and the tactics the working poor employed to voice themselves
through facts. This chapter argues that blue books’ multivalency and the state’s
insistence on the validity of its findings produced an inherently fragile text that
could be easily plundered and reused for purposes unintended by Parliament and
government, confirming that print statism was a medium fraught with risks for
the state.

Scenes of Writing
The making of blue books was a process that took place in the field and in the
metropolis, and featured many individuals and groups. The four factory inspec-
 Facts Speak for Themselves 175

tors, Leonard Horner, James Stuart, Robert Saunders, and George Howell, fur-
nished one example of such collective exertion. During their biannual meetings
(beginning in 1836), they read aloud their accounts of their respective tours of
inspection. They maintained that reading these documents in each other’s com-
pany rather than trading manuscripts drew immediate reactions, enabled on-the-
spot joint decisions, and assured the equal standing of the four senior officials
(and probably also the cohesiveness of their common voice). This routine enabled
them to craft a general report and sometimes inspired alterations in their indi-
vidual reports as well.1
For royal commissions of inquiry, prepublication work was an expensive and
protracted undertaking that added months if not years to the commission’s labor.
Just the proofs for the English Poor Law Commission’s enormous report cost over
a thousand pounds. It took André Bisset, an assistant secretary to the commis-
sion’s central board, a full year to arrange a digest of the circulars that included
no less than five thousand folio pages. By the beginning of 1834, the commission
employed fourteen people “transcribing reports of the commissioners and ap-
pendix and correcting the press for the total sum of £390.3.10.”2 As was evident
in early commissions’ fieldwork, lack of institutional experience left much to in-
dividual initiative. Irish poor-law assistant commissioner F. J. Flood was busy for
nine months with the legal segment of his account on Irish vagrancy, for which
he performed extra work such as translating the Dutch poor law and arranging
statistical tables.3 Alas, his diligently compiled report did not conform to a new
format decided upon by the central board. The document had to be severely “re-
modeled.” The two-tier structure of royal commissions, with its own measure of
friction and class animosity, affected the process of composing a report. At times,
assistant commissioners had to cede control over their accounts or other written
utterances to their seniors. In the case of the Factory Commission, for instance,
the pressure to dispatch immediate accounts to London was so great that John
Cowell, working in Lancashire, found to his surprise that early drafts of the com-
mission’s final report featured short comments he had scribbled on the margins
of the transcribed evidence.
In 1840, two factory superintendents accused their supervisor Inspector Stu-
art of introducing misleading changes into their accounts. A former superinten-
dent, William John Wood, testified before a select committee that entries in his
weekly ledgers were altered or erased in the official “report book.” In one inci-
dent, Stuart changed Wood’s account on a mill inspection from “five children un-
der 13 do not go to school” to “five children under 13 have not gone regularly to
 176 The Culture of the Social Fact

school.” “Certificate of school wanting for children under the age of 13” was re-
placed by “Schools established by the company, and the certificates to be regu-
larly produced.” “The master drunk, and incapable of showing me any books or
certificates of age, and evidently has not attended to the Factory Act” was erased
leaving only “a very small mill.”4 One point of contention with Stuart was
whether Wood’s inspection accounts should reflect the condition of the factory
when he entered the premises or when he left. Stuart preferred the latter. Pre-
sumably, the inspection itself prompted mill owners to address minor offenses,
and there was no need for further publicity. Stuart’s reports evidently prettified
the reality of compliance with the Factory Act in Scotland, and yet they could,
possibly, qualify as truthful. John Beal, another superintendent, claimed that in-
stead of framing his accounts around evidence (e.g., certificates of age, certifi-
cates of school attendance), Stuart took for granted promises made by proprietors
and their managers to rectify violations. Beal read aloud from his own visiting
books, showing case after case of abuses, big and small. His was a rather gossipy
journal, recording impressions outside the scope of the law—a drunken overseer,
masters who tried to avoid inspection, rumors concerning violation, and other
such triflings.5
Wood and Beal’s allegations so infuriated Stuart that he burst into such an in-
dignant speech that the committee room was cleared and his words were stricken
from the minutes. He later defended himself, asserting that the law did not com-
pel him to follow his subordinates’ records to the letter. These were merely aides,
private documents, for his review. He invoked another matter of privacy, a di-
rective from the Home Office to distinguish between information that referred
directly to the Factory Act and knowledge deemed private, such as exact work
methods, number of employees, and other details of industrial intelligence. The
inspector, he claimed, had full discretion in this regard. “To insert in my report
all the information which I had received from the superintendents would have
entirely frustrated all the objects for which they had been enjoined to secrecy.”6
This dispute demonstrated how routines of recording information employed
during inspections ensnared proprietors and inspectors. As with other aspects of
authorship under government patronage, confusion lingered over the status, in-
deed the very purpose, of particular texts. Because the lines separating private
and public were ambiguous, a senior inspector could construe routine daily re-
ports as private diaries. Interestingly, Ashley’s committee jettisoned (at least
implicitly) Stuart’s distinction in its own publication. An appendix to the com-
mittee’s report included a facsimile reproduction of the handwritten superin-
tendents’ abstracts and the alterations introduced by Stuart.
 Facts Speak for Themselves 177

Corporate Authorship
Authors of official documents had a stake in their publication and vast circu-
lation (see chapter 1). Mine inspector Hugh Tremenheere kept a mailing list of
between seven and eight hundred recipients (mostly proprietors and managers
of collieries and iron works) but also asked for two hundred copies for unspeci-
fied personal distribution. Occasionally, he sent proofs of his reports to “the most
intelligent persons in each district, to guard against the chance of any important
errors.”7 Edwin Chadwick also circulated early drafts and proofs in anticipation
and solicitation of response. Officials vied for the publicity and the prestige that
print culture bestowed on authors. Years after his bureaucratic prime, Chadwick
asked Lord Russell to assist him with his promotion in the Order of the Bath and
cited among his numerous achievements that his “published Reports have had,
as shewn before a Committee of the House of Lords, an extent of sale and cir-
culation unprecedented with that class of public documents.”8 In the Home Of-
fice records, there are many letters from officials imploring government to pub-
lish their reports as soon as possible. For instance, in the summer of 1854, mine
inspector Herbert Mackworth asked the Home Secretary to issue a special report
he had prepared on mine safety. “If the Reports of the Inspectors of Coal Mines
are to be published I beg to request that this Report may not be omitted, as it con-
tains the particulars of the precautions which ought to be adopted in all coal
mines and the coal proprietors in my district have frequently applied to me for
it.”9 It was important for Mackworth to show there was a local demand for his
blue book.
As authors, commissioners did not stand to benefit materially from their lit-
erary products. However, as new types of personal expertise emerged, questions
arose regarding their right to capitalize on the knowledge or skills they acquired
in their formal capacity. Like Horner, several inspectors published unofficial
tracts on social questions. However, the Home Office was less generous with lesser
officials. In 1844, to give one example, factory subinspector R. Baker asked for
permission to write the statistical chapter for a privately published book on the
worsted trade. He requested that the unpublished statistical table he had sub-
mitted to the home secretary two years earlier be returned to him for use in the
chapter, claiming the chart was prepared as voluntary extra work. The Home Of-
fice refused, saying that the secretary could not sanction the use of any informa-
tion obtained through inspection. Such publication might foment distrust be-
tween proprietors and inspectors.10
 178 The Culture of the Social Fact

Another aspect of authorship was the level of autonomy exercised by officials

as writers. Senior members of royal commissions had remarkable discretion over
the content of their reports, but the Home Office scrutinized and sometimes cen-
sored inspectors’ blue books. A manuscript of an 1855 factory inspectors’ account
included a passage in which Horner defended his conduct against Manchester
mill owners’ accusations that he was vindictive. The factory inspectors also
protested the masters’ resistance to implementing an act that prescribed fencing
off dangerous machines. Concerned about an open rift between his inspectors
and mill owners, Secretary Sir George Grey preferred to eliminate this passage.
It was essential for the value and authority of their report, he wrote the inspec-
tors, “that they should be carefully and impartially written and should not con-
tain anything approaching to personal disputes.”11 Horner was unwilling to yield
his right of response. “I considered that in narrating events, which had occurred
over the last half year, that had the most direct and important bearing upon my
part and future official proceedings, I was acting in perfect conformity to the
spirit and even to the letter of the section of the act under which the inspectors
make their reports.”12
The secretary eventually conceded that he could not enforce his will on in-
spectors but warned that if objections were raised in Parliament, he would not
be able to defend the report. In another incident, Inspector Stuart was asked to
eliminate an account of a discussion with the secretary of the Short Time Com-
mittee for the Eastern District about the fate of boy who had been dismissed from
his factory job after giving evidence in an overwork case. Stuart expressed his
hope that the committee would do its utmost to procure a position for the boy.
The Home Secretary maintained that including the episode in the official docu-
ment might imply that Stuart was too intimate with the laborers’ organization.13
Factory inspectors’ reports were sporadically criticized for their belligerent,
partisan tone. The ministry also made recurrent demands for stylistic and con-
tent uniformity in the publications of the inspectorates. With only partial suc-
cess, the Home Office endeavored to secure an enclosed system of information,
delineating between what should appear in an internal exchange (the state’s
realm of privacy) and what was proper to present in a uniform public report. It
also limited inspectors’ access to the press in their local dealings and to politicians
outside the department. In one case, the Home Office dismissed for “inexcusable
breach of confidence” a superintendent who leaked a confidential letter from his
superiors to an M.P. sympathetic to the short time cause who then read it in the
Commons.14
 Facts Speak for Themselves 179

Cabinets of Curiosities
The early 1830s tug of war between the Factory Commission and Michael
Thomas Sadler’s parliamentary report over child-labor policy sharpened the con-
trast between two archetypes or genres of official texts. Select committee reports
usually abided by a strict formula. They incorporated material obtained outside
the committee room—official records, letters, and petitions—but mostly con-
sisted of endless transcriptions of interviews in question-and-answer form. In-
terviews allowed parliamentarians to register their views in the official record,
which they often did unabashedly and at great length. There was some attempt,
chiefly by the printer Hansard, to make the information more accessible. He sug-
gested adding annotations in the margin and appending indexes at the end. A
reader would therefore scan the entire sequence of an exchange whose veracity
was assured by the presence of a stenographer and the completeness of the tran-
script. (Typically, when M.P.s wished to criticize royal commissioner Hugh Tre-
menheere’s report on the bleaching works, they charged that he neglected to in-
corporate the questions he addressed to his interviewees and thus failed to report
fully on his field conversations.)15
If select committee reports reproduced the temporal continuum of the in-
quiry, the royal commissions’ claim to represent the region, social institution, or
population under investigation also rested on the reproduction or simulation of
space. This was accomplished by transporting narratives, illustrations, commis-
sioners’ journals, and interviews from the sites of inquiry and inserting them into
official texts. The print archive replicated the field as well as the process of the
investigation. Large appendices of royal commission reports often accommo-
dated reams of miscellaneous factual matter, congested cabinets of curiosities.
The commissioners of the Scottish poor-law inquiry explained the size of their
report as a matter of fairness. “The course, which we have followed, may perhaps
appear to have extended the Evidence to an unreasonable bulk, but it has this ad-
vantage, that we cannot be accused of partiality or unfairness in having selected
any particular parishes or individuals for examination; and upon a subject of such
importance as the Scottish Poor Laws, the principles and administration of which
have been so much canvassed, it was desirable to satisfy the public mind that we
had taken the utmost pains to inform ourselves on the subject from every source
from which information could be derived.”16
Fulfilling the democratic credo to open the governing process to public ob-
 180 The Culture of the Social Fact

servation, official reports told the story of their own making. As political scien-
tist Yaron Ezrahi recently argued, in a modern democracy, “seeing and witness-
ing . . . are inseparable from the attempts to define politics as a realm of plain ob-
servable facts which are accessible to all the citizens conceived as spectators.”17
In state-sponsored research, in particular, the demand for rendering the political
process transparent coalesced with common scientific and judicial practices. Im-
portantly, the medium of witnessing was print culture and the citizen/spectator
was, in fact, a reader. The public could not attend the Factory Commission’s in-
terviewing room but was able to obtain the commission’s report. As a reader, the
Victorian subject was thus expected to master unprocessed information and to
“judge for himself.” The nineteenth-century discourse of public opinion rhetor-
ically trivialized the division between readers and lawmakers to generate what
an observer designated a “community of knowledge, as well as community of
discussion.”18 Ever since the Commons regulated the printing and selling of par-
liamentary documents, the public’s access to information was ostensibly equal to
that of lawmakers.
It was not only the ethos of public opinion that likened citizens to legislatures.
The chain of representation itself required that commissioned officials—gov-
ernment representatives—report back to legislative bodies, institutions that
were by their own right representative and required to report back. At the end
of the line of reporting stood the citizenry or the public (as well as, symbolically,
the monarch), the ultimate recipient of these epistolary documents, which were,
indeed, signed, sealed, and delivered.19 The report as a genre was thus always im-
plicitly incomplete and in search of addressees. Either walking the proverbial
corridors of power in Whitehall, inhabiting committee rooms in Westminster, or
reading in the comfort of their domestic spaces—officials as well as other im-
plied readers of state reports were expected to make law, make a decision, or ren-
der judgment. The report was not produced for a reader but for an author of sorts,
an author of opinion.
Ponderous appendices were ostensibly published to allow consumers to review
the recommendations in conjunction with the evidence, in other words, to facil-
itate an unmediated encounter between facts that speak for themselves and read-
ers who judge for themselves. Leaving facts to speak their own truth, to fend for
themselves, evinced their power of persuasion. Paradoxically, it was also a symp-
tom of the relative weakness of institutional science. There was no strong expert
culture to mitigate between facts and (reading) publics as would emerge in the
twentieth century. The national debate was intense precisely because of the ab-
sence of an accepted discursive authority.
 Facts Speak for Themselves 181

Sometimes, the order of publication was reversed. Interim reports were cir-
culated before any recommendation was made, an indication that generating
knowledge was itself a cardinal purpose of these procedures. A few select com-
mittees never reached any decision and yet made public their evidence. The
handloom-weavers commission presented the reports of the assistant commis-
sioners to Parliament as they became available and issued its own report almost
two years after the first of these accounts was made public. Similarly, when ex-
cerpts from field reports of the English poor-law assistant commissioners were
published, one commentator questioned the legality of this practice. The docu-
ment certainly publicized the limitations of the old poor-law apparatus, but its
preparation only delayed the completion of the final report and thus seemed to
defeat the commission’s stated goal to provide evidence and recommendations for
new legislation.20

Cut and Paste

Documents that were prized for the unmediated access they allowed to the
field experience—a quality that relied on the facelessness of their compilers and
the transparency of the texts themselves—often had unique personal imprints.
Government was communicating through individual authors. Few public figures
understood as well as Chadwick did the importance of print culture to the polit-
ical process. Chadwick distinguished himself early on in questioning witnesses
for the poor-law inquiry, prompting the chief commissioner, Nassau Senior, to
compare him to a French cook who can concoct a delicacy out of shoe laces. Chad-
wick contributed to the popularity of the commission’s interim report by ex-
hibiting the most interesting cases in a lucid manner. He famously never missed
an opportunity to peddle his penmanship.21 But even lesser officials left a mod-
est trace on the documents they composed. During the Irish poor-law investiga-
tion, assistant commissioners were regarded simply as recording devices whose
accounts were “to bring the reader more immediately in contact with the wit-
ness.”22 Nonetheless, each team of investigators contrived a slightly different tac-
tic for imparting information or narrating stories. One technique was to recount
discrete episodes or “case studies” in full. Another called for weaving short quo-
tations into a general statement on the affairs of the parish.

Labourers marry earlier than farmers. John Walsh, tradesman, says, “The poorer
they are the earlier they marry;” but the parish priest denies this. Others say that
early marriages are discountenanced by the general feeling; “under 20 is a won-
 182 The Culture of the Social Fact

der.” There are few applications to the parish priest. The early marriages are to
gratify passion and to serve themselves, and enable them to live better, as they
thinking [sic] there will be more compassion for them if they are married.
Michael Millins says, “He knows men of 60 who never married, and they are
not a halfpennyworth better off than those who have families. If that man is sick,
who will attend to him without payment, or who will wash or cook for him?”23

This passage effectively recreates a speaking (not to say chattering) commu-

nity. That there are clear disagreements about the details of everyday life does
not detract from the impression that everybody speaks and everybody has been
allowed a voice. In fact, the occasional dispute endows the text with a greater
measure of realism because the speakers appear to be in dialogue with each other.
This exchange simulated (or fabricated) daily local encounters, here generated
by the investigative practices adopted by the Irish Poor Law Commission. In
every parish, assistant commissioners conducted interviews with a group of lo-
cals who represented different rungs in the social ladder. Beyond recalling their
own experience, the speakers peppered their conversation with stories about oth-
ers. Investigators thus tapped into local discourse, whether comprised of opinion,
memory, or sheer gossip. The priest who told the Irish poor-law assistant com-
missioners that forty women in his parish were seduced by men of a superior class
might have had at his disposal reliable means to gather this bit of information.
But the report also featured farmers talking about their neighbors, merchants
telling stories regarding clients, and others who recalled rumors about destitute
individuals and how the local poor grappled with deprivation. The anecdotal na-
ture of such evidence did not preclude a systematic presentation in clear imita-
tion of the aesthetics of statistics, with careful editing and, in some cases, tabu-
lar forms to arrange responses to written or oral questions. In early Victorian
official reports, readers found statistical tables and testimonies, used side by side
as competing or complementing tools to gauge society.
The editorial digestive process often meant breaking witnesses’ responses and
testimonials into short, incisive utterances or morselized narratives. When infor-
mation had to be condensed for the purpose of a summary report or an abridged
document, the job could be done simply with the help of scissors. Chadwick’s per-
sonal files on the Factory Commission inquiry contain a few pages on which he
pasted short clippings from previously printed material (an indication that the
first phase of preparing a report was the printing of the handwritten evidence).
He divided the cuttings into clusters under headings such as “Factory Women as
Wives,” “Morals—Bad,” “Morals—Improved or Favourable,” and “Diseases Pe-
 Facts Speak for Themselves 183

culiarly Favoured by Cotton Factory Labour.”24 Garnering and registering

knowledge in concise narratives commenced in the field. Inspector Horner’s rec-
ord of a single infraction of the Factory Act, as taken from his inspection jour-
nal, was narrated as a story when initially entered in his report book.

In going through the mill with Mr. Platt, I saw a very young child piecing to Wm.
Fielden. The child appeared to me about eight years old, certainly not more than
nine; it had its jacket off, and there was cotton on its clothes, so that it had been
working for some time. It was a boy, Bradshaw Fielden, the brother of the spinner;
there was no certificate; Mr. Platt said that it was contrary to his knowledge and
orders, he sent for Thomas Goddard, his messenger, who declared that it was not
only contrary to his directions, but that he had turned that child several times out
of the mill. I called the parties before me in the counting-house; swore Mr. Platt
to his having given repeated orders to his people that the law was to be strictly
obeyed; swore Thomas Goddard to the above statement made by him, and there-
upon I adjudged Fielden to pay a fine of 20S.25

Attention to detail was closely related to the judicial nature of the procedure.
(At the same time, as a model case, supposedly confirming the orderly day-to-day
application of the Factory Act, the details call attention to what appears to be
missing. Why didn’t he question the Fielden brothers? Did they offer any de-
fense? Was the proprietor complicit in employing under-aged children after all?)
In the retelling of such episodes, social reality is ingrained in the fine points of
the story, dryly conveyed. Concreteness of scene, actors, and action endows anec-
dotes with a palpable, even tactile quality.
Another approach to the social anecdote’s power to engender reality high-
lights its structure rather than content. In literary critic Joel Fineman’s view, the
anecdote, the minutest of narratives, has a complete, irreducible, or indigestible
form. As such, it has the capacity to interrupt engulfing texts that are also framed
as narratives (with beginning, middle, and end) by calling into question their
flow and comprehensiveness. Anecdotes thus do not necessarily describe reality
as much as point or gesture toward it, as they indicate that there is an “outside”
or exteriority to the text. The particular miniature narrative that interests Fine-
man is the historical anecdote, the petite histoire that enables the telling of his-
tory but resists the totalizing (and ahistorical) ambition of the grand recit. “The
anecdote produces the effect of the real, the occurrence of contingency, by es-
tablishing an event as an event within and yet without the framing context of
historical successivity, i.e., it does so only in so far as its narration both comprises
and refracts the narration it reports.”26 Official reports were not arranged as
 184 The Culture of the Social Fact

mammoth narratives but were schematized—similarly to the teleological his-

torical master narratives of old—as substantial bodies of knowledge (some of
which was historical) that lead to particular conclusions. Like the historical nar-
rative, the anecdote allows the narration of society (as in a case history) but un-
dermines society-as-narrative or, in other words, the understanding of social life
as a single story. The capacity of vignettes to refuse or at least resist enclosure
was enhanced in social reportage by their separation from the rest of the text by
actual or implicit quotation marks. As we shall see, authors of social reports em-
ployed diverse methods to emphasize rather than to efface those textual stitches.
A truncated page composed of short narratives was also characteristic of the daily
newspaper.
Anecdotes were certainly not the only representational technique available to
capture social reality. The emphasis on eye witnessing as the portal to the social
real (coupled with the “environmentalist” drive in social reportage) encouraged
social observers to evaluate individuals and groups by their immediate sur-
roundings. As Joseph Childers noticed about the 1842 sanitary report, “Working
metonymically, focusing on connections, [Chadwick] and his sub-commissioners
fix on the artifacts of lower class life: attire, cottages, work-shops, dungheaps, cel-
lars.”27 Even if metonymy became the prevailing trope for realistic representa-
tion in social reportage and in Victorian fiction, the anecdotal narration of the
experience of the poor and the investigative process strongly qualified that
propensity (and the ocular emphasis in general) and introduced manifest tem-
porality to social reporting. Metonymic displacements “flattened” the portrait of
society by offering spatial instead of temporal associations. The poor could be
conceived by and through their habitat and bodily extensions. In Horner’s mun-
dane anecdote, the child—“it”—is recognized as an object of scrutiny by the
cotton on his clothes. In contrast, the anecdote endows the text with a dimension
of time. Besides, royal commissions and other state-sponsored inquiries were not
devised merely to draw dense pictures by words or numbers of the unrepresented
in their physical setting. Conversation, mostly by method of interviews, and the
concomitant seldom-missed opportunity to narrate stories and to give testimony
dominated government and parliamentary reports.

Bureaucratic Poetics
The first report of the Employment of Children Commission (Mines) displays
a panoply of composing and editing techniques. In the words of the Spectator,
this account portrays horrifying human ordeals befitting “fictions of tales of dis-
 Facts Speak for Themselves 185

tant lands.”28 Its authors selected excerpts from field depositions and pasted a
collage of quotations and observations classified according to the fourteen themes
of the investigation. The result is a three-tiered text featuring the testimony of
young miners and their families, presented in a smaller font and frequently in
phonetic English (to generate voice and accent); observations and remarks made
by individual subcommissioners; and the unified, anonymous, but commanding
voice of the senior commissioners. Field notes are reproduced with all their jit-
tery mishaps. For instance, Subcommissioner William Rayner Wood transcribed
or paraphrased his conversation with a child laborer: “No. 71. Banniester Lund,
6 years old:—Does not like t’pit; had rather be at t’top; work is hard; is not ill
tired; has not enough to eat; could eat more if he had it.”29 Wood is not quoting
as much as ventriloqizing the little miner. This utterance is short, shorthanded,
and factual, yet endowed with a poetic pace derived from repeated ts—tired, top,
pit, eat. It ends with the wonderfully suggestive “could eat more if he had it”
and is peppered with mine talk. Wood retains his narrative voice even as he as-
sumes his interlocutor’s voice. In doing so, he points to his own immersion in the
field of inquiry and, concurrently, to his distance from it.
The text moves telescopically and rather swiftly from statements by fragile,
overworked children to general overviews of entire regions. Squeezed in the mid-
dle, the subcommissioner is an observer and a witness. He delineates the scene of
suffering or confesses his own impressions and feelings. The testimonials were
too shocking even to gratify the Victorian taste for moral outrage. Such is the
story of Betty Harris from a coal pit at Little Bolton: “I have a belt around my
waist, and a chain passing between my legs, and I go on my hands and feet.” A
sketch of a barely clad young woman harnessed to a trolley and pulling her load
in a steep, dark tunnel accompanies the text. The female “drawer” continues: “I
have drawn till I had the skin off me. The belt and chain is worse when we are
in a family way. My feller (husband) has beaten me many a time for not being
ready.” Subcommissioner Jelinger Symons depicts children attending door-traps
in narrow tunnels, sitting alone for as long as twelve hours a day, waiting for the
carriage to pass. One child begs the passersby for a bit of candle wax so as not to
be left in the dark. “I found that the poor child had scooped out a hole in a great
stone, and, having obtained a wick, had manufactured a rude sort of lamp; and
that he kept it going as well as he could by begging contributions of melted tal-
low from the candles of any Samaritan passers by. To be in the dark, in fact,
seemed to be the great grievance with all of them.”30
Symons’s colleague Scriven, who took a partially dressed young girl to a pub-
lic house for an interview, also employs the dark/light opposition. He reports of be-
 186 The Culture of the Social Fact

ing chased by her alarmed collier who “became evidently mortified that these
deeds of darkness should be brought to light.” The girl testifies, “I run 24 corves
a-day; I cannot come up till I have done them all. I had rather set cards or any-
thing else than work in the pit.” The investigator then completes the scene: “She
stood shivering before me from cold. The rag that hung about her waist was once
called a shirt, which is as black as the coal she thrusts, and saturated with water,
the drippings of the roof and shaft.”31
The mines report in its various guises perfected a particularly gory genre of
social reporting that interjected charged language and sexual voyeurism in an ef-
fort to represent the physical and mental suffering of dependent populations.
Government thus participated in the production of what might be termed Vic-
torian pulp nonfiction. The report told provocative stories in a truncated way in
which the rough seams between specific narratives were kept by employing dif-
ferent fonts, quotation marks, and faulty language. The rugged, seemingly un-
controlled form denoting the veracity of the evidence converged with poignant
content—all packaged in the cheap blue paper cover supplied by cost-minded
parliamentary printers. A certain crudeness of the text was mirrored in un-
precedented sharp utterances by government officials. At one point, Symons ex-
claimed, “any sight more disgustingly indecent or revolting can scarcely be imag-
ined than these girls at work—no brothel can beat it.”32
This report also derived its power from controversial illustrations, which com-
missioners reportedly inserted to catch the attention of “busy members of Par-
liament and learned lords who might not have waded through a lengthy ‘blue
book’ to find the facts which these pictures showed at a glance.”33 Assistant com-
missioner John L. Kennedy wrote: “I found reason to believe that no words I could
use would convey to others, impressions, similar to those, which ocular inspec-
tion had given to myself. To aid the conception (for it can only be aided in en-
deavouring to convey the impressions received by the sense of smell as well as of
sight in examining the place of work), I have had recourse to my friend Mr.
Horner, to whose kindness I am indebted for the sketches which appear in the
pages of this Report.”34
The text seems to gravitate toward these illustrations, to caption but ulti-
mately supplant them, providing detail and movement that were absent in the
rather schematic sketches.

No. 2 shows the position in which the colliers are obliged to work in the thin seams.
This sketch was taken from a collier at work in Mr. Roscoe’s mine near Rochdale.
He was quite naked, and had a broad scar on his shoulder, which he told me was
 Facts Speak for Themselves 187

the mark of a kick he had received in a fight. It will be observed that the position
is much more constrained than in the preceding case. Indeed, had I not seen it, I
could not have believed that a man could have worked with so much effect in so
little space. The mine in which this man was working was not more than from 18
to 20 inches in thickness. His chest was brought down so as almost to rest on the
thigh, and the head bent down almost the knee; but even in this double-up posi-
tion it was curious to see the precision and smartness with which he dealt his
blows.35

Consistently exalting the significance of visual perception, Employment of

Children investigators produced a text with a strong ocular property. The detailed
(and, significantly, illustrated) narrative offered a receding gaze, which allowed
the reader to peek into the field of inquiry within as well as between the lines.
However, the textual simulation of the investigator’s presence at the scene was
predicated on the unbridgeable gap between field experience and its representa-
tion. The text might be translucent but not entirely transparent. The reader
needed occasionally to be reminded of that, for instance, by calling attention to
other sensorial experiences that could not be recreated in the text, or to the re-
porter’s own sense of awe and amazement. If he had not been there, he would
not have believed it himself. Estrangement functioned as a means of persuasion,
and the suspenseful play between belief and disbelief sustained a hierarchy of
experience and distance between the investigator and the reader. As importantly,
it epitomized the lingering self-doubt concerning the limits of representation
which haunted the Victorian culture of the social fact.
This “tunnel vision” was not the only way the text undermined its own ocu-
lar emphasis. The shock induced by the mine visit was not exclusively prompted
by the sights that reached the eye in barely lit shafts but by what was harder to
see in a subterranean world. The inability of the casual glance to identify the
sex of miners was certainly a cause for concern. A caption to one illustration
described a drawer of a heavy, tublike container. A woman (Subcommissioner
Kennedy supplemented the picture) was dressed in flannel shirt and trousers
and wore a small cap on her head, as did the male miners. Coal blackened every-
one’s faces. The best (perhaps the only) method to determine her sex was—
metonymy again—the deteriorating necklace and earrings she wore.36 Symons
contended that while visiting a mine in Yorkshire he found a group naked to
the waist and could distinguish the girls only by their breasts. Occasional diffi-
culty in making this distinction “caused a good deal of laughing and joking.”37
(In another mine, he found clothed women working side by side with stark
The 1842 report of the Royal Commission on the Employment of Children sensationalized child
and female labor in the mines. The bottom illustration represents young miners Ann Ambler and
Will Dyson drawn up from the pit partially clad and cross-lapped. The top sketch depicts another
young “hurrier” harnessed to a loaded corf with a chain passing between his legs. The report
alleged that these children were remarkably muscular but their height and genital development
were “stunted and defective.”
 Facts Speak for Themselves 189

naked men.) Several accompanying illustrations of miners were likewise am-

biguous about their subjects’ gender, including the images that depicted barely
clothed or even naked men and women at work.
In a few accounts, assistant commissioners elucidated their private opinion
about policy issues. For the most part these views amounted to outright support
for state intervention in the social field—for instance, Wood’s enthusiastic call
for a centralized educational system.38 These junior officials could not resist styl-
istic embellishment, usually by way of a celebratory flourish. Thus James
Mitchell described the pastoral scenery around the lead mines of Durham,
Northumberland, and Cumberland. “Weardale will be held by many to be the
most beautiful of them all. It gradually contracts into narrower spaces, and the
hills become loftier on proceeding westward from the low country.”39 Although
this prose also engaged an idiom of discovery, it was different from the shedding
of metaphoric light on the darkness of mines in Wales or Lancashire. The au-
thor dwelled on the lead country’s romantic seclusion from the forces of moder-
nity. He was especially struck by the inhabitants’ unique language, which, “away
from the tide of human intercourse,” still featured words that likely had never
been spoken elsewhere.
The printed products of the Employment of Children investigation combined
therefore a variety of literary genres and devices, including the sublime (as in
the awe-striking danger of the mine shaft), the humanitarian language of bod-
ily pain, metonymic associations, schoolbook didacticism, and provincial lyricism
of origin and seclusion. As investigators digressed from their official purposes,
randomly turning their gaze sideways, so did their reports. The mines report was,
among other things, a textbook on the methods and machinery of mining and
miners’ lives. Its ethnographic subject matter was sometimes as incidental as a
slip of the bureaucrat’s pen. In one instance, Assistant Commissioner Scriven ex-
pressed concern about North Staffordshire miners’ dangerous games. “By the
way of amusement,” he noted, “the men would sometimes inflate the mouth
with a sufficient quantity [of oil] to produce a stream, by constricting the lips and
setting fire to it as from a grand burner, to the great glee of others who looked
on.”40
A small item in Scriven’s report from the Staffordshire potteries reveals the
disposition to exhibit literal objects. Sarah Limer, a ten-year-old painter at an
earthenware factory at Shelton, maintained that she attended a Catholic Sunday
school and could read and write. The subcommissioner remarked, “This child,
like many others, professes to write, but has no idea of holding a pen,” a state-
ment which he corroborated with a facsimile of her signature, a scribble that bore
 190 The Culture of the Social Fact

no resemblance to her name.41 It is not entirely clear why the assistant commis-
sioner thought it proper to add ocular proof to demonstrate that a little girl’s
claim was groundless. The reproduced mock signature (therefore twice forged)
testified to its own meaningless or, conversely, spoke—as facts indeed can some-
times speak for themselves—to the possibility that the subcommissioner’s con-
tention was erroneous—the child was illiterate, but she had a signature and
could hold a pen. It was also ironic that the only signature that was faithfully
replicated in this otherwise signature-congested document was that of a ten year
old who could not write properly.

Discourse in the Social Report

The Employment of Children Commission report was, in many respects, one
of a kind, an exception among early Victorian blue books and yet a foundational
document in the genre of social reporting. It certainly generated more stir than
other state-authored social reports of its era, mostly because it violated conven-
tions of public exchange by depicting female nudity. Curiously, the same state
that was strongly challenged in the Stockdale versus Hansard case for its damna-
tion of a book of anatomy as a lurid work of pornography published a document
that provided readers similar forms of titillation. Several features of this partic-
ular document are reminiscent of the properties that Mikhail Bakhtin admired
in the works of nineteenth-century novelists or, even more famously, in the writ-
ing of Rabelais. Among them are a concurrent unfolding of diverse literary
styles, multivocality of utterances and accents (which in the Employment of
Children report are sometimes offered in phonetic dialect), the emergence of un-
settling characters, and the “grotesque realism” (whose most explicit renditions
in the report are the descriptions of overworked laborers’ deformed bodies and
the image of miners spitting fire for their amusement). There is a particular di-
alogical character to the manner in which the writing subjects, the commission-
ers (as well as the commission), double themselves in the text by conjuring up a
sedate official persona and another self, the self of an other who inhabits the
“field” away from office or home. While Foucault asserted that “all discourses
endowed with the author function possess . . . plurality of self,” the social report
is remarkably fecund in generating authorial identities.42 The field persona is an
observer as well as a sufferer.
Subcommissioners sometimes employed a hybridized style, blending their
voices with those of their interlocutors. (The tendency of social investigators—
and later sociologists or anthropologists—to quote themselves, usually by refer-
 Facts Speak for Themselves 191

ring to field notes, facilitates an inner dialogue that undermines the unity of the
writing subject.) The report seems to exemplify the uncertain position (which
was social but also discursive) of intermediaries, the investigator-authors who
traveled between society and its outskirts. The notion of a multiplicity of lan-
guages, or heteroglossia, seems particularly pertinent for this discussion, for it
corresponds to the multivalency of the initial field encounters between investi-
gators and the investigated populations. Bakhtin associated the modern dialogic
novel with the emergence of a new type of consciousness that enlisted the other
to shape a complex, textured understanding of self.
In contrast, the emphasis on a single voice in the printed works of commis-
sions, committees, and especially inspectorates points to the monological tenden-
cies of official discourse. Moreover, the novelistic heteroglossia is often associated
with a transgressive capacity that signified the decline of a single authoritative
language, official genres, or central power. This aspect does not seem applicable
to state-sanctioned social reportage. By issuing the Employment of Children
Commission report government might have co-opted a multifaceted, risky, in-
deed heteroglotic form for its own purposes, but blue books were an aspect of a
larger project to affirm the power of the central government. The official report
signified asymmetrical power relations. Polyphony of the sort practiced in fact
collectors’ field notes may also be construed as a screen erected to occlude rather
than to dialogue with others—to replace or speak for others. There was a hier-
archy among the various speakers in the social report. Rather than dramatizing
and accentuating social heterogeneity, the text may be rehearsing or simulating
the shift from chaos to order, from moral outrage to rationality. It depicts a coun-
tersociety that should be exposed to the scrutiny and the regulatory power of the
state.
One way of avoiding the difficulties inherent in any attempt to detect or the-
orize agency and voice in the text is to accept the text’s fundamental muteness
and to follow instead the ways historical readers actualized these documents to
voice themselves. At the conclusion of this chapter, we therefore return to power
relations outside the text where the exchange between lawmakers, government
officials, mill owners, vicars, physicians, managers, miners, piecers, and hand-
loom weavers took place.

Blue Books Dispatched

A few documents that detail the dispersion of royal commissions’ reports have
survived in the Public Record Office. The abridged Irish poor-law report was
 192 The Culture of the Social Fact

shipped to a bookseller in London, a Mr. Fellows on Ludgate Street, for its fur-
ther allocation. Out of 2,600 copies of “selections,” 650 were sold for less than a
pound each, and 264 were given away according to the commissioners’ requests.
Among these, 148 were sent to country newspapers in England and Scotland, 32
went to London newspapers, 32 went to magazines for reviews, and most of the
rest were given to the secretary of the English Poor Law Commission and to one
of its commissioners, Nassau Senior, for distribution. Prime Minister Earl Grey
received twelve copies. The king’s copy was bound with Morocco joints and silk
“insides.” Another special copy, somewhat less ostentatious, was prepared for the
king’s sister-in-law, the Duchess of Kent (Queen Victoria’s mother). Government
placed nearly a hundred advertisements for the report in newspapers and peri-
odicals at the cost of one hundred pounds.43 Of the 3,280 copies of the Rural Con-
stabulary Commission report (1839), most were sent to local authorities: petty
commissions (1,392), watch committees (196), lords lieutenant (59), and Lan-
cashire magistrates (35). Large numbers (1,105) were given to “individuals di-
rected by the Commissioners,” probably those who cooperated with the investi-
gation or could assist in the cause of reform, and 140 copies were left for the
personal use of the commissioners. Another 210 went to newspapers.44 In both
cases, the press was coaxed. Newspapers and review journals were the main ve-
hicle for publicity, and commissioners did not wait for editors’ requests.
Admittedly, the Irish poor-law and the constabulary reports had a rather mod-
est circulation. Officials peddled other documents more vigorously. During one
of the recurrent parliamentary debates on printing, the Comptroller McCulloch
of the Stationery Office gave as an example of public waste the ten thousand gra-
tuitous copies of the Committee of Privy Council on Education report, which in-
cluded 680 pages on every school visited by an inspector. “Very many school-
masters have their names blazoned abroad in I do not know how many different
forms, and the names of hundreds of the children at school are printed also, with
an endless mass of minute and trifling details.”45 The committee’s secretary,
Ralph R. W. Lingen, responded, “the persons who have promoted the various
schools . . . are extremely anxious to see what is said of them by the Government
inspectors.”46 The committee was established to allocate grants in aid to volun-
tary contributions for building schools. The only privilege government retained
was that of inspection, and so reports were essential to that collaboration.
Despite the comptroller’s sarcasm, the committee insisted on continuing the
gratis circulation of its reports, emphasizing that it did not wish to advertise its
activities to the public at large as much as to communicate with managers and
teachers of the schools under inspection. Unlike Joseph Hume, who thought that
 Facts Speak for Themselves 193

official documents would reach their proper readers if a fee was charged, Lin-
gen, Chadwick, and other bureaucrats maintained that reports would reach their
destination only if they were sent directly to a preselected group. Lingen argued
that recipients did not pass on the documents to booksellers. Hundreds of appli-
cations for them arrived in his office each year, far exceeding the supply. Twenty-
five hundred copies were sent to certified teachers and to other correspondents,
mostly clergymen. All wanted to keep a copy in their homes rather than share it
with others. Lingen claimed that if reports were shared, they would not be as
carefully read, and he had indications that recipients actually read the documents
in their entirety. Naturally, they were concerned with their specific districts, but
from his daily correspondence, he found recurrent references to reports of other
inspectors and remarks that indicated a broader interest.47
In the case of the Committee of Privy Council on Education report, a circular
system of communication developed in which reports’ addressees were the indi-
viduals who gave information in the first place. Even frugal Hume used to send
free copies of select committees’ blue books to all witnesses who came to West-
minster. They were entitled, he believed, to a copy of their own evidence as well
as to the report.48 The Irish poor-law commissioners argued that there was a great
interest among those who responded to their queries and questionnaires to see the
commission’s report in print. Through distribution of reports, officials sustained
networks of informants and local interlocutors. Witnesses’ desire to receive and
read official reports to which they contributed, especially their own testimony,
may seem self evident or even trivial, but it was symptomatic of the exchange
relations between London and the provinces, between government, local author-
ities, proprietors, and the working populations. Official documents—concrete ob-
jects—permeated the exchange between government and its citizens. This ges-
ture was meaningful not only because an object changed hands but also because
the act of reporting itself implied acknowledgment, gratitude, and respect.
For the Board of Health, dispersion of information was justified primarily in
terms of public instruction. Chadwick maintained that the Board was ordered by
the “highest authorities” that it must “conciliate public opinion.” Otherwise, it
had very little direct power. In 1852 Chadwick claimed that a distribution of a pa-
per on the removal of sewer manure to farmland had already persuaded five towns
to espouse the proposed scheme. An additional five or six towns were getting closer
to adopting new sewage systems, and several others ceased building “bad works.”
“If we get this system in complete operation in a few towns, it will be worth, I ap-
prehend, not only the whole expense of the printing ten times over but the whole
expense of the Commission.”49 Chadwick sent the material to the officers of the
 194 The Culture of the Social Fact

local boards, some of whom were unpaid and otherwise would not purchase them.
The local boards, in turn, lent copies to farmers. Chadwick asked the Stationery
Office whether it would permit Charles Knight to print copies for commercial cir-
culation as he had twenty years earlier for the poor-law report. The Board of
Health, in particular, stubbornly circumvented printing regulations, but other
commissioners and inspectors were often caught cutting bureaucratic corners to
expedite the publication of their accounts. The secretary of the Commission on
Municipal Corporations inserted into his official correspondence advertisements
for the sale of the commission’s report by, once again, publisher Knight. The
Home Office ordered the secretary to provide a full explanation.50

Blue Books Intercepted

For those who were neither close to particular investigations nor beneficiaries
of commissioners’ largesse or habitual purchasers of parliamentary reports, the
press was the main source on official inquiries. Newspapers and journals func-
tioned as large-pored filters for official discourse, publishing long unedited
segments from (or furnishing numerous details about) government and parlia-
mentary investigations, hearings, periodical reports, and returns. Like other in-
formational genres, midcentury newspapers were often in the habit of repro-
ducing rather than digesting authentic facts. In addition, periodicals such as the
Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review—Whig and Tory publications—
offered extensive commentary on blue books, often in conjunction with other fac-
tual publications or even literary productions. Official literature was thus sub-
jected to the comparative gaze or at least forced into a direct if fictitious ex-
change. For instance, the Quarterly Review examined the Factory Commission
report together with seven other texts, including Sadler’s report, John Fielden’s
pro-short-time The Curse of the Factory System (1836), Charles Wing’s politi-
cally similar The Evils of the Factory System (1836), as well as James Phillips
Kay’s differently motivated The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working
Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832).51
Other documents fared worse, steered away from the intended destinations set
by Chadwick and others. The Society for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the
British Dominions rearranged and republished the printed reports of two 1832
select committees—one in the Lords, the other in the Commons—that had de-
liberated over the fate of slavery. These committees issued bulky reports of their
proceedings but did not append conclusions or recommendations. The Commons
committee examined whether slaves could maintain themselves once emanci-
 Facts Speak for Themselves 195

pated (see chapter 6 for the 1860s American rendition of the same theme) and
whether the danger of rebellion was greater if freedom was granted or refused.
The inquiry, led by members friendly to the cause of abolition, was limited
mostly to the island of Jamaica. Published evidence occupied 655 pages and was
made available to the public despite planters’ protests.
In the Analysis (of the Commons report) and the Abstract (of the 1,400-page
Lords report), the society’s editors excerpted the evidence, eliminated the ques-
tion-and-answer format, and provided a running critique and interpretation
through extensive use of lengthy footnotes. A few remarks in the text itself eval-
uated witnesses’ integrity, but the edited testimonies generally were left without
explicit commentary. The footnotes extended the text by offering information
from the society’s publications (its own archive) to substantiate or refute details
given in the testimony or to respond to M.P.s’ queries when witnesses hesitated
or claimed they did not know enough to answer. The footnotes were especially
comprehensive in dealing with pro-planter testimony. They highlighted incon-
sistencies and demonstrated how the witnesses unwittingly imparted facts that
confirmed pro-abolition witnesses’ description of plantation life. The deploy-
ment of corrective remarks disguised the manipulation of the text and sustained
a semblance of a debate between the information given during the hearings and
the positions (or facts) expressed by the society in footnote form. The society ul-
timately completed the parliamentary volumes by answering the initial ques-
tions: once emancipated the slaves could maintain themselves, and the danger of
a rebellion was much greater with slavery still in place.
Besides the Abstract and the Analysis, two other antislavery documents pre-
sented abridged versions of the Lords hearings, employing a distinct tone and
different editing techniques. Published anonymously, these documents attacked
not just the proslavery stance but also the committee of the Lords, exposing the
personal interests its members had in slavery. “Legion,” the signatory of these
publications, closely interpreted the exchange in the committee room. Long pas-
sages quoted in full from the actual transcripts, rather than paraphrased testi-
monies decorated with scholarly styled footnotes, dominated these tracts. The
analysis followed witnesses’ and peers’ rhetorical patterns. Witnesses’ reactions
to tough questions, their pauses, hesitations, evasions, and minute discrepancies,
were as important to the determination of veracity as the information they of-
fered. “Legion” judged specific testimonies by their bearers’ access to actual
plantations and claimed that the testimony of (mostly antislavery) clergymen
should be preferred to that of casual visitors or state officials who lived on the is-
land but did not frequent the sequestered plantation world. He thus stretched the
 196 The Culture of the Social Fact

argument of the plantation as a different planet to bolster evidence close to his

views. The plantation, as one witness asserted, was a “sealed book.”52
Strong anti-aristocratic and anti–High Church sentiments pervaded these
documents. Witnesses were seemingly cross-examined by “Legion” or more pre-
cisely indicted by their own words. The analytical method deployed in this ren-
dition of the official transcripts forcefully resembled courtroom tactics. Early on
(and counterintuitively), he designated the planters as the plaintiffs on whose
shoulders lay the burden of proof in what he constructed as a virtual civil case.
The authority of the institution, the House of Lords, was cunningly employed to
undermine it. These abolitionist “reports” of the Lords proceedings implicitly
assumed the accuracy of the original text, down to its minutest details. It was the
completeness of the initial record that allowed “Legion” to perform his elabo-
rate maneuvers.53
The furor over the publication of the Report on the State of Education in Wales
(1847) also exemplified the vulnerability of published official accounts to hostile
scrutiny. Based on careful reading of the report, a contemporary observer main-
tained that a few assistant commissioners did not have full command of Welsh,
even though the commission had hired these locals because of their supposed
command of the language. One of them obviously mistranslated children’s re-
sponses to English, and another marked wrong the right answer in an arithmetic
test. In a pamphlet Artegall, or Remarks on the Reports of the Commissioners
of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales (1848), Jane Williams attacked
the chief commissioner’s mastery of English grammar. “Until Commissioner
Symons attains a more creditable knowledge of etymology and syntax, we would
earnestly recommend him to abstain from the use of metaphors and from all fig-
ures of speech.”54 Such attention to trifling linguistic infelicities was a way to
give the commission that denigrated the Welsh for their supposed ignorance
of the English language a taste of their own venom. The report’s publication
prompted an avalanche of counterdocuments. Many of the commission’s infor-
mants rose against the report, and some protested the representation of their
views. The published minutia of the inquiry enhanced the possibilities of con-
testation about the commission’s modes of operation, the evidence garnered, and
the commissioners’ speaking and writing skills.

Misrepresentation
Were blue books accessible (or familiar) to those weaker segments of the pop-
ulation who were often the subject of investigation? Certainly the better informed
 Facts Speak for Themselves 197

among the lower classes, once termed the working-class “aristocracy,” had such ac-
cess, and trade-union leaders vigilantly scrutinized the outpouring of government
publications. During the sanitary campaign of the 1840s, for example, laborers’
meetings organized by middle-class reformers featured lectures on topics of city
hygiene. In such gatherings in the lower-class neighborhoods of London, the chair
of the Metropolitan Improvement Society read excerpts from the government san-
itary report. According to the Morning Chronicle, “the attention they gave to them
was intense—not a person left the room until the discourse was concluded.”55 Doc-
uments such as the Factory Commission’s report ultimately encouraged rather
than deterred union leaders to partake in public adjudication of factual accounts
and the debate over representation and misrepresentation of working-class sub-
jects. Moreover, this particular report buttressed workers’ belief that ultimately
facts did speak for them. It served as an illustration for the ostensible power of so-
cial reality to articulate itself through an official account regardless of its compil-
ers’ intent. The commission prescribed policies that were evidently incongruent
with the laborers’ aims. Nevertheless, the evidence presented on the plight of the
factory children vindicated the veracity of Sadler’s report and supported the oper-
atives’ depiction of the factory system. In the language of the Quarterly Review,
“Though the scheme of the Commission had partial success, inasmuch as it gave
ministers a temporary power to overwhelm the ten-hours bill, yet their huge folio
contained within itself an anti-dote to the poison.”56 It was true that the heart of
the dispute between Sadler and the Whig ministry was not facts but policy. Yet,
the “antidote” also could be found in other episodes when facts proved more elu-
sive. It was a product of textual analysis and, as we shall see, textual thievery.
Mine inspector Tremenheere occasionally asked the Home Office for extra
copies of his annual reports for dissemination among the workingmen. As M.P.s
sought to improve the image of the legislature by giving away parliamentary pa-
pers, the inspector argued that leaders of the mining population (including the
editor of the Miners Advocate) changed their views about the state’s role in their
districts as a direct result of examining his reports.57 There are other indications
that miners were interested in blue books, including a November 1852 applica-
tion from a Newcastle-on-Tyne colliery for a select committee report on explo-
sions in mines.58 In another telling incident, coal miners demanded that Tre-
menheere alter an erroneous account he had published in a periodic report about
their strike. The Leeds District Branch of the Coal Miners’ Association declared
that the inspector’s description of the circumstances that led to the strike and
lockout contradicted the facts and confirmed, without examination, the masters’
version of the events. “We feel that we are misrepresented by the Commissioner
 198 The Culture of the Social Fact

whose duty it is to give a fair and impartial report of all things he is set over to
watch, he has seriously prejudiced our cause before the public.”59
Tremenheere countered that he based his account on “authentic documents”
but promised to inquire into the alleged inaccuracies and to include corrections,
if necessary, in his next periodic report. “I regret that the Miners . . . should see
reason to state that my Report . . . is not fair and impartial. I beg that they may
be assured that in this as in all my Reports, I have been guided both in what I
have inserted and what I have omitted, by a desire to promote, according to the
best of my judgment, the true and permanent interests of the working min-
ers.”60 The miners pointed to various publications they authorized during the
strike as proof that they were not “the unreasoning and unreasonable people they
are usually represented . . . That their case and the facts of the strike contentions
should be correctly reported to Government (seeing that an official was ordered
to be present at all public meetings) will be clear.”61 This episode documents two
chains of representation that involved, on the one hand, government and its com-
missioners and, on the other hand, miners and their delegations. Much of the di-
alogue between these two systems was conducted through an exchange of
printed reports. The miners saw in the periodic report of the mine inspectors an
essential part of their representation in Parliament and before the public and
duly asked to rectify the alleged inaccuracies. This case also featured a state offi-
cial who was convinced that he was representing miners by acting for them and
by depicting their conditions in his published accounts.
Tremenheere was confident about the course of action he had taken in the
mine districts and believed that his reports would either appease the restless
minds of miners, among whom he found “ignorance on various subjects affect-
ing their interest and society in general,” or move owners to introduce serious
improvements. Urging the Home Office to institute an inspection of the venti-
lation modes in all mines, he explained that such initiative would “produce a
greater sense of moral responsibility among the employers.”62 Competition (or
“jealousies”) prevented one owner from knowing about safety measures installed
in mines next to his. As for the laborers, inspection would lead “them to feel that
they were not as they have hitherto considered themselves, quite neglected by
the Government.” The colliery population, he claimed, entered periodically into
an “awkward state of mind.” During such cycles, the miners were under the
grand delusion that they held the entire industry in their hands. He was utterly
convinced that next to their education there was nothing better to shake their be-
liefs and instill “sounder opinion” among them than an inspection. In Tremen-
heere’s view, the interlocking function of inspection and reporting was to address
 Facts Speak for Themselves 199

two local problems of vision that were psychological rather than retinal. Owners
were blinded by their animosity toward each other. Seclusion and ignorance
planted in the miners’ minds dangerous notions of false power. The solution was
to liberate the two sides from their respective isolation by allowing them a com-
prehensive view of their situation, a touch of the social real. The presence of in-
spectors and, significantly, their reports on the scene had a direct sobering and
therapeutic effect.
To illustrate the success of his methods, Tremenheere claimed he had received
letters from “persons in the confidence of the working classes, expressing the sat-
isfaction at my Reports, and anticipating good results from them to themselves
and their children.”63 Chadwick also encouraged (albeit indirectly) working-
class organizations to embrace his reports. In late 1843 and early 1844, he mailed
dozens of his supplementary report on town burial to top clergymen, medical
men, politicians, industrialists, writers, (e.g., Thomas Carlyle), and editors (e.g.,
Macvey Napier) and requested them to publicize his work further. More impor-
tantly, he asked individuals with good working-class contacts to encourage work-
ers to petition both houses of Parliament and the queen in support of the mea-
sures proposed in the report. In this correspondence, Chadwick repeatedly
claimed that his report represented the true view of the lower classes.64

Telling Truth to Government

The short-time movement that opposed the factory commission in 1833 even-
tually used in its pamphlets, handbills, and broadsides evidence from the com-
mission’s reports. It was Richard Oastler’s standard tactic. For example, he pub-
lished a pamphlet entitled Intemperance and Vice: The Effects of Long Hours and
Bad System; from the Report of Dr. Francis Bisset Hawkins, One of the Medical
Officers of the Factory Commission, 1833.65 In a similar fashion, he appropriated
and then redirected the early 1830s treatises about the working classes in Man-
chester and the industrial system written by W. R. Greg, James Philips Kay, and
other ideological foes. Oastler capitalized on the supposed authenticity of the ma-
terial reproduced in the official record. Its archival quality made it brittle. Break-
ing pieces of evidence and repositioning them outside their original context was
premised on the printed text’s inherent rigidity compared with the flexibility or
fluidity of oral discourse. The interruptible property of printed texts was best il-
lustrated, albeit in a different manner, by a nongovernment publication—the pe-
riodic reports of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity in London. As the
society conceded, its annual accounts had two distinct readerships: first, mem-
 200 The Culture of the Social Fact

bers of the organization and other interested citizens who read the front pages
and, second, crooks, writers of bogus begging letters who were mainly interested
in the list of potential victims appended to each report in the form of a roster of
contributors.66 Social investigations were a means to elicit, collect, and some-
times even pluck information from unsuspecting subjects. Voluminous printed
accounts invited reciprocal behavior.
The 1833 clash between Oastler and the Factory Commission was rich with
defiant, carnivalesque gestures. Workingmen lampooned official representatives
(ostensibly of the king himself ), celebrating their own potentate (King Richard)
and engaging in a mock investigation of an investigation. Another clash between
Oastler and a royal commission lacked perhaps this open-space theatricality but
featured the same artful, eye-level maneuvering, this time over the record of
Oastler’s testimony. In late 1839, he sent two angry letters to Russell at the Home
Office demanding that he be furnished with a copy of the evidence he had given
to assistant commissioner Richard Muggeridge of the Handloom Weavers Com-
mission.67 Oastler wrote that in response to the official’s solicitation, he agreed
to testify in a public meeting of weavers and employers in Huddersfield. This
was a rather subdued performance for the vociferous orator. Somewhat unex-
pectedly, he heeded the assistant commissioner’s request not to excite the people.
At the conclusion of his testimony, however, he suggested that he would be asked
about other controversial issues, such as the poor law, the factory system, and, the
most volatile topic, the right of the people to arm themselves. Muggeridge of-
fered to interview him about these matters in private. Once again, Oastler con-
sented on the condition that he would receive a precise and full copy of the en-
tire conversation. Muggeridge accepted but stipulated that the transcript would
not be published before the commission’s report. The assistant commissioner had
already been embarrassed publicly and had even found himself in trouble with
his superiors when a copy of a testimony he had sent to another witness appeared
in the London Times.
Talking to the government official in his hotel room, Oastler stated his blunt
views on a number of points. To remove any future doubt, he read over Mug-
geridge’s notes, initialed them, and later even sent a letter to the assistant commis-
sioner confirming the transcript’s veracity. Muggeridge, in fact, solicited the letter
so as not to appear as a spy who clandestinely recorded private utterances. Oastler
diffused his concerns, remarking that he “rejoiced at this opportunity of telling the
Government all the truth.”68 In this narration Oastler was at his most shrewd self,
informing the Home Secretary how tears came to Muggeridge’s eyes when the of-
ficial described a visit he had made to a weavers’ village. The assistant commis-
 Facts Speak for Themselves 201

sioner, Oastler claimed, thanked him profusely for his testimony, but despite re-
current requests, he had never received the coveted copy. Muggeridge shrugged
him off by saying that he had already transferred the evidence to London.
Oastler’s initial request was rejected, rather obliquely, “because no proceed-
ings were taken, or are at present intended to be taken upon that evidence.”69 His
second letter assumed his recognizable caustic style, accusing government of dis-
honesty, fraud, breach of contract, and robbing him of his own testimony. Evi-
dently, the Home Office’s reluctance was due to content of the testimony that
verged on incitement to rebellion. Talking to Muggeridge, Oastler had chal-
lenged the new poor law, calling it “treason.” It was the duty of every man to re-
sist the orders of poor-law officials, he asserted, declaring that if someone would
hold his wife hostage for parish relief, he would kill that man. He attacked the
employment of the army and the police to suppress the people and, to add im-
petus to his words, showed Muggeridge a dagger of the kind sold in Hudders-
field shops. Muggeridge proposed that Oastler send one such weapon to Lord Rus-
sell and even gave him money for that purpose. (Oastler probably recounted that
episode to demonstrate that despite Muggeridge’s desire not be seen as a spy, the
assistant commissioner was a provocateur.) “Why withhold from me the words
in which I have stated these things to the Government? Why refuse me that
which is mine?”70
Why did Oastler need a copy of a testimony whose content he remembered
quite well? His correspondence with the Home Office was clearly defiant. Did he
wish to provoke government to put him on trial over what he said in a formal in-
terview with a royal commissioner? Or, conversely, did he hope to protect him-
self from prosecution? After all, he was helping government conduct an investi-
gation. One way or another, he certainly wanted to publish these words as coming
directly from the official record, to have the opportunity to quote himself from
a royal commission’s transcript. Since Muggeridge told him explicitly that his tes-
timony was very important, Oastler maintained that, “If any information which
I could give were ‘important’ to the Government, it must have been equally so to
the people, and the reason was then strong why I should not be cheated out of the
copy.”71 The request obviously confused the Home Office. An official scribbled
on Oastler’s letter that his words were indeed inciting and dangerous but that a
greater harm might be incurred if Muggeridge would not follow through on his
promise.

Of the several methods of appropriating state publications that we have ex-

amined, the first focused on reframing a report. Thus, the Society for the Aboli-
 202 The Culture of the Social Fact

tion of Slavery republished both houses’ accounts on the West Indies slavery in
a heavily edited form surrounded by discursive footnotes that dragged the text in
a different direction. Reviewing government documents in the context of differ-
ent social reports, literary descriptions, and other texts—as was the practice in
the periodical press—also reframed or recontextualized government documents,
although often in a more politically benign manner. It was more common sim-
ply to chip off bits of authentic evidence and redeploy them. These takeovers are
inherently different from tactics of direct contestation, such as criticism of in-
vestigative procedures, challenge of specific evidence (as well as other issues of
accuracy and truthfulness), or attack on policy recommendations. Appropriation
implies an agreement between the aggressor and the victim over the funda-
mental veracity of the print archive as a repository of facts—however defined.
A second form of appropriation was the attempt to commandeer reports (or
particular evidence) for the purpose of self-representation, or in Oastler’s case,
by quoting oneself from the printed page and therefore speaking of one’s own
opinion as a “fact.” (The social investigator also quotes himself from the hand-
written page of his field journals and thus articulates himself as a fact.) We
should also consider less aggressive acts of appropriation such as the miners’ oc-
casional embrace of Tremenheere’s reports as their own. This particular gesture
was politically ambiguous and could be emblematic of relinquished agency. Nev-
ertheless, it allowed miners to select which documents represented them and
which did not, and also to partake in making government reports more “repre-
sentative.” A call to remedy misrepresentation has a different resonance than a
mere challenge to the truthfulness or accuracy of government-disseminated in-
formation. Such a demand presupposes that it is incumbent upon the state to fa-
cilitate this particular form of representation.
The same semantic and material properties of information in blue books that
were guaranteed by the power of the state, the prestige of the monarch, and, as
importantly, the conventions of committing authentic facts to print—also ren-
dered the report an easier target for looting. Paradoxically, at the conclusion of
the investigative sequence, when the scenes and the subjects of inquiry were fi-
nally objectified—captured in a book—the attributes of the report as a printed
text sustained by the “order of books” resulted in a loss of control by the text’s
individual and institutional authors. Unlike de Certeau’s idea of “reading as
poaching,” these particular acts of theft were decisive and preconceived. Admit-
tedly, these were rather modest gestures of resistance or opposition. In Oastler’s
case—one steals what one already has (or steals from a thief ) but of course quot-
ing oneself from the royal commission’s record endowed the individual with a
 Facts Speak for Themselves 203

different voice. Quotation marks are a means to extract text out of context, to dis-
place it and consequently to allow its continual movement, or in Jacques Der-
rida’s words, “put between quotation marks [the iterable sign] can break with
every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which
is absolutely illimitable.”72 This perpetual movement was also an aspect of the
nineteenth-century traffic in social facts. Most importantly, the authentic fact in
the social report, separated by quotation marks of many kinds (in the Employ-
ment of Children Commission report these were different fonts) is already out
of context and coexists in some friction with the rest of the text (as in the case
of Sarah Limer’s signature). Blue books’ susceptibility to appropriation—as well
as to the modes of interrogation and interpretation to which all texts are vul-
nerable—was an essential feature of print statism and the exchange relations
between government and its reading subjects.
 chapter six

Can Freedmen Be Citizens?

“The nation is suddenly called to preside at the birth of a race. Such a crisis—
‘a nation born in a day’—devolves upon rulers and people grave responsibili-
ties.”1 These dramatic lines, proclaiming another “primal scene” in American
history, opened a petition submitted by the Boston Emancipation League to Con-
gress in late 1862. The league proposed the creation of an emancipation bureau
to accumulate information about and devise policies for the newly freed slaves,
many of whom had already congregated behind Union lines. In March 1863, fol-
lowing the emancipation proclamation, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ap-
pointed Robert Dale Owen, Samuel Gridley Howe, and James McKaye to serve
as the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission to investigate “the condition
of the [emancipated] colored population . . . and to report what measures will
best contribute to their protection and improvement . . . and, also how they can
be most carefully employed . . . for the suppression of the rebellion.”2
By this phase of the war, government was facing a true emergency—the
pressing need to manage the mushrooming refugee camps, to find some em-
ployment for former slaves, and to guarantee their well-being. Even though the
end of the war was not yet in sight, a debate on the nature of future racial
arrangements was already brewing. The Emancipation Proclamation (and later
the Thirteenth Amendment) sealed the fate of slavery but not that of the former
slave. While bondage as a social institution was doomed, the future status of
southern freedmen and free blacks everywhere remained unclear. Should they
be equal members of society? Could they become full citizens? For contempo-
raries it was evident that the answers to these questions would have consequences
far beyond the American South. The parameters of public debate were reshaped
to address these and other issues that emanated from the war. For one, govern-
ment that previously had been silent on the question of slavery targeted the for-
mer Confederate states with new fact-finding tools. The circumstances of the
Civil War generated a substantial economy of information on the South and
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 205

freedmen distinct from previous abolitionist efforts to garner facts about slaves
and plantations.
The American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC) has been long recog-
nized as the author of “a blueprint for radical reconstruction.”3 The commission’s
political influence was admittedly modest, but its reports were the first to articu-
late principles and propose programs that foreshadowed most of the innovations
of later years, including the creation of a Freedmen’s Bureau, full citizenship for
African Americans, an irrevocable prohibition of slavery, and the enlistment of
300,000 black soldiers. As importantly, the AFIC was the first federal body to offi-
cially interview slaves and former slaves. By giving voice to those who had been
barred from public testimony, the commission baptized them as participants in
public exchange or even as citizens, in the most expansive sense of the term.
The birth of a race and of a nation as a question of knowledge and a subject
of state-sponsored investigation is the focus of this chapter. The AFIC’s work was
symptomatic (and symbolic) of a particular historical moment when the slaves
moved away from their masters’ gaze to become instead a domain of knowledge
and activity for the state. In addition to policy recommendations, the three mem-
bers of the commission endeavored to provide a synoptic view of the history, pre-
sent condition, and future of blacks in the United States, triggering a long and
ambiguous history of federal attempts to address the predicament of race. At that
juncture, northern attention was turning its focus from the master’s whip and the
slave’s lacerated back to the “Negro-subject” himself—his aptitude, character,
and ability to participate in the market and the polity. The following discussion
explores the commission’s fieldwork in search of black subjectivity, its selection
of evidence, the subsequent reports, and their conceptual foundation. The rela-
tionship between social knowledge and the state is also examined. The appoint-
ment of the three-member panel appears to signify the proclivity of the modern
state to enlist knowledge or science to define, create, or capture a new group of
subjects as under its care and supervision. However, this model, which is often
associated with the early works of Foucault, does not account for the peculiari-
ties of our historical episode. As we shall see, science, mostly in the form of racial
doctrines including refined racial typologies, was introduced into the project
as an argument against protracted government intervention. It was an expres-
sion of strong ambivalence toward the state. Correspondingly, the commission
warned against zealotry on the part of government and philanthropists in Howe’s
famous words: “The white man has tried taking care of the Negro, by slavery, by
apprenticeship, by colonization, and has failed disastrously in all; now let the Ne-
gro try to take care of himself.”4
 206 The Culture of the Social Fact

The exigencies of war originated new forms of social imagination; most sig-
nificantly, perhaps, they encouraged Americans to think of themselves as a soci-
ety. In the case of the AFIC, the scale of the project prompted Owen, Howe, and
McKaye to express their respective views concerning the nature of American
democracy and to situate the United States among a host of European and New
World nations that grappled with slavery and its aftermath. This panel’s reports
challenged the prevailing notion that by the superiority of its timeless institu-
tions the United States escaped the social and political turmoil that befell the rest
of the world, especially Europe, a position often labeled “American exceptional-
ism.” In contrast to the ahistorical character of the exceptionalist stance, the
AFIC offered a decidedly historicist view of U.S. society. It held that institutions
and human nature are produced under particular sociopolitical circumstances
and are, therefore, changeable and changing, hence, the birth of a new nation
and of a new black subjectivity.
How could the commission substantiate its principles and recommendations
by empirical research? Indeed, in the course of their investigation the three com-
missioners faced obstacles directly tied to the magnitude of the issues under con-
sideration, the size of the terrain, and the lack of institutional experience. Yet,
there were even greater problems of knowledge that overwhelmed this and sim-
ilar attempts to study the freedmen. First was the subject of the inquiry itself.
What can we know about four million people in the midst of a momentous tran-
sition? What would qualify as an adequate body of knowledge on freedmen? The
abolitionist Edward Pierce, who at the time supervised the educational experi-
ment in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, conceded that before granting former
slaves full freedom and political rights their ability to sustain themselves should
be gauged. However, he argued: “The slave is unknown to all, even to himself, while
the bondage lasts . . . Not even Tocqueville or Olmsted, much less the master, can
measure the capacities and possibilities of the slave, until the slave himself is
transmuted to a man.”5 Herein lies the paradox: an a priori demonstration of the
slave’s full potential to be a member of society was deemed concurrently imper-
ative and unattainable. The demand for empirical observation (originating with
the freedmen’s “friends,” the abolitionists) was by itself bound to cast doubts on
the former slaves’ competence. To complicate matters, unlike other social prob-
lems such as slums, child labor, and asylums, the institution of slavery had not
produced any widely accepted group of experts or types of expertise. Intertwined
with the lack of experts was the predicament of discourse: What was the proper
conceptual apparatus to investigate African American freedmen and free men,
and what was the proper language to describe their condition and their past? The
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 207

Fleeing from Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s army during the Second Bull Run Campaign,
fugitive African Americans ford the Rappahannock River. During the early years of the Civil
War, slaves fled in great numbers beyond Union lines, raising enormous logistical problems for
the federal government. (Rappahannock, Virginia, August 1862, Timothy H. O’Sullivan,
photographer, Library of Congress)

commission was asked to study a practical organizational question. It viewed the

trajectory from unfree to free labor as the essence of the freedmen question.
However, the panel was soon tempted to search for knowledge about, to imagine,
and to theorize racial difference. Howe in particular seemed almost tantalized by
the explanatory might of racialism. Social discourse organized around labor re-
lations and racial discourse based on supposedly natural traits competed through-
out the larger public debate over the destiny of the former slaves.

Imagining the State

During the war and Reconstruction, the federal state was also an object of
imagination and invention. By creating the AFIC, the administration emulated,
or, imagined itself to be, a Europeanlike state. There was little precedent for such
an enterprise in the United States. The Sanitary Commission, born at the outset
of the Civil War as a semiofficial body (also labeled a commission of inquiry) to
 208 The Culture of the Social Fact

oversee civilian efforts at maintaining the well-being of Union soldiers, did not
sit squarely with the administration. Lincoln famously referred to it as “the fifth
wheel on my wagon.” Like the Sanitary Commission, which was modeled on the
experience of Britain and France during the Crimean War (1854 – 56), the
AFIC’s roots in European bureaucratic culture could be traced to the precedent
set by these two powers when they decided to set their slaves free. The British
Parliament investigated slavery from the 1780s to the 1830s, as did the Broglie
Commission in France (1840–43), of which Alexis de Tocqueville was a mem-
ber. Both U.S. projects were supported by a coterie of northeastern reformers for
whom the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner functioned as a nonofficial rep-
resentative in Congress. The Civil War allowed the cause of science—which had
lost a great friend and much clout when John Quincy Adams left the White
House more than thirty years earlier—to gain a degree of power, albeit limited
and temporary, in national affairs. The National Academy of Science began op-
erating in 1863 as an advisory board, and Sumner toyed with the idea of found-
ing an academy for literature and an academy for the social sciences.6
Instituting the commission, the administration wished to give an aura of sci-
entific impartiality to its attempt to master a charged debate. In this regard, the
cabinet needed knowledge to sway public opinion, and government supplanted
abolitionists in authoring emancipationist propaganda. (Incessant efforts to con-
trol the news typified the administration’s wartime information policy.) Howe, a
friend of Sumner, had argued earlier in the war, “We must be able to furnish . . .
as early as possible as general and reliable coup d’oeil of the actual condition of
those who are actually out of the house of bondage, their wants and their capac-
ities. We must collect facts and use them as ammunition.”7 Sumner subsequently
employed the panel’s work to push Lincoln’s administration further on the road
toward emancipation. The Massachusetts senator was deeply involved in estab-
lishing the commission, selecting its personnel, and delineating its course of ac-
tion.
He and Stanton staffed the panel with friends of the administration who also
had some experience in social welfare and in authoring or publishing propa-
ganda. Born in Glasgow, Robert Dale Owen (1801–77) was the son of the utopian
reformer Robert Owen of the New Lanark fame. In the 1820s and 1830s, he
championed the Owenite New Harmony colony in Indiana, labor unions, and
women’s rights. He later cultivated a conventional political career in the Demo-
cratic Party, serving in Congress (1843 – 47), where he was a vocal advocate for
“manifest destiny.” But when the Civil War broke out, Owen harnessed himself
to the cause of the Union. He produced a string of pamphlets in which he de-
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 209

veloped the legal argument for emancipation, maintaining that international law
invested government with the power to seize enemy property. Owen’s colleague,
Samuel Gridley Howe (1801–76) was a physician, a founder of institutions for
the blind and the deaf, and a member of a diligent Boston-based reform clique.
In the 1840s, he chaired the Boston vigilance committee and later supported the
antislavery campaign in Kansas, including John Brown’s escapades. Howe would
remain vague as to his prior knowledge of Brown’s plans for an armed action in
Virginia, and following the raid on Harper’s Ferry (1859), he was forced to flee
to Canada. Least prominent among the three, Col. James McKaye (1805– 88) was
a New York land developer who sponsored the Loyal Publication Society that cir-
culated pro-Union tracts during the war.
The commissioners ardently supported emancipation, yet none of them was
associated with the radical Garrisonian camp within the antislavery movement.
This was not merely a matter of nuance. Several notable abolitionists, who by
1863 acquired direct experience working with freedmen, were clearly shunned.8
Of the commissioners, Owen had the most ambiguous personal history regard-
ing blacks. Although he was a spirited emancipationist when the war began, it
did not escape abolitionist memory that in the late 1840s he had been responsi-
ble for phrasing the exclusionary clause in Indiana’s constitution that barred
blacks from settling in the state.

In the Field
Authorized to conduct investigations wherever they deemed necessary “in or-
der to obtain on the spot . . . authentic information,” the commissioners were
awarded the assistance of a secretary and a stenographer, limited access to gov-
ernment documents, a per diem of eight dollars a day, and the equivalent of the
expenses of a colonel in the cavalry. During the first few months, the commis-
sioners visited the seaboard states, often separating to comb a larger terrain, from
Baltimore and Washington to Fortress Monroe and Port Royal. Later, after the
submission of the interim report, the panel traversed the western department,
inspecting camps and interviewing local politicians, army officers, black soldiers,
journalists, and charity workers. Despite their long contact with slaves, masters
were not considered credible for testimony except in those rare cases when their
remarks might advance the commission’s views. A slave owner from Nashville
told the AFIC that her seven slaves were “devotedly attached to me; but still,
there is the desire for freedom, which you know is very desirable to all.”9
In the field, a stenographer recorded evidence with all the trappings of an offi-
 210 The Culture of the Social Fact

cial undertaking. Slave interviews epitomized the commission’s double mission,

documenting the past—slavery and its atrocities—and acquiring information to
justify future racial policies. In South Carolina, Solomon Bradley, a twenty-
seven-year-old soldier, recounted an incident in which a woman was brutally
flogged and then tortured with hot wax merely because she had burned the edges
of her owner’s breakfast waffles. Robert Smalls, a pilot who, at the outbreak of
hostilities, had run a steamer called the Planter out of Charleston Harbor (and
during Reconstruction would become a U.S. congressman), volunteered infor-
mation on a particularly foul form of collective punishment: slaves were put in
stocks above each other and left to defecate.10
The black family and uncertainty over its resilience, demise, or complete ab-
sence was another theme in these interviews. Many of the questions scrutinized
females’ sexual appetite: “Have not colored women a good deal of sexual pas-
sion? . . . What proportion of the young women do not have sexual intercourse
before marriage?”11 The commissioners wanted to know the condition under
which marital (or mock-marital) relations could be sustained or terminated, how
family names were assigned, what labels such as family or parent meant, and how
obedient children were to their elders. Even when the topic of conversation
turned to the organization of the workday on the plantation, interviewers probed
the possibility of domesticity under harsh conditions. They asked Harry McMil-
lan, a field hand, whether during labor food was consumed in a family setting.
The interviewers also solicited responses to a range of black stereotypes. Do “col-
ored people” tell the truth? Do they keep their promises? Stature of manhood
was also assessed. “Suppose a boy is struck by another boy what does he do?”
McMillan replied: “I would tell my boy to strike back and defend himself.” He
further maintained that government should give each family four or five acres
of land. Freedmen would rather own land than work for wages.
Owen conducted surprise visits to African American dwellings in Louisville,
Kentucky. After calling on a slave woman, he wrote, “I found her in a room tidily
kept and herself decently dressed.”12 In Kentucky the commissioners met
William H. Howard, a former slave who had been allowed to hire away his labor.
Howard purchased himself and later his future wife, whom he sent to Oberlin
College. The commissioners remarked: “This man’s house was exceedingly
pretty; it was well furnished, and had a piano.” Similarly, in Canada, Howe was
careful to meet his informants in their native surrounding—their shops, farms,
and private homes. Following a core tactic of Victorian social reportage, he ven-
tured to establish a continuum between “decencies of life” manifested in the do-
mestic space and human character, thus evaluating his subjects metonymically
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 211

through their meticulously observed domestic environment. He was later satis-

fied to report, “Cooking, eating, and sleeping, are not done in the same room . . .
[The rooms] are tidily furnished.” Traveling in the American South, the com-
missioners sporadically recorded fragments of black culture: “Under such a slave
system as this,” they wrote, “the iron enters deep into the soul. Popular songs are
the expression of the inner life: and the Negro songs of South Carolina are . . .
plaintive, despondent and religious.”13 To extend its reach the panel dispatched
two lengthy questionnaires. One, containing forty-two questions on the condition
of the contrabands’ (as the slaves that escaped to the Union lines were labeled)
camps and the performance of black soldiers, they dispatched to army officers
and treasury agents. The other survey canvassed clergymen and local surgeons
on the free blacks in the North.14 A Philadelphian, Benjamin P. Hunt, lent Owen
his enormous collection of books and foreign reports on all aspects of slavery.
Howe collected statistical charts and received substantial assistance from the
Boston physician and statistician Edward Jarvis. In its New York City Second Av-
enue headquarters, the commission received letters from office seekers, busi-
nessmen who promoted fantastical schemes to exploit the newly available work-
force, and many others who simply wanted to voice an opinion.
The AFIC customarily operated on the fine line between private enterprise
and public duty, expert advocacy and political engagement. Its correspondence
indicated how novel and peculiar for American public culture was such an offi-
cial inquiry by “experts.” It also exposed minor divisions of opinion and friction
among the members of the commission. As early as May it appeared that the
panel’s work was susceptible to long delays, in part because the three com-
missioners had overriding obligations. Writing from Norfolk, Virginia, Howe
claimed, “The more we see and reflect the more important and difficult our task
appears.”15 One unforeseen problem lay with the army’s ill treatment of former
slaves, which undermined the cause of emancipation and the commission’s own
proposals. After extensive fieldwork the commission was able to complete by late
June 1863 a preliminary report in which it advocated a division of the Confed-
erate seaboard states into three departments, each controlled by a superinten-
dent, and each further divided into smaller units of about five thousand freed-
men. Former slaves would work, under supervision, on abandoned plantations in
order to prepare themselves for freedom.
After the publication of the first report, the AFIC’s funds were running out
and the administration’s attention seemed to slip away. Howe even suggested
working for another three months without pay. The commissioners received an
additional grant from Stanton but, nonetheless, by early 1864, a greater tone of
 212 The Culture of the Social Fact

desperation was creeping into their letters. They reminded Sumner that the
French commission spent three years studying the issue of emancipating a quar-
ter of a million slaves during a time of peace. McKaye, traveling on his own re-
sources, conducted the last field trip of the commission. By then the commis-
sioners felt that they had lost some of Secretary Stanton’s support, a dissonance
that would become clearer when the commissioners contemplated publishing
their findings. To their great chagrin, McKaye and Howe had to publish their
supplementary reports on field trips they carried out in Canada and Louisiana,
respectively, without federal support. Owen submitted a final report in May 1864.

Estrangement
In view of this immense effort, it is rather surprising how little fresh infor-
mation was incorporated into the two official reports. Owen wrote a lengthy his-
torical survey of slavery in the western hemisphere that was rich in statistical
and discursive data culled from British parliamentary documents and similar
sources. The segment on U.S. slavery and its aftermath was, however, rather
sparse in comparison. In their respective reports, the commissioners duly em-
phasized their fieldwork. Howe, for example, inserted an on-the-spot diary entry
of a full day’s journey to the refugees’ communities. But this type of firsthand
knowledge only exemplified how contingent was their experience upon the
specific routes they took. Rather comically, some of Howe’s most revealing anec-
dotes were recorded in hotel lobbies where he watched a multiracial staff inter-
act. Field interviews yielded abundant details that revealed, for example, the vul-
nerability of the contrabands to abuse. Yet, in 1863 – 64 the specific conditions of
former slaves were hard to capture and subject to rapid change. The elaborate
questionnaires, in particular, produced a clutter of prejudice and confusion, con-
tradictory responses that were practically useless.
For additional evidence on slavery, Owen turned to a foreigner’s testimony, the
just-published account by the English actress Fanny Kemble on her residence on
a Georgia plantation in the late 1830s. The U.S. press deemed Kemble’s observa-
tions particularly credible due to the author’s reliance on her actual daily diary.
Moreover, she was a bystander who had arrived in the South incidentally (due to
marriage), remaining for a substantial span of time on a sizable (700 slaves) plan-
tation. Kemble enjoyed unique access, especially to the lives of female slaves. A
reviewer in the Atlantic Monthly remarked that defenders of slavery could not
dismiss her account as a collection of haphazardly garnered facts representing
the worst of slavery as had been the fate of other famous accounts about slavery,
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 213

like Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1850s travelogues, Theodore Weld’s American

Slavery As It Is (1839), or even Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A few
southern apologists cleverly rejected the latter as a conceivably true and yet ut-
terly unrepresentative story. “Indeed,” the reviewer recalled, “the most cruel and
necessary incidents, the hunting with blood-hounds, the branding, the maiming,
the roasting, the whipping of pregnant women, could not be kept from knowl-
edge. They blazed into print. But the public, hundreds of miles away, while it
sighed and shuddered a little, resolved that such atrocities were exceptional.
’Twas a shocking pity, to be sure! Poor Things! Women, too! Tut, tut!”16 The co-
existence of public thirst for such sensational narratives and public skepticism
toward the representational value of those anecdotes concerned the panel. The
AFIC toiled hard, with meager results, to break away from the anecdotal mode.
Furthermore, in his final report Owen ignored thirty years or more of aboli-
tionist and proslavery publicity. In this phase of the conflict, perhaps as a corol-
lary of the “birth of a nation,” the South was conceived to be in need of com-
plete rediscovery. As the Philadelphia Dial declared: “To thousands of people in
the North, the interior of the southern states is as much a terra incognita as the
interior of unexplored Africa. We are learning, just now, its social features in a
rapid rate.”17 A New York Times reporter enthused following McKaye’s visit to
the Sea Islands, “Facts were revealed by the investigation respecting these peo-
ple—concerning their mode of life, their habits of thought, and the strong
under-current of their former unhappy existence—of which I was entirely ig-
norant.”18 The Times’ melodramatic report reiterated facts exceedingly familiar
to readers of old abolitionist literature.
The condition of war, when society was in incredible flux, hindered investi-
gation. Typically, the commissioners considered it expedient to register all freed-
men, including “a description of the person, so as to insure identification, if pos-
sible, throughout life . . . It should be stated to each . . . that he must not alter [his
name] hereafter . . . He should be made to understand that aliases are not per-
mitted among freemen.”19 This proposal betrayed a sense of frustration leading
them to conflate freedom with social control. In Canada, Howe found that one
feature of racial freedom was to remain outside any systematic observation. It
was almost impossible to acquire pertinent statistics because the Canadian gov-
ernment did not recognize the category of color, and official records failed to note
racial distinctions except for on prison returns. Howe had to spend long hours pe-
rusing town records so he could assess the volume of taxes paid by different racial
groups.
The transient quality of the field of inquiry—the impracticality of a fixed,
 214 The Culture of the Social Fact

exhaustive overview of slavery’s aftermath—prompted the commissioners to fo-

cus on discrete case studies whether at home or abroad. One location that sug-
gested itself for such scrutiny was the Sea Islands, of which a few accounts al-
ready reached the public. The emancipation of slaves in Jamaica and other
corners of the Caribbean offered other possibilities. However, the commission
had to sacrifice early plans to visit the West Indies for lack of time and support.
Specific choices for comparison had ideological strings attached. For instance, in-
terposing the abolition of Russian serfdom (1861) into the American debate im-
plied that labor relations rather than race were at issue. There were similar fea-
tures to both national undertakings, such as the reported thirst of freedmen for
education and the respective efforts to create intermediary vehicles to train in-
dividuals for participation in society (military service and wage work for former
slaves in America, new municipal institutions in Russia). In a banquet for Rus-
sian naval officers, Mayor Frederick Lincoln Jr. of Boston remarked that Amer-
ica and Russia were both progressive nations embracing the liberal cause of ele-
vating the “great mass of the people.” The irony of the United States following
in the footsteps of a czarist regime escaped neither abolitionists nor friends of the
Confederacy.20
Looking sideways to the experience of other nations and continents was com-
mon in numerous pamphlets and tracts that circulated during the war and Re-
construction to halt the course of black emancipation. Favorite among these was
the attempt to brand the West Indies departure from slavery a failure. Other com-
parisons included various “mongrel” populations south of the United States or
in Asia, in an effort to demonstrate that racial hybridity spelled degradation and
lowliness. From either political perspective, the proclivity of Americans to in-
dulge in comparisons with ancient and modern nations was not new. To the con-
trary, it had been at the core of the U.S. sense of difference founded on a blend
of self-confidence and insecurity. Visiting Union and Confederate states at the
beginning of the war, the English journalist William Howard Russell remarked,
“The nation is like a growing lad who is constantly testing his powers in compe-
tition with his elders.”21
An often alluded-to point of reference, more directed at the dangers of the
future, was the caste system in India. Mary Putnam, to give a different example,
conjured in her anonymously published, antislavery Record of an Obscure Man
(1861) an imaginary African hinterland—republics and kingdoms of great so-
phistication and achievements—remarkably different from the African coast. At
the same time, she problematized the very possibility of cross-cultural evalua-
tion, incorporating into her text old travelers’ accounts in which England, France,
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 215

and parts of the United States were depicted as filthy dens of barbarity. Making
Africa strangely familiar while estranging Europe and white America demon-
strated the power of the comparative effort to alter judgments by shaking estab-
lished cognitive anchors.22
By introducing the unexpected into a routine political debate, comparisons of
the kind suggested by Putnam operated as a rhetorical contrivance that could be
especially effective in a society accustomed to perceiving itself comparatively by
borrowing from the experience, history, and political idioms of other nations. In
nineteenth-century literature, estrangement was a strategy to concurrently con-
jure and critique social reality. A famous example is Charles Dickens’s portrayal
at the beginning of Hard Times of the radically industrialized Coketown as a
man-made jungle populated with mechanical elephants and serpent-billowing
smokestacks, a jungle that mass-produced subjectivity-deprived, identical human
beings. Dickens’s depiction was commensurable with his profound doubt about
the feasibility (let alone desirability) of straightforward factual accounts of hu-
man society. Hard Times after all is a frontal attack on the cult of the fact. Taken
to the extreme, the novelist warned, the cult of facts would lead to “a board of
fact composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people
of fact, and of nothing but fact.”23 Western explorers’ employment of techniques
of estrangement (see chapter 3) also betrayed a strong desire to transcend mere
description (or mirroring efforts) and with it implied skepticism about the power
of inventories of facts to represent the truth of the West.
Historian Carlo Ginzburg (following the formalist Victor Shklovsky) recently
called attention to the subversive might of estrangement as a device for disman-
tling customary forms of perception in, for instance, history writing or the arts.
Exposing the strange, unfamiliar features of the ordinary in order to launch a so-
cial critique (e.g., Stoics describing sexual intercourse as a repulsive convulsion
of muscles) is one model of the estrangement effect. Another form relies on pre-
serving undiluted appearances against the taint and intrusion of superimposed
intellectual notions. Marcel Proust’s memory of his grandmother presenting ob-
jects in the order of their perception rather than according to their causal rela-
tions is a fine example. All Proustian prose is thick with estrangement of this
sort. In contrast to Ginzburg’s view, estrangement can perform diverse political
work. It may problematize fixed notions, but, alternatively, it has the capacity of
normalizing an idea or a principle of difference by demonstrating its previously
undetected relations to what is familiar and safe. (The example of Coketown and
other attempts to link industrialized Britain to equatorial Africa is double-edged,
concurrently promoting anticapitalism and racialism.)
 216 The Culture of the Social Fact

Statistical representation, which endowed the comparative imagination with

a new medium, also possesses an incredible capacity for estrangement. In the
early decades of the nineteenth century, it fascinated not just reformers but also
enthusiasts who made the accumulation of figures a weekend pastime. Numbers
could describe the familiar world in surprising and playful new ways: How many
people cross London Bridge every day? How many umbrellas are owned in New
York as against Boston? If we position all inhabitants of Philadelphia in a line
next to each other, how many times will the line circle the globe?
Statistics can also estrange ordinary phenomena by offering unforeseen se-
quences not terribly different from those offered by Proust’s memorable grand-
mother. Arranging the world by numbers, by volume, or by size establishes new
affinities that transcend causal relations. To give an example from a segment of
the commission’s final report, Owen puts at three million the number of slaves
that died while crossing the Atlantic. He reminds the reader that three million
was the population of the thirteen colonies on the eve of the 1776 Revolution.
He also computes—rather speculates—that the number of Africans who were
taken as slaves was thirty-one million, which happened to be the size of the U.S.
population in the mid-1860s. Contingent similarity (or identity) of size thus be-
comes meaningful by facilitating a new kinship, which Owen then presented to
American readers in the language of numbers so they could imagine an affinity
with the victims of slavery.24

Army Life
Attempts to find secluded settings and populations of African Americans for
purposes of laboratorylike study began in the antebellum period. For example,
Francis Lieber, an early political scientist, sent circular forms to prison wardens
on the obviously questionable assumption that in confinement blacks and whites
were subjected to equal treatment and, therefore, could be more accurately com-
pared. (In contrast, southern apologists employed prison statistics to demonstrate
the alleged degraded state of blacks in the North.) During the war, the military
provided the setting for racial study and comparison. Army commanders re-
corded racial differences in camp life as well as under the pressure of battle. One
general informed the commission that in an emergency, blacks, who had been
accustomed to congregate against master or overseer, ran toward each other while
white soldiers tended to disperse “each to himself and God for us all.”25
Writing for the Atlantic Monthly on his command of black troops, Col.
Thomas W. Higginson remarked that friends and foes subjected his First South
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 217

Carolina regiment to “microscopic scrutiny.” The officers were surprised at how

the smallest incidents in camp would come back to them “magnified and dis-
torted” through letters of inquiry from all parts of the country. It was quite clear
that the faintest sign of a coming breakdown—mutiny, mass desertion, riot—
would bring an end to their experiment. Higginson’s magazine articles were su-
ffused with estrangement trickery, for the reformer-turned-officer was a keen so-
cial investigator. As he testified, “I was colonel by day and an observer of Negro
life by night.”26 In the manner of Shakespeare’s Henry V (or Higginson’s con-
temporary, the British statesman and voyeur William Gladstone), he walked
around camp incognito not only to check the sentinels but also to study his troops.
Higginson acknowledged a barrier to whites’ ability to know blacks, a mask that
needed to be cunningly removed. He admired his soldiers’ courage and discipline
but condescendingly found them innocent, intuitive, and primitive. “A simple
and lovable people, whose graces seem to come by nature, and whose vices by
training.”27 Surrounded by former slaves in the unfamiliar nature of the South,
he was perpetually transported elsewhere, to the Middle East, the Pacific Islands,
and other exotic localities. “In all pleasant weather the outer ‘fly’ is open, and
men pass and repass, a chattering throng. I think of Emerson’s Saadi, ‘as thou
sittest at the door, on the desert’s yellow floor,’—for these bare sand-plains, gray
above, are always yellow when upturned, and there seems a tinge of Orientalism
in all our life.”28
Black music allowed peering “inside,” into the soldiers’ souls. They could en-
dure everything, he noted, by the “other world trust,” which was the spirit of
their songs. They were excited when being watched singing and yet might sing
the same song repeatedly in all circumstances and places. “Their philosophising
is often the highest form of mysticism; and our dear surgeon declares that they
are all natural transcendentalists.”29 They were evangelizing their own chaplain,
he noted sardonically. Crossing the boundaries between white and black acquired
an erotic flavor when he admitted to enjoying watching his soldiers bathing. To
his “gymnasium-trained” eyes, their physiques appeared magnificent. “Such
splendid muscular development, set off by that smooth coating of adipose tissue
which makes them, like the South-Sea Islanders, appear even more muscular
than they are.”30
The remarkable power of single anecdotes to generate evidence on an entire
race is also apparent in Edward Pierce’s commentary on the circumstances in the
Sea Islands. He reported that soldiers in Colonel Higginson’s regiment gave him
seven hundred dollars out of their salaries to send to their wives—ostensibly a
propitious sign of strong family commitment. Black soldiers appeared capable of
 218 The Culture of the Social Fact

engaging in civic duties because early in the northern occupation of Hilton Head,
they initiated a collection to pay for candles for their evening meetings. They re-
portedly felt that they should not expect the government to supply them. An ob-
ject of careful watching, a whole case study to himself, was Harry, whom Pierce
referred to as “my faithful guide and attendant.” Harry (most likely, Harry
McMillan who was also interviewed at length by the AFIC) was an entrepreneur
in the making; a model for black resourcefulness. With his own money and a loan,
Harry purchased a small farm of 313 acres at a tax sale (a sale of land confiscated
by the federal government, which was often purchased by blacks). “The instinct
for land,” Pierce summarizes, “is one of the most conservative elements of our
nature; and a people who have it in any fair degree will never be nomads or
vagabonds.”31

Case Studies
Curiously, the commission’s choices for case studies followed the plot of Har-
riet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Perhaps inadvertent, it was
still symbolically potent because the novel had done more than any other text to
mold American culture’s conception of the geography and iconography of slav-
ery. Howe followed the mulatto George Harris to a community of runway slaves
in modern Ontario, and Colonel McKaye went after Uncle Tom himself down to
Louisiana. McKaye argued that the valley of the lower Mississippi was the most
useful site for observation, for, unlike in any other Confederate region, former
masters and slaves stayed put throughout the war. He titled his report “The Mas-
tership and its Fruits: The Emancipated Slave Face to Face with His Old Mas-
ter.” This mutual glance enabled McKaye to retell the horrors of slavery while
warning that, if given a chance, the master would regain hold of his bondsmen.
In a somber letter to Sumner, McKaye was more explicit: “Nothing is more pre-
posterous than to suppose that the hideous spirit of slavery is dead in the rebel
states . . . Give it the opportunity and under another name and form it will take
good care to perpetuate its power.”32
The singularity of Louisiana only enhanced its appeal as a field of study. The
free black population was well educated, intelligent, and orderly. Its presence and
the bands of runaway slaves that roamed the treacherous Mississippi swamps al-
tered the character of slavery in the region. These circumstances, he maintained,
encouraged slaves to contemplate freedom and their masters to resort to the rod.
The commission’s final report made much of Louisiana tax returns, which re-
vealed free blacks to have had more property, on average, than citizens in the
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 219

North, regardless of color. Black property ownership lent support to the con-
tention borrowed from the ideology of the American Revolution, “It would be . . .
a thing . . . repugnant to our system of government that four and a half million
of the governed . . . should remain permanently taxed and not represented.”33
As for the incredible stories about swamp-dwelling fugitives (one Mississippi ma-
roon was reported to have lived on top of a large cypress for three years), their
unique experience demonstrated their resourcefulness and supported a prevalent
notion that blacks possessed unique knowledge, unavailable to whites, of the
southern terrain. This expertise supposedly made them particularly suitable to
serve as spies and pathfinders for the Union.
Louisiana thus provided multiple opportunities for the exercise of the com-
parative imagination along lines of class and race. There were masters and slaves
but also a prosperous free black community and a deprived, uneducated group of
whites. McKaye was all too happy to label them “white trash.” Their backward-
ness undermined notions of racial superiority and could deflect attention from
the racial element of Reconstruction, since whites too were victims of slavery.
He could argue that his most radical plan, dismantling Louisiana’s feudal system
by dividing huge plantations, would benefit both racial groups. The difference
between poor whites and former slaves was most evident in their opposing atti-
tudes toward education. By the testimony of military officers, the emancipated
blacks were hungry for instruction, while low-class whites were universally
indifferent to self-improvement. The ethnic fabric of whites in Louisiana, a re-
gion marked by traces of a foreign culture and foreign blood, enabled McKaye to
establish the French aristocracy of the ancien regime as the historical counter-
part to the local master class. (The report’s allusion to “fruits” in its title, and the
juxtaposition of slaves and masters also implied biological relations.)
Owen too employed the device of bashing “white trash.” In an essay for the
New York Times, he questioned whether poor whites could handle political power
any better than blacks. Owen told an anecdote involving an ignorant and lazy
white man he had met in Nashville. “Is it in favor of such insolent swaggers that
we are to disfranchise the humble, quiet, hard-working Negro,”34 he asked. Such
scorn toward impoverished southern whites echoed the northern bias against
Irish immigrants. The presence of a white “third man” in either region helped
Owen and his colleagues to suggest a social geometry that mitigated the binary
opposition between blacks and whites in favor of a more nuanced socioracial sys-
tem in which whites and blacks as well as another race—the mulattoes—occu-
pied differing positions. Howe even implied that skin color was sometimes dic-
tated by one’s position on the social ladder. “If you ring your bell,” he recalled of
 220 The Culture of the Social Fact

his hotel experience in Canada, “the nimble mulatto . . . does not soil his dainty
fingers by bringing the coal which you ask for, but sends a stalwart fireman, a
traditionary white man, but so black and begrimed by coal, that in the South he
might need free papers to prove his lineage.” In Canada (as in Boston), Irish im-
migrants were constantly compared to runaway slaves. Colonel Stephenson of St.
Catherine’s told Howe that blacks acquired furniture while the Irish would not.
The Irish beg for money; blacks rely on themselves. Some of the anti-Irish prej-
udice actually originated with his black informants. Mrs. Brown, a “colored”
woman told him that, “They live like pigs, and worse than pigs. The colored peo-
ple can’t live, like the Irish, on potatoes and salt.”35
Howe attributed to his case study great demonstrative value. The black com-
munity in Canada-West (modern Ontario) represented the social mixture (in
terms of their relation to slavery) and the racial composition of blacks in Amer-
ica. In other words, it consisted of former slaves, children of slaves, and the de-
scendants of freemen, but also, he wrote, “They are in about the same propor-
tion of pure Africans, half-breeds, quarter-breeds, octoroons, and of others in
whom the dark shade grows fainter and fainter, until it lingers in the finger nails
alone.”36 Howe rejected the notion that the prosperous fugitives were an elite
among slaves. They earned a living, respected women, sent their children to
school, and improved in manners and morals not because they were “picked
men,” he posited, but because they were free men. Their remoteness from the
regions and the experience of slavery, he believed, also offered some guarantee
for the truthfulness of the evidence they provided. Their success was particularly
useful in his attack of the philanthropic ideal of guided freedom, either through
apprenticeship or through schemes of colonization. The runaway community in
Canada compared favorably with the Liberian experiment. In Canada, the exiles
arrived penniless and without aid to a cold and not entirely sympathetic place; as
for Liberia, great expense was involved in sending people across the ocean to a
hospitable climate and in supporting them for six months or more. Yet, the im-
migrants in Canada did stupendously well and those in Africa virtually failed un-
der the protective shield of white benevolence.
It was a historicist conception of society that Howe and his colleagues adopted
(a position rooted in a long abolitionist tradition). The slave and the master were
predominantly products of time-specific power relations. While accepting many
preconceived notions about the freedmen’s alleged vices, the official report con-
strued these behavior patterns as a result of slavery rather than of an inherently
lacking moral sense. This principle figured prominently in press accounts of the
preliminary report. The New York Herald, for example, highlighted the panel’s
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 221

point that slaves, having no property of their own, could not be expected to re-
spect others’ property. Needing to shield themselves from masters’ despotism,
they lied to avoid punishment. Unable to form marital relations by law, they were
sexually “incontinent.” Based on the opinion of “intelligent superintendents,”
the AFIC determined that these deficiencies could be easily eradicated by an ap-
peal to the slaves’ “self-respect” and by acknowledging their new rights. A sim-
ilar argument was leveled in the Final Report against Tocqueville’s view that the
republic was trapped in a racial vicious circle: whites would not abandon their
prejudice as long as blacks could not improve their lot, but as long as whites held
these opinions blacks could not advance. The commission responded: “The
whites have changed, and are still rapidly changing, their opinion of the Negro.
And the Negro, in his new condition as freedman, is himself, to some extent, a
changed being.”37
Despite this hopefulness, the commissioners could witness from their New
York offices the violence of the July 1863 draft riots. Howe’s account also had a
pessimistic streak. Equal rights in Canada did not eliminate bigotry. Whites there
were as hateful as their neighbors south of the border, maybe more so. He re-
marked pointedly, “As long as the colored people form a very small proportion of
the population, and are dependent, they receive protection and favors; but when
they increase, and compete with the laboring class for a living, and especially
when they begin to aspire to social equality, they cease to be ‘interesting Negroes’
and become ‘niggers.’”38 Howe became somewhat suspicious when his white in-
terlocutors kept boasting that Canadian law provided equal protection and that
public offices were as open to refugees as to others. The reiteration of these state-
ments only demonstrated that a simple principle of justice was not taken for
granted. One form of prejudice was keeping blacks off juries. Another was the
segregation of schools, occasionally encouraged by the immigrants themselves.
Prophetically, Howe predicted that schools would be the site of struggle over the
caste system in the United States.
Seeking to address the gap between constitutional equality as a guarantee of
American freedom and a civil society where prejudice runs rampant, Howe
turned to racial theory. While blacks were evidently a strong and vital race, ob-
served Howe, the mulattoes were merely a breed: morally solid but physically
weak, prone to a host of ailments, somewhat emasculated, and infertile. “Breeds
are produced, modified, and may be made to disappear, by social agencies . . . Differ-
ent kinds of colored men are demanded and the supply meets the demand. Slen-
der, light-built quadroons, or octoroons are wanted for domestic purposes; dark
and heavier men for the field. Black women are wanted for their strength and
 222 The Culture of the Social Fact

fruitfulness; yellow ones for their beauty and comparative barrenness.”39 Under
slavery, production and reproduction intersected. In the plantation, commercial
interests disturbed natural laws and violated domesticity. (He also maintained
that a disproportionate male to female ratio, as among the runaway slaves, en-
couraged amalgamation.)
Nevertheless, Howe speculated that in the social body, much as in the human
body, there is a “recuperative principle” that “brings men back to the normal
condition of the race.” Under freedom, members of the same race would obey
their “natural affinity,” which tends to purify the “national blood,” and marry
among themselves. Under freedom and obeying the laws of nature, the refugees
in Canada and the blacks in the northern United States would follow their in-
herent preferences to migrate below certain “thermal lines” back to the South.
The mulatto would eventually disappear, predicted Howe, unwittingly echoing a
similar projection (or expectation) about another race on the continent—the al-
legorical “vanishing Indian.” The report’s highly flawed statistical table pur-
ported to show that while in the South mortality rates were uniform across the
racial divide, in the North, blacks had lower life expectancy than whites. By
pointing to the mulatto’s supposedly weak constitution, the official report ex-
plained the unthinkable: in freedom the African race had fared worse than in the
slave states.40 Howe used his brand of racism to fend off fears about future floods
of cheap labor from the South as well as northern anxieties about miscegenation.
He was, therefore, using one prejudice to overcome another. An 1863 pamphlet
urging the Republican Party to embrace the cause of racial amalgamation in-
troduced the term miscegenation to public discourse. The publication turned out
to be a hoax perpetrated by two proslavery journalists.

Can They be Citizens?

Howe’s theories informed the commission’s vision of future racial harmony,
a vision that historian George Fredrickson has labeled “the most authoritative
and complete presentation” of what he termed “romantic racialism.”41 The
panel maintained that while sexual intercourse would be naturally inhibited, so-
cial intercourse should abound. In fact, blacks should be encouraged not to con-
gregate in separate communities but to intermingle with whites. Howe main-
tained that the proportion of blacks among whites should not exceed 5 to 7
percent if antagonism was to be avoided. This would “weaken the feeling which
regards them as a separate and alien race.”42 Racial hostility would diminish
without state intervention. Social amalgamation would give birth not to a new
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 223

breed but to an improved national character combining the masculine and fem-
inine traits of the two races.
Always the equivocator, Howe provided two explanations—one racial, the
other social—for many of the traits he identified among the refugees. To com-
bat the prejudice that former slaves shied away from hard work, he introduced
examples of blacks’ impressive commercial success. He conceded that, as he had
personally observed, Irish immigrants ordinarily performed heavy menial work.
He therefore proposed that the former slaves learned the way of the world and
preferred to avoid hard labor as most people would. Alternatively, the mulatto’s
frail “physical organization” and lack of “animal vigor” rendered him less ca-
pable of menial work. In a like manner, Howe explained blacks’ alleged propen-
sity for “cheerfulness” as a disposition for infantile mirth, which was either the
product of cultural modification initiated by the master class, which preferred
slaves to live in some protracted state of childhood, or a property of the black
mind rooted in physical constitution. He nevertheless noted that in Canada the
race appeared to have a more sober apparition; blacks also looked older to him.43
Howe conceived of ingenious ways to measure racial differences—most no-
tably to distinguish “pure” blacks and mulattoes, a distinction that had preoccu-
pied his thinking since the summer of 1863. He tried to inquire with insurance
companies in New York whether they insured slaves, assuming they might have
maintained a rate scale for different racial types or at least kept records of mor-
tality and death risks that would substantiate his speculations.44 He corresponded
over the fate of emancipated slaves in Indian tribes affiliated with the Confed-
eracy—another opportunity for appraising and refining racial hierarchy. Howe
appropriated many of his racial views from the Harvard naturalist Louis Agas-
siz, who warned against amalgamation, deeming it immoral and a recipe for na-
tional degeneration. Agassiz supported emancipation but opined that once the
moral taint of slavery was removed, science (represented by the physiologist and
the ethnographer) would enjoy free rein in determining policy towards blacks.
Freedmen should be assured legal equality, but social and especially political
equality would be checked.
Howe demurred. With an almost indignant tone, he responded to Agassiz that
the manifest rights of blacks included “entire freedom, equal rights and privi-
leges, and open competition for social distinctions” regardless of the conse-
quences, “though heavens fall.”45 There was a pervasive tension throughout
Howe’s work between reverence for scientific theories and his convictions that
there was only one just solution for the freedmen question. In a private letter
written while on tour in Canada, he spoke somewhat dismissively of his mission
 224 The Culture of the Social Fact

to study the capacity of blacks. “You know, our people demand proofs that two
and two make four in Africa as well as in Europe.”46
Commissioners raised pragmatic justifications for granting full citizenship to
former slaves. A point that Owen (and other observers) repeatedly hammered
was that the enfranchisement of African Americans would ensure forever the de-
feat of the Confederacy and the loyalty of the reconstructed South. Only a third
of the white population of the South was unreservedly loyal. This argument was
increasingly dominant in the late 1860s when renewed southern participation in
the electoral body threatened to jeopardize political causes dear to the citizens of
the North, such as the payment of the war-incurred national debt. Black fran-
chise became even more expedient in view of lingering anti-Union sentiments
in the South. The AFIC also found itself in agreement with Tocqueville, who had
predicted a rebellion if the slaves were emancipated but not granted full equal-
ity. “We cannot expect, in a democratic republic, to maintain domestic tranquil-
ity, if we deprive millions of their civil rights.”47
Most characteristically, the commission sought positive signs that former
slaves could indeed be upright members of society and the polity. The freedmen
satisfied the test of modern, middle-class subjectivity by their inclination to
marry and engage in domesticity as well as by their desire for education. The
AFIC’s reports attested to former slaves’ marketplace ability. In St. Louis during
the worst years of the war, only 2 out of 10,000 residents who applied for public
assistance were black, and both were severely debilitated. Other exemplary cases
of black self-reliance were of two Louisville, Kentucky, women who supported
their master by renting out their labor. Their stories of grappling simultaneously
with slavery and capitalism were particularly moving. However, despite the
strong demand to examine the former slaves’ market compatibility, the commis-
sioners harbored certain suspicions toward the market. Owen and McKaye in par-
ticular inserted into their reports enthusiastic passages for the rights of workers.
McKaye wrote, “It is the producing class . . . that under every form of civil gov-
ernment is most in danger of being made the victim of the leisure, capital, and
opportunities of the non-producing class.”48 The commission demanded to abol-
ish the practice of supplying freedmen working for government with goods in-
stead of paying their wages in full. The slaves’ earning capacity was understood
to be primarily a mark of personal autonomy complemented by a rich civic cul-
ture, manifested, for instance, in church organizations. Bonding citizenship with
independence and community resonated better with old republican ideals than
with an outright celebration of market forces.
In contrast, for Edward Pierce in the Sea Islands the marketplace assured
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 225

“harmony of interests among people of diverse origins and condition.”49 Unex-

pectedly, Pierce regarded consumerism and some degree of luxury to be an indi-
cation of masculinity. Consumption would guarantee the freedmen’s dedication
to labor once “four million people would become purchasers.” The instincts and
motives that were the economy’s engine—love of life, desire to be well clad and
nourished, and attachment to family—would overcome residual reluctance to
work. The market could also ameliorate bigotry. “Your Irishman, who now works
as a daylaborer, honestly thinks that he hates the Negro; but when the war is over,
he will have no objection to going South and selling him groceries and houseful
implements at fifty per cent advance on New York prices, or to hiring him to raise
cotton for twenty-five or fifty cent a day. Our prejudices, under any reasonable
adjustment of the social system, readily accommodate themselves to our inter-
ests, even without much aid from the moral sentiments.”50 This prediction was
another testament to the widespread wish that “natural” forces instead of pro-
longed intervention would settle the freedmen question.
One of the strongest arguments in favor of full citizenship pointed to a con-
ception of manhood outside the marketplace—the masculinity of the black sol-
dier. Rather than justifying citizenship in terms of deservedness—always the
moral asset of the weak—the AFIC would have the black soldiers virtually seize
it, as though by partaking in the Union’s military effort they simulated a grand
slave revolt. “The history of the world furnishes no example of an enslaved race
which won its freedom without exertion of its own,” declared the commission,
“and in such warfare it is fitting that the African race seeks its own social salva-
tion.”51 Military service, the report quoted Higginson as saying, was the great-
est school for freedom. The panel supported organizing and drilling military la-
borers into pseudo brigades with uniforms and badges around their hats labeled
United States Service. “It tends to inspire with self-reliance, and it affords them
protection.” They noted, entirely oblivious to the irony, that the law in the form
of military rule assumed for the black man the authority of his erstwhile mas-
ter, but “he submits to it cheerfully and without sense of degradation.”52
Owen maintained that there were no arguments against enfranchising Afri-
can Americans that could not be made against the principle of universal suffrage
itself. If Mary Putnam and Higginson suggested that because of a well-shielded
cultural interiority there were limitations to whites’ ability to know the slaves,
Owen argued that the slave’s tendency to hide his true opinion would be his pro-
tection against political manipulation. “Slavery had rendered him wary and sus-
picious. The habit of the slave is, while assenting to whatever his master says, se-
cretly to hold to his own opinion . . . I do not think the freedmen will be found a
 226 The Culture of the Social Fact

ready tool for the political demagogue.”53 Supporting evidence could be found
in the commission’s record. Asked whether masters knew everything there was
to know about their slaves, Robert Smalls replied “No, sir; one life they show their
masters and another life they don’t show.”54 The notion that the impenetrable
space of black culture and black selves guaranteed their independence in the po-
litical arena typified the problematic at the foundation of the commission’s re-
search: a certain failure in the ultimate effort to study and, therefore, to unmask
the black man was necessary to demonstrate his ability to be an equal member
in the polity.
Other observers, too, reevaluated the former slaves’ supposed deficiencies to
be assets in the polity. If freedmen where deemed too inexperienced and uned-
ucated for the vote, E. P. Whipple wrote, “We live in an era, in a strange condi-
tion in which it is the instincts of the ignorant that guaranty a republican gov-
ernment in the South rather than the intelligence of the educated classes.”55
While proslavery demagoguery could manipulate the uneducated Irish Catholic,
he would never support the bigoted Know-Nothings since their animosity tar-
geted him. Similarly, the black man could fall for abolition but would never sup-
port his former master when he attempted to deprive him of his rights. The mas-
ter was most likely to control the votes of poor whites. Whipple continued that
the U.S. system was invested in the idea that voting was the best way to qualify
a man to vote. The franchise was at the foundation of all other social benefits,
including education. Lastly, Owen’s support for bestowing full citizenship on the
freedmen had, in a way, the same rationale that led him to write the exclusion-
ary clause against blacks in Indiana in the 1840s. Back then, Owen had proposed
a referendum on enfranchising blacks in the state, but once the proposal failed
he sided with exclusion. Since they could not be full citizens and the bias against
them was endemic, it would be in blacks’ best interest not to be there, he rea-
soned. Blacks and whites could live together if, and only if, political equality was
maintained.

Publication
In June 1863, when the commission concluded its first report, it sought the at-
tention of decision makers in Washington. Owen wrote to Sumner that he and
his colleagues regarded it “to be of vital importance” that they would present
the report to Stanton in person and read it aloud. They requested to schedule the
presentation, which they assumed would take two hours, when the secretary
would have time to reflect on the issues. (In previous centuries, especially in the
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 227

preprint era, reading aloud to a ruler from a work dedicated to him signified or
performed the text’s “publication.”56) Beyond persuading Washington officials,
the commissioners were keen on circulating a printed version of the report for
general consumption, and some of the commission’s friends outside the admin-
istration were as eager to read it. Francis W. Bird reminded Sumner that other,
less extensive studies on the condition of the freedmen had disappeared forever
in the Department of War’s files without ever being read by Stanton.57 But the
full circulation of the commission’s report had to wait for the completion of its
entire mission in the early summer of the following year.
On the Senate floor, Sumner enthusiastically supported the proposed publica-
tion of three thousand copies. “I have no hesitation in saying that it is one of the
most able contributions to this question that has ever appeared in our country, or
in any other country.”58 The ensuing debate assumed the form (or the façade) of
a heated discussion on the role of government in procuring information through
such unprecedented inquiry. Several Democrats challenged the commission’s sta-
tus as an official body and even its legality. Senator Edgar Cowan (Pennsylvania)
associated the publication with wasteful endeavors that were perhaps tolerable
in peacetime but not when the country was at war.

[Cowan questioned] under what law these commissioners were appointed, and by
what authority they have gone to all this pains to make this elaborate report, and
whether, if it be such a valuable report as is here supposed, it cannot be put before
the country in some other way than by the expenditure of the public money. In
this age of publication, when every table in every house is loaded with informa-
tion of all kinds and on all subjects, when the whole country is flooded with news-
papers desirous and anxious to obtain that particular species of information which
would interest the people, I should think there was machinery enough in existence
which would gratuitously give to the people all they desire to know on this sub-
ject.59

Senator Hendricks, a Democrat from Indiana, defined the report as “facts and
arguments [that] a certain set of gentlemen, irresponsible so far as the law is con-
cerned, have seen fit to present in some communication which they have made
to the War Department.” The AFIC should pursue the channels of private en-
terprise to publish its report.60 California senator John Conness remarked wryly
that it was unfortunate that there was no document pertaining to the “poor, mis-
erable Negro” that congressmen would not attack as either illegal or unconstitu-
tional. The president had the right to investigate the administration of public
affairs under his jurisdiction. “He speaks through the commission that he has ap-
 228 The Culture of the Social Fact

pointed.”61 Ultimately, eight senators voted against the publication of the report,
but twenty-four approved. Implying there were hidden motives behind the at-
tacks on the report, Senator Benjamin Wade testified that if he were a friend of
slavery, he would make every possible effort to suppress its publication. “I know
of no document in the English language that sets forth the deformities of that
institution in practice more vividly than does this document.”62

Slavery Again: Counter Exceptionalism

The Final Report (which Owen later reproduced in book form, titled Wrong
of Slavery) was crafted with the verve and poignancy of a political pamphlet.
When the commission submitted its report, the presidential elections were loom-
ing. Thus, in the middle section , Owen inserted a passionate defense of the con-
stitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation. It is in the first section, how-
ever, that Owen showed his prowess as a writer, providing a comprehensive
historical survey of slavery in the western hemisphere which features an argu-
ment that develops shrewdly and in unexpected ways. Owen decided to abandon
anecdotal literary constructions, which had been the mainstay of antislavery pro-
paganda, in favor of statistical analysis, which, he claimed, provided “a force of
evidence against which sophistry strives in vain,—which compels conviction, ex-
cept when the mind is closed against all proof by the hermetic influence of the
prejudice.”63
By offering statistical reasoning, Owen chose the weapon of his political foes.
Before the war, statistical analysis was predominantly a proslavery tool deployed
to refute the abolitionist depiction of the South by, for instance, comparing the
physical condition of slaves favorably with that of poor laborers in the North or
in Britain. (The southern journalist J. D. B. De Bow was a pioneer of statistics-
based social research.) However, despite his professed preference, Owen’s text re-
linquished neither the power of the inciting narrative nor the anecdotal stirring
personal observations of slaves and bystanders. He interposed his statistical evi-
dence—mostly on the enormous death toll that befell slaves—with two primary
stories or histories. First, he wrote a grand narrative of slavery in the western
hemisphere, beginning only a few years after Columbus’s landing, and second,
he described the slaves’ journey from the moment of their capture in the African
hinterland through their voyage across the Atlantic. His account positions U.S.
slavery in a global political economy founded on the systematic abuse of labor.
Calculating the death toll of slavery on the basis of scant information often re-
quired obscure sources, acrobatic adjustments, and heavy speculations (all of
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 229

which are detailed in Owen’s book). Nevertheless, he argued that three centuries
of slavery victimized 31 million Africans, half of whom were transported over
the ocean. The rest were fatally wounded in battle, deliberately slaughtered, or
abandoned as unfit merchandise. Another three million died and were thrown
overboard. Suffering extended beyond the slaves, a point he demonstrated by
computing the high death rate of sailors exposed to epidemics and the unsani-
tary nightmare aboard slave ships. Mortality calculations had an immediate res-
onance during the bloodiest of American wars, and Owen exploited this war-
brewed sensibility. Even if the slave merchants prettified their mortality records,
he explained, these were still staggering figures when one considered that a bat-
tle is regarded to be particularly bloody when 10 percent of the combatants were
killed or wounded. The loss at Gettysburg did not reach such a high rate.
But what happened to those who arrived in the New World? Owen turned his
arithmetic from mortality to population growth, and after additional calculations
arrived at the conclusion that in 1860 there were a mere 11,562,540 descendants
of slaves in the western hemisphere—a number that showed a population de-
cline in continents that knew little of war, famine, or plagues. Slavery “produced
a retrogression of numbers at a ratio which, had it spread over the habitable
earth, would have extinguished, in a few centuries, all human existence.”64 How-
ever, that was not the case in the United States. Only a half-million slaves had
reached the country’s shores, but by 1860 their descendants numbered 4,435,709.
One group increased ninefold; the other diminished by a half of its original size.
Owen cunningly led the reader toward the proslavery (and exceptionalist) argu-
ment that southern masters created a uniquely nurturing environment for their
slaves, with the ultimate intention of undermining that very premise. In order
to establish a connection between a population increase and comfort of life, one
had to look into the “interior of slave-life”—the motives and circumstances of
the population increase. Fanny Kemble’s journal provided these insights and
some of the details for Owen and Howe’s contention that the plantations func-
tioned as breeding farms. Masters encouraged procreation through intricate in-
centives and cruel intimidation. (Besides, nations suffering great calamity, like
Ireland during the famine, experienced population growth as well.)
Here, Owen’s approach to vital statistics is congruous with his pioneering ad-
vocacy of birth control. In Moral Physiology (1830), Owen promoted a rational
limitation on procreation (by means of coitus interruptus) as a way to assure per-
sonal, familial, and social welfare. He was among the first to argue that the lib-
eration of women relied on a smaller family. His historical survey addressed the
excessive childbearing coupled with hard work that contributed to female slaves’
 230 The Culture of the Social Fact

ill health and great suffering. Ultimately, the failure of the American slave sys-
tem found its utmost expression in the war itself. The rebellion shattered the il-
lusion of success—population growth for slaves, political control for their mas-
ters. Owen completes the circle by demonstrating that in the United States,
slavery ultimately produced an enormous mortality rate. Stating that the half
million war fatalities were also victims of slavery, he suggested another affinity
between slaves and the white Union soldiers who were dying in the battlefields
and army hospitals as Owen was composing his treatise. By so formulating the
story of slavery, Owen engaged in the ultimate act of triumph—the victor writes
the history (in this case, the prehistory) of the vanquished.

Psychic Phenomena
The periodical and daily press excerpted and reviewed the five reports that
Owen, Howe, and McKaye composed. The abolitionist camp was mostly enthu-
siastic. Lewis Tappan and Wendell Phillips wrote Owen letters commending his
efforts. The commission’s reports were read on the other side of the Atlantic as
well. J. M. Ludlow, writing in Good Words, viewed the preliminary report as a
pioneering step in the creation of a new apparatus of knowledge on slavery:
“Where formerly [slavery] could only be outlined or lightly sketched from a few
points of view, it may now be photographed in its minutest features, and from
every point.”65 However, Owen’s past political activities, especially his radical
youth, provided ammunition for those who wanted to taint the commission’s pro-
posals as manifestations of subversive utopianism. A review in the New York Her-
ald argued that the attempt to organize the blacks in “departments of labor” un-
der the freedmen’s association was “an imitation of the Fourierite phalanxes,
whose fate is so well known to all our readers.”66 Was the AFIC an indication of
a radical “Owenite” moment in federal affairs? According to a postwar rumor,
had it not been for John Wilkes Booth’s intervention, Lincoln would have prob-
ably appointed Owen to head the Freedmen’s Bureau. It would have been inter-
esting to see at the helm of the freedmen administration the person who in the
late 1820s advocated “state guardianship,” which would have placed two-
year-olds in special boarding schools. But by the 1860s, Owen’s radicalism—al-
ways tempered by a strong strand of authoritarianism, Benthamite planism, and
condescension toward the downtrodden—was further diluted by years of in-
volvement in Democratic party politics, increasing aloofness toward working-
class issues, and an intensifying religiosity that stood in stark opposition to his
freethinking youth.
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 231

Perhaps the most curious intellectual legacy Owen brought with him to the
AFIC was his newly found interest in spiritualism. While Owen’s Civil War pam-
phlets were circulating, a few of his spiritualist articles (prepared before the war)
appeared with exotic titles such as “The Convulsionists of St. Médard,” “The
Electric Girl of La Perrière,” and “Why the Putkammer Castle was Destroyed.”
His Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (1860) did much to legitimize
the immensely popular spiritualist movement. It was the first book on spiritual-
ism accepted by a respectable publisher, Lippincott, the same Philadelphia firm
that would later publish the Wrong of Slavery. (In the 1850s it was also respon-
sible for the execution of Schoolcraft’s project on the American Indian tribes.)
Since 1848, spiritualism had swept the country, embraced by radicals of all
stripes, including abolitionists and feminists. Owen was not part of this particu-
lar radical movement. He conceived his 1860 book to be a Baconian enterprise,
setting himself “to collect together solid, reliable building-stones which may
serve some future architect.”67 Both Footfall and Wrong of Slavery were ex-
pressions of a belief in facts (especially historical facts) and the merit of their ag-
gregation.
Spiritualists regarded former slaves as prospective mediums and recognized
an affinity between the freedmen’s religious beliefs and theirs. Owen’s own ap-
preciation of black religious enthusiasm did not escape critics’ ire but was a mar-
ginal issue in his report. More importantly, researching psychic phenomena may
have prepared him to address what had become a dominant theme in 1860s
freedmen studies—black mentality and other dimensions of the black psyche.
Owen’s interest in sleep and dreams and Howe’s expertise in idiocy, lunacy, and
deafness configured, to some degree, their respective journeys into the South,
Canada, and black subjectivity. This aspect of investigation became paramount
because of the peculiar problems of knowledge that haunted the freedmen’s
question. Four million men and women emerged from a collapsed society, as it
was forcefully argued, profoundly damaged and with an alleged propensity to lie,
cheat, steal, and replace sexual partners. Arguments about their capabilities and
potential had to enter into a realm of motivation that preceded moral faculties.
Contemporary writers commented incessantly on the need to improve blacks’
self-respect. This thrust was arguably a precursor of today’s self-esteem move-
ment. The AFIC’s recommendations contain the notion of a role model mani-
fested in its proposal to appoint in black regiments commanders with whom the
soldiers could identify. Howe claimed to discern strong imitative faculties among
freed slaves. There was much talk about instincts and desires in freedmen’s lives.
Black melancholy and soulfulness were often alluded to as well. The commission
 232 The Culture of the Social Fact

proposed that military officers would exploit the freedmen’s powerful religiosity
to instill in them devotion to the cause of their fight. Insight into their alleged
mental predilections was therefore a useful tool (replacing the master’s rod) to
modify black people’s behavior during the transition from slavery.
Another angle to the exploration of the black mind was tied to ideas of inte-
riority or selfhood and worked in the opposite way. It demonstrated that black
subjectivity—regardless of content—was whole (or autonomous) and would
guarantee for the newly freed their survival in a free society. Here, the notion of
an enclosed, at times impenetrable, self paralleled the demand that blacks would
construct private spheres for themselves by establishing fixed sexual relations
and by creating physical spaces that would nurture family life. It was repeatedly
alleged that southern whites—rich and poor—failed to facilitate and protect the
private sphere. The imprint of a psychological approach was also evident in the
discussion about the opinions and prejudices of whites. Some came to understand
that racial bias would not succumb to reason, and therefore parading facts before
the reading public in the tradition of the Enlightenment would not do. Howe
thought that public policy should assume bias as a given. Prejudice was an in-
escapable effect of national and ethnic differences, a protective discourse akin to
gossip. “Peoples have their way of gossiping, just as individuals have; and a fa-
vorite one is that of criticizing their neighbors, and talking national scandal.”68

The war environment was not conducive to a grand, slow-moving investiga-

tive enterprise of the kind that Owen, Howe, and McKaye had initially devised,
although many of their ideas would be incorporated into the Freedmen’s Bureau
or implemented at a later stage when radical Republicans seized Reconstruction
from President Johnson. Their difficulties were not rooted in a lack of informa-
tion. Rather, their project represented a single attempt to bring a modicum of or-
der to an avalanche of facts and figures. Its reports ultimately revealed a deeper
wish in the midst of war to grapple with the country’s shaken sense of itself, its
social and political regime, its past transgressions and present crisis. Owen, Howe,
and McKaye authored a remarkably progressive program in contemporary terms,
but mostly they wanted to normalize the freedmen’s question and remove its dis-
ruptive edges. The commission insisted, for instance, that the contraband crisis
was one of numerous social evils that were inevitable consequences of war.
The desire to master a rapidly changing world may explain why Howe and
his colleagues appropriated and refined rather familiar racial theories that were
arguably incidental to the commission’s actual recommendations. The AFIC pro-
vided one of the most comprehensive attacks on slavery as a global system of la-
 Can Freedmen Be Citizens? 233

bor abuse, but its relapse into racial reasoning betrayed the commissioners’
doubts about the capacity of their critique of labor exploitation to address the is-
sue of caste in the United States. Ultimately, the predominance of racial doctrine,
especially in Howe’s account, accentuated the ambiguity of social knowledge as
an instrument for defining a group of people concurrently as others and as po-
tential equals. At one point, it led to the absurd conclusion that African Ameri-
cans’ (or at least mulattoes’) social inclusion was somehow conditioned on their
eventual disappearance.
As for the question of U.S. citizenship, the commission (and other freedmen’s
advocates) offered diverse views and demonstrations of blacks’ political subjec-
tivity. At times, it was conceived entirely through notions of market competency
(individualism, self-sufficiency, and domesticity); in other contexts it was grafted
on the masculine agency of the soldier. In addition, the freedmen’s prospective
ability to partake in the polity was on occasion associated—paradoxically—not
so much with individual autonomy as with black collectivity and the experience
of slavery itself. Another important dimension of the commissioners’ conceptual
apparatus was the way it vacillated between idioms of labor and race. Class and
racial categories competed, at other times served to enhance each other, and oth-
erwise were consistently gendered. Abolitionists had often pointed to the sexual
exploitation of the plantation. The commission understood this exploitation in
terms of labor. At the same time, the productive/reproductive slippage was em-
ployed to uphold a false continuum between the sexual/procreative abuse of
black women on southern plantations and racial amalgamation in a future free
society. Thus the sins of the plantation were projected onto the prospects of the
free.
Beyond the AFIC’s work and similar efforts, the demand for the franchise
originated with the black leadership and the freedmen themselves, who, in nu-
merous gatherings and conventions, forcefully expressed their wish to become
voting citizens. John P. Sampson argued in a North Carolina meeting that voting
was a right, not merely a privilege, and without it “liberty is mockery.” Depriv-
ing blacks of suffrage, “you affirm our incapacity to form an intelligent judg-
ment . . . and . . . lead us to undervalue ourselves.”69 A national convention of
black soldiers and sailors, to give another example, declared that “in sustaining
the Union with the musket, [we] have won [our] right to the ballot.” The veter-
ans emphasized that they preferred the vote to any form of government assis-
tance. Only the franchise would “lift us from the lap of hate and scorn” and
“place us on the footing of full citizenship, where we ought to be.”70
This page intentionally left blank
 pa rt i i i

totem envy

In August 1845, the ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was in-

vited by a young lawyer, Lewis Henry Morgan, to address a gathering of
the New Order of the Iroquois, a fraternal organization of young white
men convened for their annual meeting in Aurora, New York. By the
light of the campfire, Schoolcraft declared, “No people can bear a true
nationality, which does not exfoliate, as it were, from its bosom, some-
thing that expresses the peculiarities of its own soil and climate . . . And
where,” he insisted, “can a more suitable element . . . be found, than is
furnished by the history and institutions of the free, bold, wild, inde-
pendent native hunter race?”1 Besides listening to literary expositions,
Morgan and his friends in the New Order of the Iroquois dedicated much
of their time together to Indian pageantry. These precursors of the mod-
ern men’s movement painted their faces, wore native costumes, called
each other by Iroquois names, and lit the “council’s fire.” Their most im-
portant initiation rite, duly labeled “Indianiation,” was the Iroquois cer-
emony of adopting captive warriors. Much attention and care were given
to structuring the fraternal society according to the organization of the
original Iroquois League, whose remnants were now living on small
reservations scattered throughout Canada and western New York.
By 1850, the United States had completed its westward territorial
march to the Pacific Ocean. A new sense of national mission, celebrated
as a “manifest destiny,” sanctioned this rapid, aggressive movement.
Many eastern tribes had been already removed and relocated west of the
Mississippi. The Indian frontier, now wholly entrapped in U.S. territory,
was relatively quiet, if only—as we know—for a limited time. Ameri-
cans commonly assumed that the native inhabitants of the continent or
their ways of life were vanishing and doomed for extinction, a prediction
 236 Totem Envy

voiced at times as a great concern and, at other times, as a policy prescrip-

tion. Just as the American Indian was expected to disappear, a new fasci-
nation with Indian artifacts, history, mythology, and customs emerged.
These materials were to be salvaged in order to generate a new and epic
national culture, distinct from that of England and other European coun-
tries. Walt Whitman, for example, maintained in 1846, “Have we no
memories of the race, the like of which never was seen on any other part
of the earth—whose existence was freedom—whose language sonorous
beauty? . . . Are these not the proper subject for the bard or the novelist?”2
During the summer of 1845, the state of New York employed School-
craft to conduct a census of the Iroquois reservations, to which he added
a study of their history and culture. He also published a private edition
of this report under the title Notes on the Iroquois (1847). Two years later,
Congress appointed him to supervise a comprehensive research project
concerning all Indian tribes in the United States, including those in the
just acquired territories of the West. This survey resulted in six monu-
mental volumes issued annually under the initial title Inquiries respect-
ing the History, Present Condition, and Future Prospects, of the Indian
Tribes of the United States (1851–57). Also, in 1851, the young Lewis
Morgan completed his own study League of the Iroquois, after years of
gathering ethnographic materials for scholarly papers and collecting abo-
riginal artifacts for the New York State Cabinet in Albany. Morgan would
become one of the leading figures of American ethnology, widely ac-
knowledged as a pioneer in the fields of structuralist and evolutionary
anthropology. He introduced kinship as an object of scientific inspection.
Morgan’s later work, especially Ancient Society (1877) inspired other dis-
coverers of “society,” namely, Marx and Engels, and consequently had a
far-reaching influence on communist archeology.
Schoolcraft’s and Morgan’s projects during the 1840s and the 1850s
featured an expanded role for the state in circulating knowledge about
the Indian population for the purpose of policy making, state building,
and commemoration. Indian research, moreover, took place during an
important debate regarding the future of the aboriginal inhabitants of
America, their character and prospects, a dispute that featured an in-
triguing permutation of the problematic of double representation—the
relationship between political representation and scholarly or artistic de-
pictions of social groups that were excluded from the polity. Concur-
rently, anthropology became a beneficiary of federal patronage of science
 Totem Envy 237

through expeditions and explorations. By the second half of the 1840s,

when the newly established Smithsonian Institution was poised to lead
the national scientific community, its secretary, Joseph Henry, launched the
Smithsonian Contribution to Knowledge series with Ephraim G. Squier
and Edwin H. Davis’s archaeological essay on the Ancient Monuments of
the Mississippi Valley (1848).
The following two chapters examine Schoolcraft’s and Morgan’s re-
spective enterprises by addressing the following questions: Why did the
federal and state governments lend their support to these projects? How
was ethnographic knowledge accumulated, presented, and validated
(whether by specific techniques of representation or on the basis of the
author’s unique experience and expertise)? What role was assumed by
these ventures in the actual relationship between the aboriginal tribes
and U.S. society? What was the degree of Indian complicity in, collabo-
ration with, or resistance to those inquiries? Finally, the discussion situ-
ates Schoolcraft’s and Morgan’s studies, as we began, in a discourse in
which national and personal identities assumed an Indian face. In this
regard, mid-nineteenth-century explorations of the Indian subject fea-
tured more complex exchange relations between investigators and the
investigated than most other inquiries we have examined in this book.
Racial masquerade was emblematic of the “removal policy” to the west,
as was the desire to move Indians to the past.
Reenactment or role playing had two interrelated consequences. First,
the elaboration of a familial alliance between the “red man” and the
“white man” was mediated by various historical constructs that arranged
the relationships between Indians and whites in temporal, sequential
terms. Second, Morgan’s “discovery” of society in the Iroquois reserva-
tion of western New York centered on familial institutions as the kernel
of the human bond. Morgan would eventually apply his insight into Iro-
quois kinship (with important modifications) to the entire human soci-
ety, past and present, in a somewhat expansionist fashion—from the con-
crete family to “the family of man.” Important aspects of his ethnology
would later become essential to the modern imagination of the social
sphere, especially the perception of society as a multifaceted and yet in-
herently, or even inescapably, rational and functional total mechanism, a
view he developed by gazing at an aboriginal “counter-society” and then
back to his own. In addition, Morgan’s work marks the transformation of
ethnology itself from a frontier experience (or a missionary tactic) to a
 238 Totem Envy

decidedly middle-class science. The focus of many of these projects on

western New York enables a detailed examination of a specific locus of
investigation. Among the Indian tribes, the Iroquois were particularly
close to American society, further along than many other nations on the
road to the coveted “civilization.” They were also conceived of as having
unique historical relations with the U.S. federal state, especially because
of their own confederate organization. Interestingly, Schoolcraft, Mor-
gan, Squier, and the Smithsonian’s Henry were all natives of rural New
York.
Grouping the literature on Indian tribes, much of which was dedi-
cated to ethnography and archeology, together with what is ordinarily
understood under the rubric of social reportage (e.g., investigations of
slums, child labor, prisons, and asylums) merits further explanation. This
classification may not seem as peculiar if we consider that facts about the
Indians’ physical and moral condition as well as about their civilization
and history were tools of policy making. Before the Civil War, the native
population was the only group for whom the federal government was di-
rectly responsible. Presumably independent nations—signing treaties
with the United States and, at times, waging war against it—they were
also dependent wards of the state and subjected to external impositions.
State paternalism was most tangibly manifested in the bureaucracy of
officials (superintendents, agents, and sub-agents) appointed to dispense
provisions and cash grants (annuities) to Indian tribes and to oversee
efforts at educating them. The most potent symbolic expression of this
dependency was the convention—adopted by Indians and their white in-
terlocutors—of referring to the will of the federal government in the
person of the president, designated the “Great Father in Washington.”
In the antebellum mind, native peoples occupied a precarious posi-
tion between nature and human society. Their unsettled and unsettling
presence generated a tremendously diverse market of knowledge: mis-
sionary annual reports that regarded the Indian as yet another domain
of philanthropic attention, epic novels on the Indian subject (popular
since the 1820s), philological dictionaries and other products of post-
Enlightenment and mostly eastern salon anthropology, and expedition
narratives that captured the Indian as an integral part of the studied ter-
rain together with lizards, cacti, and rock formations. Typically, infor-
mation was divided, as in Schoolcraft’s national project, between the his-
tory, the present condition, and the future prospects of the native tribes.
 Totem Envy 239

Distinct discursive strategies governed each of these segments. While

ethnology, archeology, and philology sought to capture a bygone or about-
to-disappear Indian existence (and addressed the question of origin), the
tribes’ present condition was the subject of reformist literature that em-
ployed moral and vital statistics as well as other familiar modes of social
reporting. The speculative or prescriptive “future prospects” were pre-
occupied with the possibility of acculturation. At the conclusion of the
Civil War, the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission asked whether
former slaves could be citizens. Meanwhile, the Indian future was under
slightly different interrogation: Can they be civilized? At the same time,
the promise of citizenship was the logical conclusion of the civilizing
process. This inquiry required not merely assessing educational policy
and institutions but also adjudicating aptitude, in other words, scrutiniz-
ing the Indian subject’s mental properties and stature of character.
The relationship between the Indian’s glorious past and fragile pres-
ent raised complex questions. The past/present/future typology threat-
ened to fragment the Indian subject. It was a type of historicism that em-
phasized sharp discontinuities. Any attempt to delineate connecting paths
required alternative historiosophical strategies. This approach stood in
contrast to the self-conception of the antebellum United States as a soci-
ety that had been born in perfection and thus escaped the forces of his-
tory. Discussions of the aboriginal subject were therefore never outside
some temporal configuration that arranged not just sequences of events
but also fundamentally distinct epochs and their relations. Thus Mor-
gan’s later work moved from actual history to “ethnological periods,” and
Schoolcraft’s writings followed the trajectory of the Christian notion of
moral history. In fact, the question of origin accompanied the Indian sub-
ject from the very beginning of the European presence in the Americas:
Who were their ancestors? Did they come from a different continent? Do
they belong to the same human grouping? Did they replace former civ-
ilizations or did they originate in them?
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the aboriginal was si-
multaneously removed along spatial and temporal axes. He was further
distanced from U.S. society, which was also largely removed from its past
as a frontier in which the Indian was an immediate presence rather than
a subject of literature or scientific discourse, contemplation, and projec-
tion. In the 1840s, the literature on the past and the future of the Indian
acquired a darker patina. The publication of Samuel Morton’s Crania
 240 Totem Envy

Americana (1839), in which he presented the proto-racist, phrenology-

inspired doctrine that would lead him to endorse polygenism rearranged
the debate over the Indian along new and more polemical lines. Rooted
in Enlightenment racial taxonomy, polygenism challenged the biblical
narrative that traced a common origin for all humanity, arguing that
indigenous peoples in America (and elsewhere) were of a different and
inferior breed. Although many in the emerging scientific community
(most importantly, Harvard professor Louis Agassiz) embraced this view
and applied it to the freedmen question, polygenism met resistance.
Many among Morton’s opponents subscribed to no less racist positions
but nonetheless could not accept, for diverse reasons, his direct challenge
to the monogenist tradition. Both the staunch Democrat Schoolcraft and
the Whig-turned-Republican Morgan framed their studies as resound-
ing attacks against polygenism and its collateral pessimism concerning
the future of American Indians and their ability to adapt to life in the
modern world.
A consequence of this debate was a heightened sensitivity regarding
the accurate portrayal of the Indian subject. Claims concerning misrep-
resentation abounded. “Misrepresentation” was a rather nebulous asser-
tion that referred to factual errors due to faulty science or excessively sen-
timental treatment, especially in works of fiction. The term frequently
denoted a moral failure, a misjudgment of the Indian, his virtues, and
character. The intellectual “Indian wars” were largely waged among
whites and involved nonaboriginals acting as “friends of the Indian,”
speaking for and representing the Indian in the worlds of science, art,
and politics. The prospect of complete civilization and citizenship (or ex-
tinction), together with strenuous efforts to establish some affiliation be-
tween natives and antebellum white “natives,” distinguished the litera-
ture on the Indian tribes from the kind of knowledge produced in the
colonial context. (In the United States, empire is always closer to home.)
Obviously, there were many similarities as well. As we shall see, U.S. an-
thropology attempted intermittently to delineate between American In-
dians and other indigenous societies but otherwise was committed to its
inherent universalism. Moreover, Indian literature was susceptible to the
fantasy and ambivalence that Homi Bhabha, among others, identifies as
the subject of the colonial discourse: splitting, doubling, turning into its
opposite, and projecting.
The federal executive was arguably the most important producer in
 Totem Envy 241

this market of information on native tribes. The fate of the aboriginals

as dependent or as enemy constituted a significant portion of the tiny ad-
ministration’s activities at the time and was the subject of numerous an-
nual and special reports compiled by several federal agencies. Congress
printed in great quantities government reports and narratives of expe-
ditions, as well as additional documents that addressed native peoples—
petitions, memorials, committee reports, and documents that originated
in individual states. Since the 1820s, the annual reports of the Indian
Office and later the Indian Bureau became a platform for the exposition
of the removal policy. (The Indian Office was established in 1824 as part
of the War Department and in 1849 was transferred to the newly created
Department of the Interior.) The expulsion in the 1830s of the Chero-
kees and other “civilized nations”—the notorious “trail of tears”—en-
tailed a fierce public controversy and intense production of pamphlets
about the condition of those tribes.
Immediately after the Civil War, Congress launched an effort to re-
construct Indian policy. It also endeavored to study the circumstances of
native tribes independent of the information it received from the federal
executive, state governments, citizen groups, or the Indians themselves.
The Doolittle Committee of 1865 examined the Sand Creek massacre of
November 1864, but it also sought to respond to periodic complaints
about corruption and mistreatment by the Indian administration. Sena-
tor James R. Doolittle and six other senators and congressmen, organized
in three groups, conducted arduous field investigations that stretched
from the prairies to the Pacific coast. In the process, they met with and
recorded the words of many Indian chiefs. Since the early days of the re-
public, government had made a special effort to capture the voices of In-
dian leaders by transcribing speeches into official reports.3
Information concerning the material conditions of the Indian tribes
and the relative success of their acculturation was comparable to the
yield of social inquiries into the physical and moral condition of the poor.
Unlike the lower echelon of society, however, native tribes’ political rep-
resentation was largely tied to their status as ostensibly independent en-
tities. Washington, D.C., witnessed a hectic traffic of Indian delegations
in town to negotiate treaties or present petitions. One such delegation of
Pottawatomie leaders arrived in the Capitol in late 1845. The chiefs hired
a former Indian official, Richard Smith Elliot, as a political advisor and
press agent. The delegation made its presence conspicuous by carefully
 242 Totem Envy

staging colorful appearances on Pennsylvania Avenue and other public

spaces throughout the city and by regularly releasing information to the
press corps on the course of the negotiations. Indians were invested in
the flow of information about them, and they collaborated, albeit cau-
tiously, in the effort to accumulate knowledge on their material condi-
tion, customs, and history.
 chapter seven

Archives of Indian Knowledge

By the middle of the 1840s, Henry Schoolcraft was broke and desperately
seeking sources of income. He supported his family by recycling ethnographical
material in articles, books, and lecture tours, and even writing poetry based on
native themes. Schoolcraft became a typical mid-nineteenth-century intellectual
entrepreneur, persistently trying to interest publishers, learned societies, and,
later, government, in his personal archive of Indian subject matter, which
spawned many literary and scientific schemes. The scholarly interest in the In-
dian received an institutional foundation with the establishment in 1842 of the
New York–based American Ethnological Society, headed by the doyen of Amer-
ican Ethnology, Albert Gallatin. The society would prove instrumental in School-
craft’s lobbying efforts.
Schoolcraft’s entire career following his appointment as an Indian agent on
the Michigan frontier in the early 1820s did much to harness ethnography in the
service of government. The following discussion focuses on the New York State
and the U.S. Congress Indian studies, two projects in which the ambitions of an
individual investigator coalesced with those of government. Both undertakings
featured an interplay between two modes of the politics of representation: first,
the idea that the management of a downtrodden population necessitated an in-
quiry into (and an elaborate depiction of ) its physical and moral conditions; sec-
ond, the radically different notion of representation by which government (ei-
ther state or federal) had a particular responsibility to record, preserve, and
display the remnants of Indian civilization.

Frontier Ethnology
Born in 1793 in Hamilton, New York and trained as a glassmaker, Schoolcraft
traveled in 1818 down the Ohio River exploring the mineral resources of the Mis-
souri and Arkansas regions. The following year, he returned as the geologist of
 244 Totem Envy

the exploring expedition to the Northwest Territory under Lewis Cass, territor-
ial governor of Michigan. In 1822, he arrived in Sault Ste. Marie, a frontier post,
as an Indian agent to the tribes of Lake Superior. These rather modest appoint-
ments relied on the patronage of Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. Schoolcraft
remained in government employment for the next two decades, later assuming
the superintendency of Indian affairs in Michigan (1836) and gradually retreat-
ing from the frontier to Mackinac and finally Detroit. In Sault Ste. Marie, he
married Jane Johnston, whose father, an Irish-born fur trader, was an important
figure in the tiny frontier community. Jane’s mother Susan was the daughter of
Wabojeeg, a Powhatan Chief. The Johnstons’ large household was equally con-
versant in Indian and western ways, and Schoolcraft’s initiation into ethnogra-
phy took place within the confines of his new family. The Johnstons were able to
verify and expand information he garnered in numerous daily encounters with
Indians who frequented the town and his agency. In his diary, Schoolcraft grate-
fully recounted how his mother-in-law instructed him about Indian ceremonies
and usages. “I have in fact stumbled . . . on the only family in North America who
could, in Indian lore, have acted as my guide, philosopher and friend.”1 In his
first foray into ethnography, Schoolcraft also received guidance from a question-
naire written by Governor Cass. Cass was a leading proponent of fusing Indian
policy with systematic accumulation of knowledge. He envisioned a “frontier
ethnology” with which he sought to dismiss erroneous, mostly romantic (and in
his view too charitable) views on the Indians’ character, conditions, and prospects.
Andrew Jackson’s administration would endorse this line of investigation to
elaborate the rationale for Indian removal. Cass regarded Indians as a “moral
phenomenon” and rather bleakly judged them (primarily on the basis of lin-
guistic analysis) to be lacking the capacity for improvement.
Schoolcraft accepted Cass’s work as an investigative template, embracing in
the process his political views as well as the ambition to combat the ethnological
establishment of the eastern seaboard by publicizing factual matter directly from
the Indian frontier. For Cass, who in 1831 became Jackson’s secretary of war,
Schoolcraft was the model ethnologist, a government field agent whose position
provided him “favorable opportunities for investigating the character and con-
dition of these people, and [surveying] them with the eyes of a cautious and ju-
dicious observer.”2 According to the tradition exemplified in the life work of the
statesman-ethnologist Gallatin, comparative philology was the main subject of
inquiry. Schoolcraft’s initial step was to study the Chippewa language, which he
found quite complex and difficult to master. (At one point, he solicited govern-
 Archives of Indian Knowledge 245

ment to withhold Chippewa treaty money in order that a dictionary of Chippewa

could be completed for use in missionary work.)
Schoolcraft soon acquired national recognition as a field expert on Indian
affairs. He corresponded with eastern scholars and publishers, entertained for-
eign dignitaries and writers visiting Michigan, and consequently was elected to
American and foreign literary societies. As an informant on the frontier, he re-
ceived much gratitude from luminaries such as the New York governor DeWitt
Clinton and the philologist Peter Du Ponceau. His scientific reputation was bol-
stered by his claim to have discovered the source of the Mississippi (1832), which
he fancifully named Lake Itasca (from the Latin verITAS CAput—or true head).
Schoolcraft brought to his ethnological exertions a practical scientific training in
the natural sciences and a collateral attachment to the aggregation of facts that
originated in close observations.
At the turn of the 1830s, Schoolcraft shifted his focus from philology to his-
tory and mythology, ostensibly seeking to probe the Indians’ “mental character-
istics” and consequently to explain their somewhat puzzling reluctance to adopt
Western civilization. “The whole mind is bowed down under these intellectual
fetters, which circumscribe its volitions, and bind it, as effectually as the hooks
of iron, which pierce a whirling Hindoo’s flesh.”3 Rather than language, legends,
and myth, stories of reincarnation, transformation, magic, and sorcery provided
the deepest insight into the Indian character. He subsequently collected tales of
the Chippewa, Ottawa, the Pottawatomie, and other local bands, an effort that
led to the publication of his Algic Researches (1839). Throughout his career as
Indian expert, Schoolcraft coupled a deep-seated identification with the aborig-
inal and an overtly condescending approach. He shared the perception of the na-
tive people as children who had lost their previous (“Hunter Stage”) ability to
govern themselves. These views were further fashioned by his religious conver-
sion during one of the revivals that were common on the frontier during the early
1830s, the last decade of the Second Great Awakening. Once converted, the moral
tone in his writing predominated.
Schoolcraft’s preoccupation with legends and religious beliefs coincided with
a new public taste for things Indian. Algic Researches’ commercial success did
not stem from any systematic effort to delve into the Indian mind but rather from
the enthusiasm prompted by the discovery of an indigenous poetic style. The De-
troit Free Press determined that the compilation was reminiscent of Greek
mythology and had the originality of Arabian Nights. “Catlin may be called the
red man’s painter, Schoolcraft his poetical historian. They have each painted in
 246 Totem Envy

living colors the workings of the Indian mind, and painted nature in her un-
adorned simplicity.”4
In 1841, with the advent of the first Whig administration, Schoolcraft lost his
government position under a cloud of scandal and accusations of wrongdoing.
Without federal employment, he decided to capitalize on his previous literary
success and moved away from the frontier to the intellectual milieu of New York
City. In response to a new archeological fad, he published in 1843 an article in
the New York Commercial Advertiser on a visit to the Grave Creek Indian mound
in Virginia where, reportedly, the first Indian inscriptions were discovered. Pro-
jects of such caliber could not secure his livelihood. The United States was still
reeling from the economic panic of 1837, and a trip to England did not yield the
expected revenue. Schoolcraft’s personal affairs worsened further when his wife
died.
Schoolcraft developed a pattern of lobbying. He devised a grand plan for the
investigation of American ethnology, which he sent to the regents of the Smith-
sonian Institution. His design included a “Museum of Mankind,” archaeologi-
cal explorations, and a library of philology.5 He proposed to utilize the State De-
partment and the navy in securing antiquities from Polynesia, Asia, and Africa.
Ambitious schemes to establish ethnological museums abounded in the late
1840s. Lewis Morgan collected artifacts for a New York State cabinet. Ephraim
Squier envisaged a national museum that would house a large collection from
all over the world. Those enterprises were consistent with the universalistic
principles that guided the establishment of Smithsonian in 1846 and the zeit-
geist of the decade. America’s national mission was conceived in vast, grandiose
terms that embraced the investigation and conquering of nature as well as the
inquiry into the natural history of “Man.” A fine example of the popular reach
of such national desires can be found in the well-plowed pages of P. T. Barnum’s
autobiography. That apostle of nineteenth-century popular culture recalled that
around 1849 he considered putting on an exhibition that “would excite univer-
sal attention.” “This was nothing less than a ‘Congress of Nations’—an assem-
blage of representatives of all the nations that could be reached by land or sea.
I meant to secure a man and a woman, as perfect as could be procured, from
every accessible people, civilized and barbarous, on the face of the globe. I had
actually contracted with an agent to go to Europe to make arrangements to se-
cure ‘specimens’ for such a show.”6 This creation of an ethnographic Noah’s Arc
never materialized. Barnum found other means to satisfy the public’s racial cu-
riosity.
 Archives of Indian Knowledge 247

Census Marshal
Schoolcraft marketed both his government projects as policy-making devices
conceived around a census of Indian tribes: subjugating Indian affairs to the mod-
ern, fact-finding tools of political economy. As importantly, he maintained that
state and federal authorities had a responsibility to assure faithful and compre-
hensive scholarly representation of the tribes’ history and life. The statistical
mission camouflaged the ethnographical nature of the New York project, for
which the New York Historical Society served as a springboard. A society resolu-
tion called on the legislature to provide a census of the Indian population. George
Folsom, a state senator and a member of the society, sponsored the campaign. In
the spring of 1845, Schoolcraft became a census marshal for the Indian tribes of
western New York. He would claim that this was the first time any American or
European government commissioned a full census of a nation or tribe of Indians
that addressed their material condition.7 The state agreed to include research
into history and antiquities. However, the Secretary of New York State N. S. Ben-
ton instructed him to conduct his study in as brief a time as possible and to ex-
ercise caution in his dealings with the Indians, for he was likely to encounter sus-
picion. “You will assure our red brethren that in taking this enumeration of them
and making the inquiries into their present condition and situation the Legisla-
ture, the Governor of the State, or any of the officers have no other objects in
view but their welfare and happiness.”8 Schoolcraft was to assure his Indian in-
terlocutors that the census had nothing to do with the federal government or the
Ogden Land Company, with which the Iroquois (especially the Seneca) were in
constant dispute.
Schoolcraft spent more than two months in upstate and western New York,
negotiating with the Indians to secure their cooperation and investigating oral
traditions and archeological sites. He dedicated most of July to the Oneidas and
the Onondagas, bringing along his nephew to assist him with the census. He pro-
ceeded to the Tuscarora reserve, where he completed the count in early August,
then paused for more than a month on the various Seneca reservations delegat-
ing canvassing to a few assistants. The new scientific research tool promoted by
Schoolcraft proved inadequate. State officials had originally designed the elabo-
rate statistical tables for a white farm or urban society, and the categories em-
ployed were, in a large part, irrelevant to the material conditions and life of the
Iroquois, as “advanced” as these tribes were. The Seneca (then the largest among
 248 Totem Envy

the descendants of the Six Nations of the Iroquois), especially the residents of
the Tonawanda reservation, were reluctant to cooperate with the canvassers,
causing serious delays. Schoolcraft attributed this attitude to their unfamiliarity
with statistics and confusion as to the benefits of enumeration.

In truth, of all subjects upon which these people have been called on to think and
act, during our proximity to them of two or three centuries, that of political econ-
omy is decidedly the most foreign and least known to them . . . If I might judge,
from the scope of remarks made both in and out of council, they regarded it as the
introduction of a Saxon feature into their institutions, which, like the lever, by
some process not apparent to them, was designed, in its ultimate effects, to uplift
and overturn them . . . Everywhere, the tribes exalted the question into one of na-
tional moment, Grave and dignified sachems assembled in formal councils, and in-
dulged in long and fluent harangues to their people, as if the very foundations of
their ancient confederacy were about to be overturned by an innovating spirit of
political arithmetic and utilitarianism.9

Indeed, the census debacle seemed to expose the cultural gap between the in-
vestigator and the investigated more than any other method of observation and
registration. The alien language of statistics precluded the exchange relations
that were characteristic of other modes of sharing Indian knowledge, an aspect
that might have contributed to the discord. However, notwithstanding School-
craft’s patronizing sarcasm, rational and pragmatic motives were at the core of
the Iroquois animosity. The tribes were then in the midst of a battle over the fate
of two Seneca reservations. Their leaders suspected that the census was part of a
sinister scheme to take over additional land or, equally threatening, a prelimi-
nary step to state taxation of their property. Thus they were particularly reluc-
tant to tally their farm products and belongings. There was also an issue of pride
at stake. Schoolcraft quoted one of the chiefs as claiming that they had little to
exhibit, equating statistical representation with intrusive public scrutiny of pri-
vate matters.
Like officially commissioned investigators on the other side of the Atlantic,
Schoolcraft functioned as an intermediary, concurrently collecting and impart-
ing information. A law that had been recently enacted granted the tribes the
power to initiate suits in state courts and also provided that the chiefs should meet
in council each year to elect a clerk and a treasurer by a plurality of votes. (Thus,
in an attempt to overhaul the Iroquois system of self-government, majority rule
was to replace traditional Indian requirements for unanimity.) The New York
governor asked Schoolcraft to examine Indian attitudes on the subject. School-
 Archives of Indian Knowledge 249

craft apparently went a step further, trying to convince the Seneca that they
should adopt the new system. Months later, several members of the tribe charged
in a petition that Schoolcraft had threatened them that failure to embrace the
new law in full and within the year would prevent them from ever benefiting
from it.

Notes on the Iroquois

In many respects, the Iroquois were model tribes. Their numbers were actu-
ally increasing. Reproducing yet close to cultural extinction, they simultaneously
confirmed and defied the “vanishing Indian” trope, a point that Schoolcraft took
as a sign of their reversal of fortune. In his report to the state of New York,
Schoolcraft was optimistic about the Iroquois future on the path towards civi-
lization. “It is by the numbers of the several tribes of our North American stocks
of red men, compared with their means of subsistence, and their capacity of pro-
ducing the supply, that we are to judge of their advance or declension in the scale
of civilization.”10 In the expanded, private (and, significantly, illustrated) edition
of his official account, titled Notes of the Iroquois, he developed a chauvinistic
theme, insinuating that the Iroquois’s superior degree of manly democracy (in
comparison with the indigenous civilizations of South and Central America)
somehow reflected on the quality of the nation that subordinated and inherited
them. “No nation of the widely spread red race of America,” he wrote, “has dis-
played so high and heroic a love of liberty, united with the true art of govern-
ment, and personal energy and stamina of character, as the Iroquois.”11 Their
long resistance to European incursions and the durability of their institutions
demonstrated Iroquois’s aptitude “as an active, thinking race of men.” During
these years, Schoolcraft, among others, promoted the intensification of the na-
tive motif in the country’s public life; toying, at one time, with the idea of re-
placing America with an aboriginal name, Alleghenia. In his report, Schoolcraft
suggested the Iroquois past, especially its history of warfare, was so intermingled
with that of the colonies that it should be acknowledged as a branch of U.S. his-
tory.
Despite the partial nature of his research, Schoolcraft saw great hope in the
evidence on “moral statistics.” Canvassers counted 350 church members of all
denominations (although 3,081 still adhered to their native religion). Fourteen
reservation schools enrolled nearly half the school-age children, while 870 indi-
viduals or more had signed the temperance pledge. Schoolcraft noted with satis-
faction that for the most advanced group, hunting was, as in civilized communi-
 250 Totem Envy

ties, “an amusement, and not a means of reward.”12 The surveyors found a total
of 371 farmers, 20 mechanics, 7 physicians, 17 teachers, 2 lawyers, and 151 semi-
hunters. The remaining 400 adult males were largely unemployed but worked
seasonally in farms, sawmills, or as unskilled laborers. Schoolcraft regarded these
individuals together with the semihunters as a hindrance to the continued
progress of the Iroquois and subsequently suggested their resettlement in the
West. Otherwise, he urged the state to offer tribesmen full citizenship, arguing
that nothing would benefit the Indian as much as his admission to the rights and
immunities of citizens. He wrote against the annuities system. The periodic al-
location of funds was an opportunity for reckless traders to exploit the Indians’
weaknesses and encourage dangerous consumption of “showy but valueless arti-
cles.”
Historical and ethnological material occupied the bulk of the Iroquois report.
Schoolcraft provided historical sketches for each of the Six Nations, supple-
mented by Indian miscellany, from brief accounts of principles of government
to pottery, archeology, language, and witchcraft—whatever he could find during
short field trips, in his personal repository, or in books written by others. In the
field and in the library, Schoolcraft was, as he fully admitted, a collector of facts;
his cut-and-paste texts exhibited a multitude of retrieved Indian objects, whether
a legend, an artifact, or a religious practice. What little he presented by way of
relating these pieces to each other rested on drawing, or merely suggesting,
broad-stroke comparisons and analogies with other native societies, ancient civi-
lizations, or sometimes, biblical stories.
The concluding third of Notes on the Iroquois featured raw material, evidence,
beginning with Schoolcraft’s letter of appointment and instructions. This trace
of official authority preceded excerpts from Schoolcraft’s private journals under
the title, “Extracts from a Rough Diary of Notes by the Way.”13 Entries had been
recorded in an abrupt style while Schoolcraft surveyed archeological sites. In a
manner reminiscent of western travelers’ (or urban social investigators’) reports,
Schoolcraft reproduced many words in an abbreviated form, ostensibly lifted di-
rectly from the original handwritten notebook. The rest of the document fea-
tured transcripts of letters sent to Schoolcraft from local informants, among
which was a communication from James Cusick, a Tuscarora, detailing his tribe’s
history. Schoolcraft added a passage borrowed from a book published by Cusick’s
brother some twenty years earlier. “As the work of a full blooded Indian, of the
Tuscarora tribe, it is remarkable. In making these extracts, no correction of the
style, or grammar is made, these being deemed a part of the evidence of the au-
thenticity of the traditions recorded.”14 He also included reports sent by Lewis
 Archives of Indian Knowledge 251

Morgan and George S. Riley, two members of the Grand Order of the Iroquois,
on a Seneca council meeting they had attended. Schoolcraft acknowledged the
incompleteness of his research yet emphasized the authenticity of the material
he had amassed. Typically, he offered gratuitous remarks about the pristine qual-
ity of the information. “Notes and sketches were taken down from the lips of
both white and red men, wherever the matter itself and the trustworthiness of
the individual appeared to justify them. Many of the ancient forts, barrows and
general places of ancient sepulcher were visited, and of some of them accurate
plans, diagrams or sketches made on the spot, or obtained from other hands.”15
These were preliminary findings for future usage, and he associated them with
other New York state ventures to commemorate and preserve its history by,
among other means, obtaining historical documents in Europe on New York’s
colonial past.
New York was not the only state that studied its aboriginal inhabitants. Fol-
lowing its neighbor, Massachusetts conducted in 1849 its own survey of its resi-
dent Indians. This modest effort was firmly rooted in the Victorian discourse of
reform and registration rather than the ethnographical sensibility that propelled
the New York project. Commissioners Francis W. Bird, Whiting Griswold, and
Cyrus Weekers were appointed “to visit the several tribes . . . of Indians, re-
maining within this Commonwealth, to examine into their condition and cir-
cumstances, and report to the next Legislature what legislation . . . is necessary
in order best to promote the improvement and interests of said Indians.” The in-
quiry took place at a time when the Indian population was so minuscule (847 in-
dividuals) that in the appendix, the committee listed the name and age of every
Indian man, woman, and child in Massachusetts, most of who were “half
breeds” and heavily mixed with the African American population. The com-
mission dispatched questionnaires but emphasized its fieldwork: “We have seen
them in their dwellings and on their farms, in their school-houses and meeting-
houses, have partaken of their hospitalities of bed and board, have become fa-
miliar with their private griefs and public grievances.” Despite initial distrust,
the commissioners reported that they received full cooperation.16
The report typified Massachusetts-style social reform, which was close in
spirit to the British model. The committee recommended the integration of the
aboriginals into white society, including the offer of citizenship. At the same
time, it contemplated the appointment of a state Indian commissioner and var-
ious schemes to aid those who wished to stay within state guardianship, at least
for a period of transition from dependency to citizenship. The report featured
statistics on property, schools, and churches. Indians were asked about their rela-
 252 Totem Envy

tionship with the state and the prejudice they suffered from whites. This inquiry,
much more than Schoolcraft’s, endeavored to integrate the opinion of the Indi-
ans themselves, brought in their own words, into the policy-making process. A
memorial by one of the small tribes was published verbatim. The commission-
ers alluded to the experience of other oppressed peoples. Foreshadowing the Civil
War–era freedmen’s debate, it maintained, “The history of all conquered and
proscribed races and classes, illustrates the impossibility of elevating such races
and classes, while under civil and political disabilities.”17 Drawing an implicit
analogy between the experience of blacks and Indians, it quoted Frederick Doug-
lass: “Take your heels off of our necks, and see if we do not rise.”18

Duties and Obligations

In February 1846, Schoolcraft completed supervising the printing of Notes on
the Iroquois in Albany and arranged to send copies to various societies, libraries,
and political figures. Two weeks later, he arrived in Washington and began mus-
tering support for a new enterprise. Based on his New York experience, he pro-
posed to Indian Commissioner William Medill to conduct a general census of the
U.S. Indian tribes. No other measure would better substantiate Indian policy. “It
is idle to suppose that we can perform the functions of government towards [the
Indian tribes], in the best manners, without an exact knowledge of the facts on
which the exercise of such governmental power depends.”19 With western ex-
pansion, contacts with indigenous tribes and the need for legislation and policy
making were bound to increase. The census component of Schoolcraft’s plan had
two related focal points: first, demography, or, more precisely, the ability of In-
dians to reproduce themselves in comparison with “European races”; second, the
physical and moral condition of the Indian tribes. In a few years, he predicted,
Indians would reside at the center of the Union and the question of their inte-
gration would become more acute.
Schoolcraft arranged for a member of the House Committee on Indian Affairs
to introduce an amendment to the War Department appropriation bill providing
for an Indian census. The amendment for $10,000 failed to survive a conference
committee. The provision calling for a census was retained, but the appropria-
tion itself was stricken out; the Indian administration was required to perform
the task itself without external assistance. Schoolcraft intensified his lobbying
campaign. He convinced a group of senators to send a letter to Secretary of War
William Marcy on the importance of gathering materials relating to Indian his-
tory and languages. “These tribes are rapidly passing away, and much of what is
 Archives of Indian Knowledge 253

most wanted, respecting them, will soon be out of reach. They are now concen-
trated, where these investigations can be conveniently made and the period is fa-
vorable for the inquiry,” wrote the senators.20 There was some tension (or, con-
versely, peculiar and rather strong causal relations) between the argument for the
urgency of devising a new and comprehensive Indian policy to further the U.S.
civilizing mission and the notion that ethnological knowledge should be recorded
with the utmost speed because Indians were about to disappear. These seemingly
incongruous purposes required recurrent explication and explanation. The ori-
gins and the characteristics of the tribes might not be as important as determin-
ing the right mode of governing them, Schoolcraft reasoned in another plea to
Medill, but the means of accomplishing this purpose were rooted in this type of
knowledge.21
Adding a sharper political angle to his campaign, Schoolcraft wrote directly
to President James Polk asking, in so many words, for a government position in
lieu of the one he had lost. He claimed the Whigs had punished him for de-
fending Martin Van Buren’s administration against a nasty press campaign that
alleged injustice in the operation of the Indian bureaucracy.22 Meanwhile, a pe-
tition drive led by key members of the American Ethnological Society produced
an appeal that emphasized the imperfect state of knowledge on the Indian race
and the importance of this material “to enable government to perform its high
and sacred duties of protection and guardianship over the weak and still savage
race placed by Providence under its care.”23 Secretary Medill joined the chorus,
urging Congress to uphold the vision of a greater project that would include the
history of the Indian, “explain their former, and account for their present con-
dition; and afford some indication of their probable prospect in the future.”24 If
in New York Schoolcraft was able to conduct ethnographical research only as a
supplement to the census, Medill’s letter legitimized the value of the historical
and ethnological research to policy making. Congressional debates on the pro-
posal featured the familiar exchange between those who argued that additional
Indian research was necessary and others like Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who
inveighed, “our papers [are already] teeming with all sorts of information that
everybody had ever dreamed of.” Nevertheless, on March 3, 1847, an amendment
to the War Department appropriation bill provided $5,000 for the project.
Schoolcraft was to run the survey and receive a salary of $1,600 a year.25
Government’s moral responsibility to record ethnological knowledge was ar-
gued for on multiple grounds. Schoolcraft and his backers referred primarily to
the federal duty to secure the well-being of the aboriginal inhabitants. But they
also conceived of the documentation of Indian culture as an obligation govern-
 254 Totem Envy

ment had toward the Indians apart from any policy consideration, and, moreover,
a duty the country had to itself and to humanity. “It is a duty we owe to the na-
tions of the world,” wrote former secretary of war John Spencer, “to investigate
the history, the language, the means of policy of the original inhabitants of this
continent,—not merely, for their own sakes, but, as probably, shedding great light
on the history of other nations.”26
A similar range of motives propelled the persistent but ultimately failed
drives to persuade Congress to purchase painter George Catlin’s gallery of Indian
portraits and curiosities. When Catlin returned from the West in 1837, he ex-
hibited his collection in Washington, D.C., and worked hard to get Congress in-
terested in procuring it. For the next fifteen years, there would be recurrent ap-
plications for congressional patronage while Catlin moved his elaborate collec-
tion to Europe, where it was presented to great effect, at least initially, in Paris,
Versailles, and London. The collection included six hundred paintings covering
forty-eight different tribes and featuring portraits, dresses, weaponry, and other
artifacts, besides two tons of minerals and fossils hauled from the frontier. Catlin
testified that he was guided by his vision of making his collection, “the nucleus
of a museum of mankind, to contain eventually the records, resemblances, and
manufactures of all the diminishing races of native tribes in various parts of the
globe.”27 The collection was also peddled as a monument for the Indian race.
A repeated argument in all solicitations was that every major country in Eu-
rope had one national site of the type that the United States was woefully lack-
ing. Italians interested in the history of Rome could visit the Vatican. The French
artist in search of the Gauls found their remnants in the Louvre. For the English,
the Tower of London was the repository of the Saxons’ weapons and armor.
America needed her own museum where artists might freely study this “bold
race who once held possession of our country.”28 This endemic Europe-envy suf-
fused public discourse in nineteenth-century America. In contrast, the plan im-
plicitly expressed the wish to disengage from a European past by demonstrating
a special bond between Americans and Indians, that was, in a self-contradictory
manner, to follow the example of, for instance, the French and the Gauls.
To add a sense of urgency, it was reported that a year after Catlin visited their
camps, the Mandan Indians were extinct, victims of smallpox. The library com-
mittee pleaded on behalf of future generations, “The intelligent American of
fifty years hence will go in search of them wherever they may be found, but it
will be a subject of grief and shame to him, if he must seek them in the galleries
of some European capital.”29 By 1852, Catlin was incarcerated in an English
 Archives of Indian Knowledge 255

prison for debt and was willing to reduce drastically the asking price of his col-
lection. Prompted by a new campaign, a select committee asserted that in all
countries but especially in a republic there was great responsibility on govern-
ment to educate the people “in valor, wisdom, and virtue.” Here the two educa-
tional missions of the federal government—informing the populace and civiliz-
ing the Indian—seemed to merge. If Barnum conceived of his museum as a
grand, universal spectacle, the congressional committee insisted that for the fu-
ture of the United State, it was important to make Washington, D.C., spectacu-
lar. Employing a recognizable republican hype, it declared: “How shall we bet-
ter strengthen the bonds of union, than by rendering the Capital an object of
pride and interest to the people of every State! How shall we impress mankind
with the excellence of the republican system more easily and more effectually
than by exhibiting to them the achievements of art and science in the classic seat
of republican authority.”30
Catlin’s campaign did not share the utilitarian dimension of Schoolcraft’s or
the ethnographer’s political acumen. Still, both projects vied for government pa-
tronage for a national gesture that rested on a theme current in nineteenth-cen-
tury evangelical philanthropy and expressed by the twin concepts of “lost” and
“found.” The Indian soul would be saved by Christian compassion and civilization.
Museums, galleries, and monumental publishing projects would preserve Indian
culture. Another common denominator in Schoolcraft’s and Catlin’s (and Bar-
num’s) visions of museumification was the immersion of the American national
theme, represented here in the figure of the Indian, in an imperial mission whose
limits transcended the actual boundaries of the United States.

Indian Census
Schoolcraft’s Indian census and the ethnological survey relied heavily on sta-
tistical tables and questionnaires mailed to numerous current (and former) field
agents, schoolteachers, missionaries, and other individuals knowledgeable about
the Indians because of either lengthy contact or scholarly research. Local offi-
cials of the Indian Office were in charge of enumeration. Schoolcraft wanted the
census to be so detailed as to list the names of the heads of every Indian family
in the country. He planned to report periodically to Congress to assure continual
public support, planting the seeds for enduring serial publication.31
Schoolcraft composed a comprehensive statistical schedule that included
ninety-nine items for each Indian family and sixty-seven questions relating to
 256 Totem Envy

tribal affairs. The statistical research recognized the Indian tribe and the ex-
tended Indian family, the band, as a social unit whose advancement should be
measured in tandem. The charts specified thirteen male occupations. The quan-
tity of household products such as knitted or woolen goods was a gauge for level
of housewifery. Schoolcraft sought to list literary rates, to count teachers and stu-
dents, and to follow the success of temperance societies. Another set of queries
comprised a census of manufacturing and commercial intercourse, listing mills
and machinery and the extent of the fur trade.
Schoolcraft’s zeal yielded a ponderous document that seemed inadvertently to
parody scholarly erudition. The hefty questionnaire included 347 items arranged
in 28 topical divisions. The language section alone featured thirty-two questions
and a vocabulary list of 350 words. Each of the queries in this mammoth com-
pilation unleashed a lengthy string of minute questions. Schoolcraft’s preoccu-
pation with the Indian mind (besides the aboriginal family) was strongly evident.
For instance, query number 189 solicited information concerning “Credulity and
Susceptibility of Being Deceived.”

Are the Indians very prone to be deceived by professed dreamers, or the tricks of
jugglers, or by phenomena of nature, of the principles and causes of which they
are ignorant? Is not the surrounding air and forest, converted, to some extent, by
this state of ignorance of natural laws, into a field of mystery, which often fills
their minds with needless alarms? Are their priests shrewd enough to avail them-
selves of this credulity, either by observing this general defect of character, or by
penetrating into the true causes of the phenomena? Do the fears and credulity of
the Indians generally nourish habits of suspicion? Do they tend to form a charac-
ter for concealment and cunning?32

He asked informants about dancing and amusements, sports, death and fu-
nerals, the “character of the race,” oratorical competence, practices of cleanli-
ness, family government, discipline of children, and the proportion of work di-
vided between husbands and wives. “How is Order Preserved in the Limited
Precincts of the Lodge?” inquired Schoolcraft, “Casual observers would judge
there was but little. Inquire into this subject, and state what are the characteris-
tic traits of living in the wigwam, or Indian house. How do the parents and chil-
dren divide the space at night? How are wives, and females of every condition,
protected in respective places, and guarded from intrusion?” Schoolcraft wanted
to know what were the Indians’ relations to property were, whether they had any
notion of equity, and how such possessive rights were acquired and preserved over
time and generations. He told his correspondents a story (most likely from his
 Archives of Indian Knowledge 257

own tenure as an agent in Sault Ste. Marie). Years ago, the tale went, an Indian
from the British dominions (Canada) applied to an American Indian agent for
payment by the United States of a private debt contracted by a “North Briton,”
a resident in Hudson’s Bay. “How did the mind operate in this case, and how does
it operate generally, in tracing the claim of right and title in property, and of ob-
ligation in the affairs of debtor and creditor? Endeavor to trace the process of in-
dividuality in rights and property.”33 Although its enthusiastic application seems
somehow at odds with Schoolcraft’s previous work, political economy enhanced
the impression of science at work. Mid-nineteenth-century statistical practices
were as suffused with moralism as Schoolcraft’s literary endeavors. Ultimately,
in the effort to correct the misrepresentation of the Indian, Schoolcraft prepared
his subject to be judged.
The last item in the questionnaire requested that prospective collaborators state
whether they were acquainted with any substantial errors in popular accounts of
“our Indian Tribes.” (If the respondent was unknown, Schoolcraft demanded ref-
erences.) Previous inquiries, he maintained, were made chiefly by casual visitors
to the Indian country (many of them foreigners, he emphasized), “who have nec-
essarily taken hasty and superficial glances at their mere external customs and cer-
emonies.”34 Circumspection should be applied whenever there appeared to be a
clash of interest between the source of information and the Indians themselves.
There was a great prejudice toward them, he warned, and preconceptions re-
garding their character. It was their due to be evaluated candidly by using the best
sources, he maintained. Schoolcraft even provided a few examples of previous de-
ceptions. An English popular writer had alleged that in 1837 the United States had
borrowed money from a wealthy Indian chief to pay its annuities to his tribes.
American policy had been challenged abroad because of such “ill-digested” or
worthless information. Schoolcraft and the Indian office were also aware of po-
tential resistance to the canvass. They ordered field agents not to alarm their abo-
riginal counterparts and appended minute details on the proper way to fill out the
printed forms. He recommended that the time of the annual payments would
afford a good opportunity for collecting much of the information.35
The long list of questions betrayed a certain sense of grandeur—personal, in-
stitutional and national—but the heft of the questionnaire threatened to sub-
merge the entire project. It was printed, bound as a book, and sent first to several
hundred selected individuals; later it was coupled with the first volume of the
survey. This became, as we saw in the case of British royal commissions, a com-
mon procedure of bureaucratic print culture; another gesture toward trans-
parency intended to incorporate the reader into the process of investigation and
 258 Totem Envy

to demonstrate the project’s quality, consistency, and impartiality. It was evident,

however, that many of the questions presumed particular answers.
The national census of the Indian tribes failed more spectacularly than the
earlier New York poll. Indian tribes were concerned that the census would even-
tuate unwanted change, including new efforts at their removal. A year and a half
into Schoolcraft’s tenure, many of the major tribes had reported no data at all,
although Schoolcraft was by then inundated with ethnological material from
other sources. It became, once again, quite impossible to squeeze Indian existence
into the uncompromising rubrics of statistical tables designed to display infor-
mation such as school attendance and farming equipment. The census faced the
combined antagonism of distrustful chiefs and government agents who did not
want to bother with a tedious task that promised no remuneration. Writing to
Secretary of War Marcy in early 1849, Schoolcraft acknowledged that the field-
work faced strong difficulties, “owing to the misapprehensions, and objections of
some of the Indians, and Indian agents, and the inaptitude, unpreparedness, or
incapacity of the latter generally.”36 For reasons of health and work, Schoolcraft
could not embark on his own tour of inspection. Only in 1854 did he consider
simplifying the schedules by dividing tribes into advanced, intermediate, and no-
madic bands. He planned this as a first step toward a new census in the spring of
next year, but that census never materialized as Congress and the Indian Office
lost patience with the subject.
Even earlier, with the arrival of a Whig administration in 1849 and the relo-
cation of the Indian Office to the new Department of the Interior, Schoolcraft
found himself pulling political strings to defend his position. His colleague (and
lodger) Smithsonian secretary Joseph Henry wrote to the secretary of the Interior
on his behalf that the scientific world was expecting the United States to provide
a full account on the race it dispossessed. “We would urge especially that the in-
vestigations be actively prosecuted at the present tim[e] while Mr [Schoolcraft] is
in the vigour of physical and mental power.”37 Indeed, Schoolcraft’s failing health
would prove detrimental to the character of the entire operation. An illness dur-
ing the summer and fall of 1849 left him unable to use his right hand. His health
gradually and irreversibly deteriorated. By 1851, he rarely went to the Indian
Office and became isolated from its affairs. A few years later, complete paralysis
took over. He could not write anymore and had to rely on the services of others,
especially his second wife, Mary Howard Schoolcraft. Schoolcraft made his last
journey in 1856 and routinely declined all scholarly and social invitations.
During those years, the ballast of the project shifted from accumulating sta-
tistics and ethnological information to publishing, which, taking lawmakers’ am-
Detail from the title page of the fifth volume of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Historical and
Statistical Information Respecting the History Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the
United States (1851–57). The illustration above the title is a sketchy rendition of Seth Eastman’s
famous drawing (inset) of an Indian warrior scalping a white man, titled, “The Death Whoop,”
an engraving of which is featured in the second volume of the series.
 260 Totem Envy

bitions into consideration, he conceived as a serial project crowded with illustra-

tions. In 1850, the department appointed Capt. Seth Eastman to make the en-
graved illustrations for the report. Schoolcraft wrote to Minnesota senator Henry
Sibley that printing the account in the ordinary style of public documents was
tantamount to doing injustice to the historical and ethnological research. It was
a “national work” and ought to be presented in the same spirit. The document
should not be confined to a single volume. In a letter to the social science pioneer
Francis Lieber, Schoolcraft predicted that the material would fill at least four-
teen quarto volumes of five hundred or more printed pages each.38 In October
1850, Schoolcraft signed a contract with the publisher Lippincott, Grambo and
Co., previously known for publishing Bibles. He would spend a few months each
year in Philadelphia to oversee the printing. An edition of twelve hundred copies
finally appeared in January 1851, at a cost of $8,661, more than half of which was
paid to three lithography firms that mounted large operations employing, among
other methods, the innovative technique of chromolithography. Another edition
of six hundred copies of the first volume was printed for new members of Con-
gress in 1852 as part of their book privileges.39 Congress then stipulated that sub-
sequent volumes would appear annually until the completion of the project.
Besides closely supervising the printing, which had become a demanding task,
the former field expert had to spend most of his time editing the bulky volumes.
Schoolcraft wanted to make his final installment a summary of the findings and
write a defense for the federal Indian policy, for which he received the special
permission to take two years rather than one. His application for a leave of ab-
sence to visit European archives was denied. All in all, Congress would spend
$126,711.59 on the Indian survey. Only a third of that sum went to amassing in-
formation and to editing. The rest funded printing and publishing. This produc-
tion made Lippincott’s national reputation as a first-rate publisher and earned
him a substantial sum of money. Schoolcraft’s wife and son received a salary and
travel allowances. In 1850, during his negotiations with Lippincott, he arranged
for the reissue of his private work, beginning with Personal Memoirs. Alas, this
and similar books that he republished with Lippincott proved to be commercial
failures.40

Archives
The six volumes of Inquiries respecting the History, Present Condition, and Fu-
ture Prospects, of the Indian Tribes of the United States were beautifully crafted
quarto tomes with gilded fronts and covers embossed with an Indian motif. More
 Archives of Indian Knowledge 261

than three hundred plates, mostly by Eastman, adorned the text, including eighty
full-page illustrations of various aspects of aboriginal life such as buffalo hunting,
wild-rice gathering, maple-sugar making, sports, and ceremonies. They rendered
the production more exquisite and introduced an element of titillation. They in-
cluded scenes of exotic religious practices and, possibly more inciting, depictions
of half-naked females at work. Furthermore, the title page featured a detail from
an iconic Eastman illustration (of which he produced a few versions) called the
Death Whoop: a fierce warrior clasping in his raised hand the scalp of a slain white
man who is lying on the ground. Opening an exuberant volume that documents
Indian history, this image constituted another uncanny “bee in the book.”
Copies were sent to foreign governments, learned societies, and literary
celebrities. President Millard Fillmore, who received a presentation copy, com-
plimented the execution of the first installment. Critics would juxtapose the vol-
umes’ lavish execution with their jumbled content, for the series ultimately con-
sisted of roughly stitched-together old and new articles, about a tenth of which
were produced by Schoolcraft himself. The remainder featured pieces written
specifically for the project, excerpts from books, vocabulary lists, expedition narra-
tives, tables, and some unedited replies to the questionnaire. Schoolcraft arranged
the vast material according to the thematic subheadings of the questionnaire but
otherwise did little. The text’s disorder, which exceeded any contemporary stan-
dard for presenting authentic evidence in its undiluted form, testified not only to
Schoolcraft’s diminishing health but also to a measure of incompetence shared
by him and the federal administration. In this case, publishing a report turned
out to be easier than conducting field research. When, at the end of the decade,
Schoolcraft’s wife Mary Howard commissioned a private edition of the project,
she quite properly chose to designate it Archives of Indian Knowledge. Once
again, congested cabinets of curiosities spring to mind.
As an encyclopedic publication, Schoolcraft’s tomes purported to cover every
aspect of Indian life and research and thus relinquished the emphasis on new
scholarship. Schoolcraft solicited contributions from a variety of experts and
even published a posthumous piece on Indian skulls by his foe Samuel Morton.
He also inserted an account of his own discovery of Lake Itasca, illustrated by a
color engraving. In his expedition through the library, Schoolcraft retrieved ac-
counts of the exploration of De Soto and Coronado, eighteenth-century travel
sketches, and other such miscellany about the West. Fresher information in-
cluded a study of Chippewa traditions by William Warren and George Gibb’s ac-
count of Redick McKee’s expedition through northwestern California. It took an-
other century for a complete index to be prepared.41
 262 Totem Envy

Whenever possible, Schoolcraft made strong statements supporting his con-

victions about the unity of the human family. He forcefully endorsed manifest
destiny as well as the federal treatment of the Indian tribes. This was a patriotic
tract, and Schoolcraft reiterated his praise for the democratic inclinations of
North American aboriginals as opposed to the feudalism he detected among the
Incas and the Aztecs. His religiosity was also fully articulated. The decline of the
Indian denoted his own moral failure, a fall from grace, and an attachment to
misguided religious beliefs and rituals—all of which Schoolcraft explained by a
curiously mechanical malfunctioning of the Indian mind. “If the Indian mind
could be taken apart, as a piece of mechanism, it would be found to be an incon-
gruous and unwieldy machine, which had many parts that did not match, and
which, if likened to a watch, only ran by fits and starts, and never gave the true
time.”42 The Indian was now facing a fateful dilemma. It was the white man’s
duty to offer the route toward civilization. It was the red man’s burden to make
the correct choice and to abandon his language, religion, hunting culture, and
tribal identity. Ultimately, Schoolcraft’s argument for the removal policy was
reminiscent of the utilitarian workhouse test, Bentham’s notion of less eligibil-
ity. While living in conditions of abundance, the Indian remained idle and at-
tached to his misguided ways, leading to inevitable extinction. Moving the In-
dian away from the surplus of the bountiful regions would impose a regime of
work and production and disengagement from the destructive life of hunting.43
Schoolcraft appropriated his model of regeneration directly from the biblical
narrative of Exodus. It took the Hebrews forty years to return to the civilized
state from which they had fallen—forty years of desert education outside hu-
man society. He advocated terminating the independent status of the tribes and
subjecting the aboriginal to the same moral, economical, and religious system in
which whites lived. With the Indians placed on isolated reservations where they
could live according to American social codes, their transformation at the hands
of educators and missionaries would be made easier. History as a morality tale
was Schoolcraft’s way of giving coherence to the disparate material he commit-
ted to print. Glowingly, he assumed the title of the Indian Historian to Congress
and presented his official project as a work of history. That may have been
prompted by Schoolcraft’s responsiveness to popular taste, as historical narratives
enjoyed commercial success at the time. His notion of history as a comprehen-
sive, all-encompassing archive and, at the same time, a narrative with a moral
rudder befitted the grandiosity of the national undertaking. The printed archive
was the proper monument to the vanishing race as well as a legacy that School-
craft wanted to leave directly to the Indian tribes to whom he always felt obliged.
 Archives of Indian Knowledge 263

The publication ameliorated a deficiency in Indian life. In Schoolcraft’s concep-

tion, the six volumes did not merely compensate for the lack of fully developed
Indian historiography; they also literally brought the Indian to the stage of his-
tory. They made history.
Public response was mixed. Writers who praised him did so largely because
of the report’s material opulence. Schoolcraft’s course of action, however, was
alien to the sensibilities of the 1850s scholarly milieu. Personal and ideological
animosities were also at play. The intellectual community’s ambivalence was
manifested in the shifting response on the pages of the North American Review.
A short, one-page review in July 1851 celebrated the first installment.

It is worth much more, in a national point of view, than is usually achieved by any
single session of Congress, consumed in no matter how many speeches. It is, me-
chanically, a beautiful specimen of book making. The engravings are finely exe-
cuted, and the letter press is from the hands of an editor, than whom there is no
one in the country more competent to the task of grouping the facts and elucidat-
ing the mysteries of Indian tradition and history . . . The plan of this book is strictly
national. It could only be achieved by a wealthy nation. To gather all the scattered
proofs and traditions, in respect to the Indian races of America—to bring them to-
gether, in due relationship, for the future student—is to confer incalculable bene-
fits upon science, history and art.44

The reviewer maintained that the publication’s most important aspect was the
inspiration it could provide for national art. This project thus assumed the func-
tion (otherwise associated with Catlin’s gallery) of aestheticizing the Indian sub-
ject. Implicitly supporting Schoolcraft’s editorial style, the reviewer argued that
the project should have included all records on the subject “without mutilation,”
for no editor could know what part of a specific chronicle, tradition or artifact
would invigorate art in the future, inspire the poet, painter, sculptor, or drama-
tist, for history’s best use is art. “The errors and misconceptions of tradition are
still portions of history, and are themselves not infrequently seized upon by ge-
nius.” Even outlandish tales by early voyagers like the “Isles of Devils” were
turned by the likes of Shakespeare into unsurpassed works of beauty. The re-
viewer further proposed that government should embrace another literary ven-
ture—a collection of all narratives ever written of discovery voyages to the New
World. The publication of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hi-
awatha (1855), which was clearly based on material collected by Schoolcraft for
his federal project, seemed to demonstrate the artistic need for access to raw his-
torical material.
“Transporting Water and Grass Seed, Valley of San Joaquin, California.” This illustration from
Schoolcraft’s Indian volumes is typical of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with women’s
labor and the female naked body which also was evident in British social investigations. (Seth
Eastman, after sketches by Edward Kern)
 Archives of Indian Knowledge 265

Two years later, Francis J. Bowen, the editor of the North American Review,
attacked Schoolcraft’s editorial incompetence, especially the printing of random
and unreliable information. He quoted Alexander von Humboldt, who report-
edly dismissed the work as a valueless compilation. Bowen called for public scru-
tiny of federal appropriations. He contrasted the enormous resources that had
been invested in this “sumptuous” work with the government’s parsimony in
publishing Wilkes’s exploring expedition reports and other scientific accounts
such as the Coast Survey, which “appear[ed] in a dingy pamphlet the typogra-
phy of which would be a disgrace to a penny newspaper.”45 For political reasons,
Schoolcraft’s project thrived at the expense of more valuable scholarly enter-
prises. In the wealth of information on the West’s geology, geography, and dis-
covery, the Indian himself was pushed aside, almost disappearing, sneered
Bowen, repeating the cliché about writing the character Hamlet out of the play
that bears his name. Bowen, it seems, was right. Schoolcraft’s work did not so
much commemorate the Indian as simulate his disappearance.
Coming at this phase, the criticism threatened to abort the project, which re-
lied on annual appropriations. Schoolcraft believed that the polygenist camp was
conspiring against him and that the archeologist Ephraim Squier stood behind a
few hostile reviews. (Schoolcraft had criticized Squier’s work in unflattering
terms.46) One way or another, Schoolcraft was by then branded by many as a ves-
tige of old amateurish ethnology. In January 1858, a particularly nasty review
appeared in the New York Herald, attacking not just Schoolcraft but congres-
sional excess as well. “Year after year massive quartos . . . fall like mud avalanches
upon an unoffending public; provoking infinite mirth among those acquainted
with aboriginal subjects at home, and astonishing scientific men abroad, by their
crudity and incoherence. They are printed on costly paper, in luxurious type, and
are full of sprawling outlines of beast and bird, smeared with bright yellow or
dirty red, which for any scientific value they possess might be copied from the
walls of a country schoolhouse; and the text is to match.”47
The anonymous writer called Schoolcraft “a garrulous old man who should
have been left to mumble his rubbish . . . under the porch of the corner grocery.”
A tone of bitterness and paranoia crept into Schoolcraft’s correspondence during
this period. In October 1853, he assured Indian commissioner George Many-
penny that he had systematically organized the project according to a precon-
ceived plan and that the material was untainted by the speculations and theories
that had muddied public judgment of the Indian. They couldn’t be expected to
become political economists over night and manage their affairs. “There are per-
sons in America who believe that our duties to the unenlightened aboriginal na-
 266 Totem Envy

tions are overrated,” he wrote about his polygenist foes. These individuals would
not feel great sadness if the Indian race should soon perish.48

Property
In 1858, the ailing Schoolcraft appealed to Congress to compensate him for
services rendered during his decade of work on Indian history. The following
year, Schoolcraft’s wife secured the passage of a private act under which Congress
granted her and her husband an exclusive fourteen-year copyright for his Indian
history. She had written to the Committee on Indian Affairs. “Congress deter-
mining to print no more of the “Indian History” consigns said plates, to the van-
dalism of rust, in the ghostly vaults of the capitol, with other . . . rubbish while
to the author’s deeply venerating wife, these souvenirs, would be inestimable, &
cherished with all a woman’s adhesiveness . . . and pride of a husband, who has
spent a long life of dignified research in science, literature, & art & commands
immortal fame as the only consecutive historian of the Red Race, known to the
world’s traditions.”49
The copyright included the exclusive use of the engraved plates. Mary How-
ard then began arranging the publication of a commercial edition with which
she hoped to recoup the family’s fortunes. She recruited Spencer Fullerton Baird
of the Smithsonian to help her find buyers for her husband’s work in the scien-
tific community at home and in Europe. There had been an earlier initiative to
issue a private edition of the work. After the first volume was printed, the School-
crafts obtained permission to use the steel plates. In endorsing this project, Sen-
ator James Pearce, chairman of the library committee, wrote, “The only motive
the Gov. had in ordering the publication was to preserve and diffuse the infor-
mation it contained of a people fast fading away. A private edition would more
completely effectuate this object by more widely diffusing this great national
memorial.”50 Pearce claimed that the committee had always allowed such priv-
ileges to authors of “timely publications” under its supervision and that no spe-
cial copyright was required. However, without copyright the Schoolcrafts had to
spend more money and to charge fifteen dollars per volume. Mary Howard
hoped, “Now that the book is no longer a ‘Public Document’ and the market can-
not be overstocked by congressional presentations, of it, at home & abroad; we
think it can be plausibly sold at $10 per volume.”51 Congress’s unprecedented de-
cision to concede by law to a private citizen an exclusive copyright of one of its
formal publications showed the absence of a strict distinction between private
and public ownership of official reports. Moreover, Lippincott, who was hired to
 Archives of Indian Knowledge 267

execute the report, became in the early 1850s the Schoolcrafts’ private publisher.
He republished some of Schoolcraft’s old writings and (quite reluctantly) the
pro-slavery manuscript, The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South
Carolina (1860) written by Mary Howard as a response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
In another twist that exemplified the confusion over governmental and per-
sonal stakes in intellectual property, illustrator Seth Eastman claimed that Con-
gress had wronged him and demanded proper compensation for his artwork. In
a memorial prompted by Schoolcraft’s copyright, Eastman argued that prior to
his appointment as the project’s artist he had contemplated a literary undertak-
ing of his own, based on the knowledge of the Indian subject he had acquired in
his leisure time.52 He had made a great effort “perfecting himself in his art,” ac-
quiring material, and drawing sketches. He had in his possession sixty-seven
paintings and sketches, which he eventually used for the six-volume enterprise.
Government paid the engraver $325 for each of these plates, but Eastman re-
ceived no compensation beyond his salary as an officer of the U.S. army. He now
asked Congress to pay him for his property, which it had unduly granted to an-
other person.
The congressional committee that examined the matter was sympathetic to
Eastman’s complaint. It recommended paying seventy-five dollars for the copy-
right of each of the sixty-seven pictures, a total of $5,025. The bill, however,
never passed, and seven years later, the Senate Committee on Claims considered
again compensating Eastman. This time, senators were less obliging. It was
brought to the committee’s attention that the illustrator’s wife, Mary Eastman,
published a book, Chicora, and other Regions of the Conqueror and the Conquered
(1854) that featured twenty-one of Eastman’s drawings; most, if not all of them,
were identical to those in the official publication. As far as these twenty-one pic-
tures were concerned, the committee argued, the Eastmans had already secured
a priority of rights. As for the rest of the application, Eastman was employed by
government and received a salary. He also had used, without pay, government-
owned plates for his wife’s book. The illustrator, the committee concluded, was
not entitled to any special compensation.53

Ancient Monuments
In his oration before the Grand Order of the Iroquois, Schoolcraft commended
his young listeners for banding together for the cause of scholarship. In Europe,
he remarked, literary institutions depended on the benevolence of monarchs but
republicans relied on the ability of individuals. Among the aboriginals, the to-
 268 Totem Envy

temic bond secured the tie between men and society. The union the Grand Or-
der formed was just as noble, a totemic union of minds. “It is a band of brother-
hood, but a brotherhood of letters . . . You aim at general objects and results, but
pursue them, through the theme and story of that proud and noble race of the
sons of the Forest, whose name, whose costume and whose principles of associa-
tion you assume. Symbolically, you re-create the race.”54
The following year, the brotherhood of science in America would have its own
totem and grand order in the form of the Smithsonian Institution. The institu-
tion soon decided to inaugurate its most prestigious publication forum, the Smith-
sonian Contribution to Knowledge, with a work on an Indian “theme and story,”
Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi
Valley (1848). Like Schoolcraft, Squier, the monograph’s primary author, re-
garded his archaeological work as a first step in a prospective national project.
The monograph did much to bolster the institution’s standing as a leading sci-
entific force.
Born in 1821 in Bethlehem, New York, Squier was editing a weekly newspa-
per in Chillicothe, Ohio, when in 1845 he and Davis, a local physician, began ex-
ploring archaeological sites in the region. The following year he became the
Clerk of the Ohio House of Representatives and, embarking on a political career
that would later lead to a short appointment (1849 – 50) as chargé d’affaires to
Guatemala. The two budding archeologists explored large artificial mounds, os-
tensibly shrines or burial sites whose ancient builders’ ties to contemporary In-
dians was uncertain. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, there was
much debate over the identity of the mound builders. Their enigmatic origins
and mysterious disappearance stirred the taxonomic imagination of American
scholars and fiction writers. Were they survived by or destroyed by Indians? Were
they more advanced? Did they come from South America or had they migrated
there? Some thought that the answer to these and other questions could refute or
affirm Morton’s controversial ideas. The most prevalent among the contending
views was that the mounds were constructed by a superior civilization. As an ad-
ditional justification for his Indian removal policy, President Jackson employed
the speculative theory that inferior Indians had driven the more sophisticated
mound builders away.55
At the conclusion of two years of research, Squier was looking for public pa-
tronage for publishing their survey. In March 1847, he wrote Smithsonian secre-
tary Joseph Henry, boasting that he and Davis might finally solve the “grand eth-
nological problem” presented by the mounds.56 Squier had already described his
findings to Gallatin, who offered the support of the American Ethnological So-
 Archives of Indian Knowledge 269

ciety. Henry decided to adopt the project and to utilize this manuscript as a model
for all future publications in terms of scientific protocol, stylistic uniformity, and
production value. It was uncharacteristically risky of him to sponsor a mono-
graph on such an incendiary topic. Yet he was keen on demonstrating that, de-
spite his own training as a physicist, the new institution would address diverse
scholarly interests. (The Smithsonian was charted to engage social research into
topics such as penal reform in addition to natural science.) This account, more-
over, presented an opportunity to display the might of science, not so much in re-
solving questions of origin as in properly representing the aboriginal subject mat-
ter in print. It was essential that Squier’s finding would follow the acceptable
scientific procedures that were the norm in the most admirable European insti-
tutions: peer review by an expert panel ostensibly unaware of the author’s iden-
tity or affiliation. Through the Smithsonian series, Henry devised an apparatus
of official publication very different from the unprincipled, haphazard patron-
age Congress bestowed on literary and scientific projects.
In a letter to Squier, Henry delineated a procedure for reviewing his mono-
graph. The authors would apply to the Smithsonian for publication. The Smith-
sonian secretary then would refer the memoir to the Ethnological Society to de-
termine whether it was an original contribution to knowledge. If the committee
of the society replied in the affirmative, the memoir would be accepted for pub-
lication. Subsequently, Henry referred the study to the society for a blind exam-
ination and in response received Gallatin’s endorsement for publication. As a ges-
ture to scientific transparency, Henry published the entire exchange of letters
between himself, Squier, and the Ethnological Society, as a preface to Squier’s
volume and later in the Smithsonian’s annual reports. This approach became a
template for the treatment of scholarly work.57 Alas, the correspondence was
heavily altered to fit the review process. The society was well acquainted with
Squier and his work before the review began. Henry even dictated changes in the
society’s “independent” report, claiming, “I am obliged to be very cautious in
conducting the first business of the Institution in order that I may not establish
precedents which may embarrass my future operations.”58 He asked Squier to
add to the preface (in fact, to fabricate) a mock application for the Smithsonian’s
assistance in making public his scholarship. In many respects, the first secretary
of the Smithsonian was the moral compass of American science, but in his zeal
to formalize the rituals of scientific publication, he falsified the record and pre-
sented a misleading account of the correspondence that had taken place. Em-
ploying this masquerade, the Smithsonian rendered the description of an in-
digenous past as a form of pure scientific endeavor (in the tradition of natural
 270 Totem Envy

history), a process through which the Indian himself, once again, disappeared
and the Smithsonian came to regulate and stratify the fraternal world of Amer-
ican science.
Squier was in charge of supervising the report’s production. New York City
artists made most of the engravings and woodcuts. From Washington, Henry fol-
lowed the process carefully. He was preparing for a strictly uniform serial publi-
cation. Dictating the little details of the page outlay, he demanded, for instance,
that Squier use only one column for the text’s footnotes. “I am responsible for the
style of the work,” he insisted, “as this is the beginning of a series of volumes
each [volume] of which must be on the same plan it is highly important that we
start aright.”59 A few weeks before the monograph appeared, he wrote to Asa
Gray, “I think it will make one of the most beautiful books ever published in this
country.”60 In his view, only the Smithsonian could conduct a project of such
quality.
In short, with the rise of the Smithsonian, the authoritative voices of the in-
stitution and science, in many ways mightier than that of the executive or Con-
gress, were to overshadow the scholar’s own authorial presence. Correspondingly,
Henry censured Squier for the arrogant tone of his prose.61 He also forbade him
to add any theoretical speculation to the description of the mounds and their con-
tents. Squier, a polygenist, was initially defiant but ultimately conformed to Hen-
ry’s preferences.
The monograph’s introduction carries a familiar assurance to the reader,
“Care was exercised to note down, on the spot, every fact which it was thought
might be of value . . . [n]o exertion was spared to ensure entire accuracy, and the
compass, line, and rule were alone relied upon.”62 Otherwise, the preface was of
a fresh character. It commenced with a short overview of previous literature on
the mounds, at the conclusion of which the authors maintained that because of
deficiencies in previous studies they had decided to start over, to jettison any pre-
conceptions, and to devise a new plan of investigation. The main text was struc-
tured around visual representations (maps, woodcuts, engravings) of the mounds
and the relics found in them, further enhancing the impression of a methodical
survey focused on description and classification. Any direct mention of contem-
porary Indians was avoided. Three stock aboriginals occupied the front left cor-
ner of the frontispiece, which depicted “Ancient Works, Marietta, Ohio,” but it
seems that they were placed there for aesthetic reasons only, merely to frame the
picture. The engraving of another famous site, Grace Creek Mound in western
Virginia, which in the 1840s became a tourist attraction, depicted the mound in
its modern condition: fenced and covered with trees, with a group of visitors en-
 Archives of Indian Knowledge 271

joying a picnic at its base. Most of Squier and Davis’s text was occupied by de-
tailed description of artifacts and places. The run was modest (1,000 copies) and
sumptuously bound in red morocco. It was categorically decided that only insti-
tutions would receive copies. As a work of science, the publication was distrib-
uted in exchange for the transactions of literary and scientific societies. Addi-
tional copies were given to all the colleges and principal libraries in the country.

Schoolcraft and Squier signified two modes of mid-nineteenth-century field-

work-based scholarship that in one form or another required the assistance of or-
ganized science and the state. Squier and Davis’s method of demonstrating the
value and precision of their work was largely based on standardized procedures
of research and publication as well as on strong markers of institutional author-
ity. These conventions were sustained by a loosely defined scientific community
and were devised to guarantee the veracity, importance, and originality of the
information as well as the transparency of the process itself. Schoolcraft’s tech-
niques of verifying information rested on his proximity to the field of inquiry—
his lengthy residence on the frontier and his familial ties with indigenous
people—and to his association with the federal government. He also employed
recognizable modes of representing authentic facts on the printed page. School-
craft and Squier shared an entrepreneurial zeal and were uneasy in their rela-
tionships with formal institutions. Schoolcraft’s national project demonstrated
federal inexperience, on the one hand, and the power of Congress in the dispen-
sation of patronage to publishing ventures, on the other.
Why did Congress bother, for nearly a decade, to allocate substantial sums to
what would become one of the costliest antebellum publication enterprises? This
project was certainly an early attempt by the state to engage in a large-scale so-
cial survey (outside the census) based on detailed and rather intrusive statistical
returns and canvassing performed by government officials. More importantly,
Schoolcraft’s work corresponded with political and national sentiment and with
previously published exploration reports established an official history of the
West. The federal government did not need scientific tools to devise a new pol-
icy, but Democratic administrations were interested in a strong endorsement of
their existing policy. With this goal in mind, the ethnological material was as effi-
cacious as statistics. This may also explain why, even after the exceedingly par-
tial outcome of the poll became apparent to all, the project was not aborted.
Schoolcraft’s surveys thrived on party politics (although the support of Senator
Charles Sumner—no friend of the Democratic Party—indicates a somewhat
broader appeal.) In the midst of toiling over the first volume, Schoolcraft sup-
 272 Totem Envy

ported Lewis Cass’s candidacy for the 1848 presidential election. He even wrote
Cass’s campaign biography. The ultimate failure of Schoolcraft’s Indian census
featured a tacit collaboration between native groups, who refused to be enumer-
ated and be known to the federal government through detailed statistics (and
thus exercised a measure of control over their representation), and federal field
agents, who, for a variety of reasons, were strongly reluctant to conduct the sur-
vey and to impose the will of the Indian Office on their local interlocutors.
 chapter eight

The Purloined Indian

The circumstances of Lewis Henry Morgan’s research and writing seem in-
commensurable with Henry Schoolcraft’s frontier experience and official pa-
tronage. Nevertheless, the social and national foundations of Schoolcraft’s eth-
nology were present in Morgan’s discovery of and attachment to the Indian
subject. The book he published in 1851, after seven years of continuous yet mostly
leisure-time research in western New York, was revolutionary. In League of the
Iroquois, Morgan offered relatively little by way of Indian history. He also did
not parade disconnected facts about native cultures and antiquities. Artifacts were
described in conjunction with his observations on the social matrix of the Iro-
quois nations. His was a synchronic (rather than merely synoptic) look into the
Iroquois league’s political bodies, laws, family structures, religion, and culture,
and how these elements operated in concert to enhance the particular political
organization of the league. Ultimately, Morgan was as much a researcher of the
Iroquois’s political affairs or “state” as a social investigator. Like Schoolcraft, he
was interested in the Indian mind. But Morgan regarded indigenous institutions
and political arrangements as positive manifestations of mental capabilities. In
the first of his ethnological monographs, Morgan inverted the paradigm, asking
not how native ways impeded civilization but how this society, the Six Nations of
the Iroquois, had remained viable for such a long time.
Morgan’s book has been often considered (in fact, celebrated as) a prototype
of structuralist anthropology. In it Morgan also made the initial steps toward the
introduction of anthropology of kinship—which had not been an object of the
ethnological gaze—by observing that the Iroquois family was structured differ-
ently from the western one. It expanded laterally—uncles were designated by
specific terms as fathers, cousins were siblings, and so forth. He also learned that
descent among the Iroquois was strictly matrilineal. These findings would lead
to Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family published by the
 274 Totem Envy

Smithsonian in 1870 (on the basis of circulars sent through the State Department
all over the globe). Marx and Engels enthusiastically embraced Morgan’s later
work, in which he delineated a course of human social evolution closely linked
to material progress. Engels produced his treatise The Origin of the Family, Pri-
vate Property and the State in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan
(1881) under the influence of Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877). He went as far as
declaring that Morgan’s typology of the human family contributed to anthro-
pology as much as Darwin’s theory of evolution did to biology and Marx’s the-
ory of surplus value did to political economy.
In League of the Iroquois, Morgan also eschewed elaborate techniques to
demonstrate the authenticity of the material he was presenting to his readers.
Instead, in the preface he made two unusual gestures. First, he dedicated the book
to his native informant: “To hä-sa-no-an’-da (Ely S. Parker) A Seneca Indian,
this work, the materials of which are the fruit of our joint researches, is inscribed:
in acknowledgment of the obligations, and in testimony of the friendship of the
author.”1 Second, as for the integrity of his evidence, Morgan (writing in third
person) succinctly remarked, “Circumstances in early life, not necessary to be re-
lated, brought the author in frequent intercourse with the descendants of the Iro-
quois, and led to his adoption as a Seneca. This gave him favorable opportunities
for studying minutely into their social organization, and the structure and prin-
ciples of the ancient League.”2 The circumstances Morgan alluded to, rather
vaguely, were his leadership in the New Order of the Iroquois, the “secret” fra-
ternal organization of young aspiring professionals and businessmen in 1840s
western New York.
This chapter focuses on Morgan’s activities in the New Order of the Iroquois
and his encounters with faux Indians, actual Indians, and ethnological informa-
tion. It explores two mechanisms for the transmission of social knowledge: first,
racial mimicry or masquerade, and second, the agency and representational work
of the individual informant. Putting on “red face” was essential to the content
of Morgan’s ethnological work, to his sense of social discovery, as well as to the
textual character of his reports. Racial cross-dressing was also emblematic of In-
dian-white relations in general and symptomatic (if atypical) of other social in-
vestigators’ desire to cultivate some affinity with the investigated population. In
comparison with Schoolcraft’s project, it seems that the state receded from the
scene of Morgan’s investigations but, as will become patent, it never really dis-
appeared. Like ethnographers and social investigators, Morgan served as an in-
termediary between government and the Indian.
 The Purloined Indian 275

The New Order

Morgan was born in 1818 to the wife of an affluent farmer near Aurora. Af-
ter graduating from Union College, he returned home to study law, where he
soon became involved in the Gordian Knot, a literary club that drew many of its
members from the nearby Cayuga College. Whereas the early 1840s found
Schoolcraft looking desperately for employment, the lingering depression fol-
lowing the panic of 1837 left Morgan with an abundance of free time. He was
admitted to the bar but could not find a position. For a time he devoted himself
to the temperance crusade, lecturing in nearby villages, but then immersed him-
self in the activities of his fraternal organization. Importantly, the Gordian Knot
was a substitute for the type of social setting elsewhere offered by Freemasons
and comparable associations. In the late 1820s, western New York had witnessed
the emergence of the Anti-Mason Movement, instigated by the mysterious dis-
appearance of William Morgan (not related to Lewis) who at the time of his al-
leged kidnap and murder (1826) was working on a manuscript aimed at expos-
ing the secrets of Freemasonry.
Initially, members of the Gordian Knot wore white robes (in accordance with
the Greek-revival vogue) and elaborate regalia and chose for their meetings the
abandoned Masonic lodge in Aurora. Soon after, Morgan and his colleagues de-
cided to “cut the knot” and to abandon the white robes in favor of an Indian
theme.3 In 1842, the new association was to be renamed the Cayugas (after the
Indian nation that had occupied the region) but quickly assumed the identity of
the entire Iroquois Confederacy, duly labeling itself, the Grand (or New) Order
of the Iroquois (or the New Confederacy of the Iroquois). The society decided to
replicate the internal organization of the Indian nations. An official plan was
adopted, and the following summer the Grand Order of the Iroquois was for-
mally established at a conference in Aurora attended by 150 delegates. For an abo-
riginal name, the organization selected We-yo-ha-yo-de-za-de Na-ho-de’-no-sau-
nee, or “they who live in the home of the dwellers in the long house,” in other
words, those who replaced the Iroquois.
Morgan further elaborated the notion of substitution in an 1844 article he
wrote for the Knickerbocker. The piece began with a quotation from the famed
late eighteenth-century Iroquois orator Red Jacket: “Who then lives to mourn
us? None. What Marks our Extermination? Nothing.”4 At the core of the article
was a tale about a Cayuga Sachem, the historical figure Karistagia, or Steeltrap.
 276 Totem Envy

Ninety years earlier, the story goes, he had a prophetic vision occasioned by the
first white visitors to the region. Steeltrap observed them come and go with an
“anxious eye.” Watching from the pastoral serenity of Cayuga Lake, the sachem,
now in a state of slumber, was alarmed by the sight of the forest disappearing
and the rising spire of a church surrounded by broad streets and cottages. He had
a second detailed vision of a different spectacle, a restoration scene: a council
house was once again located in its original grove, a council fire was lit, warriors
were clad in the costumes of the ancient Cayugas, and bands of warriors brought
a captive ready for the adoption ritual, a war dance.
Steeltrap consulted Delonoga (Copperhead), the aged prophet of the Cayugas,
who construed the first part of the vision as foretelling of the rise of the “pale
face” and the demise of the Indian, who would then be compelled to wander
westward from his home. The symbol of the substitution was a bright star rising
in the East while a dim star declined in the West. The prophet found promise in
the second scene; it predicted the destruction of the new race and the return of
the Indians to their forefathers’ world. Morgan hinted here at the possibility
that the new Indians were none other than the “braves” of the New Order of the
Iroquois. The article concluded didactically with biographical details about Steel-
trap and Copperhead, a short history of the Cayugas, and the original names of
their clans or tribes. Morgan described the tortured existence and the desolation
of the nation, which by 1800 had emigrated almost entirely to Ohio and Michi-
gan (a small part joined the Senecas near Buffalo). Only two painted posts ini-
tially marked the graves of the sachem and the prophet. These were removed to
make room for a “public convenience” and a road that passed over the graves, “a
striking illustration of the truth, that we retain but little feeling or respect for
the unfortunate Indian, and would fain disturb him, even in the silent resting
place of the tomb.”5 During the same month in which Morgan published his vi-
sion, the fraternity adopted a song by the warrior George Glendinning, whose
chorus declared:

Then raise on high the battle cry

We scorn the white man’s laws;
We form a band, called throughout the land
Grand Order of the Iroquois.6

Members of the order decided to establish branches wherever they would go.
Morgan reported that at its height the order numbered four hundred individu-
als. The league’s annual conventions, rich with pageantry and initiation rites per-
formed in the woods at midnight, were held in Aurora and usually attended by
 The Purloined Indian 277

literary celebrities such as Schoolcraft and Alfred B. Street. Morgan was proba-
bly the group’s most enthusiastic leader and served as its grand chief between
1844 and 1846. In late 1844, he settled in Rochester, where he practiced law and
established a chapter of the order. That year he began writing reports on his Iro-
quois research, which he read during New Order meetings and eventually pub-
lished in the American Review as “Letters on the Iroquois” (1847). Soliciting his-
torian George Bancroft’s patronage, Lewis described his society in some detail.

We are all young men and the primary object of our confederacy is to rescue and
preserve all that remains of the Six Nations—their manners, customs and orga-
nization, their history, mythology, and literature . . . We also aim to create and en-
courage a kinder feeling towards the Red-Man founded upon a true knowledge of
the virtues . . . of his character. Our confederation is literary and social and entirely
secret from the world . . . In our organization we have followed the old Confeder-
acy in all respects and have studied it out in order to perfect the same. We think it
is now firmly planted and can near an Indian order that will be an honor to the
Republic and has a tendency in the said to do justice to the Red Man.7

In the quest to find patrons among the elders of American ethnology and the lit-
erary world, the Grand Order sought the cooperation of Lewis Cass, Washington
Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and even John Quincy Adams. Morgan framed
his essays on the Iroquois as letters to Albert Gallatin. He also met with the
Onondaga chief Abram La Fort and with Joshua V. H. Clark, who was then work-
ing on the history of Onondaga County. The New Confederacy bestowed hon-
orary membership on both.
The playfulness of Indian pageantry coalesced with the ponderous sincerity of
a scholarly and reform association. These two missions were perhaps best mani-
fested in Morgan’s idea that performing Indian rites and methodically building the
order according to the authentic structure of the Indian confederacy constituted
doing justice to their memory. At the same time, the Indian motif was grafted onto
what was fundamentally a fraternal society modeled on Freemasonry. In a letter
to a new chapter of the Grand Order, Morgan specified that the Indian customs as-
sumed the role that uniforms had for Masons or voluntary fire companies (another
form of mid-nineteenth-century fraternal association). “They seem to lend dig-
nity and interest to the organization, and in my way of viewing the subject, an In-
dian costume is indispensable and one of the most interesting departments of the
order. Have the whole equipage, dress, bow, tomahawk, and head dress of feath-
ers, the bow next to the coat goes the furthermost.”8 For their initiation rite, mem-
bers performed the ceremony of war captives in full regalia.
 278 Totem Envy

The Warriors met for the initiation of W. Hurd. The Council fire in the Valley of
the Shistus. Soon after it was lit up, the boundaries of the sacred ground being in-
truded upon by a pale face, he was sent howling through the forest, causing the
rocky banks of fair Cayuga to re-echo with his yells. By the presence of mind of
one of the Braves the initiation then followed. He was led to the sacred spot by
Shenandoah. After having gone through the regular ceremonies some of the bold
and daring warriors sallied forth bringing back with them the produce of the
White mans cornfield which was roasted by the glowing coals of the Council fire
and served as nutritive aliment to the empty abdomens of our Warriors. After hav-
ing chanted the war songs and danced the war dance each warrior returned to his
wigwam to enjoy the exquisites of somnolency.9

The Grand Order’s desire to duplicate the original Iroquois ways presented a
problem of knowledge. The founders were familiar with the names of the Six
Nations but not much more. Morgan was born and raised in the land of the Iro-
quois, but by the time he was a child the Cayugas were all but gone. It was Mor-
gan’s proximity to the actual Iroquois nations that prompted him to assume an
Indian face. As it was for social investigators in urban settings, the proverbial
other was both near and unknown.
Morgan began combing history books for details, though these sources proved
grossly inaccurate. While he had already acquired some information from Indian
acquaintances, his friendship with Seneca interpreter Ely Parker produced a few
of the most important breakthroughs. Morgan met Parker in 1845, and the young
Seneca (sixteen years old at the time) introduced him to his grandfather Jemmy
Johnson, the most revered living authority on Iroquois culture, especially on the
spiritual beliefs of the early nineteenth-century Iroquois religious innovator
Handsome Lake. In his initial interviews with Johnson, other Seneca elders, and
members of the Parker family, Morgan was particularly interested in learning
Seneca words that he could use for the New Order’s communications. He sought
information on the structure of the league so that the order could employ au-
thentic titles for its office holders. Every “tribe” had a sachem, a head warrior, a
prophet in charge of the initiates, as well as modern functionaries: a secretary, a
treasurer, and a librarian—offices that were also adorned with Seneca monikers.
In the 1845 meeting, the New Order added the functions of Leader of the War
Songs and Keeper of the Wardrobe.
The supposedly secretive interior of the New Order (in imitation of Freema-
sonry conventions but, as importantly, a sequestered peer environment in which
adolescents could become men) was thus to be sustained by the probe into the
 The Purloined Indian 279

“secrets” of the ancient Iroquois. In their performances and initial forays into
ethnology, the New Order exercised three modes of Indian representation. First,
they impersonated natives and simulated aboriginal society through rituals, at-
tire, implements, bodily practices, and the organization of their fraternity. Sec-
ond, amassing and committing information to writing, they functioned as a re-
ceptacle of Iroquois memory. In the preamble of their constitution, the New
Confederacy defined itself as the “repository of all that remains of the Indians.”
Third, the young members embarked on advocacy and publicity in order to
demonstrate to white society the intrinsic value of aboriginal civilization.
Ultimately, Morgan would engage in a fourth form of representation, by
speaking and negotiating on the Iroquois’s behalf. Acquiring, presenting, and
representing Indian knowledge also constituted an act of judgment. As he ex-
plained his emerging ethnological plan: “We study other and ancient races as
much through their institutions and governments as in their political transac-
tions. How then shall a just estimate of the Iroquois be formed if we confine our-
selves to their exploits upon the warpath and in council.”10 For that purpose, he
defined five categories of investigation: government (alliances, councils, decision
making), people (social condition, manners and customs, arts, games, dress), laws
(property, descent, marriage, punishments, captivity and adoption, hostility), re-
ligious systems, and historical events. Morgan’s was not the only effort at Iroquois
scholarship to emerge out of the New Order experience. Other members pre-
sented papers during monthly and annual meetings, and some of Morgan’s find-
ings were the result of collective exertions. Clark was to write about cemeteries
in the Onondaga country. Isaac Hurd, to give another example, devised a set of
rules for interviewing informants. It “is imposed upon the inquirer to make his
questions simple, yet comprehensive, brief, yet embracing all the important
points necessary to be known. It will not do to ask questions, and then answer
them, as best suit the fancy of the investigator, for in that case the facts which he
supposed he had likely obtained, are not facts, but a specious decoction of his own
brain.”11 This elementary advice was a step up from the confused state of eth-
nological conversation between white visitors and Indian hosts. The former usu-
ally asked questions that the respondent could satisfy by a simple yes or no. Rarely
would the Indian informant bother to go beyond a direct, monosyllabic reply.12
In September 1845, three chiefs of the New Order visited the Tonawanda
reservation to witness the Condolence Council. The council convened to raise
new sachems to replace deceased ones. This presented an invaluable opportunity
to study first hand the political framework of the Six Nations and the process of
leader selection that was still a functioning ritual. The ceremony featured the roll
 280 Totem Envy

call of the Iroquois supreme chiefs, the fifty sachems that comprised the highest
council of the league. Chatting with a few Indian acquaintances, Morgan was
able to complete the sachem list. The roll documented the dispersion of
sachemships along nations and clans and was the key to the structure of the en-
tire league. Upon his return to Rochester, he boasted to Schoolcraft, “I think the
Old Confederacy or the mere shadow of it which is left, is opened to the New.”
Now he was so “crammed with matter pertaining to the Iroquois that I intend
for my own relief to sit down immediately and write a series of essays upon the
government and institutions of the Iroquois for publication.”13
The Condolence Council, Morgan’s portal into Iroquois society, had been the
league’s most important mnemonic device, its living archive. The council’s cer-
emonies had been expanded during the colonial period into a complex drama in
which, for over a century, British and French governors, their agents, and other
European actors performed side by side with native leaders. In modern versions
participants divided into two moieties, mourners and condolers, or the “clear-
minded,” and the sequence of rituals had a strong reciprocal character. Expres-
sions of grief interlaced with recurrent attempts to lift the spirit, wipe tears, open
ears, and clear throats. In addition to the eulogy or the roll call of the fifty
founders, the rites featured the Requickening Address, recitation of Iroquois
laws, presentation of new chiefs, songs, a feast, and Rubbing Antlers, the cele-
bration dance.14 The ultimate purpose of these rites was regeneration. Through
moments of acting out mourning, consolation, and rebirth, the council restored
society to its old functioning form.
In his correspondence with Schoolcraft, Morgan offered another rationale for
publishing his findings. It was the best way to put the other New Order “nations”
in possession of knowledge. Indeed, as new information arrived, the New Con-
federacy modified itself accordingly. It therefore decided to drop the Tuscarora
Nation because as relative newcomers to the original league (they joined in the
1720s) they did not partake in the sachem structure. The relationship between
the new and the old leagues seemed even closer when Morgan, Charles Talbot
Porter, and Thomas Darling arrived in the Tonawanda reservation in the fall of
1847 for their adoption into the Seneca Nation. For ten days, the visitors wit-
nessed games and dances staged in their honor and at night listened to Seneca el-
ders reminiscing about Iroquois tradition and historical events. Each morning,
Morgan made sure to record the information in his notebook. The adoption cer-
emony took place in the council house where Jemmy Johnson, the religious in-
structor, bestowed Seneca names on the young guests, identified the specific
tribes that they now joined, and explained the reasons for their adoptions. Two
 The Purloined Indian 281

chiefs escorted each neophyte, holding his arms and chanting. The audience re-
sponded enthusiastically. After three rounds, the simple ritual ended. The
evening concluded with a formal dance and a feast paid for by the guests. Mor-
gan was adopted into the Hawk clan and received the Indian name of Ta-ya-do-
wuh’-kuh meaning the one who is lying across the bridge, or the bond between
Indians and whites.

Red Face
Like many modern scholars who have explored his ethnological project, Mor-
gan acknowledged the importance of the Grand Order in igniting his initial in-
terest in ethnology. However, he dismissed the society’s activities as adolescent
play, a temporary phase that led serendipitously to important discoveries but was
otherwise immaterial. Nevertheless, the experience of the New Order was more
than merely an accidental venue for Morgan’s ethnology. In the second half of
the 1840s, he conducted only half a dozen short field trips. Much of the infor-
mation he gathered came from informants. Most importantly, Morgan asked
different questions than other ethnologists because he wanted to sustain the New
Order as a miniature replica of the Iroquois League. His interest gravitated to-
wards issues of organization and function. His insights into the political struc-
ture of the Iroquois and its familial arrangement were due in no small part to
Grand Order’s weekend pursuits. This, rather than his later adoption, was ulti-
mately the foundation of his insiderness.
Playing Indian is a recurrent theme in American history, a practice that has
served diverse social and political purposes. While Morgan and his friends were
masquerading in the western part of the state, bands of tenant farmers in up-
state New York followed the tradition of the Boston Tea Party and disguised
themselves in mock Indian attire to protest the leasehold tenure. In the mid-
1840s, the antirent movement turned to violence when “Indians” prevented the
auction of farmland and attacked agents, sheriffs, and uncooperative neighbors.
The New York State Assembly decided to prohibit by law the use of the Indian
disguise.15 However, the New Order of the Iroquois masquerade seems to have
originated from a somewhat different social environment, the rise of a new ur-
ban middle class and, with it, the male culture of fraternal organizations. Their
initiation rites were an essential practice of nineteenth-century bourgeois mas-
culinity. As described by historian Mark Carnes, young men were leaving pro-
tected private spheres—increasingly dominated by their mothers—and seeking
experiences that would permit them to enter the world of adult men. Beyond ini-
 282 Totem Envy

tiating adolescents through elaborate rituals, these fraternities facilitated com-

munities and equipped their younger members with social contacts important for
their future success in the marketplace.
The New Iroquois’s passion for transforming into Indians in a historically cor-
rect fashion meant that this particular rite was to be emplotted as a story of cap-
tivity, surrender, and implied torture. (Concocted rituals of capture and torment
resolved by adoption were the staple initiation ceremonies of most fraternal or-
ganizations.) The fantasy of being taken over and then saved by aboriginals was
particularly potent in American culture, as confirmed by the numerous permu-
tations and longevity of the Pocahontas stories. It was a known custom among
the Iroquois to decimate enemy nations by adoption, although most enemy war-
riors were tortured and killed. Those who consented to adoption were virtually
reborn; their old identity obliterated. Adoption severed all preceding ties, in-
cluding birthrights, marriage, and children. It was symbolically the moment of
crossing over, of surrender and remaking.
Torture and rebirth were common motifs in other culture’s initiation rites,
where male adolescents on the verge of adulthood are often consigned to limi-
nal groups that reside outside the confines of society. According to one interpre-
tation, reenacted torture was an instrument to shatter the bonds between mother
and son or an expression of a desire to undermine the exclusive female hold on
reproduction; here, by the “birthing” of men by other men (usually older men)
through, for instance, mock adoptions and the forging of new identities.16 In the
case of the Grand Order, the figure of the Indian assumed the role of the patri-
arch. We have already encountered traces of this fantasy on the national level in
the wish to recognize Indians as ancestral figures replacing other symbolic par-
ents, moving attention from the British mother country to the masculine native.
Morgan and his friends were thus acting out the desire to assume an indigenous
(and therefore non-European, exceptionalist) national identity. Schoolcraft’s na-
tional vision rested on an imagined or, rather, entirely fabricated kinship with an
authentic past based on a shared scenery and nature, a vision of utilizing abo-
riginal history for forging new nationalism. In the Grand Order’s identification
with the Iroquois, there were hints of animosity against the young men’s own
American fathers or forefathers—evidenced in Karistagia’s dream of avenging
the intrusion on Iroquois land—as well as traces of what Freud termed “family
romance,” the child’s fantasy of replacing his parents with a more noble pair.
This private wish had a larger resonance in the cultural landscape of the early
republic, when Americans first formalized and practiced the cult of the “found-
ing fathers,” revering them as specimens of human perfection. Could it be then,
 The Purloined Indian 283

that the United States was supplementing the pantheon of its progenitors with
another set of mythic ancestors like Red Jacket, Copperhead, and the venerated
fathers of the Iroquois League?
What singled Morgan’s group out from other nineteenth-century fraternal
bodies borrowing the Indian theme was its emphasis on the accuracy of the em-
ulation and insistence on maintaining actual relations with a group of Indian na-
tions. This aspect also distinguished the New Iroquois from the later anthropo-
logical tradition of close observation. The history of anthropology is crowded
with explorers who “went native” and practiced what Bronislaw Malinowski
would formulate as the practices of participant-observation. But in this particu-
lar episode, in what may be modern anthropology’s moment of birth, racial mas-
querading was not merely a cunning technique to obtain information. It worked
the other way around. First, Morgan and his friends became “Indians.” Then,
they assumed the mantle of ethnographers. Ethnology, as much as playing Indi-
ans, was the substance of their rite of passage.
This understanding of the Grand Order’s activities foregrounds the imper-
sonation of Indians over the specific content of the fraternity’s rituals. The most
relevant historical context of playing Indians might be not the burgeoning fra-
ternal organizations but the growth of yet another transgression of racial bound-
aries. In the 1840s, minstrelsy or black face became a popular art form and thrived
from northeastern cities to the California gold mines. Donning the black mask
allowed white performers to appropriate black music and dance while simulta-
neously negotiating racial curiosity and hostility. These performances gave li-
cense to the articulation of disruptive social notions about class, gender, and
sexuality. As minstrelsy, red-face pageantry had the double consequences of
transporting cultural knowledge and forms and, at the same time, reconfiguring
the relationship between original performers and their surrogates. Indian mas-
querade resulted in the adoption of games, attire, dances, ceremonies, names, and
ultimately ethnological knowledge. One crucial aspect of that traffic—and rela-
tions between whites and Indians in general—was the symbolic dissolution of
the bonds between contemporaneous Indians and their ancestors or ancestral
memory.
Gender ambiguity further complicated the widening split between the Indian
and the historic Indian. While the latter was manly and ancestral, he was also an
aesthetic being, as clearly demonstrated by the spectacular drawings in School-
craft’s six-volume project and other treatments of the native theme in books,
paintings, and sculptures. The Indian was an object of beauty, whose otherness
could substitute for gender differences. The persona that was assumed by Indian
 284 Totem Envy

pageantry was strongly female if only by virtue of its performativity. It certainly

needed a host of accouterments: facial and bodily paint, headwear, dresses, feath-
ers, and similar adornments.
The benign nature of the Grand Order’s games, the strong empathy that Mor-
gan and his friends expressed towards the Senecas, and the Senecas’ cooperation
with their ethnological project only masked the ambiguous character of the
young whites’ gesture. They commandeered aboriginal otherness for transgres-
sive pleasure, for their rites of passage, and to craft an exceptionalist native iden-
tity. (This rendition of antebellum nativism rested on Indian heritage.) As in
Schoolcraft’s and Ephraim Squier’s projects, in the Grand Order’s insistence on
the historicity of the objects of their emulation, the Indian (or the glorious In-
dian of yesterday) vanished. This disappearance rested on the assumption that
the aboriginal would entirely assimilate. We should not regard Indians as merely
our fellow men, opined Morgan; they should become part of American society.
He consequently recommended that their common tribal property be divided
among them. Private property was the first step towards making them citizens
of the state. “When this time arrives,” he concluded, “they will cease to be In-
dians, except in name.”17 The Jacksonian treatment of aboriginals as dependent
children has received scholarly attention, but it is highly significant that the In-
dians, in fact, occupied alternating positions as ancestors and descendants. This
oscillation continued to dominate the relationship between aboriginal and white
societies well into the twentieth century. Whatever roots this ambivalence toward
the Indian had in private desire, it also affected the way national policy was de-
vised and justified.
As a story of mimicry and exchange, the Grand Order’s masquerade shares a
few intriguing affinities with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (1844).
(Jacques Lacan famously employed this story to explicate his notion of the “mir-
ror-stage” in which the child recognizes himself completely through his image
in a mirror or in his mother’s eyes. Lacan’s concept inspired Franz Fanon’s views
of racial identification in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) as well as many later
readings of racial and gender cross-dressing). Poe’s is a tale of the double theft
of a compromising private letter, at the center of which is a technique of ob-
taining or retrieving an object. The aggressor assumes the vantage point of his
victim. In the first scene, it is the minister who boldly purloins the queen’s com-
promising letter in her own chamber and in the presence of the unsuspecting
king; in the second scene, the nimble detective Dupin appropriates the letter
(now hidden in the minister’s domicile) under the nose of the obtuse police. In
“The Purloined Letter,” the effort to recognize oneself in the other (or to see one-
 The Purloined Indian 285

self from the mirror reflection’s point of view) was premised on a physiognomic
technique of mimicry.
Poe’s story encapsulates important themes in antebellum culture: its fascina-
tion with hoaxes, deceptions, and crime (including crimes of identity by con-
fidence men, a term coined in the period), the increasing desire for social critique,
and most importantly, the attempt to grapple with the immense fluidity of posi-
tions and identities offered by the new marketplace. In some important respects,
the “Dream of Karistagia” was itself a version of “The Purloined Letter” (and
in a different manner, the Iroquois’s own Condolence Council), not just as a story
of double appropriation but because the second scene (deceptively) restored and
addressed the primary scene. The dream triggered a succession of further sub-
stitutions. Grand Order braves reenacted tribal society, initiated each other into
a mock-Indian peer group, and then were adopted (in fact, only a few leaders
were) by the genuine Seneca. But there was also an opposite way in which the
New Order of the Iroquois embraced the old. Both leagues adopted each other as
children and fathers in an apparent, yet misleading symmetry. Similar mirror-
ing episodes were evident on the national scene. In the nineteenth century, In-
dian tribes were first removed from white society so they could (paradoxically)
better resemble it. Some argued that only from outside the boundaries of U.S. so-
ciety could this civilizing mimetic process succeed. Native peoples relocated to
the West and then the United States placed itself in the West as well, in ways real
and symbolic.

Names of the Fathers

Morgan’s formal adoption, and what he considered his intimate knowledge of
the Iroquois, seemed to relieve him from the conventions of reports written by
the fact collectors of the earlier period. League of the Iroquois is unencumbered
by the obsession with the authenticity of objects or veracity of facts; these were
assured by the social intercourse that surrounded the text. It seemed that the doc-
ument stood in equipoise to its scene of research rather than collapsed into it.
The book is not an account of red-face (or other field experiences) but its after-
the-fact conclusion. This property of the monograph, juxtaposed to Schoolcraft’s
Notes on the Iroquois published only five years earlier, may serve as the basis for
one story of the coming of age of anthropology itself. (If Notes appeared to be
stuck in the mirror stage and, as the rest of Schoolcraft’s oeuvre, exemplified a
somewhat retentive aggregation of field objects ostensibly reproduced in great
fidelity, League transgressed the mirror by identifying the work of culture and
 286 Totem Envy

attempting to capture, rather than merely reflect, it in a theoretical framework.

This is the trajectory from ethnography to ethnology, or—drawing further from
the Lacanian well—from the imaginary to the symbolic.) Morgan established a
theoretical contrivance that, in later decades and with important alterations, he
would apply universally. In this new ethnological mode, facts were separated
from artifacts. Like Schoolcraft, Morgan collected Indian material culture, in his
case, for New York State. New York initiated its own version of state building and
cultural production, launching projects to document the state’s history, geology,
and native past. However, working for the state cabinet accentuated the differ-
ence between ethnographical texts functioning as museums and actual muse-
ums—another venue for Indian representation.
Morgan dedicated the first part of League of the Iroquois to discussing polit-
ical institutions. In the second, he surveyed cultural aspects such as faith, reli-
gion, burial customs, moral sentiment, festivals, and marital relations, while the
third section featured material culture and matters that pertained to language,
geography, and place names. Morgan wrapped his ethnological findings in re-
formist passages, beginning with a preface on the book’s purpose in inspiring
kinder feelings toward the Indian and concluding with a chapter on the future
of the aboriginal.18
He asserted that Iroquois historical resistance to European incursions indi-
cated strength, at the roots of which he saw the conscious building of social and
political institutions. The “founders of the League” were aware of the impair-
ing effects of divisions into small, contending hunting bands. By instituting a fed-
eration, they sought to establish an empire that would control surrounding na-
tions and protect the Iroquois from incessant war. As a modular concept, the
League of the Iroquois had the potential of further expansion.19 Was Morgan
then falling victim to the trickery of mirrors? Unwittingly, perhaps, he recog-
nized in the Iroquois a distant image of the United States, imperial ambitions
and sagacious founding fathers included. Publishing his book just a year after the
contentious Compromise of 1850, Morgan was particularly attentive to the for-
midable stability of Iroquois society.
At this point, Morgan arrived at the crux of his ethnological discovery. The
league, he posited, was merely an elaboration of the family organization that su-
tured the entire Six Nations together in “one common, indissoluble brother-
hood.”20 Later in his scholarly career, Morgan would refine his views of familial
configuration and descent, but as early as this monograph he conceived of (or, in
fact, invented) kinship as the primary structural principle of society. At the same
time, he realized that family designations could divert from western norms. In
 The Purloined Indian 287

the Iroquois, the scope of the nuclear or “biological” family was drastically ex-
tended by means of language. His work implicitly acknowledged the arbitrary
nature of human kinship and by implication the importance of mock kinship.
Familylike social commitments mitigated between affiliations of blood and large
political organizations, between society and the state. This was the social mortar
(the totemic link) offered in the antebellum United States by fraternal organi-
zations, as well as by literary, religious, and reform associations.
The Iroquois social bond was achieved by a particular pattern of kinship and
descent that supported tribal society and then braided tribes into discreet nations.
Kinship-tribes (distinct from the political nations) were never made up of de-
scendants of the same father, for the father and his son were never of the same
tribe. The building blocks of that regime were eight tribes with which the
founders of the league “sought to interweave the race into one political family.”21
The tribes (Wolf, Turtle, Beaver, Bear, Deer, Snipe, Heron, and Hawk) were di-
vided among the five nations and maintained fraternal ties. The Mohawk of the
Wolf tribe acknowledged the Seneca of the Wolf tribe as his sibling. Cross-
relationship among tribes of the same name were stronger than fellowship among
tribes of the same nation. This hybridity of the Iroquois social identity that pre-
scribed “national” and “tribal” affiliations—western concepts superimposed on
native societies—was responsible for the ability of the entire structure to hold
firmly together. (Morgan’s finding may be of some interest to observers of iden-
tity politics debates today, especially in light of the racial hybridity sanctioned by
the census of 2000.) If any of the five nations wanted to break off the alliance,
it would have broken the cord of tribal brotherhood, the sinews of the Iroquois
society.
Iroquois could marry into any tribe except their own. Matrilineal descent was
a guarantee to preserve the individuality and the unity of the tribe. A man could
not take a sachemship with him into a different tribe. He could not leave the ti-
tle or for that matter any other sort of property, including his tomahawk and
other war implements, to any of his sons. Morgan argued that the purpose of that
convention was “the perpetual disinheritance of the son” in order to maintain
the purity of bloodline.22 Tribal affiliation transferred through the mother, not
through her husband who, in a previous state of society when the mother plau-
sibly had multiple sexual partners, was not necessarily the father of her children.
No distinction was made between the lineal and collateral lines. The maternal
grandmother and her sisters were equally mothers; the children of a mother’s
sisters were brothers and sisters; the children of a sister were nephews and nieces,
and the grandchildren of a sister were grandchildren. Out of the tribe, the pa-
 288 Totem Envy

ternal grandfather and his brothers were equally grandfathers, the father and his
brothers equally fathers, and so forth. In his later work on consanguinity, Mor-
gan called this the “classificatory family” rather than the western “descriptive
family” (comprised of biological fathers, mothers, and siblings) and attempted
to identify similar structures among other so-called primitive societies, pro-
claiming that family structure attested to a society’s location on the road to civi-
lization.
It is somewhat ironic that Morgan, who engaged in masculine Indian role-
playing, would find out that among the Iroquois the relationship between father
and son was disjointed. At the same time, it was clear to him that this society was
conceived by men and for men, and that the matrilineal line was a way to retain
the identity (and “names”) of the original tribal chieftains. Every facet of Iro-
quois culture—religion, dances, ceremonies, artifacts, and architecture—was
put in place for the specific reason of sustaining the sociopolitical edifice. Func-
tionalist at heart, Morgan regarded these operations as enhancements of social
intercourse. He construed the elaborate Indian dances, for example, as a means
to allow controlled encounters between the sexes but also as a device to ignite
a national spirit. Similarly, the council fires were sites of political decision-
making, but in addition functioned as a public sphere where the Iroquois came to-
gether literally and symbolically.
What Morgan discovered in Iroquois society was not actual fathers or bor-
rowed fathers but what Lacan called (somewhat opaquely) the “name of the fa-
ther,” that is, the entire symbolic order of society that separates the child from
his mother and assures social cohesion. Morgan was fascinated by actual Indian
names. They bestowed identity, either by the totemic principle by which affilia-
tion was determined through a shared symbol, a fetish, or by the custom of nam-
ing individuals figuratively and renaming them whenever their social status
changed. (Indian place names were probably one of the earliest indications for
the American child of the presence of the cultural other.) Morgan took an In-
dian name early on and received another one upon his adoption. At the age of
twenty, before leaving Aurora for college, he inexplicably adopted a middle name,
Henry. (Schoolcraft also assumed different native names, and for almost a year
in the early 1840s, he went by Colcraft.) Such trifling acts of personal transfor-
mation or self-making were emblematic of the emerging marketplace-bound
and anxiety-ridden mass society.
It has been suggested that the presence in western New York of utopian com-
munities and other forms of radicalism inspired Morgan’s insight into Iroquois
kinship. Between the 1820s and the 1850s, the region was a fertile ground for re-
 The Purloined Indian 289

ligious and social experimentation. Early in this period, a wave of evangelical en-
thusiasm earned western New York the label “the burned-over district.” In the
1840s, religious inventiveness was supplemented by the proliferation of political
radicalism, from the women’s movement (whose first conference was held in
1848 in Seneca Falls) to socialism (Millerite communities of property and Fouri-
erist socialist phalanxes), spiritualism, and abolitionism. Mormon families, Mil-
lerite communities, and free-love communes, all practiced unconventional eco-
nomical and sexual arrangements. Their example may have contributed to
Morgan’s ability to discern differing social structures.23 However, the split be-
tween father and son was not necessarily a characteristic of utopian communi-
ties but rather a facet of the modern middle class and its model or myth of the
self-made (and therefore parentless) man. Morgan’s own biography exemplifies
the rupture between the world of the father (who was a farmer on the old west-
ern New York frontier) and his son. The farmer’s son became a lawyer, whose
livelihood depended on the whims of the market. Any reading of League of the
Iroquois should, therefore, consider the role of western New York in forging a
new American middle class. During the rapid commercialization that followed
the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, communities in that region experienced,
probably earlier than other parts of the country, the remaking of domesticity
along the separation of spheres and its removal from the market place. Corre-
spondingly, there is in Morgan’s ethnological work an immense appreciation of
the familial institution in all of its permutations and extensions, and yet a cer-
tain awareness of the family’s fragility or insufficiency; hence, the importance
he associated with transfamilial arrangements.

In the Long House

Morgan aestheticized Iroquois society in a manner distinct from that of his
ethnological predecessors. The Iroquois political system was itself an artifact that
his analysis rendered a complete, coherent, and perfectly rational apparatus. His
effort to decipher the principles underscoring Iroquois stability can also be read
as a manifestation of the period’s fascination with the working of elaborate me-
chanical devices, as evident in Schoolcraft’s writing on the Indian mind and in
several of P. T. Barnum’s enterprises. Associating the Iroquois regime with an ar-
tifact also rested on the symbolic self-designation of the Iroquois as dwellers of
the longhouse. In this metaphor, craftsmanship, government, and domesticity
merged. “In their own figurative enunciation of the idea, the chiefs served as
braces in the Long House—an apt expression of the place they occupied in their
 290 Totem Envy

political structure.”24 In antebellum parlance, the house trope often denoted the
American Union as well.
Morgan had a keen interest in material culture. He regarded Iroquois crafts-
manship as an expression of intellectual ability. However, in a manner that would
so profoundly impress Engels, he insisted that material objects were expressions
of social organization. (Conversely, the interest in material culture was no more
than a variant on the metonymic employment of physical environment to define
and judge individuals and communities, as was customary in urban social in-
quiries.) “The fabrics of a people unlock their social history. They speak a lan-
guage which is silent, but yet more eloquent than the written page.” This ca-
pacity for articulation was especially apparent in the Iroquois techniques of
memory keeping. In the absence of written language, they registered treaties and
laws by weaving wampum belts. With the help of an interpreter the belt could
“tell” about an exact law or a transaction. The notion of the speaking artifact or
the artifact as a memory aid reappeared in Morgan’s commentary on material
culture. He considered his collection for the New York State Museum “a me-
mento of the red race . . . [who would be] . . . enabled to speak for itself through
these silent memorials.”25 The eloquence of those articles was predicated on
their placement in a museum in Albany. Morgan subscribed to the principle that
it was government’s duty to accumulate relics of aboriginal culture. “We stand
with them in many interesting relations,” he wrote, repeating Schoolcraft’s
words in a letter to the Regents of the State University of New York in yet an-
other attempt to define those links.26 New York had committed itself to gather
historical material following Governor John Young’s visit to the historical and
antiquarian museum in Hartford, Connecticut.27 Morgan collaborated in this
effort, first sending plans of five archaeological sites together with about fifty
ethnographic articles. Finding archeological relics was common in antebellum
western New York, where farmers stumbled upon aboriginal objects almost daily.
In 1848 and 1849, when the state cabinet was expanding, Morgan proposed to
gather “a full exhibition of the manufactures of the Indian tribes still remain-
ing within our State.”28 The regents granted him $215 to supervise the project.
His official assignment brought him again to the Tonawanda reservation. While
in Albany arranging the collection and finalizing the report, he introduced into
the state legislature a bill for the support and education of Indian students at the
State Normal School at Albany, thus reaffirming the Janus face of American eth-
nology: reforming the Indian while preserving his legacy. His account for the re-
gents’ third annual report was accompanied by richly colored engraving prepared
by Richard H. Pease of Albany. Pease also engraved two plates of Indian subjects
 The Purloined Indian 291

which Morgan used for his League of the Iroquois published early the following
year. In the fall of 1850, Morgan traveled to the Six Nation Reserve on the Grand
River in Ontario, where he obtained and purchased objects such as a shell breast-
plate, a carved can, silver beads, a wampum belt, and a fine burden trap. Unlike
other collectors of Indian relics (and in line with social investigators), he was in-
terested in a comprehensive collection of daily implements rather than spectac-
ular ceremonial gear, large weapons, or artifacts that belonged to departed In-
dian dignitaries.29

Informants
In April 1844, Lewis Morgan visited Albany to peruse Indian treaties. Scan-
ning the shelves of a local bookstore in search of information on the Cayuga, he
ran into a young Seneca from the Tonawanda reservation, Ely Parker. Educated
in a Baptist missionary school and the Yates Academy, Parker (Hä-sa-no-an’-da,
“Leading Name”) was serving as an interpreter and advisor to the Seneca chiefs
in their dealings with authorities in Albany and Washington. In Washington,
young Parker became a celebrity. He fraternized with President James Polk at
the White House, small-talked with Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, and later
bragged about riding around the city in Mrs. Polk’s carriage. By his mid-
twenties, Parker was formally elevated to the Grand Sachem of the Seneca and
thus was the de facto leader of the Six Nations. Trained throughout this period
as a lawyer and as an engineer, he worked in the 1850s for the New York state
canal before moving west. In Galena, Illinois, he befriended a former army
captain by the name of Ulysses S. Grant who was then a clerk in his father’s
store. When the Civil War began, Parker attempted to enlist. Rejected at first, he
tried again and eventually joined Grant’s headquarters as his military secretary.
Parker witnessed the most famous battles of Grant’s campaign. The conditions
of Robert E. Lee’s surrender were recorded in his handwriting, and he was in-
side the courthouse at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, as a member of Grant’s staff.
Parker left the army with the rank of an honorary (brevet) brigadier-general.
After Grant entered the White House in 1869, Parker became Commissioner of
Indian Affairs, the first Indian to hold this position.
But before all of that, in the mid 1840s, Parker was Morgan’s informant. In
fact, the entire Parker family assisted Morgan and his colleagues in their re-
search. They helped him in ways similar to the introduction to the native world
that the Johnstons gave to Schoolcraft in Sault Ste. Marie in another bicultural
family setting. The Parkers were among the small number of Christians (Bap-
 292 Totem Envy

tists) on the reservation, where most other Senecas still resisted the invasion of
the white man’s religion. Ely’s siblings posed for illustrations for Morgan’s book.
Levi, an older brother, was depicted in the book’s frontispiece (in an engraving
probably made from a daguerreotype) wearing a traditional garment. Dressed in
attire that Morgan obtained in 1849 for the state museum, Caroline was also a
subject of an engraving. (Morgan’s relationship with Parker’s sister was close and
flirtatious.) It was in discussions with Ely’s parents, William and Elisabeth, that
Morgan first became acquainted with the structure and the domestic uses of the
longhouse. Morgan borrowed additional material for his book directly from Ely
and his brother Nicholson’s essays on Iroquois customs.
In the fall of 1848, Morgan wrote to Ely Parker and requested that he record
in full Johnson’s speech to the annual council. He also wanted to know exactly
how Indian objects were crafted and what were their correct designations. “What
is the name of these earthen dishes? Give me the names both of the earthen and
the brass. I have also a calumet, a long one about two feet. The stock is wood, and
covered with a case of beadwork. It is from the west. Give me its name.”30 Mor-
gan hoped that Parker would help him come up with a ringing, one-word appel-
lation for the state’s Indian collection. The Parkers acquired or made most of the
objects. They were also recipients of much of the funds Albany had allotted for
putting together the collection. When visiting the reservation the following year,
Morgan purchased many items but also received gifts, such as a pipe from
William Parker for which he reciprocated with a German silver tobacco bag.
Morgan later exhibited the curiosities in his office, where Rochester women were
invited to observe the trove of Indian domestic artifacts. In June 1850, Morgan
received an additional $250, and he promptly shipped to the state capital a model
of an Iroquois house made by William Parker and a canoe.31
Cooperation with ethnologists had a practical rationale. Throughout the 1840s
and 1850s, the Senecas were fighting the treaty of 1838, which guaranteed the
sale of the Tonawanda and Buffalo Creek reservations to the Ogden Land Com-
pany. That agreement was obtained by an obvious deceit; several chiefs were
bribed, and others were not consulted. In order to revoke the treaty—it took two
decades to circumvent it—the Seneca requested and received help from many
white organizations and individuals. With the Senecas’ blessing, the Grand Or-
der initiated a petition drive and dispatched Morgan to Washington to lobby for
their cause—another form, innocuous as it may be, of supplanting the Indian.
Because of the urgency of protecting the Indians from the incursions of the Og-
den Land Company, the Indians’ public image became an acute concern. In the
early 1840s, the Quakers who controlled other Seneca reservations, helped bro-
 The Purloined Indian 293

ker a compromise that the Tonawanda band rejected because it sacrificed their
reservation and Buffalo Creek to save two others. In December 1848, at the urg-
ing of the Society of Friends, the Senecas at Cattaraugus and Allegheny abol-
ished the old forms of government and adopted a new republican regime, call-
ing themselves “the Seneca Nation of Indians.”32
Importantly, Morgan’s exposition of the Iroquois political tradition took place
soon after their government was put into disrepute and was in jeopardy. Another
incident exemplified the increased dependence of the Tonawandas on Morgan
and his friends. During the condolence ceremony in the fall of 1845, the Iroquois
asked their guests to induce a white man selling whiskey to leave the reservation.
The Indians would not chase him away themselves. The attending members of
the New Order bought the jug and poured it out. Shortly after, they were called
again. This time they drew up a warrant authorizing them to pour the whiskey
into the creek. According to the testimony of Charles Talbot Porter—Morgan’s
brother-in-law and brother warrior in the Grand Order—once Morgan was
known as a leading “friend of the Indians,” the Seneca were willing to extend
their support for his studies. “Everything was communicated to him with a cor-
dial frankness and fullness that prevented him from falling into errors, which are
inevitable when information is given with reserve or perhaps with intentional
inaccuracy.”33
During this campaign, Parker wrote Schoolcraft a formal letter to solicit ex-
pert advice, which he intended to incorporate into the public drive. First, he asked
whether, according to the information at Schoolcraft’s disposal, the two remain-
ing Seneca reservations had enough fertile land to support the inhabitants of the
Tonawanda and Buffalo Creek. Second, he wanted to know whether in his cen-
sus Schoolcraft had discovered that Indians governed themselves entirely by the
principle of consensus. “Tell us, if you please, whether the Indian ever recog-
nized the majority principle, whether in fact they knew any thing about majori-
ties and minorities before the principle was introduced by the whites.”34
Schoolcraft confirmed that if Tonawanda and Buffalo Creek were lost, the re-
maining land would not be sufficient for the entire nation. He also maintained
that according to Iroquois customs, decisions crucial to the future of a particular
Iroquois faction must be made unanimously. Therefore, the treaty of 1838, which
had not won unanimous consent, had not been properly ratified.35 This exchange
reversed the course of the original racial masquerade and brought ethnological
expertise full circle. Parker was now speaking from Schoolcraft’s throat, the eth-
nologist was instructing his Seneca informant of his tribe’s political protocol.
This circulation of ethnological material was made complete by the fact that de-
 294 Totem Envy

spite his intimate knowledge of the Seneca and the access he had to the Iroquois
elders, Parker was also quite familiar with, and sometimes consulted in, various
printed accounts on the Iroquois and their history written by whites such as De-
Witt Clinton. Similarly, Ely Parker was reportedly very proud of Morgan’s
League of the Iroquois and used it to present himself. He even gave a copy to Sec-
retary of State Daniel Webster when the latter accompanied President Millard
Fillmore on a visit to western New York.

Pale Face
It should come as no surprise that Parker decided to join the New Order of the
Iroquois so that he could secure the accuracy of its pseudo-Iroquois rituals. Ac-
cording to a Rochester paper, he was spotted one August 1846 day in Aurora,
sporting full Indian attire, dancing in a torch parade of the New Order. The white
“warriors” wore fringed leggings, headdresses, and frock coats and brandished
tomahawks.36 In a few of its features, Parker’s trajectory into white society was
the mirror image of Morgan’s path into Indian culture. In 1847, the same year
that Morgan and two of his friends asked to be adopted by the Seneca, Parker be-
came a member of the Batavia Lodge Number 88 of the Free and Accepted Ma-
sons. He later joined other Masonic lodges and was one of the founders of Min-
ers Lodge, Number 273 in Galena where he became the first Worshipful Master
in 1858. The Freemasons cherished the Indian sachem and conferred on him var-
ious official and ceremonial duties. In a Chicago banquet, Parker described the
Masonic fraternity as his sanctuary. “Where shall I go when the last of my race
shall have gone forever? Where shall I find home and sympathy when our last
council fire is extinguished? I said, I will knock at the door of Masonry and see
if the white race will recognize me as they did my ancestors when we were strong
and the white man weak. I knocked at the door of the Blue Lodge and found
brotherhood around the altar.”37
Parker’s presence in white society had great symbolic power. In Appomattox,
when Grant introduced his staff to Lee, the confederate general was, according
to one account, perplexed. He suspected that in order to humiliate him Grant had
brought with him a black officer. Immediately realizing his mistake, Lee did not
lose his composure. He extended his hand and said, “I am glad to see one real
American here,” to which Parker replied, “We are all Americans.”38 Whether
such a conversation ever took place or not, Parker’s Indian origin assigned him
moral authority to heal the fratricidal wounds, both as the ultimate ancestral
American and as the remnant of the first victims of (by implication, fraternal)
 The Purloined Indian 295

bloodshed on U.S. soil. His first biographer, his great nephew Arthur Parker, re-
marked, “It was in the handwriting of an Iroquois sachem, and an Indian that
the two warring factions of the white race were finally united.”39 In later
decades, Parker would be active in the Grand Army of the Republic, a politically
powerful organization of Union war veterans and another form of fraternal as-
sociation in the nineteenth-century United States. The Civil War invested the at-
tachment of the Iroquois to their federated political arrangement with even
greater significance, which Parker elaborated on in his oratory.
Parker was proficient in two languages and a resident of two cultures. How-
ever, his assumption of a doubled identity was a permanent fixture—in many
ways an extension of his parents’ home that required reiteration—not merely a
youthful initiation rite. Increasingly, he found himself experiencing his Indian
self through white means. His most cherished Indian relic, which he wore in offi-
cial portraits throughout his life, was a medal George Washington gave to his
great-great-uncle, Red Jacket, in 1792. (Morgan probably purchased the medal
from Jemmy Johnson for the State Museum but instead of sending it to Albany
gave it to Parker, who reimbursed him.40) In Washington as a youth, Parker vis-
ited Mount Vernon with a friend and then went to George Washington’s church
in Alexandria. They sat in the first president’s pew and imagined themselves rev-
olutionary war generals. Later in life, he lived among whites and only rarely un-
derwent what his white friends described in terms of cultural relapse.41
Red Jacket had been famous as a spokesperson for the Indian cause in Wash-
ington and Albany. Likewise, many of the services that Parker extended to the
Iroquois were in the realm of representation in places of power and in the pub-
lic arena in general. Being an informant to several ethnologists launched a ca-
reer as a dispenser of knowledge about Indian life and culture. This exchange of
information was woven, as a token, into his negotiations with the outside world.
Parker was not a political leader as much as a “voice” for the Six Nations and, al-
ternatively, a “representative man,” a living monument to Indian aptitude and
Indian sorrows. Like the English miners who were attentive (and sensitive) to
the manner in which they were depicted in official government reports, Parker
protested in July 1853 to Commissioner Manypenny about a statement made by
New York subagent Stephen Osborne. In one of his reports, the official Osborne
claimed that slowly but surely the Tonawanda Senecas were “retrograding.”
Parker wanted government to know that the despite their harassment by the Og-
den Land Company the Seneca were making progress.
Parker capitalized on the cultural fascination with Indian eloquence, and his
voice was suffused with indignation. Throughout his public career, he lamented
 296 Totem Envy

the fate of the Indian nations at the hands of the white man. These sentiments
were even more pronounced in his private correspondence and diary. When he
visited the Capitol in 1846, the picture of the pilgrims’ landing prompted him
into thinking about the injustices his people had suffered. “[The pilgrims] are
represented as in a starving condition, and being about to land, an Indian has
come forward offering them provision of his bounty. Who now of the descen-
dants of those illustrious pilgrims will give one morsel to the dying and starving
Indian.”42
Rage for the fate of his ancestors was intermixed with personal frustration.
Despite his meteoric career, he was barred at important junctures of his life.
Trained as a lawyer, as a noncitizen he could not join the bar. At the beginning
of the Civil War, Secretary of War William H. Seward told him, and he remem-
bered those words for many years, that it was not his struggle. (His eventual mil-
itary career as well as the enlistment of three hundred other Iroquois was—not
unlike the enlistment of blacks—a basis for the claim that their place among
whites was fully earned.) At the apex of his tenure as Indian Commissioner, he
was trapped by his foes among the missionaries who had supervisory power over
Indian affairs. They accused him of upholding corrupt administrative practices.
Merely two years after his appointment Parker had to leave his post, even though
a congressional investigation cleared his name.
Parker’s bitterness was dignified, wry, and subtle. When Schoolcraft requested
ethnological material for his national project, Parker disguised sarcasm with flat-
tery. “A few day ago I accidentally stumbled against your last edition of Notes of
the Iroquois and picking it up I carefully pursued it, and founded that you had
collected in your book more than I have or can expect to have in some time to
come. I should very much dislike to send my collections, when so much is already
before you.”43 Likewise, his journal description of Morgan’s adoption was dou-
ble-edged. “As I heard the long shrill whoops and looked upon the motley group
of warriors who had stripped themselves for the dance, I could not avoid re-
flecting upon the changed condition of the Indian race. Once the savage yell and
the painted band was the terror of the white man . . . As the dancers played their
warlike antics before me, with pleasure I thought of the time when my fathers
were strong, when their arms were felt over half the American continent, when
with joy they danced around the captive bound for torture at the stake.”44
In a way, his Indian persona, anger included, reflected white expectations. On
September 26, 1891, the aging General Parker addressed veterans at Gettysburg.
He centered his speech on the depiction on the battle’s monument of the
Delaware chief Tammany. “I believe,” he said, without blinking, “that if ever
Ely Parker, the Seneca sachem turned Commissioner of Indian Affairs, intermediated in his
youth between his Iroquois community in western New York and the white world. He assisted in
the ethnographic research of Henry Schoolcraft and Lewis Morgan, who dedicated his pioneering
League of the Iroquois (1851) to Parker. In this portrait (taken in Elvira, New York, c. 1855),
Parker is donning the medal that George Washington gave his great-great-uncle, the Seneca
orator Red Jacket, in 1792. (Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio)
 298 Totem Envy

there was a good Indian he was one, and that, too, before he was a dead one.”45
Parker did not hesitate to enumerate in front of the veterans a long list of cru-
elties committed against the Indian, but he also drew an implicit affinity be-
tween Tammany’s struggle for freedom against a treacherous enemy and the bat-
tle cry for freedom of the Union soldiers in Gettysburg. Thus, in a rather astute
way he assured his listeners, whose compatriots and ancestors he castigated for
abusing his forefathers, that their appropriation of the figure of Tammany was
not entirely misplaced.
This episode demonstrates the multivalent quality of Parker’s role in Victo-
rian mnemonic culture as a living repository of indigenous culture and senti-
ment. Schoolcraft had remonstrated, speaking to the members of the Grand Or-
der that, “there are no plate columns of marble [to commemorate the Indian];
no tablets of inscribed stone—no gates of rust-coated brass. But the man himself
survives, in his generation. He is a walking statue before us. His looks and his
gestures and his language remain. As he is himself, an attractive monument to be
studied.”46 (Schoolcraft’s remark on the Indian-as-statue collapsed the difference
between the opposing modes of collective memory which Pierre Nora’s recently
defined as traditional “milieus of memory” as opposed to modern “sites of mem-
ory.”) Parker would assume a double task in this regard as a personification of
the “walking statue,” the living ghost but also its spokesperson and investiga-
tor—an object and a subject. Later in life Parker was engaged in plans to com-
memorate the Seneca past in actual monuments and sites. In 1890, he led the
campaign to build a monument, which he wanted to be in the shape of a tree,
depicting Red Jacket in an oratorical pose, broken war implements, and the long-
house in ruins. He petitioned the state legislature of New York to set aside an an-
cient Seneca burial place located on the State Agricultural Farm near Geneva.47
Leaving the federal government in the early 1870s, Parker moved to New York
City, where he assumed a modest position at the police department as an archi-
tect and later as a supply clerk. He was still an attraction, a pilgrimage site. Ja-
cob Riis, the Danish reporter who became the most influential social investiga-
tor of New York slums, visited him frequently. Despite long silences, Riis was
grateful for those meetings. He found Parker’s affinity with his childhood heroes,
Leather Stocking and company, to be irresistible. The imaginary world of the
frontier, he admitted, was one of the forces that attracted him to the United States
in the first place.48

Parker’s sense of irony probably prevented him from completely falling for
the mirror illusion. Whatever he offered by way of material assistance, he un-
 The Purloined Indian 299

derstood the ludicrousness in the white man’s performance. However, he was

deeply implicated in the substitution, as he too endeavored to speak for or repre-
sent the historical Indian by assuming his imminent disappearance. The subtext
of his public career, as much of the state’s involvement in supporting lavish eth-
nological ventures, was bringing the ancestral Indian to his proper burial. Only
then could a new nation replace the old. The underscoring anxiety was arguably
that if left unburied the dead would come to haunt us. We should also bear in
mind that Parker supported a civilization policy when he was appointed Indian
commissioner and much before. As commissioner, he advocated terminating the
practice of negotiating treaties with the tribes. Parker believed that his task was
not to preserve Indian tradition but to assure his people a fair treatment on the
road to integration and commemoration.
The relationship between the aboriginal and the antebellum United States
needed constant working and reworking through ethnology, physical anthropol-
ogy, red face, museumification of the Indian past, literature, and visual depiction
on state emblems, sculptures, and flags. In this historical process, ethnoknowl-
edge became a currency, in part, because of its ability to change hands, its re-
movability. It traveled from the Michigan frontier to New York City, from
Rochester to Albany. It connected trifling local encounters with the nation’s capi-
tol. It built scientific institutions, monuments, and personal careers and, in the
case of Parker, a confluence of loyalties and affiliations. Ethnoknowledge ap-
peared as a commodity in the exchange relations (however unequal) between the
two societies. For the Seneca, their involvement with ethnology was also a mat-
ter of necessity. They wanted to retain their land.
The intense efforts to establish or redefine the association between ancient In-
dian cultures and the modern United States—Schoolcraft’s and Morgan’s per-
sistent search for similitude, resemblances, and reflections to justify or ease the
substitution—were a surrogate for a lack of actual “descriptive” kinship. They
were also a response to Morton and the American School’s insistence on the im-
possibility of a shared biological ancestry. The absence of obvious blood kinship
did not preclude the possibility that a palpable substance tied both communities
together. In Schoolcraft’s romanticism was an endorsement of an affiliation
based on common climate and soil, which, in turn, associated American nature
with American democracy. Schoolcraft’s poetic style greatly influenced young
Morgan. But Morgan’s rationalist materialism would lead him to postulate that
human intelligence creates its own synchronic social and material environment.
Moreover, he maintained that similar structures—social, technological, and ar-
chitectural—could be found across continents and oceans. Although this argu-
 300 Totem Envy

ment went beyond the natural features on the American terrain, it still upheld
that social relations have decidedly spatial manifestations. The longhouse could
be rebuilt wherever the Iroquois might go. Once they entered the building, they
resided in some particular relations to each other. Similarly, the United States
could be defined in universal terms and make its own expansion a sign of the su-
periority of its institution. As Morgan wrote in the early 1840s, America was a
perfect idea that was just made more “geographically complete.”49 His research
later in the century extended to embrace the human family in its entirety and
tied together American expansionism and ethnology (or science in general) by
making the latter an imitation of the former rather than simply its justification.
The Iroquois had attracted special attention much before the 1840s, in part
because of their location close to the eastern seaboard and the longevity of their
contacts with the white world. They are probably the most studied tribes in North
America. Since the early days of the republic, the U.S. federal structure and the
confederate design of the Iroquois were considered to have a special relation to
each other. It has been hypothesized that the “founding fathers” followed the
Iroquois example in constructing the political alliance among the American
states. The latest permutations of this theory flourished during the Constitution’s
bicentennial. In September 1987, Cornell University hosted a conference on
“The Iroquois Great Law of Peace and the United States Constitution.” The dis-
cussion continued in a number of other academic venues, as well as in popular
journals, newspapers, and radio shows. Senator Daniel K. Inouye, the chair of the
Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, introduced a resolution to commemorate
the Iroquois’s early advice to the founding fathers and to affirm the “government
to government relationship.” “I think that as we celebrate the Constitution bi-
centennial, we should realize that our Constitution came into being, in many
ways, because of Indian contributions. George Washington and Benjamin Frank-
lin, in several papers, spoke with great admiration, great awe, over the skill with
which the leaders of the Iroquois nations were able to maintain the sovereignty
of each nation, but yet were able to form a confederacy and serve as a unit. This
gave our Founding Fathers the idea of the federal-state relationship.”50
Among the evidence that has been marshaled to demonstrate that the United
States appropriated Iroquois federalism (a notion that Morgan—regardless of
his red-face antics and Iroquois-face ethnology—surely would have found sacri-
legious) has been a pamphlet, Apocalypse de Chiokoyhikoy, Chiefs des Iroquois
(1777). Written in French and published by the Continental Congress, it used an
Iroquois prophecy that emphasized the synthesis of European and Iroquois ways
in North America.51 These conjectures have been under dispute for a long time.
 The Purloined Indian 301

Most significantly, they seem to express a longing to establish a closer intimacy

with the aboriginal peoples of America. The urge is still intensely enduring in
various branches of the environmental movement, contemporary (“New Age”)
spirituality, and the sort of rituals current in the men’s movement and other red-
face expressions.
 Conclusion

In the nineteenth century, the American and British states embraced two
novel tasks, investigation and publication. Documenting society and nature, the
two countries propped and configured domains of exchange in which state in-
stitutions collaborated and feuded with reform organizations, political parties, in-
dividual reformers, and the press over the production and circulation of knowl-
edge and information. The state designated an audience (or multiple audiences)
in need of information and another, overlapping, set of publics requiring repre-
sentation. It then set forth to satisfy both wants. Conversely, the new medium
represented and even came to define the subject and the boundaries of the state.
Print statism thus functioned as a field of communication and as an archive. The
procedures elaborated during the early part of the century for supporting print
statism amounted to a profound transformation of the “public sphere” that was
arguably more radical than the one Habermas associated with the endemic com-
mercialization of the press at the conclusion of the century.
The nineteenth-century state inhabited diverse fields of knowledge, from the
decennial census to the perpetual publication of laws. Enterprising state officials
and lawmakers in Washington and London entertained even greater visions that
included direct communication between the state and its citizens and the kind of
mass political education that British blue books and the U.S. government’s print
products offered the lay reader. By the middle of the century, public arenas were
characterized by a growing inequality among participants and increased efforts to
standardize, ritualize, and often stage or mimic debate. Parties controlled politi-
cal conversation (at least in the United States) and a new, popular, market-driven
press was already in place, although not yet as dominant as it would become by
the end of the century. However, the emergence of conventions for diffusing
knowledge and conducting public exchange as well as the intrusion of the mar-
ket did not stifle agency. As this book demonstrates, production of knowledge
equipped British and American governments with great advantages and even
 Conclusion 303

power, but the vehicles and rules for making, diffusing, and consuming texts were
unwieldy and, at times, proved inimical to the goals of the state. The traffic in
facts, reports, and books had a reciprocal, indeed, dialogical quality—although a
fully rational dialogue was not necessarily the prime modality of this commerce.
Within a wide range of informational tools, the grand inquiry occupied a
unique place, for it anchored and reorganized the state’s archive and reenacted
and refined the state’s investigative faculties. The large-scale investigation was a
means to extend or exceed the boundaries of the state. Such projects were often
called into being when traditional institutions and procedures of representa-
tional politics seemed inadequate. It is, therefore, not terribly surprising that
many of the specific inquiries examined in parts 2 and 3 surpassed the limits of
their declared goals or at least contained an excess of performance and reportage,
betraying seemingly unbound documentary zeal. This proclivity was particularly
noticeable during episodes of social and political tension, as, for instance, the case
of royal commissions’ investigations into child labor and poor law, or the Amer-
ican Freedmen Inquiry Commission’s survey on the condition of former slaves.
But the grand inquiry’s ambitions reached beyond documentation. While con-
ducting investigations, official emissaries endeavored to settle the very questions
government had commissioned them to study and reflect upon in their reports
and recommendations.
Thus, royal commissions in Britain created local assemblies and courts, delin-
eated and sanctioned class distinctions, and acknowledged working-class organi-
zations and leadership. The freedmen’s investigation and other Civil War and Re-
construction inquiries (for instance, the congressional investigation that followed
the postwar race riots in Memphis and New Orleans) had to negotiate and de-
termine, via the investigative process, the social and political status of the newly
emancipated slaves. Beyond justifying Indian removal policy, Schoolcraft’s re-
search took part in the civilization effort by rendering Indian culture an object
worthy of museumification. This may be the reason why—unlike other social
investigators—Schoolcraft did not bother with articulating native voice. The
logic of the civilizing mission prescribed that the Indian was to vanish so a new
person could appear. Paradoxically, the aboriginal was denied a voice so that he
could be given a voice as a civilized individual and a citizen. Regardless of in-
vestigators’ intentions, the inquiry was enmeshed in the field of investigation, al-
tering it not only by making recommendations but also by staging events and by
(literally) making noise. Public hearings, interviews, and inspections produced
auditory exchanges, clamor, and, ultimately, voice. As a type of “orature,” the
official report begins with orality or aurality.
 304 States of Inquiry

The entire sequence of inquiry comprised a chain of registration and substi-

tution that intermeshed texts and performances. Schoolcraft’s and Morgan’s In-
dian projects provide extraordinary illustrations of the proximity of ritual and
documentation. Despite strong claims of engaging in policy making—at least in
Schoolcraft’s ventures—both scholars were ultimately writing Indian history
and making Indian culture historical. (Robert Dale Owen wrote a history of slav-
ery—under federal auspices—to signify the ultimate destruction of the pecu-
liar institution.) The two ethnographers exercised what Joseph Roach recently
labeled “surrogation,” an always partial, anxiety-saturated performance that
reenacts and substitutes for vacant people and missing cultural forms. Surroga-
tion ultimately constitutes a mode of memorization, centered, in Roach’s lan-
guage, on “effigies”—actors, celebrities, masks, and periodic masquerades—as
tools of collective memory and reinvention.1
In the Iroquois, the two ethnologists found a society that already had been
archived, in the sense that it was acutely aware of its own historicity. After all,
Eli Parker, Morgan and Schoolcraft’s chief informant was himself an investiga-
tor and chronicler of Iroquois society. It was thus fitting that Morgan’s propitious
moment of discovery—when he finally had a glimpse into Iroquois society—
took place while he witnessed the Condolence Council rehearsing and memoriz-
ing the entire Iroquois structure. In the previous centuries, the Iroquois elabo-
rated this ritual of substitution as a method of preserving Indian memory in the
face of European incursions and the constant need to renegotiate their position
with foreign powers. Morgan’s New League of the Iroquois’s antics, which were
fashioned in accordance with what he learned at the condolences ceremony, were,
in turn, a mnemonic device, a ritual of registration and memory keeping. These
successive acts of surrogation (and subrogation) began with Iroquois rituals but
were ultimately supplemented by printed texts, another form of effigy, as well
as the state archive or the ethnological archive. The chain of substitution con-
tinues, for in the twentieth century Morgan’s writings and the subsequent work
of native and white scholars—invention and fiction included—were accepted
by many latter-day performers of the Condolence Council as canonical texts. In
this regard, the New Order was successful in archiving the Iroquois, although it
was unable to completely civilize the Indian.2
Ambiguities of exchange, representation, and surrogation are as discernible
today in early twenty-first-century attempts at public investigation. In late 2002,
the U.S. Congress created the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the
United States, commonly known as the 9/11 Commission. In the absence of in-
dependent mechanisms of investigation such as the British royal commission of
 Conclusion 305

inquiry, the federal government assured the panel’s public standing by populat-
ing the commission with an equal number of Republicans and Democrats.
(Politicizing the inquiry in such a manner presumably assured that opposing bi-
ases would balance each other.) Congress accordingly delineated a rather convo-
luted process that allowed the president and the congressional leaders of the two
parties to determine membership. The law prescribed that the board’s mission
would be to examine the course of events before and during the attack on the
World Trade Center, to scrutinize government response, and subsequently to
make policy recommendations. The commission had in the privileges of con-
gressional inquest, including taking evidence under oath and the power of sub-
poena.
This obviously was not a “social” investigation. No community, class, or occu-
pation was put under scrutiny or marked for extraparliamentary representation.
Yet, the panel charged itself with a greater mission, which included a deep sense
of responsibility to bereaved families and to the public at large. In its official web
site the commission stated, “The Commissioners and staff are dedicated to work-
ing on behalf of the safety and security of the American people and the thou-
sands of families who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. The Commission
strives to relate to family members and keep them apprised of the progress it
makes during the course of its investigation into the attacks upon our Nation.”3
Indeed, this panel did more than any other official body to substantiate the pub-
lic status of these families (who had lobbied hard to make sure that Washington
would sanction an independent investigation). Together with other spectators,
the victims’ relatives endowed these sessions with the atmosphere of an open as-
sembly. Audiences occasionally applauded, cheered, and hissed witnesses. The of-
ten-reiterated responsibility toward the 9/11 families and the public precipitated
unforeseen events, such as the apology that former counterterrorism chief Rich-
ard A. Clarke offered the families. Clarke’s gesture then prompted the expecta-
tion that other senior officials would follow with similar acts of contrition. In that
particular stage of the inquiry, and for a brief moment, the process seemed to in-
troduce to U.S. politics the type of public self-searching and therapeutics that
over the last decade or so has been part of truth and conciliation commissions in
South Africa and elsewhere.
Fact-finding rituals—public investigations—have the capacity to carve out
public spaces for such an unscripted exchange between the state, the public, and
commissioned individuals, including the introduction of practices and idioms
borrowed from the experience of other societies. The potential for transactions
of this kind is grounded less in the supposed impartiality of the commission or
 306 States of Inquiry

its relative independence from the political process than in the manner in which
it imitates elected representative bodies. The 9/11 Commission, in particular, in-
sisted on representing, in the sense of “acting for,” the “American people.” Ap-
pointing an investigative panel that operated within congressional practices, the
federal government seemingly reproduced one of its investigative mechanisms,
but, in turn, the commission surrogated the state including its representational
duties, such as doing the people’s work. Giving voice to the 9/11 families may
also be considered a gesture of filling in for a state that was obviously reluctant
to do so.
Most indicative of the commission’s representational reach was its somewhat
unusual decision to contract a trade publisher, W. W. Norton, to issue an autho-
rized ten-dollar edition of its official report. Published in late July 2004, the 567-
page report became an instant best seller. Norton’s president Drake McFeely ad-
mitted being initially flabbergasted by the enthusiastic public reaction. Upon
reflection, he remarked, “For $10, it’s a quick impulse buy, to buy a piece of his-
tory, and then they start reading it and find out they have a lot to learn.”4
Affordability and accessibility was one of the main criteria for choosing this
venue for disseminating the report. Norton promised to give a copy of the report
to each family of the 9/11 victims. The authorized edition supplemented the
publication of the report on the Internet and the Government Printing Office’s
own official version. Meanwhile, in the tradition of intercepting and redirecting
state papers, another private publisher, PublicAffairs Books, issued The 9/11 In-
vestigations. This tome weaves highlights of the 9/11 commission’s interim staff
reports and the Joint House-Senate Inquiry report on the attack into a single nar-
rative and reprints key witness testimony.5 Sensing commercial opportunity,
other publishers also offered their own versions of the 9/11 report.
The commission explained its decision to contract Norton as part of its duty
to communicate with the “American people,” which it appropriated as its public.
Commission chairman and former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean ex-
plained, “Our mandate requires the Commission to report to the President and
the Congress. Our report, ultimately, is for the American people. We want the
public to read the Commission’s findings, evaluate its recommendations, and en-
gage in a dialogue on how to improve our nation’s security.”6 Kean reportedly
wanted the public to read the report before the “spin doctors” took over.7 An-
other commissioner, Timothy J. Roemer, said he was reluctant at first but then
embraced the idea of a trade publication because he “wanted to make sure that
the American people had access to this product.”8 One observer argued that be-
cause the event under scrutiny was a “national trauma,” government had to in-
 Conclusion 307

form the people “as broadly and as quickly as possible.”9 The commission’s
spokesperson Al Felzenberg cited as precedents Kenneth Starr’s report on the
Monica Lewinsky scandal (1998) but also, curiously, the publication of the Pen-
tagon Papers (1971) and the Nixon White House tapes (1974). The 1968 Kerner
Commission on race riots issued a commercial edition of its report. Similarly,
Random House published the Warren Commission’s report on the assassination
of President Kennedy shortly after its submission. The latter sold more than 1.5
million copies within a couple of months of its release.
The commission’s strong wish to be read met with an equal public eagerness
to peruse the report or at least to purchase it. Norton received the text already
formatted and had four days to print and bind the book and deliver it to book-
stores. On July 22, 2004, bookstores sold 150,000 copies, and Norton announced
its intention to print another 200,000 copies beyond the initial run of 600,000.
Once again, government (at least vicariously) was in the business of producing a
best seller. Bookstore owners reported that the demand for the 9/11 Commission
report was surpassed only by the enthusiasm that followed the publication of Bill
Clinton’s autobiography or the Harry Potter installments. Katie Foreman, a
thirty-six-year-old graduate student from Washington, D.C., told the Associated
Press she had followed the hearings online and in the newspaper but was glad
she could obtain the report in book form. “This is one I’ll read every page of . . .
I’m shocked at how many warnings there were before the attacks. I want to get
the full official record and read it for myself.”10
Reporters employed every cliché in their lexicon to juxtapose the report’s
somewhat surprising popularity (after all the book market was already saturated
with 9/11 material) with the proverbial tediousness of most official tomes. In-
terestingly, this was presented as a literary success. As are many government pub-
lications, the book was written by a committee. A group of seven to twelve, mostly
staffers, sitting at the commission’s offices in the U.S. General Services Adminis-
tration Building spent many nights going through endless drafts of each chap-
ter. At the same time, the press was eager to identify specific authors. The San
Francisco Chronicle, for example, emphasized that Philip D. Zelikow, the com-
mission’s executive director, is an accomplished author. Zelikow and a senior ad-
visor to the commission, historian Ernest R. May, had collaborated in writing a
book about the White House during the Cuban missile crisis.
There were clear efforts to make the report more palatable to a large reader-
ship. The commission’s spokesman said it outright: “It was a long, arduous pro-
cess to get to the point where [the report] tells an engrossing story—of oppor-
tunities missed in some cases, of tremendous courage and foresight in some cases,
 308 States of Inquiry

filling in details that were not always known or dispelling misconceptions.”11 In

a most telling move, the document’s compilers decided to forgo a strict chronol-
ogy in favor of a more enticing plot line. They swapped chapters 1 and 2 in the
original draft because the opening chapter in the final version, which describes
the story of each of the four planes that crashed, was deemed more dramatic.
The chapter, titled “We have some planes,” is then followed by historical back-
ground.

While several key practices associated with the political culture explored in
this book have recently resurfaced in ways reminiscent of their original mid-
nineteenth-century form, others appear to be on the verge of extinction. Since
the early decades of the twentieth century, the production of policy-oriented so-
cial knowledge has been regularized within government and concurrently be-
come a major field of academic production. Similarly, the state has refined and
expanded its media presence. It has also continued directly to generate and dis-
seminate knowledge, which over the last half-century is more efficiently ar-
ranged as transparent, bodiless “information.” (Parkinson’s warnings about the
state printer’s predisposition to devastate forests seem somewhat less urgent in
the age of cyberspace.) There is perhaps less tolerance today for government pro-
paganda that is packaged too recognizably or for instruction films and pamphlets
of the kind that were popular in the 1950s. However, White House press confer-
ences or USDA consumer recommendations, to give two examples, still have the
capacity to grab great attention. Presidents still appoint special panels—hence
the investigations into various aspects of the war in Iraq or the 2001 bipartisan
Commission to Strengthen Social Security (CSSS) headed by the late senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Richard Parsons, CEO of AOL/Time Warner.
Nevertheless, the ambitious, large-scale, social investigation that endeavors to
devise new institutions and policies is often derided as symptomatic of a much-
maligned expansionist bureaucratic culture. Since the early 1980s, there has been
great reluctance in Britain to appoint royal commissions of inquiry to grapple
with major public issues. (The situation is somewhat different in Commonwealth
countries such as Australia or New Zealand.) Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
suspected social experts of all sorts to be liberal sycophants of the welfare state,
although in 1991 her conservative replacement John Major appointed the Runci-
man Commission on criminal justice. Later, Tony Blair appointed two commis-
sions—one on care for the aged and the other on reforming the House of Lords.
In the United States, the transformation was more complex and stretched from
the Moynihan Report of 1965 and the adversarial reactions it prompted among
 Conclusion 309

the Left, to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health reform report of the early 1990s and
the opportunity it gave conservatives to undermine the welfare state.
The health care investigation was one of the last classic, massive, civic fact-
finding expeditions into the realm of social policy. The administration initiated
a task force of public figures and experts who interviewed a host of other experts
and “ordinary people” who, because of their personal experience, testified to the
miseries inflicted by ill-run and wrongly motivated health-care institutions.
There was also a row over the secrecy of the procedure. Some argued that the ad-
ministration was working hard to circumvent the lawmaking process in Con-
gress. Finally, the protracted investigation yielded a ponderous document, which
signified by its sheer size and unreadability the excess of a supposedly unbridled
bureaucracy. This ritual, and its discontents, would have been quite familiar to
British factory commissioners of the mid-1830s.
In contrast to the fate of Clinton’s Task Force on National Health Reform, it
seems that the needs of the modern media privilege the traditional legislative in-
quest. This is certainly the case in the United States, where congressional hear-
ings have been quite effective in publicizing, dramatizing, and representing so-
cial issues, from smoking to AIDS. This success has had much to do with the
quasi-judicial and open-ended character of the proceedings (including the pos-
sibility of cross-examination), their remarkable visibility, and the opportunities
they give individual lawmakers and witnesses to commandeer the exchange. It
is this type of public performance that heralded the return of “representative
men,” like movie actors and pop singers who serve as spokespersons for particu-
lar illnesses (or rather their victims) or for other sufferers of deprivation or
wrongdoing, or, conversely, those like the 1840s “factory cripple” William Dodd
who are made celebrities on the foundation of their public testimony.
Other ideological constructs and customs that all but faded away after the
nineteenth century reemerged in yet another indication of our postmodern con-
dition. Thus, open advocacy for fragile groups has eclipsed the ostensibly neutral
standing of science. In recent decades, numerous public experts have jettisoned
their impartial posture in favor of open identification with particularly vulner-
able groups, for example, victims of child abuse or rape. We have also witnessed
the increased efficacy of personal narratives of suffering and overcoming and the
general cultural fascination with ubiquitous public confessions. Another retro-
phenomenon is the new legitimacy earned by virtue discourse in determining
public policy, as shown by the renewed efforts over the last fifteen years to sepa-
rate the deserving poor from the undeserving. In the case of one neoconserva-
tive, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, such calculations are consciously and di-
 310 States of Inquiry

rectly imported from the early Victorian moral imagination, especially Bentham’s
notion of “less eligibility” that once governed the notorious post-1834 workhouse
policy.
Social problems are frequently grasped through the “authentic” experience
of unique individuals rather than ordinary citizens John and Jane Doe who were
constructs of drab statistical charts and bureaucratic lore. Likewise, presidents—
starting with Ronald Reagan—have performed a Let-Us-Now-Praise-Famous-
Men act in their annual State of the Union address (the modern, televised ver-
sion of the early-nineteenth-century annual message) when they point to a
select few heroes, usually seated next to the First Lady. The cultural propensity
to focus on the life experiences of the few and, at the same time, the mixture of
fascination and scorn toward experts and (unfeeling) science was characteristic
of the nineteenth century. But in contrast to Dickens’s views, the cult of facts, of
social experts and expertise, is suspected today by some of harboring too strong
an empathy toward the lower stratum of society.
By the end of the 1990s, another official report captured public attention and
became a national best seller—special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s voyeuristic ac-
count of President Bill Clinton’s sexual liaison with a woman in the White
House. The published report was issued concurrently by three publishers and
sold a million copies. Its emphasis on the details of Clinton’s sexual escapades ex-
posed Starr and his team to textual scrutiny and public ridicule, demonstrating,
once again, the risks involved in crafting, publishing, and circulating an official
report.
 notes

Abbreviations

BL British Library
GHA Gray Herbarium Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
HL Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
HoL Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
JCBL John Carter Brown Library, Providence, R.I.
LC Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
MHS Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston
NARA National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., and
College Park, Md.
NYHS New York Historical Society
PRO Public Record Office, Kew
SA Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.
UCL University College, London

Introduction

1. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Karl Marx and Freder-
ick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (London, 1970), 171. Edward Said employed this quo-
tation from Marx to launch his Orientalism (New York, 1978).
2. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, 1967), 8 –9.
3. Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument of Em-
pire (Cardiff, Wales, 1998), 217–18.
4. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Govern-
ment, Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy, ed. J. M. Dent (London, 1993), 258– 59.
5. “Letter to John Penn,” in Works of John Adams, vol. 4 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), 205.
6. Melissa S. Williams, Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings
of Liberal Representation (Princeton, 1998), 27.
7. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the
World (London, 1998), 42.
 312 Notes to Pages 25 –45

p a r t i • Monuments in Print

1. Quarterly Review 70 ( June and Sept. 1842): 159.

2. J. C. Frémont, The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont, ed. Donald Jackson and Mary
Lee Spence, vol. 1 (Urbana, Ill., 1973), 269–71.
3. Quoted in Edwin L. Sabin, Kit Carson Days, 1809 –1868, vol. 1 (New York, 1935), 362.
4. Justin McCarthy, Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches (New York,
1872), 194.
5. William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870 (Philadelphia,
1959), 49.
6. Geoffrey Nunberg, “Farewell to the Information Age,” in The Future of the Book, ed.
Geoffrey Nunberg (Berkeley, 1996), 120.
7. For orature, see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New
York, 1996), 11–12; Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Toward a Critical
Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (Oxford, 1998), 103 –28.
8. John Stuart Mill, Writings on India, ed. John M. Robson, Martin Moir, and Zawahir
Moir, vol. 30 (London, 1963), 33.

Chapter One • Blue Books and the Market of Information

1. Nassau Senior to Lord Brougham, March 9, 1833, 44,843, Lord Brougham Papers, UCL.
See also Senior to Brougham, December 16, 1832, 44,440.
2. Harriet Martineau, March 5, 1834, Harriet Martineau File, Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge Papers, UCL.
3. Third Report of the Controller of the Stationery Office, 1890 (c 5993) 26, pp. 18, 19.
4. Lawrence Goldman, “Experts, Investigators, and the State in 1860: British Social Sci-
entists through American Eyes,” in The State and Social Investigation, ed. Michael J. Lacey and
Mary O. Furner (Washington, D.C., 1993), 95.
5. Hansard’s Parliamentary Papers, 3d ser., 123 (Dec. 7, 1852): 1069.
6. Since the mid-1830s, government’s periodical reports and reports of royal commissions
of inquiry were under the supervision of the Stationery Office. Although they were presented
to the House of Commons in a printed form they were still labeled parliamentary papers. The
designation parliamentary papers as an overarching label to describe all official publications
was in use throughout the period under discussion.
7. In their appearance, blue books often resembled pamphlets. Official print ephemera
could also be purchased in loose leaves.
8. Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register 81 ( July 6, 1833): 17–18.
9. Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register 80 (Apr. 6, 1833): 22.
10. J. Toumlin Smith, Government by Commissions Illegal and Pernicious (London: S.
Sweet, 1849), 168.
11. Ibid., 182–83.
12. In the nineteenth century, there were seven categories of printing for the House of
Commons: votes, petitions, journals, returns, bills, command papers, and reports (select com-
mittees).
 Notes to Pages 45– 52 313

13. Report from the Select Committee on the Printing Done for the House of Commons, HC
1828 (520) 4, p. 7 fn. Report from the Committee for Promulgation of the Statutes in Great
Britain. Parliament, House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Sheila
Lambert, vol. 105 (Wilmington, Del., 1975), 5 –7.
14. L. G. Graves, Luke Graves Hansard: His Diary: A Case Study in the Reform of Patron-
age, ed. P. and G. Ford (Oxford, 1962), xviii.
15. Report from the Select Committee on Printing Done for the House, HC 1828 (520) 4,
p. 49.
16. There were other parliamentary printers. In the 1820s, Eyre and Strahan (later Eyre
and Spottiswoode) printed the bills, journals, reports, and miscellaneous papers of the House
of Lords and also had a patent for the separate business of printing acts of Parliament, forms
of prayer, Bibles, and prayer books and were booksellers for the acts and prayers. Nichols
printed the votes of the House of Commons and performed confidential night work. Hansard
printed the Commons reports, returns, bills, and command papers.
17. Second Report from the Committee on Public Documents, HC 1833 (717) 12, pp. 6–7. Sec-
ond Report from the Select Committee on Printed Papers, HC 1835 (392) 18, pp. xxix.
18. J. C. Trewin and E. M. King, Printer to the House: The Story of Hansard (London,
1952), 150. First Report from the Select Committee on Public Documents, HC 1833 (44) 12, p. 13.
19. First Report from the Select Committee on Public Documents, HC 1833 (44) 12, p. 3.
20. Ibid., 23.
21. Ibid., 6.
22. Report from the Select Committee on Public Petition, HC 1831– 32 (639) 5, p. 3.
23. Report from the Select Committee on the Printing Done for the House of Commons, HC
1828 (520) 4. Also see First Report from Select Committee on Publication of Printed Papers,
1840 (130) 15, p. 6.
24. The Poor Man’s Guardian: A Weekly Paper for the People (June 29, 1833): 205.
25. Report from the Select Committee on the Printing Done for the House of Commons, 1828
(520) 4, p. 8. Of 24,492 petitions presented from 1823 to 1831 not less than 10,685 were printed.
Of 13,610 petitions referred in 1839 to the committee of petitions, only 1,133 were printed
(from four-ninths to one thirteenth). First Report from Select Committee on Publication of
Printed Papers, 1840 (130) 15, p. 10.
26. Hansard’s, 3d ser., 31 (Feb. 18, 1836): 553.
27. Journals of the House of Common 90 (Aug. 13, 1835): 344. The selling of votes of the
House had become the established practice after the revolution of 1688. First Report from Se-
lect Committee on Publication of Printed Papers, HC 1840 (130) 15, p. 5.
28. From an average of 973,053 annual copies in the three years preceding the decision
to an average of 920,010 in the three years that followed it (a reduction of slightly less than 5 %
in the number of copies between 1833–35 and 1836– 38); First Report from Select Committee
on Publication of Printed Papers, HC 1840 (130) 15, p. 8. In the 1830s, the largest run of any
document was the private bill resolution (12,000 copies). Commissions’ reports were printed
in between 2,000 and 3,000 copies.
29. Hansard’s, 3d ser., 32 (Mar. 24, 1836): 579 – 83. For Lord Lennox’s complaint, see
Hansard’s, 3d ser., 103 (Mar. 15, 1849): 755.
30. Trewin and King, Printer to the House, 190. Hansard: His Diary, ed. Ford and Ford, 161.
 314 Notes to Pages 53–62

31. Trewin and King, Printer to the House, 208 – 9. The publication in question was Report
from the Selected Committee on the System of Transportation, 1837 (518) 19.
32. Joseph Redlich, The Procedure of the House of Commons: A Study of its History and
Present Form, trans. A. Ernest Steinthal, vol. 2 (London, 1908), 49– 50.
33. Report from the Select Committee on Publication of Printed Papers, HC 1837 (286) 13,
p. 9.
34. First Report from the Select Committee on Publication of Printed Papers, HC 1840 (130)
15, p. 11.
35. Hansard’s, 3d ser., 36 (Feb. 1, 1837): 73.
36. Ibid., 74.
37. First Report from Select Committee on Publication of Printed Papers, HC 1840 (130)
15, p. 11.
38. Edwin Chadwick to Florence Nightingale, August 28, 1860, Add. Mss., 45,770, f. 151,
BL. Nightingale responded in the affirmative. Nightingale to Chadwick [copy], September 3,
1860, Add. Mss., 45,770, f. 159, BL.
39. Chadwick to Nightingale, February 19, 1858, Add. Mss., 45,770, f. 10, BL. See also
Chadwick to Nightingale, August 2, 1858, Add. Mss., 45,770, f. 25, BL.
40. Smith, Government by Commissions, 172–73.
41. Report from the Select Committee on Printing, HC 1854 – 55 (447) 11, p. viii.
42. Hansard’s, 3d ser., 122 ( June 25, 1852): 1317; also, see Hansard’s, 3d ser., 123 (Dec. 7,
1852): 1067.
43. Letter (March 19, 1849) From the Board of Health on Printing Reports in the Octavo
Form, HC 1849 (293) 45, p. 3.
44. J. R. McCulloch, Comptroller of the Stationery Office, to Sir Charles E. Trevelyan,
Treasury, March 26, 1849 in Letter (March 19, 1849) From the Board of Health on Printing Re-
ports in the Octavo Form, HC 1849 (293) 45, p. 7.
45. Hansard’s, 3d ser., 84 (Feb. 24, 1846): 14 –15.
46. Report from the Select Committee on Parliamentary Papers, HC 1852– 53 (720) 34,
p. 163.
47. Edwin Chadwick to Lord Brougham, June 1849, 10,807, Brougham Papers.
48. Hansard’s, 3d ser., 123 (Dec. 7, 1852): 1067.
49. Report from the Select Committee on Parliamentary Papers, HC 1852–53 (720) 34,
p. 159.
50. Ibid.
51. This description is taken from Joseph Hume’s testimony. Report from the Select Com-
mittee on Parliamentary Papers, HC 1852– 53 (720) 34, p. 168. [Six] Report[s] from the Select
Committee on the Combination Law, HC 1824 (51) 5.
52. Report from the Select Committee on Parliamentary Papers, HC 1852–53 (720) 34,
p. 161.
53. Hansard’s, 3d ser., 123 (Dec. 7, 1852): 1066.
54. Ibid., 1068, 1070.
55. Report from the Select Committee on Parliamentary Papers, HC 1852–53 (720) 34, p. iii.
56. Hansard’s, 3d ser., 178 (Mar. 24, 1865): 215. A different printing project based on a se-
lection of government papers (especially diplomatic documents) began in the 1850s under the
 Notes to Pages 63 –72 315

title The British and Foreign State Papers. These volumes were edited by the librarian of the
foreign office, issued annually, and sold for about thirty shillings per volume.
57. Lord Stanley, “What Should We Do with Our Blue Books? Or, Parliament as the Na-
tional School Master” (London: Savill and Edwards, Printers, 1854), 13.
58. Report from the Select Committee on Printing, HC 1854– 55 (447) 11, p. 31.
59. It is not clear what report he had in mind, but see “Bill to Amend the Law as to Mar-
riage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister or Niece,” HC 1854 –55 (56) 4.
60. Report from the Select Committee on Printing, HC 1854 –55 (447) 11, p. 32.
61. Hansard’s, 2d ser., 18 (Mar. 6, 1828): 989. Report from the Select Committee on Print-
ing Done for the House, HC 1828 (520) 4, p. 8.
62. “A plan for a new Police Gazette to replace the old Hue and Cry, 1827,” HO 44/58,
PRO. Government also published three gazettes (London Gazette, Dublin Gazette, and Edin-
burgh Gazette) that were used mainly for official and legal advertisements.
63. Second Report from the Select Committee on Printing, HC 1847– 48 (710) 16, p. 4.
64. First Report of the Select Committee on Printing, HC 1847–48 (657) 16, p. 27. The first
experiment in this direction was not to print the evidence of the third report of the Sanitary
Commission. The Home Office decided to submit the appendix in manuscript form (p. 26).
65. Report from the Select Committee on Printing, HC 1854 – 55 (447) 11, p. 48. Printing
the reports for the Sanitary Commission cost between £10,000 and £12,000. Report from the
Select Committee on Miscellaneous Expenditure, HC 1847– 48 (543) (543-II) 18, part 1, p. 50.
The average cost of printing was about £3,000.
66. Report from the Select Committee on Printing, HC 1854– 55 (447) 11, p. 46.
67. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or, the Two Nations (1845; Ware, Hertfordshire, 1995), 196.
68. Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamond (1872; New York, 1998), 24.
69. Hansard’s, 3d ser., 179 ( June 1, 1865): 1144.
70. Hansard’s, 3d ser., 178 (Mar. 24, 1865): 215.
71. Hansard’s, 3d ser., 146 ( July 17, 1857): 1690.
72. T. J. Ward, The Factory Movement, 1830–1855 (London, 1962), 102; Lytton Strachey,
Eminent Victorians (1918; New York, 1988), 101.
73. David Low, “The Book of the Month—(Heavyweight Section)”[caricature], Evening
Standard, June 10, 1930.
74. The term was coined by Lord Derby in 1867. Trewin and King, Printer to the House, 241.
75. Quoted in F. Knight Hunt, The Fourth Estate: Contributions Towards A History of
Newspapers, and of the Liberty of the Press, vol. 1 (London, 1850), 7.
76. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into
a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (1962; Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 66–67.
77. Cyril Northcote Parkinson, The Law and the Profits (London, 1960), 130.

Chapter Two • The Battle of the Books

1. For example, in 1849, Congress printed extra copies of the following documents: Coast
Survey, 4,500; Report on Commerce and Navigation, 10,000; Patent Office Report on Agricul-
ture (which was displayed by Stevens in the committee hearing), 100,000; Patent Office Report
on Machines, 50,000; King’s Report on California, 10,000; Banks of the United States, 5,000;
 316 Notes to Pages 73 –82

Foster and Whitney’s Mineral Report, 10,000; Proceedings Relative to the Death of General
Taylor, 30,000. Report from the Select Committee on Parliamentary Papers, HC 1852– 53 (720)
34, p. 178. Beyond circulation by congressmen, the Library of Congress and the State Depart-
ment were initially responsible for sending copies to designated colleges, learned societies, and
state and territorial libraries. The responsibilities for educational distribution were transferred
in 1858 to the Department of the Interior.
2. Ibid., 176. The witness estimated the federal expenditure on publication to be about
£100,000 annually (at that time, about $600,000). J. R. McColluch gave a similar assessment
about the expense of parliamentary printing in Britain, although Hansard’s figure was sub-
stantially lower, £28,000. These general estimates may not be accurate. It is difficult to dis-
tinguish in the historical records between expenses for printing reports, and other stationery
and printing appropriations. In the U.S. case, publication budgets often came from the contin-
gency fund of both houses rather than from the printing budget. However, it is safe to assume
that, relative to the size of its budget and the scope of its federal activity, the federal govern-
ment spent proportionally much more than the British government on state printing.
3. Report from the Select Committee on Parliamentary Papers, HC 1852–53 (720) 34, p. 171.
4. The closest term to parliamentary papers in the United States was the similarly nebu-
lous concept of government publications. A law approved in 1847 defined pamphlets or books
that were published, procured, or purchased by Congress as “public documents.” See Leroy
Charles Merrit, The United States Government As Publisher (Chicago, 1943), 2.
5. There were attempts to persuade Congress to produce more documents for educational
purposes by, for instance, distributing to schools public documents such as the president’s an-
nual message and the publications of the Smithsonian Institution. See “Memorial of Joseph
L. Smith,” March 24, 1856, RG 46, SEN 34A-H17, 34th Cong., 1st sess., NARA.
6. Culver H. Smith, The Press, Politics, and Patronage: The American Government’s Use of
Newspapers, 1789–1875 (Athens, Ga., 1977), 72.
7. James L. Harrison, 100 GPO Years, 1861–1961 (Washington, D.C., 1961), 12.
8. Suzanne deLong, “What is in the United States Serial Set?” Journal of Government In-
formation 23, no. 2 (1996): 123 – 35; and Richard J. McKinney, “An Overview of the U.S. Con-
gressional Serial Set” (Washington, D.C., 2002). For the initial House of Representative order
for serial publication, see House of Representatives, Journal (Dec. 8, 1813) 13th Cong., 2d sess.,
166 – 67.
9. Report on Public Printing, Senate Doc. 99, 15th Cong., 2d sess., serial 15, p. 1.
10. On Executive Patronage, Expenditures of Government . . . and Public Printing in Con-
nection with Retrenchment, Senate Doc. 399, 28th Cong., 1st sess., serial 437, p. 43.
11. Report of the Superintendents of Public Printing, House Misc. Doc. 110, 35th Cong., 1st
sess., serial 963. Report on an Investigation into Alleged Corruption in Public Printing, House
Report 648, 36th Cong., 1st sess., serial 1071. Smith, The Press, Politics, and Patronage, 226.
12. Harrison, 100 GPO Years, 54.
13. Charles Sumner to William T. Bingham, December 31, 1860; Sumner to C. F. Smith,
February 7, 10, 1860, Charles Sumner Papers, LC.
14. Sumner to Theodore Parker, Jan. 6, 1853 [copy], vol. 10, 262.5; Sumner to Parker,
March 27, 1853 [copy], vol. 10, 263.5; Parker to Sumner, August 18, 18[53?] [copy], vol. 6, 261.
Theodore Parker Papers, MHS.
 Notes to Pages 82–89 317

15. George P. Button to [Hunt?], April 21, 1849, Letters to the Clerk of the House of Rep-
resentatives, RG 233, HR 30C-B1, NARA.
16. Congressional Globe (Sept. 23, 1850): 1923. William L. Hickey, ed., The Constitution of
the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1848).
17. Congressional Globe (Sept. 23, 1850): 1923.
18. Ibid.
19. Report of the Commission of Patents for the Year 1858: Agriculture (Washington, D.C.:
James B. Steedman, 1859), or, House Exec. Doc. 105, 35th Cong., 2d sess., serial 1012, p. 239.
20. Congressional Globe (Mar. 7, 1850): 473–74.
21. Ibid., 475.
22. Ibid.
23. Harrison, 100 GPO Years, 54. The 1875 report contained 536 text pages and 128 pages
of woodcuts.
24. Congressional Globe ( Jan. 17, 1850): 172.
25. Ibid., 173.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 174.
28. Congressional Globe (Dec. 31, 1850): 139. By the second session of the fortieth Con-
gress (1868), the cluster of executive documents known as the Annual Message of the Presi-
dent, reached almost 11,000 pages and cost approximately $110,000 to print. This was one of
the most important federal documents issued, and three thousand copies were made with an
abridgment printed in a massive 35,000 copies. The document was dispatched to specific news-
papers in central areas ahead of time so to that they would be able to publish it on the day of
its formal presentation to Congress. Cost of Public Printing and Distribution of Public Docu-
ments, Senate Report 247, 40th Cong., 3d sess., serial 1362, p. 3. The New York Herald employed
express horse service to beat other newspapers in getting Jackson’s annual message to New
York in 1835.
29. Congressional Globe (Dec. 18, 1850): 77. The document under consideration was Sen-
ate Exec. Doc. 64, 31st Cong., 1st sess., serial 562.
30. Congressional Globe (Dec. 19, 1850): 96. Also see Congressional Globe (July 26, 1850):
1464.
31. Congressional Globe ( Jan. 21, 1852): 332.
32. Congressional Globe ( Jan. 17, 1850): 171.
33. Ibid., 171–72. Other congressmen also complained of spreading ink and fading illus-
trations.
34. Congressional Globe (Dec. 12, 1850): 35; Congressional Globe (Dec. 17, 1850): 66. Also
see “Memorial of German-American Agriculturists and Citizens for Printing of the Agricul-
tural Report of the Patent Office in the German Language,” House Misc. Doc. 41, 37th Cong.,
2d sess., serial 1141.
35. Congressional Globe (Dec. 12, 1850): 35; (Dec. 17, 1850): 66.
36. Congressional Globe (Dec. 17, 1850): 66.
37. Ibid., 67.
38. Ibid., 68.
39. Ibid.
 318 Notes to Pages 89–98

40. “Memorial of Eugene Plunkett,” December 21, 1852, 32d Cong., 2d sess., RG 46, SEN
32A-H17, NARA.
41. Congressional Globe (Dec. 23, 1852): 138.
42. Clarence E. Carter, “The United States and Documentary Historical Publication,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review 25 ( June 1938): 4 –7. In early 1833, the Clerk of the
House, Matthew St. Clair Clarke, was inundated with requests from libraries and colleges for
copies of the twelve volumes of Sparks’s Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolu-
tion, which according to a law past by the Twenty-second Congress were to be granted to all
incorporated literary institutions in the country.
43. United States Telegraph, January 28, 1830. Also, see House of Representatives, Journal,
21st Cong., 1st sess., 350, 363, 368, 404, 419. “An Act Making Provision for a Subscription to a
Compilation of Congressional Documents,” H.R. 652 (Feb. 28, 1831) House of Representa-
tives, Bills and Resolutions, 21st Cong., 2d Sess.
44. Register of Debates in Congress, vol. 1, preface (Washington, D.C., 1825).
45. National Intelligencer, January 24, 1843.
46. The distribution list of the Documentary History of the American Revolution included
dignitaries (e.g., James Madison, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson), foreign ministers,
government departments, lawmakers (3 copies each), justices, states, territories, and colleges.
Senate Record Book of the Distribution of Publications by Act or Resolution, 33d Cong., RG 46,
SEN 33d-B3, NARA.
47. John Spencer Bassett, The Middle Group of American Historians (New York, 1917),
241–43, 287– 88.
48. Report of Select Committee of House of Representatives, on Purchase and Publication
of Madison Papers, Senate Misc. Doc. 20, 30th Cong., 1st sess., serial 511.
49. “Petition of Elizabeth Hamilton for the Patronage of Congress to the Publication of
Her Late Husband’s Papers,” Senate Doc. 52, 29th Cong., 1st sess., serial 473.
50. “Petition of Samuel L. Gouverneur,” Senate Misc. Doc. 10, 30th Cong., 2d sess., serial
533, p. 2.
51. Congressional Globe ( June 13, 1850): 1203– 4.
52. Congressional Globe (Aug. 21, 1850): 1623.
53. Ibid., 1624.
54. Congressional Globe (Aug. 26, 1850): 1664.
55. Ibid., 1665.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., 1668.
58. See, e.g., A. B. Farlin to Thomas Campbell, Clerk of the House of Representatives, Feb-
ruary 19, 1849, Letters to the Clerk of the House of Representatives, RG 233, HR 30C-B1,
NARA.
59. William Morrison to Campbell, August 26, 1848 [copy], Letters to the Clerk of the
House of Representatives, RG 233, HR 30C-B1, NARA.
60. Morrison to Thomas Stall, n.d. [copy], Letters to the Clerk of the House of Represen-
tatives, RG 233, HR 30C-B1, NARA.
61. Printed circular from Thomas J. Campbell, Clerk to the House of Representatives, Jan-
 Notes to Pages 98 –107 319

uary 15, 1849, Letters to the Clerk of the House of Representatives, RG 233, HR 30C-B1,
NARA.
62. The most expensive item was the American State Papers, which cost $235.50. “Letter
from the Clerk of the House of Representatives transmitting additional estimates of appro-
priations of the contingent expenses of the House of Representatives,” 33d Cong., 1st sess., n.d.,
Letters to the Clerk of the House of Representatives, RG 233, HR 33C-C1.2, NARA.
63. Congressional Globe (Aug. 21, 1850): 1661.
64. New York Herald, January 17, 1858.
65. Cost of Public Printing and Distribution of Public Documents, Senate Committee Re-
port 247, 40th Cong., 3d sess., serial 1362.
66. Ibid., 6.
67. Ibid.
68. In 1864, government printed 50,000 copies of the Army Register of Volunteers with-
out any gratis allocation. It was poorly executed and failed to sell. However, the Congressional
Directory cost less than sixteen cents a copy and large numbers were sold. A few senators and
representatives bought hundreds of copies for their own distribution. Cost of Public Printing
and Distribution of Public Documents, Senate Committee Report 247, 40th Cong., 3d sess., se-
rial 1362, pp. 12–13.
69. Congressional Globe ( Jan. 31, 1872): 723.
70. George Alfred Townsend, Washington, Outside and Inside (Hartford, Conn.: James
Betts and Co., 1873), 239
71. Ibid., 250 – 51.
72. Ibid., 239.
73. Ibid., 251.
74. Ibid., 240.
75. Congressional Globe ( July 13, 1870): 5528.
76. Ibid., 5528.
77. Ibid., 5624, 5645.
78. Townsend, Washington, Outside and Inside, 240 –41.
79. Ibid.
80. Thomas H. Benton to John Charles Frémont, March 20, 1843, in Expeditions of John
Charles Frémont, ed. Jackson and Spence, vol. 1, 164 –65.
81. Congressional Globe (May 24, 1866): 2804. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of
the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 70 vols. in 128 parts (Washington,
D.C., 1880–1901). Carter, “The U.S. and Documentary Historical Publication,” 16.

Chapter Three • The Bee in the Book

1. William Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men (New York, 1986), 178. This figure may be
less impressive if one takes into consideration the limited scope of federal government activ-
ity before the Civil War.
2. Catherine Coffin Phillips, Jessie Benton Frémont: A Woman Who Made History (San
Francisco, 1935), 69.
 320 Notes to Pages 107– 113

3. Charles Wilkes had his wife copy his narrative on the exploring expedition. One mem-
ber of the scientific corps of the expedition, Horatio Hale, left his manuscript with his mother,
novelist Sarah Josepha Hale, to proofread.
4. J. J. Abert to Frémont, April 26, 1843, The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont, ed. Don-
ald Jackson and Mary Lee Spence, vol. 1 (Urbana, Ill., 1973), 342.
5. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 10, ed. Ralph
H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 431; Bernard De Voto, The Year of
Decision: 1846 (Boston, 1942), 40.
6. Publication of Result of late Exploring Expedition of J. C. Frémont to California and
Oregon, Senate Committee Report 226, 30th Cong., 1st sess., serial 512, p. 3.
7. Letter of J. C. Frémont to National Intelligencer on his last Expedition across Rocky
Mountain, and Route for Railroad to Pacific, Senate Misc. Doc. 67, 33d Cong., 1st sess., serial
705.
8. Expeditions of Frémont, ed. Jackson and Spence, 270. Frémont’s biographer raises the
possibility that the bumblebee anecdote was a fabrication inspired by the bee motif in William
Cullen Bryant’s The Prairie (1834) and in Washington Irving’s Tour on the Prairies (1835).
Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire (New
York, 2002), 144 –45.
9. Notes of Military Reconnaissance from Fort Leavenworth in Missouri to Sand Diego, in
California, Exec. Doc. 41, 30th Cong., 1st sess., serial 517, p. 15.
10. Ibid., 419.
11. Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years’ View, or, A History of the Working of the Ameri-
can Government for Thirty Years, vol. 2 (New York, 1861), 579.
12. “Letter of the Clerk of the House of Representatives U.S. . . . relative to the distribu-
tion of Frémont’s Report,” House Doc. 118, 29th Cong., 1st sess., serial 483. “Resolution to in-
quire into causes of delay in delivery of Frémont’s Report, and the possibility that any officer
or person in employ of Senate has withheld or disposed of documents in manner contrary to
rules of Senate,” Senate Doc. 486, 29th Cong., 1st sess., serial 478.
13. Asbury Dickins to E. Weber and Co., Letters on Frémont’s Maps of California and Ore-
gon, September 25, 1848, RG 46, Office of the Secretary of the Senate, Transcribed Copies of
Outgoing Correspondence, 278, NARA. Also see Dickins to Weber, January 27, 1849, RG 46,
Office of the Secretary of the Senate, Transcribed Copies of Outgoing Correspondence, 307,
NARA.
14. Dickins to Alexander Dallas Bache, May 5, 1847, RG 46, Office of the Secretary of the
Senate, Transcribed Copies of Outgoing Correspondence, NARA.
15. Dickins to Boyd Hamilton, June 27, 1851; Dickins to Sherman and Smith, April 4, 1851,
RG 46, Office of the Secretary of the Senate, Transcribed Copies of Outgoing Correspondence,
NARA.
16. Quoted in Anita M. Hibler, “The Publication of the Wilkes Reports, 1842–1877”
(Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1989), 206.
17. William H. Dall, Spencer Fullerton Baird: A Biography (Philadelphia, 1915), 78.
18. Brief Account of the Discoveries and Results of the United States Exploring Expedition
(from the American Journal of Science and Arts, vol. 44) (New Haven: B. L. Hamlen, 1843), 1.
The findings of Napoleon’s expeditions to Egypt were published in twenty-three sumptuous
 Notes to Pages 113 – 117 321

and enormous volumes (measuring 107 cm. by 71 cm.), Commission des sciences et arts
d’Egypte, Description de l’Égypte, ou, Recueil de observations et des recherches qui ont été faites
en Égypte pendant l’éxpédeition de l’armée française, 23 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie impériale,
1809–28).
19. Brief Account of the Discoveries and Results of the United States Exploring Expedition, 4.
20. Publication of Result of late Exploring Expedition of J. C. Frémont to California and
Oregon, Senate Committee Report 226, 30th Cong., 1st sess., serial 512, p. 3.
21. On Causing to be Published additional Copies of Scientific Work of Exploring Expedi-
tion, Senate Doc. 405, 29th Cong., 1st sess., serial 477, pp. 10–11. By the resolution of February
20, 1845, a copy was awarded to each state; two each to France, Britain, and Russia; one apiece
to twenty-five other countries, one to each of the commanders of the three main vessels that
participated in the journey, one to the Naval Lyceum in Brooklyn, and two to the Library of
Congress.
22. North American Review 63 ( July 1846): 100 –101.
23. [Charles Davis], “The United States Exploring Expedition,” North American Review
61 (July 1845): 106–107. Southern Literary Messenger 11 (May 1845): 310.
24. Instructions of James K. Paulding, Secretary of the Navy to Charles Wilkes, quoted in
Daniel C. Haskell, The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842, and its Publications,
1844–1874 (New York, 1940), 34. For Gov. Isaac I. Stevens’s expedition from St. Paul to Puget
Sound, it was determined, “Each officer and scientific man of the expedition will keep a daily
journal, noting everything worthy of observation of a general character. These journals will
be deemed a part of the results of the expedition, will be turned over as a part of its archives,
and will be made use of in preparing the report. This is not intended to preclude copies being
taken and published by the writer, after the publication of the report and proceedings of the
expedition.” Reports of the Explorations and Surveys, to Ascertain the Most Practicable and
Economical Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, vol. 1 (Wash-
ington. D.C.: A.O.P. Nicholson, Printer, 1855), 4.
25. Report from the Library Committee on Exploring Expedition, Maps, Plates, Etc., House
Report 160, 28th Cong., 2d sess., serial 468, p. 6. William F. Party, Copyright Law and Practice
(Washington, D.C., 1994), 340.
26. The difference between this edition (published by Lea and Blanchard in 1845) and the
original one was the size and type of paper, the substitution of forty-seven woodcuts for steel
vignettes, and the exclusion of sixty-four plates. An English edition issued by Wittaker and
Co. omitted the entire appendix on Wilkes’s instructions to his officers, which had comprised
one-fifth of the text but was deemed tedious by the British publisher.
27. Charles Wilkes, Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes, ed. William James
Morgan et al. (Washington, D.C., 1978), 542.
28. Quoted in Hibler, “Publication of the Wilkes Reports,” 154– 56.
29. Augustus A. Gould, United States Exploring Expedition, vol. 12, Mollusca and Shells
(Philadelphia: C. Sherman, Printer, 1852).
30. Dirk J. Struik, Yankee Science in the Making (Boston, 1948), 293.
31. Of the appropriations already spent, the largest expenditure was for engraving natural
history plates ($41,189.13). Engraving charts and maps cost $24,810.85, engraving narratives
and other plates $16,808.71, and printing the text $20,633.27. During those years, James Dana
 322 Notes to Pages 117–125

received $16,200 for preparing four volumes for publication, Charles Pickering received
$9,654.41, Louis Agassiz $5,916.66 (2 vols.), and Asa Gray $5,400.00 (2 vols.). Report of the Li-
brary Committee on the Progress of the Publication of the Exploring Expedition, Senate Com-
mittee Report 391, 35th Cong., 2d sess., serial 994, pp. 1–2.
32. Congressional Globe (Mar. 3, 1859): 1616–18.
33. Congressional Globe (Feb. 26, 1853): 880.
34. U.S. Statutes at Large, vol. 12, p. 368. “Collections of Exploring Expedition Directed to
be Transferred to the Smithsonian Institution,” House Doc. 117, 35th Cong., 1st sess., serial 958.
35. Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876 (New York,
1987), 209.
36. Quoted in Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting,
1825–1875 (New York, 1980), 129.
37. Congressional Globe (Apr. 5, 1853): 312.
38. Ibid., 313.
39. Ibid., 313–14.
40. Ibid., 315.
41. John Russell Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations in Texas, New Mexico, Cal-
ifornia, Sonora, and Chihuahua, vol. 1 (1854; Chicago, 1965), 399.
42. National Intelligencer, April 26, 1854.
43. Washington Union, April 27, 1854, Mexican Boundary Commission, Scrapbook, mi-
crofilm ed., p. 277, Bartlett Papers, JCBL.
44. Washington Union [April 1854], Mexican Boundary Commission, Scrapbook, clipping
2, microfilm ed., p. 277, Bartlett Papers.
45. Major Emory to General Robert B. Campbell, April 24, 1854, reprinted in the Wash-
ington Union [April 1854], Mexican Boundary Commission, Scrapbook, microfilm ed., p. 279,
Bartlett Papers. The paper also published a letter from the Chief Clerk of the Interior De-
partment, George C. Whiting, reporting that Bartlett had admitted that Pratt’s illustrations
were at his possession and that he used them for his private publication (p. 290).
46. New York Quarterly Review ( July 1854): 3, Mexican Boundary Commission, Scrap-
book, microfilm ed., p. 319, Bartlett Papers.
47. New York Times, June 16, 1854.
48. Ibid.
49. Churchman, n.d., Mexican Boundary Commission, Scrapbook, microfilm ed., p. 334,
Bartlett Papers.
50. Republished in Providence Daily Journal, [ July? 14, 1858?], Scrapbook, microfilm ed.,
p. 312, Bartlett Papers. William H. Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary
Survey, 2 vols. in 3 (Washington, D.C.: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1857–1859). Congress decided to
print 10,000 copies of the first volume of Emory’s report, the narrative, and 3,000 of the botan-
ical and zoological volume.
51. Mexican Boundary Commission, Scrapbook, microfilm ed., clipping 1, reel 11, p. 352,
Bartlett Papers.
52. Ibid.
53. Robert V. Hine, Bartlett’s West: Drawing the Mexican Boundary (New Haven, 1968), 87.
54. Fred E. Cannon to Jacob Thompson, October 8, 1858, box 2, binder 1, Requests for
 Notes to Pages 126–130 323

copies of the Report and Maps Relating the Pacific Railroad Route, 1854– 61, Records of the
Office of Explorations and Surveys, Department of the Interior, RG 48, NARA.
55. William Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803–1863 (New Haven,
1959), 296.
56. Lt. John W. Gunnison, in charge of the middle route—38th and 39th parallel—and
other members of the expedition were killed by Utah Indians on October 26, 1853. George P.
Merrill, The First One Hundred Years of American Geology (New Haven, 1927), 315–16; Na-
tional Intelligencer, March 14, 1807.
57. Report of the Secretary of War on the Several Pacific Railroad Explorations, House
Doc. 129, 33d Cong., 1st sess., serial 737.
58. Explorations and Surveys for Pacific Railroad, vol. 11, Explorations, 1800–1857, Senate
Exec. Doc. 78, 33d Cong., 2d sess., serial 768; House Exec. Doc. 91, 33d Cong., 2d sess., serial
801.
59. Edgar Conkling to Jefferson Davis, August 9, 1855, Requests for copies of the Report
and Maps Relating to the Pacific Railroad Route, 1854–61, Records of the Office of Explorations
and Surveys, Department of the Interior, RG 48, Entry 724, NARA.
60. Levi Jones to Jefferson Davis, August 7, 1855, Records of the Office of Explorations and
Surveys.
61. Dr. Christian Raub to the Secretary of War, November 6, 1858, binder 1, box 2; August
Harvey to Jefferson Davis, December 22, 1856, binder 2, box 2; Richard Rigely to Floyd,
Nicholsville, KY, January 25, 1858 and another letter in February 26, 1858; Henry B. Dawson,
December 31, White Plains, NY, 1857; Gibson to Floyd, May 27, 1858, binder 2, box 2, Records
of the Office of Explorations and Surveys.
62. David Wyrick to Abbot, July 21, 1858; Wyrick to [Acting] Secretary Drinkard, July 29,
1858; Drinkard to Wyrick, July 27, 1858. In a later request for documents, Wyrik wrote “I sup-
pose there hardly another to be found who takes more pride in collecting and Reading Gov-
ernmental Reports than I do—as well as preserving of them.” Wyrik to Humphreys, January
9, 1859, binder 1, box 2, Records of the Office of Explorations and Surveys.
63. John H. Carpenter to the War Department, May 17, 1857, binder 1, box 2, Records of
the Office of Explorations and Surveys.
64. Gibson to Floyd, May 27, 1858, binder 1, box 2, Records of the Office of Explorations
and Surveys.
65. E. Franseen to Jefferson Davis, November 4, 1856, binder 2, box 2, Records of the Office
of Explorations and Surveys.
66. J. J. Ames, October 7, 1857, binder 2, box 2, Records of the Office of Explorations and
Surveys.
67. Samuel B. Cowdney, November 29, 1859, binder 2, box 2; Breven, n.d., binder 2, box 1,
Records of the Office of Explorations and Surveys.
68. George M. Fowle to Floyd, January 12, 1858, binder 2, box 2, Records of the Office of
Explorations and Surveys.
69. Thomas H. Howell to Floyd, January 20, 1858, binder 2, box 2, Records of the Office
of Explorations and Surveys.
70. W. J. Merton [and ?] April 27, 1858; David White to Floyd, June 25, 1857, binder 2, box
2, Records of the Office of Explorations and Surveys.
 324 Notes to Pages 131 –138

71. W. B. Maclay to Floyd, [March?] 25, 1858; Asa Gray to Lieut. Abbot, August 15, 1857;
Spencer Baird to Humphreys, Jan 30, 1858, binder 2, box 2, Records of the Office of Explo-
rations and Surveys.
72. William J. Loomis to the War Department, July 8, 1858, binder 2, box 2, Records of
the Office of Explorations and Surveys.
73. John Fitch to Floyd, November 14, 1857, binder 2, box 2, Records of the Office of Ex-
plorations and Surveys.
74. J. W. to Floyd, Philadelphia, March 19, 1858, binder 2, box 2, Records of the Office of
Explorations and Surveys.
75. Fred E. Cannon to Jacob Thompson, Geneva, N.Y., October 8, 1858, binder 1, box 2,
Records of the Office of Explorations and Surveys.
76. John McKiernan to the Secretary of War, February 3, 1859, binder 1, box 2, Records of
the Office of Explorations and Surveys.
77. Capt. W. C. Palmer to Humphreys, March 12, 1856, binder 1, box 2, Records of the
Office of Explorations and Surveys.
78. A. Marschalk to [U.S. Representative] Jacob Thompson, Belton, Texas, November 20,
1858, binder 1, box 2, Records of the Office of Explorations and Surveys.
79. Alexander S. Taylor to Secretary Floyd, March 31, 1858, binder 1, box 2, Records of the
Office of Explorations and Surveys.
80. The Polytechnic College of the State of Pennsylvania, September 30, 1858, binder 1,
box 2, Records of the Office of Explorations and Surveys.
81. H. W. Wood to Secretary Floyd, April 27, 1858, binder 1, box 2, Records of the Office
of Explorations and Surveys.
82. Stein to Floyd, February 24, 1858, binder 1, box 2, Records of the Office of Explorations
and Surveys.
83. J. N. Hurd to the Secretary of War, September 23, 1858, binder 2, box 2, Records of the
Office of Explorations and Surveys.
84. Augustus Addison Gould to Senator Benjamin Tappan, December 17, 1843, quoted in
Haskell, U.S. Exploring Expedition, 74. In order to guarantee early publicity, Gould suggested
issuing before full publication of the report “short Latin characters” of the new species and
their names in one of the scientific journals or in a government pamphlet. He consequently
published short notices in the Proceedings of the Boston Society for Natural History.
85. The British government published sporadically geological surveys on the British Isles.
See, e.g., Sir Henry de la Beche, Report on the Geology of Cornwall, Devon, and West Somer-
set (London: HMSO, 1839). It included 624 pages, many woodcuts, and twelve plates. Also see
Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and of the Museum of Economic Geology,
2 vols. (London: HMSO, 1846).
86. George Alfred Townsend, Washington, Outside and Inside (Hartford, Conn.: James
Betts and Co., 1873), 240–41.

p a r t i i • The Culture of the Social Fact

1. Appendix to First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines);

Reports and Evidence of Subcommissioners, Part 2, HC 1842 (382) 17, p. 63.
 Notes to Pages 139–147 325

Chapter Four • Scenes of Commission

1. Herman Finer, Theory and Practice of Modern Government, rev. ed. (New York, 1950),
47.
2. W. Cory, A Guide to Modern English History, vol. 2 (London, 1882), 366.
3. Quarterly Review 50 ( Jan. 1834): 348 fn.
4. Also alluded to are the Poor Law Commission for England and Wales (1832– 34) and
two investigations that had meager effects on policy making, the Poor Law for Ireland Com-
mission (1833 –36) and the Rural Constabulary Force Commission (1836 – 39). Other investi-
gations include the Handloom Weaver Commission (1837– 41), Health of Town Commission
(1843–48), Framework Knitters Commission (1844– 45), and Bleaching Works Commission
(1854 –55).
5. Since the monarch did not enjoy the judicial prerogative to interrogate witnesses, it is
hardly plausible that the crown could delegate such authority to a commission. Hugh M. Clokie
and Joseph F. Robinson, Royal Commissions of Inquiry: The Significance of Investigations in
British Politics (Stanford, 1937), 85 – 87. Only in 1921, with the Tribunals of Inquiry (Evi-
dence) Act, were royal commissions given compulsory privileges.
6. Daily Telegraph, February 15, 1865, item 116, Sir Edwin Chadwick Papers, UCL.
7. The Poor Law Commission had eight commissioners and twenty-four subcommission-
ers. The Factory Commission had fifteen full commissioners but still adopted the office/field
division. The Employment of Children Commission (Mines) was led by four commissioners
who supervised twenty subcommissioners.
8. [Letter to the Times in 1831] in William John Fitzpatrick, The Life, Times, and Corre-
spondence of Dr. Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin (Boston, 1862), 319.
9. Appendix to First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines),
Part 2, p. h12.
10. Irish Poor Law Commission, The Miseries and Misfortunes of Ireland and the Irish
People from the Evidence Taken by the Commissioners for Inquiring into the Condition of the
Poorer Classes in Ireland (London: John Reynolds, 1836), 8–11.
11. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Methods of Social Study (London, 1932), 90.
12. G. Calvert Holland, “The Mortality, Sufferings and Diseases of Grinders,” Part 1 (Lon-
don: John Ollivier, 1841), 7.
13. First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines), HC 1842
(380) 15, p. 266. For the remark on Welsh stature, see p. 250.
14. Kirkman Finlay, “Letter to the Right Hon. Lord Ashley on the Cotton Factory System
and the Ten Hour’s Bill” (Glasgow: John Smith & Son. Printer, 1833), 9.
15. Peter Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England (1833; New York, 1972), 72.
16. “Letters from the Home Office to the Handloom Weavers Commission,” HO 74/1, ff.
148–49, 155– 58, 165 –66, PRO. Also see, J. M. Collinge, ed. Office Holders in Modern Britain,
vol. 9, Officials of Royal Commissions of Inquiry 1815–1870 (London, 1984), 25–26.
17. Appendix to First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines),
Part 2, p. H1.
18. Factory commissioner Rickards’s expenses in Manchester (£86.14.0) included renting
and fitting an office (carpentry); painting (for writing on the office door); bell-hanger’s fees;
 326 Notes to Pages 147–154

an oak table, candlesticks, fenders and fire irons, library table and other office furniture (chairs,
carpets); coal, mounting a map of Lancashire; seal-engraver’s fees, printer for circulars; “di-
aries” for mill owners; advertisement in Bolton, Manchester, Stockport, and Preston; and
postage. George Rickards to the Treasury, May 22, 1834, T/3736, PRO.
19. “Final Account,” March 18, 1837, T 1/4100, PRO. The Poor Law for England and Wales
Commission cost only £6,565.17.2; the Factory Commission, £4,919.17.2; the Municipal Cor-
porations in England and Wales Commission, £24,700. These were not the most expensive in-
vestigations. The Commission of Arbitration for Inquiring into Claims of Compensation for
the Abolition of Slavery cost £140,722.12.11. Return on Commissions of Inquiry, HC 1842 (449)
26, p. 373. The Mine Commission cost £8,214.2.4. Return on Commissions, HC 1846 (187) 25,
p. 318.
20. Irish Poor Law Commission, Miseries and Misfortunes of Ireland, 8.
21. Factory Commission Report (1), 76. Chadwick to Lord John Russell, July 2, 1866 [copy],
item 1733, Chadwick Papers.
22. Factory Commission Report (1), 78.
23. Ibid., 77. John Cowell to the Central Board of the Factory Commission, May 3, 6, 9,
1833 [copies], item 41, Chadwick Papers.
24. First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines), 267.
25. Appendix to First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines);
Reports and Evidence of Subcommissioners, Part I, HC 1842 (381) 16, p. 758 fn. For the min-
ers’ gathering at Bransley, see p. 262.
26. First Report from the Select Committee on Bleaching and Dyeing Works HC 1857 (151
Sess. 2) 11, p. 242.
27. Report on the Poor Laws in Scotland, ii.
28. Chadwick to Home Secretary Lord John Russell, August 1836 [copy], item 1733, Chad-
wick Papers. Also, see Irish Poor Law Commission, Miseries and Misfortunes of Ireland, 8.
29. Constabulary Commission Files, item 14, Chadwick Papers. See also “Practices of Ha-
bitual Depredators; as Disclosed in a London Prison,” Report from the Constabulary Force
Commission, HC 1839 (169) 19, pp. 205–15.
30. Irish Poor Law Commission, Miseries and Misfortunes of Ireland, 6.
31. Frank Prochaska, Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy (New Haven,
1995), 80– 81, 88. Gaskell, Manufacturing Population of England, 161– 63.
32. Report from the Select Committee on the Bill to Regulate the Labour of Children, HC
1831–2 (706) 15, pp. 150, 152– 53, 172, 183, 204, 287, 381, 420, 494– 95.
33. Diana Davids Olien, Morpeth: A Victorian Public Career (Washington, D.C., 1983), 91;
Report from the Select Committee on the Bill to Regulate the Labour of Children, HC 1831–32
(706) 15, pp. 150, 172, 420.
34. First Report from the Select Committee on the Operation of the Factory Act, HC 1840
(203) 10, pp. 63, 905 – 912.
35. Ibid. Frederic Hill to Home Secretary Sir James Graham, July 30, 1845; Hill to Un-
der-Secretary H. Manners Sutton, October 28, 1845; Hill to [Under-Secretary Manners Sut-
ton?], March 12, 1846, HO 1845/46, PRO.
36. Irish Poor Law Commission, Miseries and Misfortunes of Ireland, 12.
37. Under-Secretary Fox Maule to Webster, April 24, 1837; Maule to George Howell, May
 Notes to Pages 154– 160 327

18, 1837; Maule to Howell, June 3, 1837; Maule to Webster, July 9, 1839, Letters from the Home
Office to Inspectors of Factories, Mines, and Colliers, HO 87/1, PRO.
38. Factory Commission Report (1), 749.
39. John Cowell to the Central Board of the Factory Commission, May 21, 1833 and July
24, 1833 [copies], item 41, Chadwick Papers. Also, see “Correspondence and Accounts of the
Factory Commission,” September 10, 1833, T 1/3736, PRO. On Samuel Swain Scriven’s meth-
ods, see Appendix to First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines),
Part 2, p. 65. On Alfred Power’s decision, see Factory Commission Report (1), 531.
40. Stuart to Wilson, August 32, 1833, in Evils of the Factory System Demonstrated by Par-
liamentary Evidence, ed. Charles Wing (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 492.
41. John Cowell to the Central Board of the Factory Commission, June 24, 29, July 1, 3, 10,
1833 [copies], item 41, Chadwick Papers.
42. Tremenheere to the Home Office, February 3, 1845, HO 45/952, PRO.
43. On the Heathcote affair, see the correspondence between Heathcote, Horner, and the
Home Office (Mar.–May 1843) in HO 45/423, PRO.
44. First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines), 2.
45. Factory Commission Report (1), 10
46. Chadwick to Major George Graham [copy book], December 7, 1843, item 2818/1,
Chadwick Papers.
47. First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines), 95.
48. Appendix to First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines),
Part 2, 58.
49. Ibid., Part 1, 519.
50. Irish Poor Law Commission, Miseries and Misfortunes of Ireland, 9.
51. See petition from the Irish assistant commissioners, May 4, 1836, T 1/4100, PRO. Also,
assistant commissioner Thomas Nuget Vaughan’s correspondence with the Treasury, June 6,
16, 1836, T 1/4100, PRO.
52. Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of
Great Britain, ed. M. W. Flinn (1842; Edinburgh, 1965), 397.
53. First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines), 268.
54. Mrs. Charles L. Lewes, Dr. Southwood Smith: A Retrospect by His Granddaughter (Ed-
inburgh, 1898), 88.
55. Hector Gavin to Chadwick, December 21, 1853, item 797, Chadwick Papers.
56. For attempts to protect witnesses, see, e.g., First Report from the Select Committee on
the Operation of the Factory Act, HC 1840 (203) 10, pp. 21–22, 141; Second Report from the Se-
lect Committee on the Operation of the Factory Act, HC 1840 (227) 10, p. 16.
57. First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines), 3. Also see
request from the Home Office to the Treasury to remunerate superintendent Charles Brown
for journeys to Holywell, where his presence was needed due to his knowledge of the Welsh
language, April 3, 1838, T 1/3736, PRO.
58. First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines), 9.
59. Quarterly Review 64 ( June 1839): 92.
60. Report on the State of Education in Wales, HC 1847 (870) 27, Part 1, 2.
61. Leonard Horner, Employment of Children, in Factories and Other Works in the United
 328 Notes to Pages 160– 168

Kingdom and in Some Foreign Countries (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Long-
mans, 1840), 2.
62. “Memoranda of Instructions for Ascertaining the Causes of Pauperism,” n.d., item 22,
Chadwick Papers.
63. Appendix to First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines),
Part 1, 539.
64. Ibid., 514.
65. Ibid., 515.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., 520.
68. G. R. Porter to the Privy Council on Trade, August 14, 1832, reprinted in First Report
of the Select Committee on Public Documents, HC 1833 (44) 12, pp. 15, 28.
69. First Report from the Select Committee on the Operation of the Factory Act, 5.
70. Report of the Commissioners on Handloom Weavers: Assistant Commissioners’ Reports,
HC 1839 (159) 42, p. 1.
71. Report of the Royal Commission on Handloom Weavers, HC 1840 (43-I) 23, p. 407.
72. First Report from the Select Committee on Bleaching and Dyeing Works, HC 1857 (151
Sess. 2) 11, p. 2.
73. Ibid., 3.
74. Ibid.
75. The demand for daily accounts came from Secretary Lord Russell, October 8, 1836, HO
87/1, PRO. Inspectors were to report to the Home Secretary quarterly. Superintendents were
to give a detailed account of each day of employment to the inspectors.
76. Dickinson to Home Secretary Sir George Grey, June 8, 1863, HO 45/7006, PRO.
77. [A Lancashire Cotton Spinner], “Letter to the Right Hon. Lord Ashley on the Cotton Fac-
tory Question, and the Ten Hours’ Factory Bill” (Manchester: Henry Smith, Printer, 1833), 7.
78. [ James Leach], Stubborn Facts from the Factories by A Manchester Operative (London:
John Ollivier, 1844), 17–18.
79. A. E. Musson, The Congress of 1868: The Origins and Establishment of the Trades
Union Congress (1955; London, 1968); Simon Cordery, British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914
(Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2003), 95.
80. T. W. Jobling to Secretary Grey, February 1, 1851, HO 45/3491, PRO.
81. “The Ten Hours’ Factory Question: A Report Addressed to the Short Time Commit-
tees of the West Riding of Yorkshire” (London: John Ollivier, 1842), 32.
82. “Memorial from the Framework Knitters of Leicester to Home Secretary Lord John
Russell,” May 23, 1838, ff. 355 –56, ff. 417–20, HO 44/31 PRO. Also see “Memorial from the
Leigh Silk Weavers Committee to the Home Secretary,” January 29, 1844, HO 45/657; “Peti-
tion from the inhabitants of Rhos Parish of Ruabon County of Denbigh in North Wales,” De-
cember 16, 1850, enclosed in Richard Cobden to Secretary Grey, July 7, 1851, HO 45/3868,
PRO. Report of the Commissioner Appointed to Inquire into the Condition of the Framework
Knitters, HC 1845 (609) 15, p. 2.
83. Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument of Em-
pire (Cardiff, Wales, 1998), 103.
84. T. J. Ward, The Factory Movement, 1830 –1855 (London, 1962), 92.
 Notes to Pages 168 –179 329

85. John Cowell to the Central Board of the Factory Commission, May 3, 6, 9, 1833
[copies], item 41, Chadwick Papers.
86. Michael Thomas Sadler, “Protest Against the Secret Proceedings of the Factory Com-
mission in Leeds” (Leeds: F. E. Bingley and Co., 1833), 7.
87. Sadler, “Protest Against the Secret Proceedings,” 12.
88. John Elliot Drinkwater, “Letter to Michael Thos. Sadler” (Leeds: Printed for Baines
and Newsome, 1833), 9.
89. John Elliot Drinkwater and Alfred Power, “Replies to Mr. M. T. Sadler’s Protest against
the Factory Commission” (Leeds, Printed for Baines and Newsome, 1833), 9, 11–12.
90. [William Cobbett’s] The Poor Man’s Guardian: A Weekly Paper for the People (June
29, 1833): 208 –10.
91. Brooklyn Eagle, May 8, 1843, clipping, item 116, Chadwick Papers.
92. Fifth Report from the Select Committee on the Operation of the Factory Act, HC 1840
(227) 10, pp. 125–28. In 1838, Chadwick (then the secretary of the Poor Law inspectorate and
a royal commissioner on rural police force) provided the Home Office with a confidential state-
ment on trade union activities. See January 29, 1838, ff. 82– 85, HO 44/31, PRO.

Chapter Five • Facts Speak for Themselves

1. “Factory Inspectors Half Yearly Meetings,” January 16 –18, 1836, ff. 48 –50; January 18,
1836, f. 49, LAB 15/1, PRO. Also see July 6, 1838, f. 109.
2. “Expenses of the Poor Law Commission since September 4, 1835, Completed in May
26, 1835,” T1/4100 –102, PRO.
3. Flood to [Assistant Secretary of the Commission Hamilton Dowdall?], July 1836 [copy],
enclosed in Dowdall to the Treasury, July 29, 1836, T 1/4100, PRO.
4. Second Report from the Select Committee on the Operation of the Factory Act, HC 1840
(227) 10, pp. 107– 9.
5. Ibid., 15, 58, 76– 80, 175.
6. Ibid., 92.
7. Hugh Seymour Tremenheere to G. Cornewall Lewis, October 23, 1848; Tremenheere
to Lewis, July 5, 1850, HO 45/2366, PRO.
8. Chadwick to Lord Russell, July 2, 1866 [copy], item 1733, Sir Edwin Chadwick Papers,
UCL.
9. Herbert Mackworth to Secretary Lord Palmerston, August 23, 1854, HO 45/5374, PRO.
10. Saunders to Under-Secretary Manners Sutton, September 3, 1844, HO 45/657(/8),
PRO. Also see John James to R. Baker, August 21, 1844; Baker to Saunders, August 31, 1844;
Home Office to Saunders, September 5, 1844, HO 87/1, PRO.
11. Under-Secretary H. Waddington to Horner, June 11, 1855, HO 87/3, PRO.
12. Horner to Waddington, June 13, 1855, HO 45/6249, PRO.
13. Under-Secretary Manners Sutton to Stuart, November 25, 1844, HO 45/1417, PRO.
14. Under-Secretary Maule to John Beal, July 18, 27, 30, October 13, 17, 31, 1840; Home
Office to Horner, June 15, 1841, HO 45/1417, PRO,
15. First Report from the Select Committee on Bleaching and Dyeing Works, HC 1857 (151
Sess. 2) 11, p. 240.
 330 Notes to Pages 179– 190

16. Report on the Poor Laws in Scotland, ii.

17. Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary
Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 69.
18. Thomas Erskine May, The Constitutional History of England since the Accession of
George III, 1760–1860, vol. 1 (New York, 1895), 409.
19. Reports of royal commissioners were officially delivered to the Home Office in man-
uscript form with the signatures and seals of the commissioners.
20. Quarterly Review 50 ( Jan. 1834): 349.
21. Nassau Senior to Lord Brougham, January 4, 1833, 44, 437, Lord Brougham Papers,
UCL.
22. Irish Poor Law Commission, Miseries and Misfortunes of Ireland, 11.
23. Parish of Carrick in County Tipperary, ibid., 265. For an analysis of the different lin-
guistic choices of the three commissioners in the 1847 Education in Wales investigation, see
Roberts, The Language of Blue Books, chap. 5.
24. Item 42, Chadwick Papers.
25. Second Report from the Select Committee on the Operation of the Factory Act, Appen-
dix, 115.
26. Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in The New His-
toricism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York, 1989), 61.
27. Joseph W. Childers, “Observation and Representation: Mr. Chadwick Writes the Poor,”
Victorian Studies 38 (Spring 1994): 411.
28. On the Spectator’s remarks in the context of the 1840s language of discovery, see
Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York,
1983), 356 –57.
29. Appendix to First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines):
Reports and Evidence of Subcommissioners, Part 2, HC 1842 (382) 17, p. H30.
30. First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines), HC 1842
(380) 15, p. 161.
31. Ibid., 80.
32. Ibid., 24.
33. Lewes, Southwood Smith, 74.
34. Appendix to First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines),
Part 2, 156 –57.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 161.
37. Appendix to First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines),
Part 1, 182 (381) 16, p. 96.
38. Appendix to First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines),
Part 2, H12.
39. Ibid., 721.
40. First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines), 137.
41. Appendix to First Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines),
Part 2, p. c38.
 Notes to Pages 190 –199 331

42. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New
York, 1984), 112.
43. “Distribution List of the Irish Poor Law Report,” March 15, 1836, Treasury/Irish Poor
Law Correspondence 1833 –1839, T 1/4100, PRO. These figures, however, do not include the
distributions of reports in Ireland.
44. “Distribution List of the Rural Constabulary Commission Report,” item 7, doc. 6,
Chadwick Papers. Five thousand copies of this particular report were sold.
45. Report from the Select Committee on Printing, HC 1854 – 55 (447) 11, pp. 4– 5.
46. Ibid., 33.
47. Ibid., 34. The cost of 10,000 copies for 1851– 52 (1,397 pages) was £1,211.10.11.
48. Report from the Select Committee on Parliamentary Papers, HC 1852– 53 (720) 34,
p. 173.
49. Chadwick to McCulloch, February 24, 1852 [copy], item 1296, Chadwick Papers.
50. C. Macaulay to Sir C. E. Trevelyan, December 11, 1852; Treasury Minute, December
14, 1852; Macaulay to Trevelyan, December 24, 1852; Treasury Minute, January 7, 1852, in Re-
port from the Select Committee on Printing, HC 1854 – 55 (447) 11, p. 145.
51. Quarterly Review 57 (Dec. 1836): 396– 443.
52. “Legion,” A letter from Legion to . . . the Duke of Richmond . . . on the Slavery Commit-
tee of the House of Lords: Containing an exposure of the character of the evidence on the colo-
nial side produced before the Committee (London: S. Bagster Printer [1833]), 13.
53. For an example of “interception” by pro-employer advocates, see William Rathbone
Greg and Samuel Greg, “Analysis of the Evidence Taken Before the Factory Commissioners
as Far as It Relates to the Population of Manchester and the Vicinity Engaged in the Cotton
Trade” (Manchester, 1834).
54. Quoted in Roberts, The Language of Blue Books, 212.
55. Morning Chronicle, January 27, 1844.
56. Quarterly Review 57 (Dec. 1836): 413.
57. Tremenheere to Lewis, July 5, 1850, HO 45/2366, PRO.
58. Joseph Bell to Lord Walpole, November 23, 1852, HO 45/4206, PRO.
59. “Memorial from the Miners of Pontefract Lane Colliery in Leeds,” September 27,
1859, HO 45/6782, PRO.
60. Tremenheere to Waddington, September 28, 1859, HO 45/6782, PRO. See also Sec-
retary Lewis to the Pontefract Lane Colliery Miners, October 17, 1859, HO 6782, PRO.
61. John Holmes and the Delegates of the Miners of the Leeds and Wakefield Districts,
“A Memorial to Secretary Lewis,” September 14, 1859, HO 6782, PRO. Also see “Letter from
a Meeting Held in Lofthouse Gate Near Wakefield at the Star Inn to Secretary Lewis,” Octo-
ber 4, 1859; Henry Shaw, Elijah Stocks and the Delegates of the western portion of the Leeds
Branch of the Coal Miners Association to Secretary Lewis, September 13, 1859, HO 6782, PRO.
62. Tremenheere to Secretary Grey, December 31, 1846, HO 45/1490, PRO.
63. Ibid.
64. See, e.g., Chadwick to James Simpson, December 25, 1843, January 4, 1844, April 25,
1844; Chadwick to Dr. Holland, January 6, 1844; Chadwick to Dr. Laycock, January 11, 1844
[copybook], item 2181/1, Chadwick Papers.
 332 Notes to Pages 199 –210

65. B. F. Hawkins, “Intemperance and Vice, the effects of long hours and a bad system
from the report of Dr. Bissett Hawkins, one of the medical officers of the Factory Commis-
sion, 1833” (Bradford, 1835), Richard Oastler’s Collection: Short Times Tracts, Goldsmith’s Li-
brary of Economic Literature, University of London.
66. Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, Fourth Annual Report (London, 1822), 22.
67. Richard Oastler to Secretary Lord Russell, August 29 and September 14, 1839, and n.d.,
ff. 181–203, HO 44/33, PRO.
68. Ibid., f. 194.
69. Ibid., f. 181.
70. Ibid., f. 187.
71. Ibid., f. 185.
72. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and
Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, Ill., 1988), 12.

Chapter Six • Can Freedmen Be Citizens?

1. “Memorial of the Emancipation League (Boston, Mass.) praying for an immediate es-
tablishment of a Bureau of Emancipation,” Senate Misc. Document 10, 37th Cong., 3d sess.,
serial 1150, p. 1. The notion of a nation born in a day was probably taken from Isaiah 66:8.
2. United States War Dept., The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records
of the Union and Confederate Armies, ser. 3, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C., 1899–1900), 73–74.
3. John G. Sproat, “Blue Print for Radical Reconstruction,” Journal of Southern History
23 (February 1957): 25 – 44.
4. Samuel Gridley Howe, The Refugees From Slavery in Canada West: Report to the Freed-
men’s Inquiry Commission (Boston, 1864), 104.
5. Edward L. Pierce, “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” Atlantic Monthly 13 (Sept. 1863): 301.
6. Charles Sumner to Francis Lieber, Washington, January 31, 1864, in The Papers of
Charles Sumner: Microfilm edition, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer, reel 64/294. Also, see Lieber
to Sumner, New York, January 31, 1864, ibid., reel 77/642.
7. Howe to Francis W. Bird, Washington D.C., September 17, 1862, Samuel Gridley Howe
Papers, HoL.
8. Anti-Slavery Standard, March 18, 1863, 2.
9. The commission was denied the absolute power to call for any official document they
wished to examine for fear of interfering with “official business.” Sumner to Howe, Wash-
ington, April 9, 1863, The Papers of Charles Sumner, reel 64/244. For the slave-owner testi-
mony, see “Testimony of Mrs. DeMoville from Nashville Tennessee,” November 23, 1863,
quoted in Ira Berlin et al., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser.
1, vol. 1, The Destruction of Slavery (Cambridge, 1985), 312.
10. The commission’s forty-eight black interviewees were unrepresentative of the black
population. Most of the witnesses came from the upper regions of the South, about half were
runaways, and many others had been manumitted or had purchased their freedom. Only
twelve women were included, although their testimony figured prominently in the com-
mission’s reports. For interview with Solomon Bradley, see Records of the American Freed-
men’s Inquiry Commission, testimony, file 3, in Letters Received by the Office of the Adju-
 Notes to Pages 210–217 333

tant General, Main Series, 1861–1870, File 328-o 1863, microfilm M 619, reel 200, pp. 274 –
77, NARA.
11. Ibid., 278– 91.
12. Robert Dale Owen, The Wrong of Slavery: The Right of Emancipation (Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1864), 121.
13. Howe, Refugees from Slavery, 63. Howe visited St. Catherine’s, Hamilton, London,
Toronto, Chatham, Buxton, Windsor, Malden, and Colchester. American Freedmen’s Inquiry
Commission, Preliminary Report, Senate Exec. Doc. 53, 38th Cong., 1st sess., serial 1176, p. 86.
14. These two questionnaires indicate that during the summer of 1863, Howe decided to
focus his inquiry on the supposed physical differences between blacks and mulattos and was
interested in particular in fertility, demography, and diseases. The questionnaires are in the
American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission Papers, HoL. Benjamin Hunt to the AFIC, Phila-
delphia, May 27, 1863, James McKaye Papers, LC. Owen, Wrong of Slavery, 214.
15. Howe to Sumner, Norfolk, Va., June 11, 1863, The Papers of Charles Sumner, reel 77/133.
16. Atlantic Monthly 70 (Aug. 1863): 260 – 63.
17. The Philadelphia Dial, quoted in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 18, 1863, in
a report on the address in Philadelphia of a former southern female slave Oneda E. Dubois.
18. New York Times, June 13, 1863. The Times reporter H. J. Winser served as a clerk to
McKaye during the visit.
19. American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, Preliminary Report, 16. Also, see Howe to
Sumner, Norfolk, Va., June 11, 1863, The Papers of Charles Sumner, reel 77/133.
20. J. Lang, “Results of the Serf Emancipation in Russia” (New York: Loyal Publication
Society, No. 47, 1864). Liberator, June 17, 1864; National Anti-Slavery Standard, August 19,
1863.
21. William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Eugene H. Berwanger (1863;
Philadelphia, 1988), 37.
22. On the caste system, see Charles Sumner, “The Question of Caste: Lecture Delivered
in the Music Hall Boston, October 21, 1869,” in The Works of Charles Sumner, vol. 13 (Boston,
1870–83), 131– 83. [Mary Putnam], Record of an Obscure Man (Boston: Ticknor and Fields,
1861), 171– 91.
23. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854; New York, 1980), 16.
24. Carlo Ginzburg, “Making Things Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device,” Rep-
resentations 56 (Fall 1996): 17–19.
25. “Queries and answers respecting the colored convicts in the Sing-Sing state prison,”
August 19, 1833, Francis Lieber Papers, HL. For anti-emancipation propaganda, see, e.g., “Free
Negroism; or, Results of Emancipation in the North, and the West Indies,” Anti-Abolition
Tracts—no. 2 (New York: Van Evrie, Horton and Company), reprinted in Anti-Abolition Tracts
and Anti-Black Stereotypes: General Statements of the “Negro Problem,” ed. John David Smith,
Part 1 (New York, 1993), 37. The general’s remark was quoted in the New York Herald, Au-
gust 15, 1863.
26. Thomas W. Higginson, “Leaves from an Officer’s Journal [part I],” Atlantic Monthly
14 (Nov. 1864): 527
27. Thomas W. Higginson, “Leaves from an Officer’s Journal [part II],” Atlantic Monthly
15 ( Jan. 1865): 65.
 334 Notes to Pages 217 –255

28. Thomas W. Higginson, “Leaves from an Officer’s Journal [part I],” Atlantic Monthly
14 (Nov. 1864): 528.
29. Ibid., 70.
30. Ibid.
31. Edward Pierce, “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” Atlantic Monthly 12 (Sept. 1863): 309–11.
32. McKaye to Sumner, New York, January 20, 1864, The Papers of Charles Sumner, reel
30/244.
33. Owen, Wrong of Slavery, 198. James McKaye, “The Mastership and its Fruits: The
Emancipated Slave Face to Face with his Old Master: A Supplemental Report” (New York:
Loyal Publication Society, no. 58, 1864), 8. Free blacks in Louisiana had an average of $525
worth of property (by another account close to $700). The average property in the loyal states
was only $484. These assessments refer to the 1860 census. American Freedmen’s Inquiry Com-
mission, Final Report, Senate Exec. Doc. 53, 38th Cong., 1st sess., serial 1176, p. 101.
34. Quoted in E. P. Whipple, “Reconstruction and Negro Suffrage,” Atlantic Monthly 16
(Aug. 1865): 245.
35. Howe, Refugees from Slavery, 56, 63– 64.
36. McKaye, “The Mastership and Its Fruits,” 1.
37. Preliminary Report, 3. New York Herald, August 15, 1863. Final Report, 98 – 99.
38. Howe, Refugees from Slavery, 40.
39. Ibid., 18–20.
40. The slaves were also favorably contrasted to American Indians in their attitudes to-
ward women. Evidence included the 1847 Constitution of Liberia, which featured provisions
for women’s property rights. Howe, Refugees from Slavery, 96. Final Report, 105.
41. George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-Amer-
ican Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York, 1971), 101–2, 124, 160– 64.
42. Final Report, 103. Howe, Refugees from Slavery, 103. Letters and Journals of Samuel
Gridley Howe: The Servant of Humanity, ed. Laura E. Richards, vol. 2 (Boston, 1909), 512.
43. Howe, Refugees from Slavery, 56, 99 –100.
44. The Knickerbocker insured mostly “house slaves,” mechanics, and steamboat sailors
or operators. The company took detailed descriptions of the slaves’ racial features, but its pres-
ident could not discern any variance in death risks dependent on racial mixture. Frederick
Law Olmsted to Howe, New York, August 13, 1863, American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commis-
sion Papers.
45. Howe to Agassiz, August 18, 1863, in Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence, ed.
Elisabeth C. Agassiz, vol. 2 (Boston, 1886), 613 –14.
46. Howe to Mary Peabody Mann, Toronto, September 6, 1863, Horace Mann Papers,
MHS.
47. Owen, Wrong of Slavery, 201; Final Report, 99; Whipple, “Reconstruction and Negro
Suffrage,” 246.
48. McKaye, “The Mastership and Its Fruits,” 35; Final Report, 25.
49. Pierce, “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” 291.
50. Ibid., 311.
51. Preliminary Report, 22–23.
52. Ibid., 7, 10.
 Notes to Pages 226– 244 335

53. Owen, Wrong of Slavery, 201.

54. “Testimony taken by the Commission, Department of the South,” Records of the Amer-
ican Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, Microfilm M 619, reel 200, p. 287, NARA.
55. Whipple, “Reconstruction and Negro Suffrage,” 242– 44.
56. Owen to Sumner, New York, June 29, 1863, The Papers of Charles Sumner, ed. Palmer,
reel 28/647. Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from
Codex to Computer (Philadelphia, 1995), 33.
57. Bird to Sumner, Boston, July 2, 1863, The Papers of Charles Sumner, reel 28/670.
58. Congressional Globe ( June 27, 1864): 3285.
59. Ibid., 3286.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Owen, Wrong of Slavery, 62.
64. Ibid., 83.
65. For the abolitionist reaction, see Richard W. Leopold, Robert Dale Owen: A Biography
(Cambridge, Mass., 1940), 364. J. M. Ludlow, “American Slavery: As It Now Stands Revealed
to the World,” Good Words (1863), 827.
66. New York Herald, August 8, 186[4?].
67. Robert Dale Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott and Co., 1860), 5.
68. Howe, Refugees from Slavery, 38.
69. Quoted in Roberta Sue Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen: Relations Dur-
ing Presidential Reconstruction, 1865– 67 (Durham, 1985), 19.
70. Quoted in Proceedings of the Black National and State Conventions, 1865 –1900, ed. P.
Foner and G. Walker, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, 1986), 289 – 90.

p a r t i i i • Totem Envy

1. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, “An Address Delivered before the Was-ah Ho-de-no-sen-ne,
or New Confederacy of the Iroquois . . . at its Third Annual Council, August 14, 1845”
(Rochester, N.Y.: Jerome and Brother Printers, 1846), 6.
2. Walt Whitman, The Gathering of the Forces: Editorials, Essays, Literary and Dramatic
Reviews and Other Material Written by Walt Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
in 1846 and 1847, ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black, vol. 2 (New York, 1920), 136 –37.
3. See, e.g., Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks: Speeches, Negotiations and Trea-
ties with the United States, Indian Affairs 92, 7th Cong., 1st Sess. ASP07; Treaty with Florida
Indians, with speeches, Indian Affairs 198, 18th Cong., 1st sess., ASP08.

Chapter Seven • Archives of Indian Knowledge

1. Henry R. Schoolcraft, Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian
Tribes on the American Frontiers (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Co., 1851), 107–8.
 336 Notes to Pages 244 –253

2. [Lewis Cass], “Review of Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley,”
North American Review 26 (Apr. 1828): 365 – 66.
3. Henry R. Schoolcraft, “Mythology, Superstitions and Languages of the North Ameri-
can Indians,” Literary and Theological Review 2 (1835): 103.
4. Schoolcraft, Personal Memoirs, 652, 654; Detroit Daily Advertiser, April 17, 1839; De-
troit Free Press, April 21, 1839.
5. Schoolcraft, Plan for the Investigation of American Ethnology (New York: NY Histori-
cal Society, 1847), reprinted in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian In-
stitutions, Part I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1886), 907–14.
6. P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, Or, Forty Years’ Recollection of P. T. Barnum, ed.
Carl Bode (New York, 1981), 170–71.
7. New York State Senate Document 84, 68th sess., 1845; Laws of the State of New York
(1845), 136. However, in 1788 the legislature of Virginia ordered the enumeration of the
Powhatanic tribes. Henry R. Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iroquois; or Contributions to American
History, Antiquities, and General Ethnology (Albany: Erastus H. Pease and Co., 1847), 5.
8. Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iroquois, 9 –10. Also, N. S. Benton to Schoolcraft, June 25, 1845,
June 25, 1845, Schoolcraft Papers, LC.
9. Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iroquois, 5 – 6.
10. Ibid., 1. He calculated the Iroquois’s increasing population based on somewhat flimsy
historical evidence. He found in the United States and Canada 6,942 Iroquois, out of whom
3,843 were in the state of New York (25–26).
11. Ibid., iii. The thirty-seven illustrations in the private edition were mostly of negligible
value and included a portrait of Pocahontas and small woodcuts of artifacts and archeological
sites.
12. Ibid., 12.
13. Report of Mr. Schoolcraft, to the Secretary of State, Transmitting the Census Returns in
Relation to the Indians, New York Senate, Doc. 24, 1846, pp. 206–32.
14. Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iroquois, 475.
15. Report of Mr. Schoolcraft, 4 – 5.
16. Report of the Commissioners Relating to the Condition of the Indians in Massachusetts,
Massachusetts House Report 46, February 1849, pp. 4 –5.
17. Ibid., 48– 49.
18. Ibid., 51.
19. Schoolcraft to Medill, February 24, 1846 [copy], Schoolcraft Papers.
20. Cass, Dickerson, and Dix to Marcy, July 21, 1846 [copy], Schoolcraft Papers. Also see
Schoolcraft to William Medill, February 24, 1846, Schoolcraft Papers. Office of Indian Affairs
Circular, September 1, 1846, Letters Received by the Western Superintendency, 1846 –1848,
Record Group 75, NARA.
21. Schoolcraft to Medill, July 28, 1846 [copy], Schoolcraft Papers.
22. Memorandum for the President, August 1846 [draft], Schoolcraft Papers.
23. Report of the Committee of Indian Affairs on Albert Gallatin’s Memorial on the Statis-
tics of Indian Tribes to Accompany Bill H. R. No. 649, House Report 53, 29th Cong., 2d sess.,
serial 501, p. 3.
24. “Medill’s Report,” February 1, 1847, in Report of the Committee of Indian Affairs.
 Notes to Pages 253– 265 337

25. Statutes at Large, 29th Cong. 2d sess., vol. 9 (1847), 204. Schoolcraft accepted the offi-
cial position on March 19, 1847. Letter of Appointment, William L. Marcy [Secretary of War]
to Schoolcraft, March 18, 1847, Schoolcraft Papers.
26. Enclosed in a letter from Schoolcraft to Marcy, August 2, 1846 [copy], Schoolcraft Pa-
pers.
27. Memorial of George Catlin Praying Congress to Purchase His Collection of Indian
Portraits and Curiosities, in Senate Misc. 152, 30th Cong., 1st sess., serial 511, p. 3.
28. Ibid.
29. Committee of the Library to Whom was Referred the Memorial of R. R. Gurley, Pray-
ing for the Purchase of Catlin’s Collection of Paintings, House Report 820, 30th Cong., 1st sess.,
serial 527, p. 2.
30. Report of the Select Committee on the Expediency of Purchasing Mr. George Catlin’s
Collection of Indian Scenes and Portraits, Senate Report 271, 32d Cong., 1st sess., serial 631, p. 2.
31. Schoolcraft to Medill, March 25, 1847, Office of Indian Affairs, Letter Received, Misc.,
Record Group 75, NARA.
32. Henry R. Schoolcraft, Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History,
Present and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, vol. 1 of 6 (Philadelphia: Lip-
pincott, Grambo and Co., 1851), 548 –49.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 567.
35. “Circular to the Superintendents, Agents and Sub Agents of the Indian Department,”
May 1847, Schoolcraft Papers.
36. Schoolcraft to Marcy, February 1, 1849 [copy], Schoolcraft Papers, LC. In a May 1849
letter to Medill, Schoolcraft urged him to dispatch someone to the western agencies to induce
the agents and subagents to fill up the forms. Schoolcraft to Medill, May 20, 1849 [copy],
Schoolcraft Papers.
37. Joseph Henry to Secretary of the Interior Thomas Ewing, June 19, 1849 [copy], School-
craft Papers.
38. Schoolcraft to Lieber, March 22, 1851, Schoolcraft Papers, Rhees Collection, HL.
39. Schoolcraft to Indian Commissioner Luke Lea, December 10, 1852, Office of Indian
Affairs, Letter Received, Misc., Record Group RU 75, NARA.
40. “Expenses of Collecting and Digesting Statistics of the Indian Tribes of the U.S.,” Ab-
stract of Expenditures of the United States, Record Group 213, vol. 5, p. 183, NARA. Henry R.
Schoolcraft and Lippincott, “Memorandum of Agreement,” December 6, 1850, Schoolcraft
Papers.
41. Frances S. Nichols, Index to Schoolcraft’s “Indian Tribes of the Untied States,” Bureau
of American Ethnology, Bulletin 152 (Washington, D.C., 1954).
42. Schoolcraft, Historical and Statistical Information, 3:58.
43. Ibid., 1:367– 68; 2:x-xi; 4:179, 461; 6:28–29.
44. “History of the Indian Tribes,” North American Review 73 (July 1851): 243. Friends
of Schoolcraft wrote several of these reviews. For example, see Knickerbocker 37 (May 1851):
458 –59, and Knickerbocker 39 ( June 1852): 553.
45. Francis J. Bowen, “Schoolcraft on the Indian Tribes,” North American Review 77 (July
1853): 245, 247.
 338 Notes to Pages 265–274

46. See, e.g., Schoolcraft to Spencer Fullerton Baird, March 25, 1851, Assistant Secretary
Incoming Letters, 1850 –1877, RU 52, SIA. George Robbins Gliddon to Ephraim George
Squier, April 16, 1851, Ephraim George Squier Papers, LC.
47. New York Herald, January 17, 1858.
48. Schoolcraft to George Manypenny, October 1, 1853, Office Of Indian Affairs, Letter
Received, Misc., RU 75, NARA.
49. Mary Howard Schoolcraft to the House of Representatives Committee of Indian
Affairs, January 21, 1859, Committee Papers, RG 233, HR 35A-D8.7, NARA; Private Bill no.
9, 35th Cong., 2d sess; Congressional Globe, 35th Cong. 2d sess. (Jan. 21, 1859): 517.
50. George Manypenny to Schoolcraft, June 11, 1853, RU 75, Letters Received, Misc.,
NARA.
51. Mary Howard Schoolcraft to Spencer Fullerton Baird, November 12, 1859, Assistant
Secretary Incoming, RU 52, SIA.
52. “Report [to accompany bill S. 308] on Seth Eastman’s Memorial,” Senate Committee
Report 151, 36th Cong., 1st sess., serial 1039.
53. “The Committee on Claims on Seth Eastman’s Memorial,” Senate Committee Report
160, 39th Cong., 2d sess., serial 1279. In 1863, the Schoolcrafts proposed to publish the re-
mainder of the material collected under the Act of 1847, but despite support in the Senate a
$10,000 appropriations failed in the House. Judging by remarks made during the discussion,
it appears that senators were in fact somewhat knowledgeable about the volumes’ content. Con-
gressional Globe ( June 25, 1864): 3257– 58.
54. Schoolcraft, “An address delivered before the New Confederacy of the Iroquois,” 4– 5.
55. Robert E. Beider, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880 (Norman, Okla., 1986), 112.
56. Squier to Henry, March 24, 1847 [draft], Squier Papers.
57. Henry to Squier, June 23, 1847; Henry to John Russell Bartlett, June 23, 1847, Squier
Papers. On the alterations introduced to the original correspondence, see Gallatin to Henry,
June 16, 1847, Albert Gallatin Papers, NYHS. An edited version of that letter was included in
the published correspondence. See, e.g., Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report (1847), 186.
Henry to Squier, April 28, 1847 [draft], Joseph Henry Papers, SIA.
58. Henry to Squier, June 23, 1847; Henry to John Russell Bartlett, June 23, 1847, Squier
Papers.
59. Henry to Squier, April 18, 1848; also see Henry to Squier, April 14, 1848, Squier Papers.
60. Henry to Gray, May 23, 1848, Historic Letters, GHA.
61. Henry to Squier, August 18, 1848, Squier Papers.
62. Ephraim George Squier and E. H. Davis, “Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Val-
ley: Comprising the Results of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations,” Smithsonian
Contributions to Knowledge, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution, 1848),
xxxiv.

Chapter Eight • The Purloined Indian

1. Lewis H. Morgan, League of the Ho-Dé-No-Sau-Nee or Iroquois (Rochester: Sage and

Brother, 1851), x.
2. Ibid., x–xi.
 Notes to Pages 275 – 287 339

3. Lewis H. Morgan Diary Entry, October 19, 1859, printed in “How Morgan Came to
Write Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity,” ed. Leslie A. White, Papers of the Michigan
Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 42 (1957), 260.
4. “Aquarius” [Lewis H. Morgan], “Vision of KAR-IS-TA-GI-A, a Sachem of Cayuga,”
Knickerbocker 24 (Sept. 1844): 238.
5. Ibid., 245.
6. Carl Resek, Lewis Henry Morgan: American Scholar (Chicago, 1960), 24.
7. Lewis H. Morgan to George Bancroft, August 16, 1844, George Bancroft Papers, MHS.
The Oneidas were located at Utica; the Onandagas at Syracuse; the Cayugas, further divided
into four tribes, were at Aurora, Auburn, Ithaca, and Owego; and the Seneca, also divided into
four, were at Waterloo, Canandaigua, Rochester, and Lima.
8. “Proclamation of the Tek-a-ri-ho-ge-a Instituting and Confirming the Wolf Tribe of
the Oneida Nation at Utica,” in Elisabeth Tooker, Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Cul-
ture (Tucson, Ariz., 1994), 74.
9. Thomas R. Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley,
1987), 42–43.
10. Skenandoah [Lewis H. Morgan], “To the general Council Fire of the Confederacy at
the Falls of the Genesee, 11 Gya-ong-wa [Oct.] 1845,” in Robert E. Beider, Science Encounters
the Indian, 1820–1880 (Norman, Okla., 1986), 201.
11. Quoted in Beider, Science Encounters the Indian, 210. Also see Tooker, “Issac N. Hurd’s
Ethnographic Studies of the Iroquois: Their Significance and Ethnographic Value,” Ethnohis-
tory 27 (Fall 1980): 363 – 69.
12. Eli Parker to William C. Bryant, November 26, 1884, reprinted in Arthur Caswell
Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker: Last Grand Sachem of the Iroquois and General
Grant’s Military Secretary (Buffalo, N.Y., 1919), 216.
13. Morgan to Schoolcraft, October 7, 1845, Schoolcraft Papers, LC.
14. William N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iro-
quois Confederacy (Norman, Okla., 1998), 136 –39.
15. David Maldwyn Ellis, Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk region, 1790–
1850 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1946), 242– 50, 271–72. Also see David R. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness:
Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991), 104.
16. Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, 1989),
12–13.
17. Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 456.
18. The book was published in two different styles. A luxurious ($35) edition on tinted pa-
per included twenty-two colored plates and illustrations that had been prepared for Morgan’s
reports for the New York State Board of Regents. These volumes had full gilt edge and were
bound in blue leather boards decorated with a chief ’s headdress in gold. In the general edition
($15), maps, plates, and woodcuts were in black and white, and the volume was bound with ei-
ther cloth or leather. William N. Fenton, Introduction to Morgan, League of the Iroquois (1962;
New York, 1993), vi.
19. Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 57–48.
20. Ibid., 60.
21. Ibid., 79.
 340 Notes to Pages 287 – 298

22. Ibid., 84.

23. Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship, 66.
24. Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 102.
25. Quoted in Fenton, Introduction to Morgan, League of the Iroquois, xiv.
26. Lewis Henry Morgan, “To the Honorable the Board of Regents of the University of
the State of New York,” November 13, 1848, Second Annual Report of the Regents, 85.
27. Second Annual Report of the Regents of the University, on the Condition of the State
Cabinet of Natural History with Catalogue of the Same, New York Senate Doc. No. 20, 1848
(Albany: Charles Van Benthuysen, 1848), 10.
28. Third Annual Report of the Regents of the University, New York Senate Doc. No. 75,
1849 (Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1850), 10.
29. Tooker, Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture, xiv.
30. Morgan to Parker, Rochester, October 30, 1848, in Tooker, Lewis H. Morgan on Iro-
quois Material Culture, 53, 56.
31. Ibid., p. 75. Third Annual Report of the Regents, 15.
32. Society of Friends, Documents and Official Reports Illustrating the Causes Which Led
to the Revolution in the Government of the Seneca Indians, in the Year 1848 (Baltimore: William
Wooddy and Son, 1857).
33. Charles Talbot Porter, “Personal Reminiscences,” in Morgan, League of the Iroquois,
ed. Herbert M. Lloyd, vol. 2 (New York, 1904), Appendix B, 156.
34. Parker to Schoolcraft, May 2, 1846, Schoolcraft Papers.
35. Schoolcraft to Parker, May 7, 1846, Schoolcraft Papers. Two years later Parker wrote
Schoolcraft asking him to keep an eye on the Tonawanda case in Washington (Parker to
Schoolcraft, Jan. 23, 1848, Schoolcraft Papers). In 1850, Parker tried to get Schoolcraft to find
him a vacant Indian agency in the Midwest or the West (Parker to Schoolcraft, Feb. 25, 1850,
Schoolcraft Papers).
36. Ithaca Daily Chronicle, August 17, 1846, quoted in William H. Armstrong, Warrior in
Two Camps, Ely S. Parker: Union General and Seneca Chief (Syracuse, N.Y., 1978), 31.
37. Masonic Chronicle (Columbus, Oh.) 16 (Nov. 1896), quoted in Parker, Life, 97.
38. Ibid., 133.
39. Ibid., 141.
40. Tooker, Lewis H. Morgan on the Iroquois Material Culture, 303, fn 30.
41. These incidents usually involved heavy drinking. Parker, Life, 132–33.
42. Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps, 33.
43. Parker to Schoolcraft, April 10, 1848, Schoolcraft Papers. However, Parker continued
to send Schoolcraft ethnological material about Indian games, dances, and crime. Parker to
Schoolcraft, May 8, 1848, Schoolcraft Papers.
44. Resek, Lewis Henry Morgan, 38.
45. “The Gettysburg Speech of Grant’s Military Secretary,” reprinted in Parker, Life, 183.
46. Schoolcraft, “An Address Delivered Before the New Confederacy of the Iroquois,” 7.
Emphasis in the original.
47. Parker, “Memorial To the State Legislature, New York, February 1, 1888,” reprinted
in Parker, Life, 212–13, 218 –20.
48. Ibid., 222.
 Notes to Pages 300 –308 341

49. “Aquarius,” “Thought at Niagara,” Knickerbocker 22 (Sept. 1843): 195.

50. José Barreiro, ed., Indian Roots of American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), viii. Don-
ald A. Grinde Jr., “Iroquoian Political Concept and the Genesis of American Government,” in
Barreiro, Indian Roots, 47–66.
51. Dwight W. Hoover, The Red and the Black (Chicago, 1976), 56–57.

Conclusion

1. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 2– 3.

2. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confed-
eracy (Norman, Okla., 1998), 713.
3. http://www.9-11commission.gov/family/index.htm (accessed August 2004).
4. Polly Summar, Albuquerque Journal, July 27, 2004.
5. The 9/11 Investigations: Staff Reports of the 9/11 Commission; Excerpts from the House-
Senate Joint Inquiry Report on 9/11, ed. Steven Strasser, intro. Craig R. Whitney (New York,
2004).
6. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Al Felzenberg,
Deputy for Communications, Media Advisory, May 19, 2004. http://www.9-11commission
.gov/press/pr_2004 –05 –19b.pdf.
7. New York Post, July 25, 2004.
8. New York Times, May 25, 2004.
9. Baltimore Sun, May 30, 2004.
10. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-07-22-report-book-buyers_x.htm.
11. Heidi Benson, “9/11 Report Creates a Stir in Bookstores,” San Francisco Chronicle, Au-
gust 1, 2004 (www.sfgate.com). Ernest R. May, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House
During the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York, 1998).
This page intentionally left blank
 es s ay on s o urc es

Introduction

On the history of social investigations in Britain, see Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation
in Britain, 1840–1914, ed. David Englander and Rosemary O’Day (London, 1995). A useful sur-
vey of antebellum reform is Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815 –1860 (New York,
1978). Also see Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre–Civil War Reformers
(Baltimore, 1995). On utilitarianism, political economy, and scientific legislation, see Eric
Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959); L. J. Hume, Bentham and Bureau-
cracy (Cambridge, 1981); and Donald Winch, “The Science of the Legislature: The Enlight-
enment Heritage,” in The State and Social Investigation, ed. Michael J. Lacey and Mary O.
Furner (Washington, D.C., 1993), 63– 94. The State and Social Investigation is a fine anthol-
ogy that focuses on a later period and supports a rather monolithic view of the state which all
but ignores the role of legislatures in generating social knowledge. On the history of sociol-
ogy, see Bruce Mazlish, A New Science: The Breakdown of Connections and the Birth of Soci-
ology (New York, 1989); Randal Collins and Michael Makowsky, The Discovery of Society
(New York, 1972); The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, ed.
Patrick Joyce (London, 2002), Part 1; Robert C. Davis, “Social Research in America Before the
Civil War,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 8 (1972): 69– 85; and Selwyn K.
Troen, “The Diffusion of an Urban Social Science: France, England, and the United States in
the Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Social Research 9 (1986): 247– 66. On knowledge and
social control, see Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull, Social Control and the State (Oxford, 1983);
Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain, ed. A. P. Donajgrodski (Totowa, N.J., 1977); and
David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum; Social Order and Disorder in the New Re-
public (Boston, 1971).
On the feud over the comparative benefits of the two systems of incarceration in antebel-
lum America, see Negley K. Teeter and John D. Shearer, The Prison at Philadelphia, Cherry
Hill: The Separate System of Penal Discipline, 1829–1913 (New York, 1957). For individual
states’ engagement in social research see, for example, Pennsylvania Senate, Report of the Se-
lect Committee Appointed to Visit the Manufacturing Districts of the Commonwealth for the
Purpose of Investigating the Employment of Children in Manufactories (Harrisburg, 1838);
Report of Select Committee Appointed to Examine into the Condition of Tenant Houses in New
 344 Essay on Sources

York and Brooklyn, New York Assembly Document 205 (March 9, 1857); and Report of the
Commissioners of Alien Passengers and Foreign Paupers, Massachusetts House Document 18
(Boston, 1853). On Dorothea Dix’s campaign for asylum reform, see Dix, On Behalf of the In-
sane Poor, Selected Reports (1843 –52; New York, 1971). In the wake of the Civil War, many
states established institutions for social research; see William R. Brock, Investigation and Re-
sponsibility: Public Responsibility in the United States, 1865–1900 (Cambridge, 1984). A good
survey of antebellum politics is Joel Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of Amer-
ican Politics Before the Civil War (New York, 1985). On the Reform Act as a watershed in
British politics, see J. A. Phillips and C. Wetherell, “The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the
Political Modernization of England,” American Historical Review 100 (Apr. 1995): 411–36, and
“The Great Reform Bill of 1832 and the Rise of Partisanship,” Journal of Modern History 63
(Dec. 1991): 621– 46. Frederick Law Olmsted’s project was titled A Journey in the Seaboard
Slave States, with Remarks on Their Economy (New York, 1856). On the visits by agents of sta-
tistical societies to the domiciles of the poor, see M. J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early
Victorian Britain (New York, 1975), 135 – 37. On the contribution of religious revivals (rather
than the marketplace) to the making of modern American print culture and mass media, see
David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in Amer-
ica (New York, 2004).
Along with Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, 1967), I found
helpful Brian Seitz, The Trace of Political Representation (Albany, 1995). An important analy-
sis of the emergence of the American public sphere and its relationship with print culture is
Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth
Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). On citizenship and the public sphere, see Michael
Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York, 1998); Mary Ryan,
Civic Wars, Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century
(Berkeley, 1997); and James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Cul-
ture, 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993). On print culture in historical perspectives, see Roger
Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth
and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, 1992); Elizabeth L. Eisenstein,
The Printing Revolution as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, 1980); Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive
People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Pubic (New York, 1993);
and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 2000).
The concept of the archive has been widely used in postcolonial literature to designate, in
a rather loose manner, bodies of knowledge, scholarly disciplines, and other types of discourse,
administrative records, official publications, and brick-and-mortar-archives. See, for example,
Thomas Richard, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London,
1993); Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Art of Governance,” Archival Science 2,
nos. 1–2 (2002): 87–109; and Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British
Empire (New York, 2002). Also see Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago, 1996); Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (1972; New York, 1982), part
3, and Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002).
On the gap between the panoptic desire (and the attempt to create a total archive) and the re-
ality of knowledge production and circulation, see Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 9. Ann
Stoler remarked recently that colonial regimes were “imperfect, and even indifferent knowl-
 Essay on Sources 345

edge-acquiring machines. Omniscience and omnipotence were not, as is so often assumed,

their defining goals” (“Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North Ameri-
can History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88 (Dec. 2001): 829 –
66). Since the early 1980s, “new historicist” literary scholars have offered fresh ways of con-
textualizing literary texts historically; see Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Prac-
ticing New Historicism (Chicago, 2001); Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fic-
tion: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago, 1985); and The New
Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York, 1989). On the social sciences and the question of
objectivity, see Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of
American Social Science. 1865–1905 (Lexington, Ky., 1975); Linda Gordon, “Social Insurance
and Public Assistance: The Influence of Gender in Welfare Thought in the United States,
1890–1935,” American Historical Review 97 (Feb. 1992): 41– 43.

p a r t i • Monuments in Print

The famous report on child labor in the mines was published as First Report of the Royal
Commission on Children’s Employment (Mines) 1842 (380) 15, and in private editions, for in-
stance, by William Clowes and Son. John Charles Frémont’s first report was issued in 1843 as
A Report of an Exploration of the Country Lying between the Missouri River and the Rocky
Mountains on the Line of the Kansas and Great Platte River, Senate Document 243, 27th Cong.,
3d sess., serial 416. It was later coupled with the report of his 1843 –44 expedition and pub-
lished in separate editions by the printers of the House and the Senate; see Report of the Ex-
ploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North Califor-
nia in the Years 1843– 44 (Washington, D.C., 1845).
The prominence given to minute details in natural history, on the one hand, and in social
reportage, on the other, has received diverse scholarly attention. Susan Cannon views the bum-
blebee episode in Frémont’s account and similar detailed descriptions as a demonstration of
the influence of “Humboldtian Science” (instead of a Baconian aggregation of facts) on an-
tebellum American science. Thomas Laqueur argues that detailed descriptions of human bod-
ies are constitutive of the post-Enlightenment humanitarian sensibility. See Susan Faye Can-
non, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York, 1978), especially chapter 3, and
Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural
History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1989), 176 –204. On the motif of the sublime in mid-nine-
teenth-century American paintings and geology, see Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture:
American Landscape and Painting, 1825 –1875 (New York, 1980), 18 –77.
On the imaginary work that sustains national communities, see Benedict Anderson, Imag-
ined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London, 1991).
Geoffrey Nunberg’s views on the historicity and materiality of information is influenced by the
writing of Walter Benjamin, especially “The Storyteller,” and “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt (New York, 1969). On issues of copy-
right in state publications in historical perspectives, see William F. Party, Copyright Law and
Practice, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1994), 338–58; Neil Davenport, United Kingdom Copyright
and Design Protection: A Brief History (Emsworth, Hampshire, 1993), 157–64.
On the production and diffusion of books as a “circuit of communication,” see Robert Darn-
 346 Essay on Sources

ton, “What is the History of Books?” in Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New
York, 1990), 107–35. Also see D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cam-
bridge, 1999). On authorship, see, for instance, Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in The
Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), 101–20; Carla Hesse, “Enlightenment
Epistemology and Laws of Authorship in Revolutionary France, 1777–1793,” Representations
30 (Spring 1990): 109–37; John Brewer, “Authors, Publishers and the Making of Literary Cul-
ture,” in The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New
York, 1997), 125–66; and Mark Rose, “Literary Property Determined,” in Books and Owners:
The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 92–112. A good example of literary crit-
icism that incorporates the physical aspects of books is Reading Books: Essays on the Material
Text and Literature in America, ed. Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles (Amherst, 1996), and
Robert Patten, “When is a Book Not a Book,” Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Li-
brary (Spring 1996): 35–63. On reading, see Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching,” in The
Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), 165–76; Jonathan Rose, The
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, 2001); Richard Altick, The English
Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (1957; Columbus,
Ohio, 1998); William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural
Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1989); and Roger Chartier, “Text,
Printing, Readings,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Hunt, 154–175. On the “information
age” in historical perspectives, see, for instance, A Nation Transformed by Information: How In-
formation Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Alfred D. Chan-
dler and James W. Cortada (New York, 2000). On the documentary style, see William Stott’s
classic Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York, 1973), and Paula Rabinowitz,
They Must be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (New York, 1994). On the literariness
of official state documents, see Robert A. Ferguson, “The Literature of Public Documents,” in
The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 1, 1590–1820, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (New
York, 1994), 470–95. For orality and print in the colonial period, see Sandra M. Gustafson, Elo-
quence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill, 2000).

Chapter One • Blue Books and the Market of Information

A. V. Dicey’s late-nineteenth-century confidence in the might of “public opinion” was

challenged in the 1960s by Oliver Macdonagh, who demonstrated that important reforms
(namely the Passenger Acts) rested on bureaucratic initiatives without any previous public
campaign. Macdonagh’s conception was known as the “Tory thesis” of government growth.
The entire Tory/Whig debate over public opinion was displaced in the historical literature by
the ascendance of the Gramscian notion of “hegemony” and by the growing emphasis on per-
vasive public culture or an omnipotent “discourse.” Both approaches reject a mechanistic view
of power, opinion, and political action. In addition, the “Benthamite” category itself has lost
much of its explanatory appeal. There were strong divisions among Bentham’s followers as to
the role of government in allocating documents and diffusing information. Moreover, some of
the utilitarians’ publication strategies were employed by other factions as well. See A. V. Dicey,
Lectures on the Relation Between Law and Public Opinion in England (London, 1905), and
Oliver Macdonagh, A Pattern of Government Growth, 1800 –1860: The Passenger Acts and
 Essay on Sources 347

Their Enforcement (London, 1961). On Chadwick’s circle’s publicizing techniques, see S. E.

Finer, “The Transmission of Benthamite Ideas 1820– 50,” in Studies in the Growth of Nine-
teenth-Century Government, ed. Gillian Sutherland (London, 1972), 27. On the New Poor Law,
see Anthony Brundage, The Making of the New Poor Law: The Politics of Inquiry, Enactment,
and Implementation, 1832–1839 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1978), and Peter Mandler, “The Mak-
ing of the New Poor Law Redivivus,” Past and Present 117 (Nov. 1987): 131– 57. On working-
class publications against the New Poor Law, see R. K. Webb, The British Working Class Reader,
1790–1848 (London, 1955), 123 –36. Harriet Martineau’s book was titled Poor Laws and Pau-
pers Illustrated: The Parish; The Hamlet; The Town; The Land’s End (London, 1833). On the
centralization of information at the hands of the British government, see David Eastwood’s
excellent “‘Amplifying the Province of the Legislature’: The Flow of Information and the En-
glish State in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Historical Research 62 (Oct. 1989): 276– 94.
The best archival record for an early Victorian royal commission of inquiry is that of the
Constabulary Force Commission (1836– 39). The commission issued a thin report in 1839 but
never completed its work or published the lengthy document its commissioners had envisaged.
Many of its records (questionnaires, letters, notes) are still in the Public Record Office (HO
73/2– 9) and sections 5 – 4 of the Edwin Chadwick Papers, University College, London. On
the history of public-record legislation, see Winston Churchill’s First Report of the Royal
Commission on Public Record, 1912 (cd. 6361) 44, Appendix 1. See also Hilary Jenkinson, Guide
to the Public Record (London, 1949), 7–10, 12–14; The British Public Record Office (Richmond,
Va., 1960), 17–21; and Philippa Levine, “History in the Archives: The Public Record Office and
Its Staff, 1838 –1886,” English Historical Review 101 (1986): 20 –41.
Library scholar Margaret Steig conducted pioneering work on the informational functions
of the Victorian state in “The Nineteenth Century Information Revolution,” Journal of Li-
brary History 15 (Winter 1980): 22–52. On Stationery Office history, see David Bucher, Offi-
cial Publications in Britain (London, 1991); Hugh Barty-King, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office:
The Story of the First 200 Years, 1786–1986 (Norwich, England, 1986); James G. Ollé, An In-
troduction to British Government Publications (London, 1965); and P. Ford and G. Ford, A Guide
to Parliamentary Papers (Oxford, 1956). A good anthology on Habermasian scholarship is
Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). Another valu-
able collection is The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, 1993). For an
early critique of Habermas’s work, see Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and
Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter
Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis, 1993). On the “plebian pub-
lic sphere,” see Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early
Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1996). Also see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans.
Thomas Burger (1962; Cambridge, Mass., 1991), and Robert C. Holub, Jürgen Habermas: Critic
in the Public Sphere (London, 1991).

Chapter Two • The Battle of the Books

On the New York State geological project, see Michele L. Aldrich, “New York Natural His-
tory Survey, 1836 –1845” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1974). For post–Civil War
 348 Essay on Sources

congressional investigation of the conditions in the South, see, for example, Memphis Riots
and Massacre, House Report 101, 39th Cong., 1st sess., serial 1274; and Affairs in the Late In-
surrectionary States, 13 vols., House Report 22, 42d Cong., 2d sess., serial 1529 – 41. On con-
gressional investigative powers, see Allan Barth, Government by Investigation (New York,
1955); James Hamilton, The Power to Probe: A Study of Congressional Investigations (New
York, 1976); and Congress Investigates: A Documentary History, 1792–1974, ed. Arthur M.
Schlesinger Jr. and Roger Burns, 5 vols. (New York, 1975). Carl Schurz’s report was titled Re-
port of Carl Schurz on the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and
Louisiana, in Message of the President of the United States, Senate Exec. Doc. 2, 39th Cong.,
1st sess., serial 1237. Also see Hans L. Trefousse, Carl Schurz: A Biography (Knoxville, Tenn.,
1982), 158– 60. An important source on government printing and patronage is Culver H.
Smith, The Press, Politics, and Patronage: The American Government’s Use of Newspapers,
1789 –1875 (Athens, Ga., 1977). On press coverage of Washington politics, see Samuel Kernell
and Gary C. Jacobson, “Congress and the Presidency as News in the Nineteenth Century,” The
Journal of Politics 49 (Nov. 1987): 1016 –37; and Thomas C. Leonard, The Power of the Press:
The Birth of American Political Reporting (New York, 1986). On the circulation of informa-
tion and the early version of the “informed citizen,” see Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is
Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700 –1865 (New York, 1989), and The
Strength of the People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650 –1870 (Chapel Hill,
1996). On antebellum newspapers, see Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social His-
tory of American Newspapers (New York, 1967); Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The
Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia, 1981); and David T. Z. Mindich,
Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism (New York, 1998). For
histories of the Government Printing Office, see James L. Harrison, 100 GPO Years, 1861–1961
(Washington, D.C., 1961); Robert Washington Kerr, History of the Government Printing Office
(Lancaster, Pa., 1881); and Laurence F. Schmeckebier, The Government Printing Office: Its His-
tory, Activities and Organization (Baltimore, 1925).
On circular letters and their relationship to other forms of information, including official
publications, see Noble E. Cunningham’s introduction to Circular Letters of Congressmen to
Their Constituents, ed. Cunningham, vol. 1 (Chapel Hill, 1978). On Gales and Seaton as con-
gressional reporters, see Donald A. Ritchie, Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Cor-
respondents (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 7–34. Jonathan Swift’s famous tale is “A Full and True
Account of the Battel fought last Friday between the Antient and the Modern books in St.
James’s Library” in Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Edward Rosenheim Jr. (New York, 1959),
150 – 82.
Government publications have been of interest predominantly for bibliographers. Thus,
for a pioneering overview of federal publications in the early republic, see J. H. Powell, The
Books of a New Nation: United States Government Publications, 1774–1814 (Philadelphia, 1957).
On government publications during the first half of the twentieth century, see Leroy Charles
Merrit, The United States Government As Publisher (Chicago, 1943), and Paul Bixler, “Uncle
Sam’s Best Sellers,” Saturday Review of Literature 18 (May 28, 1938): 3 – 4, 16. On the War of
the Rebellion project, see Dallas D. Irvine, “The Genesis of the Official Records,” Mississippi
Valley Historical Review 24 (Sept. 1937): 221–29. On the nexus of culture and the state, see
Mathew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, 1965); Ian Hunter, Culture
 Essay on Sources 349

and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education (London, 1988); David Lloyd and Paul
Thomas, Culture and the State (New York, 1998); and State/Culture: State Formation after the
Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca, 1999). On “Saxon eloquence,” see Kenneth
Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth Century America
(Berkeley, 1991), 111–20. On reconciliation as the predominant theme of Civil War memory,
see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge,
Mass., 2002).

Chapter Three • The Bee in the Book

John Higham, From Boundlessness to Consolidation: The Transformation of American Cul-

ture, 1848 –1860 (Ann Arbor, 1969). Allan Nevins claimed that too much was made of Jessie
Benton’s contributions to Frémont’s reports (Frémont: Pathmaker of the West [1928; New York,
1955], 117–18). Frémont’s reports were reprinted, for example, by D. Appleton and Co. in New
York City (1846 and 1856, when Frémont was the Republican party’s candidate for presidency),
G. H. Derby and Co. in Buffalo (1849 and 1850), by Hall and Dickson in Syracuse in conjunc-
tion with Hall and Dickson in New York (1847), and by H. Polkinhorn in Washington (1845).
On John C. Frémont’s explorations, see Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the
Course of American Empire (New York, 2002), 95 – 366. See also William Goetzmann, Ex-
plorations and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West
(1966; New York, 1993), 240– 52. On the exploring expedition, see Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of
Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842 (New York,
2003); William Stanton, The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842 (Berke-
ley, 1975); and Magnificent Voyagers, ed. Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis (Washington,
D.C., 1985). Anita Hibler’s research on the publication of the exploring expedition reports is
particularly detailed and useful. Anita M. Hibler, “The Publication of the Wilkes Reports,
1842–1877” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1989). For a bibliographical history
of each volume, see Daniel C. Haskell, U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842, and Its Publica-
tions, 1844–1874 (New York, 1940). Charles Wilkes’s narrative account was issued as Narrative
of the United States Exploring Expedition, During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842, 5 vols.
(Philadelphia, 1844).
On the border dispute with Mexico, see William Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the
American West, 1803–1863 (New Haven, 1959), 175 –78; L. David Norris, James C. Milligan,
and Odie B. Faulk, William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist (Tucson, 1998), chap. 3; and Odie B.
Faulk, Introduction to the reprint of John Russell Bartlett’s Personal Narrative of Explorations
(1854; Chicago, 1965). David Dale Owen’s geological report was issued as Report of a Geolog-
ical Reconnaissance, of the Chippewa Land District of Wisconsin, and the Northern Part of
Iowa, Senate Exec. Doc. 57, 30th Cong., 1st sess., serial 509. On mid-nineteenth-century sci-
ence, see Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876 (New York,
1987), 201– 68; Howard S. Miller, Dollars for Research: Science and Its Patrons in Nineteenth
Century America (Seattle, 1970); and Lillian B. Miller, The Lazzaroni: Science and Scientists
in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (Washington, D.C., 1972). On the dispute over the route
to the pacific, see Robert Royal Russel, Improvement of Communication with the Pacific Coast
as an Issue in American Politics, 1783 –1864 (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1948), 168–201. For biblio-
 350 Essay on Sources

graphical details of antebellum western reporting, see Henry R. Wagner and Charles L. Camp,
The Plains and the Rockies: A Critical Bibliography of Exploration, Adventure and Travel in
the American West, 1800 –1865, ed. Robert H. Becker (San Francisco, 1982).
On dedicating books in early modern Europe, see Natalie Z. Davis, “Beyond the Market:
Books as Gifts in Sixteenth Century France,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ser.
5, 33 (1983): 69 – 88. On authorship in antebellum America, see William Charvat, The Pro-
fession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (1968; New York, 1992),
and Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Phil-
adelphia, 2002). McGill provides an exceedingly valuable analysis of antebellum debates about
intellectual rights (especially the international copyright law) in which market-driven and re-
publican notions about authorship and publishing clashed. Her discussion, together with re-
cent work on the publication might of antebellum religious societies, and this book’s empha-
sis on the role of government in circulation of texts demonstrate, in different contexts, that
the antebellum literary arena was not entirely governed by the modalities and ideologies of
the liberal, profit-driven marketplace.

p a r t i i • The Culture of the Social Fact

Chapter Four • Scenes of Commission

For useful details on royal commissions and their personnel, see Officials of Royal Com-
missions of Inquiry 1815–1870, ed. J. M. Collinge, in vol. 9 of Office Holders in Modern Britain
(London, 1984). The only monograph on the topic is still H. M. Clokie and Joseph F. Robin-
son, Royal Commissions of Inquiry: The Significance of Investigations in British Politics (Stan-
ford, 1937). Also see H. F. Gosnell, “British Royal Commissions of Inquiry,” Political Science
Quarterly 49 (1934): 84 –118. Two biographies of Chadwick stand out: S. E. Finer, The Life and
Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London, 1952), and Anthony Brundage, England’s “Prussian
Minister”: Edwin Chadwick and the Politics of Government Growth, 1832–1854 (University
Park, Pa., 1988). On the debate over the expansion of Victorian government, see The Victorian
Revolution-Government and society in Victoria’s Britain, ed. Peter Stansky (New York, 1973).
On the early history of royal commissions, see T. J. Cartwright, Royal Commissions and De-
partmental Committees in Britain (London, 1975), 32– 48. For details on the work of the Fac-
tory Commission, see T. J. Ward, The Factory Movement, 1830–1855 (London, 1962), 81–134.
A good analysis of the politics of Whig governments is Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Govern-
ment in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford, 1990). The Irish Poor Law
Commission’s recommendation not to legislate a poor law for Ireland was rejected outright by
the British cabinet; see Helen Burk, The People and the Poor Law in Nineteenth Century Ire-
land (Littlehampton, England, 1987), 17–46. The version of the Irish Poor Law Commission’s
report employed in this chapter is the privately published The Miseries and Misfortunes of Ire-
land and the Irish People from the Evidence Taken by the Commissioners for Inquiring into the
Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland (London, 1836). For the tension between scientific
and local knowledge, see Hugh Raffles, “Intimate Knowledge,” International Social Science
Journal 54, no. 3 (2002): 325 – 35. On nineteenth-century statistical imagination, see Mary
Poovey, “Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech—The Discourse of Statistics in the 1830s,”
 Essay on Sources 351

Critical Inquiry 19 (Winter 1993): 256–76; Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cul-
tural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995); Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Think-
ing, 1820 –1900 (Princeton, 1986); and Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990).
Michel Foucault explored the panopticon to great effect in Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), 195 – 308. Also see Foucault, “The Eye
of Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin
Gordon (New York, 1980), 146 – 65. Foucault’s earlier work, especially his description of the
“medical gaze” in the Birth of the Clinic, acknowledged more complicated movements and
arrangements of the eye than in the Panopticon; see The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology
of Medical Perception, trans. Alan M. Sheridan (London, 1973), 107–23. Also see Martin Jay,
Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley,
1993), 381–416 (esp. 411– 416); John Rajchman, “Foucault’s Art of Seeing,” October 44 (Spring
1988): 89–119; and Thomas R. Flynn, “Foucault and the Eclipse of Vision,” in Modernity and
the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley, 1993), 273 – 86. Nick Crossley
contends that the Panopticon presupposes an intersubjective rather than objectifying gaze in
“The Politics of the Gaze: Between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty,” Human Studies 16 (October
1993): 399 – 419. For other critical approaches to the role of royal commissions in British po-
litical life, see Adam Ashforth, “Reckoning Schemes of Legitimation: On Commissions of In-
quiry as Power/Knowledge Form,” Journal of Historical Sociology 3 (Mar. 1990): 1–22; Frank
Burton and Pat Carlen, Official Discourse: On Discourse Analysis, Government Publications,
Ideology and the State (London, 1979); and P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch: English
State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1985).
On the factory movement’s exposure of factory conditions, see The Poor Man’s Advocate;
or, A Full and Fearless Exposure of the Horrors and Abominations of the Factory System in En-
gland, 50 vols. (Manchester, 1830), and R. G. Kirby and A. E. Musson, The Voice of the People:
John Doherty, 1798 –1854: Trade Unionist, Radical and Factory Reformer (Manchester, 1975).
On the counterinvestigation conducted by the Glasgow operatives, see Sixth Report from the
Select Committee on the Operation of the Factory Acts, HC 1840 (504) 10, pp. 27–28. For
William Dodd’s work as a social investigator, see Dodd, The Factory System Illustrated: In a Se-
ries of Letters to the Right Hon. Lord Ashley Together with A Narrative of the Experience and
Sufferings of William Dodd (1842; London, 1968). On tourism to factories, see R. Boyson, The
Ashworth Cotton Enterprise. The Rise and Fall of a Family Firm, 1818–1880 (Oxford, 1970),
181–83. For an example of a delegation of laborers that traveled abroad to conduct a social in-
vestigation, see Report of the Coventry Independent Deputation of Workmen Appointed to Visit
the Ribbon-weaving Districts of France and Switzerland (Coventry: Taunton’s Free Press Office
[1860]). On Inspector Stuart’s career, see Ursula Henriques, “An Early Factory Inspector,” Scot-
tish Historical Review 1 (1971): 18 –46. For a critique of the power of law to affix social cate-
gories, see Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Modernity (Princeton, 1995).

Chapter Five • Facts Speak for Themselves

An important summary of Bakhtin’s theories is Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin; The Di-
alogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis, 1984). On the 1840s language of dis-
covery, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age
 352 Essay on Sources

(New York, 1983), 356 – 57. On the sexual voyeurism of post-Enlightenment reform literature,
see Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American
Culture,” The American Historical Review 50 (Apr. 1995): 303 – 34. Victorian authors drew on
parliamentary reports to build scenes and characters in their narratives. See, for example,
Sheila M. Smith, “Wilenhall and Wodgate: Disraeli’s Use of Blue Books Evidence,” Review of
English Studies 13 (Nov. 1962): 368–84.
For the antislavery appropriation of the parliamentary hearings, see the Society for the
Abolition of Slavery, Analysis of the Report of a Committee of the House of Commons on the
Extinction of Slavery (London: S. Bagster Printer, 1833); The Society for the Abolition of Slav-
ery, Abstract of the Report of the Lords Committee on the Condition and Treatment of Colonial
Slaves (London: S. Bagster Printer, 1833); “Legion,” A Letter from Legion to . . . the Duke of
Richmond . . . on the Slavery Committee of the House of Lords: Containing an Exposure of the
Character of the Evidence on the Colonial Side Produced Before the Committee (London: S. Bag-
ster Printer, [1833]); and “Legion,” A Second Letter from Legion to . . . the Duke of Richmond . . .
Containing an Analysis of the Anti-slavery Evidence Produced Before the Committee (London:
S. Bagster, 1833). In all likelihood, the two pairs of documents were produced by the same or-
ganization.
On metonymy and representation of social reality, see Jonathan Arac, Commissioned Spir-
its: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (New York,
1989), 34 – 47; Stephen J. Spector, “Monsters of Metonymy: Hard Times and Knowing the
Working Class,” English Literary History 51 (Summer 1984): 365–84; Roman Jakobson, “Two
Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Jakobson and Morris Halle,
Fundamentals of Language (The Hague, 1956), 53 – 82. The notion of the implied reader was
elaborated by Wolfgang Iser; see his The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Bal-
timore, 1978). In recent decades, the social sciences (anthropology in particular) have engaged
in self-critique that centers on the dynamics and ethics of fieldwork (especially the relation-
ship between researcher and informant) as well as the textuality of social scientific texts. The
literature is enormous. Standing out is the compilation Writing Culture: The Poetics and Pol-
itics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, 1986), especially
Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” 1–26, and Renato Rosaldo, “From the Door of His
Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor,” 77– 97.

Chapter Six • Can Freedmen Be Citizens?

The Emancipation League commenced collecting information about freedmen by sending

questionnaires to superintendents and supervisors of freedmen’s affair. See Facts Concerning
the Freedmen, Their Capacity and Their Destiny, Collected by and Published by the Emanci-
pation League (Boston: Press of Commercial Printing House, 1863). On the history of the
American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC), see John G. Sproat, “Blue Print for Radi-
cal Reconstruction,” Journal of Southern History 23 (Feb. 1957): 25–44; and James M.
McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Re-
construction (Princeton, 1964), 178 – 91. On the federal government and the freedmen, see
Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy Toward Southern Blacks, 1861–
1865 (Westport, Conn., 1973); Mary Frances Berry, Military Necessity and Civil Rights Policy:
 Essay on Sources 353

Black Citizenship and the Constitution, 1861–1868 (London, 1977); and Freedom: A Documen-
tary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ed. Ira Berlin et al. ser. 1, vol. 1, The Destruction of Slav-
ery (Cambridge, 1985), and vol. 2, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (Cam-
bridge, 1993).
The AFIC’s official reports were published together as Senate Exec. Doc. 53, 38th Cong.,
1st sess., serial 1176. Also see Official Records, ser. 3, 3:430– 54; ser. 3, 4:289– 82. The two sup-
plementary reports were published privately. See Samuel Gridley Howe, The Refugees From
Slavery in Canada West: Report to the Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (Boston, 1864), and
James McKaye, “The Mastership and Its Fruits: The Emancipated Slave Face to Face with His
Old Master: A Supplemental Report” (New York: Loyal Publication Society, no. 58, 1864).
Robert Dale Owen published a book based on the commission’s final report, The Wrong of
Slavery, The Right of Emancipation, and the Future of the African Race in the United States
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1864). Abridged versions of the reports were published
in the abolitionist and the general press. See, for example, National Anti-Slavery Standard, Au-
gust 15, 1863.
On the Sanitary Commission, see William Quentin Maxwell, Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel: The
Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission (New York, 1956). The Sanitary
Commission also engaged in social research; see Benjamin Apthorp Gould, Investigations in
the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers (New York: US Sanitary Com-
mission, 1869). For an account on a politically charged congressional investigation (the
Thompson Committee) of the war effort, see Bruce Tap, Over Lincoln’s Shoulder: The Com-
mittee on the Conduct of the War (Lawrence, Kans., 1998). For biographical material on Robert
Dale Owen, see Elinor Pancoast and Anne E. Lincoln, The Incorrigible Idealist: Robert Dale
Owen in America (Bloomington, 1940), and Richard W. Leopold, Robert Dale Owen: A Biog-
raphy (Cambridge, Mass., 1940). On Samuel Gridley Howe, see Harold Schwartz, Samuel Grid-
ley Howe: Social Reformer, 1801–1876 (Cambridge, Mass., 1956). For Robert Dale Owen’s Civil
War propaganda, see, for example, Robert Dale Owen, The Policy of Emancipation: In Three
Letters (Philadelphia, 1863). For information on the Sea Islands experiment, see Willie Lee
Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis, 1964). On the
invention of “miscegenation,” see Sidney Kaplan, “The Miscegenation Issue in the Election
of 1864,” in Kaplan, American Studies in Black and White: Selected Essays, 1949–1989 (Am-
herst, Mass., 1991), 47–100. Also see Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America
(Philadelphia, 2002), 115 –44. On the history of U.S racial thinking, see Bruce R. Dain, A
Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge,
Mass., 2002).
De Bow’s statistical research is described in Ottis Clark Skipper, J. D. B. De Bow: Magazin-
ist for the South (Athens, Ga., 1958); and H. G. and Winnie Leach Duncan, “The Development
of Sociology in the Old South,” American Journal of Sociology 39 (1934): 649– 56. The first
American book to include sociology in its title was George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South or
the Failure of Free Society (Richmond: A. Morris, 1854). On spiritualism, see Ann Braude,
Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston,
1989). On the rise of professional social science after the Civil War, see Thomas Haskell, The
Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the
Nineteenth Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana, Ill., 1977). For the relations between the war
 354 Essay on Sources

experience and public awareness of the social sphere, see, for instance, Ellen E. Guilot, Social
Factors in Crime as Explained by American Writers of the Civil War and Post Civil War Period
(Philadelphia, 1943). On the prejudice against former American slaves in Canada, see Jason H.
Silverman, “The American Fugitive Slave in Canada: Myths and Realities,” Southern Studies
19 (Spring 1980): 215–27.

p a r t i i i • Totem Envy

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft submitted his survey of the Iroquois to the New York senate as
Report of Mr. Schoolcraft, to the Secretary of State, Transmitting the Census Returns in Rela-
tion to the Indians, New York, Senate Doc. 24, 1846. The ethnologist-publisher John R. Bartlett
(see chap. 3) co-published the report under the title Notes on the Iroquois: or, Contributions to
the Statistics, Aboriginal History, Antiquities, and General Ethnology of Western New York
(New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1846). The following year it was republished in expanded
form as Notes on the Iroquois; or Contributions to American History, Antiquities, and General
Ethnology (Albany: Erastus H. Pease and Co., 1847). Schoolcraft’s congressional project on the
Indian tribes was titled Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Present
and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, 6 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott,
Grambo and Co., 1851– 57). It was also published as Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge: Con-
taining All the Original Papers Laid Before Congress Respecting the History, Antiquities, Lan-
guage, Ethnology, Pictography, Rites, Superstitions, and Mythology, of the Indian Tribes of the
United States, 6 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1860). Lewis Henry Morgan’s study of the Iro-
quois was published as League of the Ho-Dé-No-Sau-Nee or Iroquois (Rochester: Sage and
Brother, 1851).
On congressional publications that address Indian nations, see Steven L. Johnson, Guide to
American Indian Documents in the Congressional Serial Set: 1817–1899 (New York, 1977). On the
history of the perception that the Indians were fated to disappear, see Brian W. Dippie, The Van-
ishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, Conn., 1982). On Indian
federal policy, see Christine Bolt, American Indian Policy and American Reform: Case Studies of
the Campaign to Assimilate the American Indians (London, 1987). On the contributions of the
Smithsonian to American ethnology, see Curtis M. Hinsley, The Smithsonian and the American
Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victorian America (Washington, D.C., 1981). On the
Office of Indian Affairs, see Edward E. Hill, The Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–1880: Historical
Sketches (New York, 1974). For insightful analysis of the removal policy and the haunting In-
dian ghost in literature, see Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth Century American Literature
and the Politics of American Indian Affairs (New York, 1991), and Reneé L. Bergland, The Na-
tional Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, N.H., 2000).
Samuel G. Morton’s book is Crania Americana; Or, a Comparative View of the Skulls of Var-
ious Aboriginal Nations of North and South America: To Which is Prefixed an Essay on the Va-
rieties of the Human Species (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1839). For a remarkably useful descrip-
tion of the anthropological projects of Gallatin, Schoolcraft, Morton, Morgan, and Squire, see
Robert E. Beider, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880 (Norman, Okla., 1986). Also, see
Reginald Horsman, “Scientific Racism and the American Indian in the Mid-Nineteenth Cen-
tury,” American Quarterly 27 (May 1975): 152– 68; and Race and Manifest Destiny (Cam-
 Essay on Sources 355

bridge, Mass., 1981). For federal documents that were used to justify the removal of Indians,
see, for example, Correspondence on Removal of Indians West of Mississippi River, 1831– 33,
Senate Doc. 90, 29th Cong., 2d sess., serial 494. The Doolittle Commission’s report was pub-
lished as U.S. Congress, Condition of the Indian Tribes: Report of the Joint Special Committee
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1867). On the Pottawatomie leaders visit to
Washington, D.C., see Richard Smith Elliot, Notes Taken in Sixty Years (St. Louis: R. P. Stud-
ley and Co., 1883). Homi Bhabha’s observations are offered in The Location of Culture (Lon-
don, 1993), 93 –101. On temporality and the anthropological subject, see Johannes Fabian,
Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983).

Chapter Seven • Archives of Indian Knowledge

The most detailed biography of Schoolcraft is Richard G. Bremer, Indian Agent and
Wilderness Scholar: The Life of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (Mount Pleasant, Mich., 1987). For
secondary literature on “savagery” and “civilization,” see Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White
Man’s Indian: Images the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, 1978), and
Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976). On Schoolcraft and
Hiawatha, see Chase S. Osborn and Stellanova Osborn, Schoolcraft—Longfellow—Hiawatha
(Lancaster, Pa., 1942). On Seth Eastman’s life and artistry, see John Francis McDermott, Seth
Eastman: Pictorial Historian of the Indian (Norman, Okla., 1961).
For Squier’s archeology, see Thomas G. Tax, “E. George Squier and the Mounds, 1845–
1850,” in Toward a Science of Man: Essays in the History of Anthropology, ed. Timothy H. H.
Thoresen (The Hague, 1973), 99–124; and Gordon Willey and Jeremy Sabloff, A History of
American Archaeology (San Francisco, 1974), 42–87. The mystery of the mounds also inspired
poetic production, such as William Cullen Bryant’s “The Prairies,” Poems (1832). For a highly
detailed account on Catlin’s and Schoolcraft’s efforts to seek congressional patronage, see Brian
W. Dippie, Catlin and His Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage (Lincoln, Nebr., 1990). On
chromolithography and Schoolcraft’s project, see Peter C. Marzio, The Democratic Art: Chro-
molithography, 1840–1900, Pictures for a Nineteenth Century America (Boston, 1979), 27–31.

Chapter Eight • The Purloined Indian

For biographical details, see Carl Resek, Lewis Henry Morgan: American Scholar (Chicago,
1960), and “How Morgan Came to Write Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity,” ed. Leslie
A. White, Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 42 (1957). Thomas
Trautmann’s Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley, 1987) is the most
important scholarship on Morgan’s work on kinship. Herbert M. Lloyd’s edition of League of
the HO-DE’-NO-SAU-NEE or Iroquois, 2 vols. (New York, 1904) also contains useful docu-
ments. On Morgan and Marxism see, William H. Shaw, “Marx and Morgan,” History & The-
ory 23 (1984): 215 –28. Elisabeth Tooker explores more comprehensively than most other Mor-
gan scholars do the importance of the New Order for his ethnological output; see “The
Structure of the Iroquois League: Lewis H. Morgan’s Research and Observations,” Ethnohis-
tory 30 (Spring 1983): 141– 54; and “Lewis H. Morgan and His Contemporaries,” American
Anthropologist 94 ( June 1992): 357–75.
 356 Essay on Sources

On American masculinity and the Indian motif, see E. Anthony Rutondo, American Man-
hood: Transformation in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993),
227–28. For a different psychological interpretation of Morgan’s Indian games, see Mark C.
Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, 1989). On antebellum
minstrelsy, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
(New York, 1993). On Indians as the children of the Great Father in Washington, see Michael
Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian
(New York, 1975). On the history of mimicking Indians in the United States, see Philip J. De-
loria, Playing Indian (New Haven, 1998).
Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter” was republished in The Complete Poems
and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, with Selections from his Critical Writings, ed. Edward H.
O’Neill, vol. 2 (New York, 1946), 593 – 607. For the Lacanian mirror stage, see Jacques Lacan,
“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Ex-
perience,” Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), 1–7; and Shoshana Fel-
man, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture
(Cambridge, Mass., 1987). On Franz Fanon’s work, see Ronald A. T. Judy, “Fanon’s Body of
Black Experience,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-
Whiting, and Reneé T. White (Oxford, 1996), 53–73. On womanhood as a performance, see
Joan Rivier, “Womanliness as a Masquerade” (1929), in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Bur-
gin, James Donald, and Cora Caplan (London, 1986), 35– 44. For analyses of the social turmoil
in antebellum western New York, see Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in
Oneida County, New York, 1790 –1865 (Cambridge, 1981), and Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s
Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York, 1978).
Morgan’s reports on material culture were incorporated into the annual report of the Re-
gents of the University of the State of New York: Second Annual Report of the Regents of the
University, on the Condition of the State Cabinet of Natural History, New York Senate Doc. No.
20, 1848 (Albany: Charles Van Benthuysen, 1848), 84– 91; Third Annual Report of the Regents
of the University, New York Senate Doc. No. 75, 1849 (Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1850), 65– 97
(63– 95 in the rev. ed.); and Fifth Annual Report of the Regents of the University, New York
Assembly Doc. No. 122, 1851 (Albany: Charles Van Benthuysen, 1852), 67–117. For a great ex-
ample of Morgan’s ability to tie together domestic arrangements and political regimes, see
Morgan, “Montezuma’s Dinner,” review of Hubert Howe Bancroft’s Native Races of the Pa-
cific States, vol. 2, Civilized Nations, North American Review 122 (Apr. 1876): 265–308.
For sites and environments of memory, see Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History:
Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24. On the affinity between the
League of Iroquois and the American federal structure, see Bruce Johansen, Forgotten
Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois and the Rationale for the American Revolution (Ip-
swich, Mass., 1982); Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations and the U.S.
Constitution, eds. John Mohawk, Oren Lyons, and Bruce Johansen (Santa Fe, 1992); and Don-
ald Grinde Jr. and Bruce E. Johansen, Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution
of American Democracy (Berkeley, 1991). For a critique of the notion that the Iroquois inspired
American federalism, see Elisabeth Tooker, “The United States Constitution and the Iroquois
League,” in The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies, ed. James A.
Clifton (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990), 107–28. A few years after the appearance of League of
 Essay on Sources 357

the Iroquois, Minnie Myrtle (pseudonym for Anna Johnson) published The Iroquois: The
Bright Side of the Indian Character (New York, 1855), in which she popularized Morgan’s re-
search in a further attempt to defend the character of the Indian against prejudice.

Conclusion

For information about the Commission to Strengthen Social Security, see http://www
.csss.gov. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Report was published as United States Department of La-
bor, Office of Policy Planning and Research, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action
(Washington, D.C., 1965). On the Left reaction to Moynihan’s report and similar social stud-
ies, see, for example, William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York, 1970). On President Clin-
ton’s health reform plans, see Jacob S. Hacker, The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President
Clinton’s Plan for Health Security (Princeton, 1997), and Theda Skocpol, Boomerang: Clinton’s
Health Security Effort and the Turn Against Government in U.S. Politics (New York, 1996). On
the replacement of scientific neutrality with advocacy and other aspects of victims’ represen-
tation, see Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood (Stanford, 2006). Historian Gertrude
Himmelfarb’s 1990s writings are a good example of neo-Victorian moralism; see, for example,
her The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (New York,
1995).
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 index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

Abbot, Charles, 45– 46 compared to, 19 –20, 28, 135, 138; congres-
Abercromby, J., 52 sional hearings, 309; expeditions and, 25 –
Abert, James W., 108, 109, 126 26, 104; investigations by, 75 –76; printing
Abert, John James, 107 and, 28–30. See also congressional publica-
Adams, John, 16 tions; expeditions
Adams, John Quincy, 208, 277 American Slavery As It Is (Weld), 213
AFIC. See American Freedman’s Inquiry American State Papers series, 90, 111
Commission (AFIC) Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley
Agassiz, Louis, 118, 223, 240 (Squier and Davis), 237, 268–71
Agriculture Report (U.S. Patent Office), 83 – Ancient Society (Morgan), 236, 274
84 Anderson, Benedict, 31– 32
Ainsworth, J. H., 163–64 anecdotes in reports, 183 – 84, 213, 217–18
Albert (prince), 152 Annals of Congress series, 90 – 91
Algic Researches (Schoolcraft), 245–46 Annual Message of the President, 317n. 28
Ambler, Ann, 188 Anthony, Henry B., 99–100
American Archives series, 91 Anti-Mason Movement, 275
American Ethnological Society, 243, 253, antirent movement, 281
268 – 69 antislavery documents, 81–82, 194 –96, 212–
American exceptionalism, 206, 229 13, 228
American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission archive in print, 10, 11, 89 – 93, 103, 133– 34,
(AFIC): case studies of, 218 –22; enfran- 261–66
chisement and, 224 –26, 233; field experi- Arnold, Matthew, 76
ences of, 209–12; members of, 204, 208– 9; Artegall, or Remarks on the Reports of the
model for, 137; origins of, 207–8; publica- Commissioners of Enquiry into the State of
tion of report of, 226 –28; racial theories of, Education in Wales (Williams), 196
232–33; reports of, 212–16, 228–30; role Ashley, Lord (7th Earl Shaftesbury), 26, 57,
of, 204 – 5; science and, 208; society and, 58, 149, 152, 176
206, 220–21; subject of, 206–7; suspicions Assiniboine Indians, 128
toward market of, 224. See also Howe, Atchison, David Rice, 82
Samuel Gridley; McKaye, James; Owen, audience: for official reports, 17, 56 – 57, 58;
Robert Dale search for, 59 – 63; state and, 302
American government: British government Audubon, John James, 112
 360 Index

authenticity: contrasted to objectivity, 11, 16; British government: acts printed by, 45, 57;
masquerade and, 274, 277, 282, 285; ren- American government compared to, 19 –20,
dering of facts and, 154, 174, 179–81, 186, 28, 135, 138; legislators, documents pro-
250– 51, 261, 271 vided to, 52, 65 – 67, 66; mines investiga-
authorship: Benton on, 95–96; corporate, tion and, 25 –26; parliamentary culture,
177–78; field exertions and, 112; individual 43– 44; printing and, 28 –29, 30; ruling
versus governmental, 4, 33, 34; western ex- elite, 142; select committee of parliament,
plorations and, 133 141, 142, 179, 181. See also blue books; par-
liamentary papers; royal commissions of
Bache, Alexander Dallas, 111 inquiry
Badger, George E., 82, 86, 88, 89 Brotherton, Joseph, 62
Baird, Spencer, 104, 112, 127, 130, 266 Brougham, Henry, 43
Baker, R., 177 Brown, Albert Gallatin, 84
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 190, 191 Brown, John, 75, 209
Bancroft, George, 277 Brown, John Carter, 91–92
Barham, Charles, 149, 158 Browne, James, 152
Barnum, P. T., 246, 255 Bryant, William Cullen, 277
Barry, David, 156 Buller, Charles, 50, 55– 56
Bartlett, George, 118–19 Bulwer, Edward, 43
Bartlett, John Russell, 96, 106, 118–25 Burr, Aaron, 79
Beal, John, 176
Bentham, Jeremy, 40, 140, 262, 310 cabinets of curiosities, 179 – 81, 290
Benton, N. S., 247 Calhoun, John C., 244
Benton, Thomas Hart: committees and, 86; Campbell, Thomas, 98
daughter of, 106; Foote and, 97; Frémont Canada, 213, 219 –20, 221
expeditions and, 26, 29, 110; on Indian re- Carlyle, Thomas, 6, 199
search, 102, 253; publications and, 80, 94 – Carnes, Mark, 281
96, 98–99 Carson, Christopher “Kit,” 27
Bent’s Fort, 109 Cartter, David K., 84
Bhabha, Homi, 240 Cass, Lewis, 244, 271–72, 277
Bird, Francis W., 227, 251 Cassin, John, 117
Bisset, André, 175 Catlin, George, 245– 46, 254 – 55
Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 284 census: of Indian tribes in New York, 247–49;
Blair, Francis P., 80, 107 of Indian tribes of U.S., 255– 60; national,
Blair, Tony, 308 22–23, 31
Bleaching Works Commission, 163, 325n. 4 Chadwick, Edwin: career of, 35, 139, 142; dis-
blue books: appropriation of, 201–3; as tribution of documents and, 177, 193–94;
archival, 50– 51; description of, 28, 173; Factory Commission and, 148; methods
Disraeli on, 41; distribution of, 191–94; fo- of, 143; on mines investigation, 23, 156;
lio editions, 58, 59; in literature, 65; mak- Nightingale and, 56; print culture and, 181;
ing of, 174–75; octavo editions, 40, 58–59; reports of, 182– 83; rural constabulary in-
press and, 194– 96; privileges to, 67; as self- quiry and, 150; sanitation committee and,
referential, 68 –69; use of, 61 57–59, 158, 184; working class and, 199
Board of Health (Britain), 57–59, 193 –94 Chartier, Roger, 18
Borland, Solon, 86, 120, 121 Charvart, William, 31
Boston Discipline Society, 7 Chase, Salmon P., 89
Bowen, Francis J., 265 Cherokees, 241
Bradbury, James W., 88 Childers, Joseph, 184
 Index 361

citizenship: for freedmen, 224–26; for Iro- cross-dressing, 156 – 57, 169, 274. See also mas-
quois, 250, 251 querades
Civil War, 75, 102– 3, 207, 291, 294–95 Cusick, James, 250
Clark, Joshua V. H., 277, 279
Clarke, Matthew St. Clair, 91 Dana, James Dwight, 116, 130
Clarke, Richard A., 305 Darling, Thomas, 280
class suspicion, 147–48, 159, 161, 162 Davis, Charles, 115
Clay, Clement J., 117 Davis, Edwin H., 237, 268 –71
Clay, Henry, 77, 291 Davis, Jefferson, 94, 126
Clinton, Bill, 309, 310 Dayton, William, 94
Clinton, DeWitt, 245, 294 “The Death Whoop” (Eastman), 259, 261
Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 309 De Bow, J. D. B., 228
Clokie, Hugh, 142 de la Bache, Henry, 156
Cobbett, William, 44, 49 Delonoga (Copperhead), 276
command papers, 40–41 Denman, Thomas, 53, 55
comparative approach: AFIC and, 214–15; of Derrida, Jacques, 203
commission work, 144–46; of text, 19–20 De Vote, Bernard, 108
The Concept of Representation (Pitkin), 13–14 diaries and journals, 10, 69, 326n. 18, 339n. 3;
Condé, Pedro Garcia, 119, 122 appropriation of, 202; Howe and, 212; of in-
“condition of England” question, 6, 161, 174 spectors, 176; of L. G. Hansard, 52; mainte-
Congress. See American government nance of daily, 107; Parker and, 296; pri-
Congressional Globe series, 73, 80, 91, 107 vacy and, 165; Schoolcraft and, 250; Stevens
congressional publications: binding of, 86 – and, 321n. 24; Wilkes and, 115
87; citizens, readers, and, 81–84, 133; as Dickens, Charles, 158, 215
dangerous, 94 –95, 100; debate over, 120 – Dickins, Asbury, 111
21, 227–28; distribution of, 73–74, 85 –86, Dickinson, Joseph, 164
97–99, 102; funding for, 72–73; language didacticism: distribution of reports and, 193 –
of, 87–89; management of, 111; pointless 94; of federal government, 255; in nine-
splendor of, 100–102; printing and, 74, 75– teenth century, 32; poor-law investigations
81; requests for, 82, 125–26, 128–33; sale report and, 40; selling documents and, 57
of, 100; Schoolcraft and, 271–72; traffic in, Diplomatic Correspondence of the American
97–99; U.S. Indian census report, 260 Revolution series, 90
Congressional Record series, 99 Disraeli, Benjamin, 41, 65, 158
Congressional Serial Set, 79, 86 distribution: of blue books, 191– 94; Chadwick
Conkling, Edgar, 128–29 and, 177, 193 –94; of Congressional publi-
Conness, John, 227–28 cations, 73 –74, 85– 86, 97– 99, 102; didac-
Cooke, Philip St. George, 108 ticism and, 193 – 94; of mines investigation
copyright: government publication and, 25, reports, 29, 40; of parliamentary papers,
40, 73, 95; international law and, 102; 61–62; of poor-law investigations reports,
Schoolcraft and, 266–67; Wilkes and, 191–92
115 The Documentary History of the American
Council of the Publishers Association, 71 Revolution series, 91, 94
Couthouy, Joseph P., 116 Dodd, William, 149, 309
Cowan, Edgar, 227 Dodge, Augustus, 88
Cowell, John, 154, 155, 175 Doolittle, James R., 241
Crania Americana (S. Morgan), 239– 40 Doolittle Committee, 76, 241
Crawford, William, 53 Doyle, James Warren, 143
Creuzefeldt, Frederick, 127 Doyle, John, 66
 362 Index

Drayton, Joseph, 115–16 175; published instructions of, 147– 48; re-
Drinkwater, John Elliot, 168–69 port of, 43, 67, 197
Dunn, Mathias, 166 Factory (or Short Time) Movement, 145, 166 –
Du Ponceau, Peter, 245 67, 199
Dyson, Will, 188 facts: fact-finding rituals, 305– 6; production
of, 11–12; social, culture of, 137– 38; verifi-
East India Company, 37 cation of, 11, 174, 179 –81, 186, 250– 51, 261,
Eastman, Mary, 267 271; voice and, 174, 180, 197
Eastman, Seth, 259, 260, 261, 264, 267 Facts from the Factories (Leach), 165
Education, Committee of Privy Council on, Fanon, Franz, 284
62, 192, 193 Federal Writers’ Project, 103
Eisenstein, Elisabeth, 11 Felton, C. C., 113
Elliot, Richard Smith, 241 Felzenberg, Al, 307
Emancipation Proclamation, 204, 228 field experiences: of AFIC, 209 –12, 213; coun-
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 14–15, 108 terinvestigations, 164– 67; documents as al-
Emory, William, 108, 109, 119, 123, 124 –25, lowing access to, 181; informant distrust
126 and, 160–62; in Ireland, 150 –51; knowl-
Employment of Children, Royal Commission edge exchange and, 3 – 4; observation, 151–
on the: comparative approach of, 144 –45; 52; representation and, 14, 187; tropes in,
distribution of reports of, 29, 40; experi- 172; visits, of government officials, 152–53
ences of, 147, 156, 159; mission of, 146; re- field investigators: advocacy and, 155– 56; as
ports of, 25, 26 –28, 184 – 87, 188, 189–91; authors, 34, 178; census of Indian tribes
witnesses for, 148–49 and, 258; doubling of in reports, 190; im-
Engels, Friedrich, 10, 236, 274 provisation and, 154; local knowledge and,
Erle, William, 165 –66 143–44; reports on visits by, 156; require-
estrangement motif, 109, 187, 212–16, 217 ments placed on, 164; sense of indepen-
ethnology: cooperation of Indians with, 292– dence of, 154–55; as spies, 172; subjectivity
93; frontier, 243–46; government and, of, 157
253 – 55; Janus face of, 290; Morgan and, Fillmore, Millard, 261
237–38, 239, 279, 281, 286; Schoolcraft Fineman, Joel, 183
and, 243, 265 Finer, Herman, 139
Europe-envy, 254 Finer, S. E., 40
The Eustace Diamonds (Trollope), 65 Fleet Papers, 170
Evans, Alexander, 87 Flood, F. J., 175
Ewart, William, 66– 67 Folsom, George, 247
expeditions: authorship and, 133; guiding Foote, Henry S., 88, 93, 96 –97
forces behind, 104; narrative strategies of Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World
texts of, 108–10; publication of reports (Owen), 231
from, 105, 110–11; support for, 25 –26, 104. Force, Peter, 80, 91, 94
See also Frémont, John Charles; Wilkes, foreign languages, printing in, 50, 87–89
Charles Fortescue, John William, 61
Ezrahi, Yaron, 180 Foucault, Michel, 3, 140, 172, 190, 205
founding fathers: Iroquois and, 300– 301; ven-
Factory Act (1833), 171, 176 eration of, 92– 93, 282– 83
Factory Commission: class-based challenge to, Fowle, George M., 130
167–71; duration of, 147; files on, 182–83; Framework Knitters Commission, 167, 325n. 4
Oastler and, 200; prepublication work of, franking privilege, 78
 Index 363

fraternal organizations, 281–82 Greenhow, Robert, 94 – 95

Fredrickson, George, 222 Greg, W. R., 199
Frémont, Jessie Benton, 106–7 Grey, Earl, 137, 192
Frémont, John Charles: bee and, 109; career Grey, George, 59, 164, 178
of, 35, 108; flag and, 26, 27, 30; government Griswold, Whiting, 251
and, 25–26; nation building and, 31; presi- Gwin, M., 82, 87– 89
dential campaign of, 27; reports of, 26 –28,
29, 105, 106–7, 110 –11; sublime motif and, Habermas, Jürgen, 32, 43, 69, 70, 302
109 Hale, John P., 87, 117
Freud, Sigmund, 282 Hamilton, Alexander, Works, 92
Fuller, Thomas J. D., 85 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 92
Hamlin, Hannibal, 86, 94, 96
Gales, Joseph, Jr., 79, 80, 90–91, 92, 107, 111 Handloom Weavers Commission, 145 –46,
Gallatin, Albert, 243, 244, 268, 269 162–63, 167, 181, 200 –201
Gaskell, Peter, 145, 151–52 Handsome Lake, 278
Gass, Patrick, 127 Hansard, Luke, 45, 46, 53– 54, 61, 179. See
Gavin, Hector, 159 also Stockdale v. Hansard
gender issues, field investigations and, 151– Hansard, Luke Graves, 52
52, 159; Indian and, 283 –84; marketplace Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 68
and, 224–25; mines investigation and, 187, Harding, J. D., 163
188, 189, 190; poor-law investigations and, Hard Times (Dickens), 65, 215
182; short time committees and, 166; social Harlan, James, 101
investigations and, 264 Harris, Betty, 185
Gibb, George, 261 Harrison, Frederic, 165– 66
Ginzburg, Carlo, 215 Hazard, Ebenezer, 89 – 90
Gladstone, William, 217 Headlam, Thomas Emerson, 57
Glendinning, George, 276 Heathcote, John, 155
Goetzmann, William, 127 Henley, Joseph Warner, 67
Gonzales, Inez, 122 Henry, Joseph, 237, 258, 268 –70
Gould, Augustus Addison, 116, 134 heteroglossia, 191
Gouverneur, Samuel L., 92–93 Higginson, Thomas W., 216 –17, 225
government: definition of, 23; ethnological Higham, John, 104
knowledge and, 253 – 55; as publisher, 1, Hill, Frederick, 153
28; textuality of, 9. See also American gov- Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 309–10
ernment; British government; state Historical and Statistical Information Respect-
Government by Commissions: Illegal and Per- ing the History Condition and Prospects of
nicious (Smith), 162 the Indian Tribes of the United States, 259
Gowers, Ernest, Plain Words, 71 history, research projects as “making,” 10–11
Grace Creek Mound, Virginia, 270–71 History of Oregon and California (Green-
Graham, James (Sir), 153 how), 94–95
Graham, James D., 119 Holland, G. Calvert, 144
Grand Army of the Republic, 295 Hooker, Joseph, 118
Grand Order of the Iroquois. See New Order Hope, John, 152
of the Iroquois Horner, Leonard: in field, 152, 160, 162, 183,
Grant, Ulysses S., 76, 291 184; as inspector, 155, 174 –75; report by,
Gray, Andrew, 119 178
Gray, Asa, 104, 113, 117, 127, 130 Houston, John, 85
 364 Index

Houston, Sam, 120–21 and, 247–48; Condolence Council of, 279 –

Howard, William H., 210 80, 304; as dwellers of longhouse, 289 – 90;
Howe, Samuel Gridley: AFIC and, 204, 208; family organization of, 286 –88; influence
black psyche and, 231; in Canada, 213, 219 – of, 300–301; New Order of the Iroquois
20, 221; career of, 209; on freedmen, 205; and, 285; Ogden Land Company and, 247;
methods of, 210–11; racial theory of, 221– political organization of, 286, 287– 88;
24, 232–33; reports of, 212; on skin color, Schoolcraft and, 249 – 52; study of, 237– 38.
219 –20; Sumner and, 82 See also Seneca
Howe, Timothy O., 117 Irving, Washington, 277
Howell, George, 174–75
Hume, Joseph: committee of, 54; reform Jackson, Andrew, 80, 92, 244, 284
efforts and, 43; reports and, 57, 73, 192–93; Jacksonian revolution, 74
sale of papers and, 51, 52; on statistical Jarvis, Edward, 211
compilations, 49 Jobling, T. W., 166
Humphreys, Andrew, 126 Johns, Adrian, 11
Hunt, Benjamin P., 211 Johnson, Andrew, 76
Hunter, Robert, 96 Johnson, Jemmy, 278, 280, 292
Hurd, Isaac, 279 Johnston, Jane, 244
Hurd, W., 278 Journal of the Constitutional Convention of
1787, 90
illustrations in reports: mines investigation,
186 – 87, 188; plates, hand-colored, 116; Kansas Committee, 75–76
Schoolcraft volumes, 261, 264, 267; U.S. In- Karistagia (Steeltrap), 275 –76
dian census, 259, 260 Kay-Shuttleworth, James Philips, 139, 199
Imagined Communities (Anderson), 31–32 Kean, Thomas H., 306
Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chia- Kearny, Stephen Watts, 108
pas and Yucatan (Stephens), 121 Kemble, Fanny, 212, 229
Indian: interest in, 236–37, 243; knowledge Kennedy, John L., 186
about, 242; past/present/future typology Kerner Commission, 307
and, 238 –39; playing, 281– 82; as vanish- Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 82
ing, 134, 222, 235 –36, 249, 253, 284. See kinship, anthropology of, 237, 273
also Indian removal Knight, Charles, 39, 59, 194
Indian Office (U.S.), 241, 255, 258 knowledge: accessibility of, 48 – 49; commerce
Indian removal, 75, 237, 241, 244, 262 of, 12, 51–56, 70, 85; ethnological, 253 –55,
industrial novel, 30 299; exchange of, 2– 4; about Indians, 242;
informants. See witnesses of locality, 143, 144; policy of, 42–44; policy-
information, concept of, 32– 33 oriented social, production of, 308; repre-
initiation rites, 277–78, 281– 82 sentation and, 174; useful, 77; use of term,
Inouye, Daniel K., 300 60 –61
inquiries. See royal commissions of inquiry;
social inquiries laborers: demands from, 166 –67, 197– 98; re-
Inquiries respecting the History, Present Con- ports and, 198 –99; representation of, 159;
dition, and Future Prospects, of the Indian as witnesses, 148 – 49
Tribes of the United States (Schoolcraft), Lacan, Jacques, 284, 288
260– 65 La Fort, Abram, 277
Intemperance and Vice (Oastler), 199 language issues, 87–89, 159– 60, 191
Iroquois: adoption by, 280 –81, 282; census Leach, James, 165
 Index 365

League of the Iroquois (Morgan), 236, 273, McLane, Robert, 84

285 – 89 McLernand, John A., 84 –85
Lee, Robert E., 291, 294 McMillan, Harry, 210, 218
Leifchild, John Roby, 157, 161 McWillie, William, 83, 86
“Letters on the Iroquois” (Morgan), 277 Mechanics’ Institutions, 61– 62
Lewis, George Cornewall, 64 Medill, William, 252, 253
Lewis, Meriwether, 127 Meehan, John S., 115 –16
Liberia, 220, 334n. 40 Melville, Herman, 30
libraries: of Congresspersons, 98–99; of par- Memphis riots committee, 75–76
liamentarians, 65 –67, 66 Mesilla Strip, 119
Lieber, Francis, 216 middle class, 6–7, 237– 38, 281–82, 289
Limer, Sarah, 189– 90 Miles, William Augustus, 163
Lincoln, Abraham, 77, 81, 208, 230 military, African Americans in, 216 –18, 225
Lincoln, Frederick, Jr., 214 Mill, John Stuart, 16, 37
Lingen, Ralph R. W., 192, 193 Millins, Michael, 182
Linn, Lewis F., 107 Milnes, Richard Monckton, 59
Lippincott (publisher), 231, 260, 266–67 mines investigation. See Employment of Chil-
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 30, 263 dren, Royal Commission on the
Louisiana, 218 –19 minstrelsy, 283
Ludlow, J. M., 230 miscegenation, 222, 223, 233
Lund, Banniester, 185 misrepresentation, 15, 196 – 99, 240
Lynch, William, 111 Mitchell, James, 189
Moby Dick, or, The Whale (Melville), 30
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 69 Monroe, James, 92– 93
Mackworth, Herbert, 177 Moral Physiology (Owen), 229
Madison, James, 92 Morgan, Lewis Henry: adoption of, 280 –81;
Major, John, 308 Ancient Society, 236, 274; authenticity and,
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 283 274; ethnology and, 237– 38, 239, 279, 281,
Mandan Indians, 254 286; Gordian Knot and, 275; Indian names
“manifest destiny,” 26, 235, 262 and, 288; informants of, 291–94; Iroquois
Manypenny, George, 265, 295 kinship and, 237; League of the Iroquois,
Marcou, Jules, 127 236, 273, 285 –89; “Letters on the Iro-
Marcy, William, 252 quois,” 277; material culture and, 290 –91;
Marshall, John, 48 museum and, 246; polygenism and, 240; ra-
Martineau, Harriet, 39, 40, 49 tionalist materialism of, 299 – 300; School-
Marx, Karl, 4, 10, 236, 274 craft and, 250 –51; Systems of Consanguin-
Mason, James, 120 ity and Affinity of the Human Family, 273–
masquerades, 169, 171, 237–38, 281–83, 293. 74; utopian communities and, 288 – 89. See
See also cross-dressing also New Order of the Iroquois
Massachusetts, 7, 251– 52 Morgan, William, 275
May, Ernest R., 307 Morpeth, Lord (7th Earl Carlisle), 152
Mayhew, Henry, 160 Morrison, William, 98
McClellan, John, 118–19 Morton, Edward, 59– 60, 61
McClelland, Robert, 123 Morton, Samuel, 239 – 40, 261
McCulloch, John Ramsay, 63, 65, 192 mound builders, 268
McFeely, Drake, 306 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 308
McKaye, James, 204, 209, 212, 218–19, 224 Moynihan Report, 308 –9
 366 Index

Muggeridge, Richard, 200–201 Osborne, Stephen, 295

museumification, 246, 254, 255 O’Sullivan, Timothy H., 207
Owen, David Dale, 82, 120
Napier, Macvey, 199 Owen, Robert Dale: AFIC and, 204; career of,
Narrative of the United States Exploring Ex- 208 –9, 230; on enfranchisement, 225 –26;
pedition (Wilkes), 30, 105 – 6, 113, 114 Final Report and, 228 – 30; Footfalls on the
National Academy of Science (U.S.), 208 Boundary of Another World, 231; history of
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks slavery of, 304; market and, 224; methods
upon the United States (9/11 Commission), of, 210; Moral Physiology, 229; reports of,
304– 5, 306–8 212, 213, 216, 219; spiritualism and, 231
National Health Reform, Task Force on, 309
National Intelligencer, 79, 107, 122–23 Pacific Railroad surveys, 105, 125, 126 – 33, 128
Native American. See Indian; Iroquois Pakington, John, 67
The Nature of the Book (Johns), 11 Palmer, Aaron H., 93 – 94, 95– 97
New Order of the Iroquois: activities of, 276 – panopticon, 3, 140, 165, 172
78, 281–83; advocacy of, 292, 293; descrip- Parker, Arthur, 295
tion of, 235, 275, 277; Iroquois and, 285; as Parker, Ely S.: career of, 291, 294 –95, 299; on
mnemonic device, 304; modifications to, depiction of Chief Tammany, 296, 298;
280; Morgan and, 274; Parker and, 294; doubled identity of, 295; family of, 292;
representation and, 279; Schoolcraft and, Freemasons and, 294; irony of, 298 – 99;
235, 267–68, 276–77; search for knowl- Morgan and, 274, 278, 291– 92; photo of,
edge for, 278 –79; song of, 276 297; Schoolcraft and, 293–94; voice of,
newspapers, 31, 77–78, 194 295 –96
New York Historical Society, 247 Parker, Theodore, 81
New York State, 73, 74, 247– 49, 288–89 Parkinson, Cyril Northcote, 63, 71
Nicholls, George, 147 Parkinson’s Law, 63
Nightingale, Florence, 56 parliamentary papers: conflict over, 41– 42,
The 9/11 Investigations (PublicAffairs Books), 64 – 68; definition of, 312n. 6; distribution
306 of, 61–62; editing of, 46; proper names in,
Nora, Pierre, 298 63– 64; readability of, 61, 70–71; reform
Normanby, Marquess of, 158 initiatives and, 43, 47–51; sale of, 51–56.
“Notes of Military Reconnaissance from Fort See also blue books
Leavenworth in Missouri to San Diego in Parsons, Richard, 308
California” (Emory, Abert, and Cooke), 108 Peale, Titian Ramsay, 116 –17
Notes of the Iroquois (Schoolcraft), 249–51, Pearce, James A., 97, 116, 117, 118, 266
285 – 86 Pease, Richard H., 290 –91
nudity, female, 188, 190, 264 Peel, Robert, 55, 70, 166
Nunberg, Geoffrey, 32, 33 performance, 3, 33–34, 139 –40, 303
Personal Narrative of Explorations and Inci-
Oastler, Richard, 169, 170, 199, 200–201, 202–3 dents in Texas, New Mexico, California,
Ogden Land Company, 247, 292, 295 Sonora, and Chihuahua (Bartlett), 121–24
Olmsted, Frederick Law, 7, 212–13 petitions, printing of, in Britain, 49, 55
orature, 36– 37, 303 Phillips, Wendell, 230
Organization and Rules of Trade Unions, Pierce, Edward, 206, 217–18, 224 –25
Royal Commission on the, 165 –66 Pierce, Franklin, 80, 126
The Origins of the Family, Private Property Pitkin, Hanna, 13 –14
and the State in the Light of the Researches Plain Words (Gowers), 71
of Lewis H. Morgan (Engels), 274 Plunkett, Eugene, 89
 Index 367

Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Purloined Letter,” “Reconnaissances of Routes from San Anto-
284 –85 nio to El Paso,” 86
policy of knowledge, 42–44, 75 Record of an Obscure Man (Putnam), 214 –15
Polk, James, 253, 291 Red Jacket, 275, 295, 297
polygenism, 240 Reform Act (1832), 137, 168
polyphony of social reporting, 173–74, 190–91 Register of Debates in Congress, 91
poor-law investigations: dates of, 325n. 4; dis- Report on the Geology of Lake Superior
tribution of report of, 191–92; in England (Owen), 120
and Wales, 150, 153, 167; in Ireland, 143, reports, official: accuracy of, 55– 56; appen-
147, 153, 154, 157, 159; methods of, 171–72, dices, 180; appropriation of, 201– 3; audi-
182; overview of, 39; reports of, 39 –40, 175, ence for, 17, 56 – 57, 58, 59 – 63; confusion
181; in Scotland, 150, 179 over purpose of, 176; criticism of, 178; fac-
Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated (Mar- tual, 5; inquiries and, 303; leaking of, 178;
tineau), 39, 40 looting of, 202– 3; movement of, 35 – 36;
Porter, Charles Talbot, 280, 293 9/11 Commission and, 306 – 8; objectifica-
Porter, G. R., 162 tion of West through, 110; presentation of,
Pottawatomie, 241– 42 36–37; representation and, 15; of royal
Power, Alfred, 154, 168–69 commissions, 67– 68; as subgenre in history
Pratt, Henry, 120 of book, 35. See also blue books; Congres-
Preuss, Charles, 106 sional publications; illustrations in reports;
print culture: Constitution and, 92; as parliamentary papers; requests for official
medium of witnessing, 180; national cul- documents
ture and, 30–31; republicanism and, 9–10, representation: chain of, 180, 198; double,
76 –77; studies of, 34–35; veneration of, 236–37; explicit and implicit aspects of,
69 –70; voice and, 37 14–15; field experiences and, 14, 187; Gray
printers, 313n. 16. See also specific printers on, 113; knowledge and, 174; metonymy
print statism: appropriation and, 201–3; com- and, 184; Morgan and, 279; of nation by
munity and, 31– 32; divergent publics and, government, 2; New Order of the Iroquois
70; national culture and, 30 –31; overview and, 279; 9/11 Commission and, 304 –8;
of, 2, 8 –13, 302; print capitalism and, 2, 9; occlusion, erasure, and, 4; official report
risks of, 53– 55, 95, 105, 125, 174 and, 15; performance and, 139 –40; politi-
proprietors, self-reporting duties of, in cal, 15 –17, 18, 161, 243; self-representation,
Britain, 164–65 68–69, 102, 202; state and, 2, 5, 17–18; sta-
Proust, Marcel, 215 tistical, 216; typology of, 13 –14
psyche: of African Americans, 231–32; of In- Representative Men (Emerson), 14 –15
dian, 245 republicanism and print culture, 9–10, 76–
public opinion, 16, 49, 174, 180 77
Public Record Office (PRO), 49– 50, 191 requests for official documents: for agricul-
public school system (U.S.), 7, 32 tural report, 84; by laborers, 197; Mechan-
“The Purloined Letter” (Poe), 284 –85 ics’ Institutions and, 62; by members of
Putnam, Mary, 214 –15 Congress, 86; by M.P.s, 52; for Pacific Rail-
road surveys, 125 –26, 128 –33; from U.S.
questionnaires, 147, 211, 212, 255– 58 citizens, 81, 82
quotations: from reports, 201; in reports, 181– Rice, Thomas Spring, 43
82, 203 Richard, Henry, 15
Riis, Jacob, 298
Reade, Charles, 30 Riley, George S., 250 – 51
Rebecca riots, 160 Rives (printer), 80, 107, 111
 368 Index

Roach, Joseph, 304 Schoolcraft, Mary Howard, 258, 261, 266

Robinson, Joseph, 142 Schurz, Carl, 76
Robinson’s Account of the Structure and Dis- science, 11–12, 113, 205, 309, 310
eases of the Generative System, 53 Scriven, Samuel Swain, 138, 154, 156 – 57,
Roemer, Timothy J., 306 185 –86, 189–90
romantic racialism, 222–24 Scully, V., 65
royal commissions of inquiry: as discoverers Sea Islands, S. C., 213, 214, 217–18, 224 –25
and intermediaries, 158; home secretary Seaton, William W., 79, 80, 90 – 91, 92, 107,
and, 142; prepublication work of, 175; privi- 111
leges of, 325n. 5; public sphere and, 42; re- Second Great Awakening, 12, 245
ports of, 179; use of, 137, 141– 42; views of, self-representation, 68 – 69, 102, 202
139. See also field experiences; field investi- Seneca, 247–49, 280 – 81, 284, 291– 93, 299
gators; specific commissions Senior, Nassau, 39, 143, 181, 192
Royal Geographical Society of London, 118 Seward, William H., 296
Rural Constabulary Force Commission, 147, Sherman, John, 100
150, 192, 325n. 4 short-time (factory) movement, in Britain,
Rusk, Thomas Jefferson, 82, 94 145, 166– 67, 199
Russell, John, 150 Slade, William, 91– 92
Russell, Whitworth, 53 slavery: abolition of, 7, 204, 214; British parlia-
Russell, William Howard, 214 mentary hearings about, 194 – 95; history
of, 228–30; in the U.S., 7, 205, 209–10,
Sadler, Michael Thomas, 43, 148, 168, 179 212–13, 218–19
Sampson, John P., 233 Smalls, Robert, 210, 226
sanitary campaigns, in Britain, 146, 197 Smith, J. Toumlin, 44, 56, 162
sanitation commission (Britain), 57– 59, 158, Smith, Samuel H., 79
184 Smithsonian Contribution to Knowledge series,
Saunders, Robert, 174–75 237, 268
Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe: Algic Researches, Smithsonian Institution, 72, 104, 237, 246,
245– 46; career of, 243 –44; copyright of, 258, 268–70. See also Baird, Spencer
266 – 67; correspondence of, 265– 66; eth- social inquiries: discovery and, 18, 29, 158; In-
nology and, 244 –45, 265; on Indian-as- dian tribes and, 238–39; medium of, 9;
statue, 298; Indian census and, 247–48, overview of, 6–8, 302–3; reform cam-
255– 60; Indian names and, 288; Inquiries paigns compared to, 10 –11; reports of, 11–
respecting the History, Present Condition, 12, 186; Sadler on, 168; sequence of, 304; so-
and Future Prospects, of the Indian Tribes cial groups and, 18; in twenty-first century,
of the United States, 260– 65; as intellectual 304–6, 308–10; vantage point of, 142– 46.
entrepreneur, 243; as intermediary, 248– See also field experiences; field investiga-
49; Lake Itasca and, 245, 261; lobbying by, tors; royal commissions of inquiry
246, 252– 53; methods of, 271; moral his- society, 330n. 28; Civil War and, 206; culture
tory and, 239; national vision of, 282; New of social fact and, 137– 38, 139; discovery
Order of the Iroquois and, 235, 267– 68, (and imagination) of, 31, 144, 151–52, 158,
276–77; Notes of the Iroquois, 249–51, 159, 172, 184, 189; historicist conception of,
285 – 86; Palmer compared to, 93; Parker 220–21; Iroquois, discovery of, 236, 237,
and, 293–94; personal life of, 246, 258; 286–87, 288, 304; Morgan, and discovery
polygenism and, 240; publications of, 30, of, 273, 274, 281; overview of, 5 –8
236; publishing and, 258, 260; support for, Society for the Abolition of Slavery (Britain),
271–72; wives of, 244, 246, 258, 261, 266 194– 95
 Index 369

Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowl- Strachey, Lytton, 67

edge (SDUK), 39, 40 Street, Alfred B., 277
Society for the Suppression of Mendicity in Stuart, James, 155, 172, 174–76
London, 199–200 sublime motif, 109
The Song of Hiawatha (Longfellow), 30, 263 Sumner, Charles, 76, 81–82, 103, 208, 227, 271
Soulé, Pierre, 94 surrogation, 304
Southwood Smith, Thomas, 139, 158 Swift, Jonathan, 96–97
Sparks, Jared, 90 Sybil (Disraeli), 65
Spencer, John, 254 Symons, Jelinger C., 162– 63, 185, 186, 196
spiritualism, 231– 32 Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the
Squier, Ephriam G., 237, 246, 265, 268 –71 Human Family (Morgan), 273–74
Stall, Thomas, 98
Stamp Tax, 43 Tammany (chief ), depiction in monument,
Stanley, Edward Henry, 62–63 296, 298
Stanley, John Mix, 128 Tappan, Benjamin, 112, 114, 115
Stanton, Edwin, 204, 208, 212 Tappan, Lewis, 230
Starr, Kenneth, 307, 310 Thatcher, Margaret, 308
state: audience and, 302; culture and, 30–31, Thomas B. Wait and Sons, 89 – 90
76 –77; informational tasks of, 1–2; as ob- Thompson, Jacob, 85
ject of imagination and invention, 207–9; Thurston, Benjamin Babcock, 124
as own medium, 2; paternalism of, 238; Tocqueville, Alexis de, 208, 221, 224
public sphere and, 70; as publisher, 31– 32, Tooke, William, 52
93– 97; representation to publics by, 5; sci- Toombs, Robert A., 84, 117
ence and, 205; as subject and object of rep- Torrey, John, 104, 106, 127, 130
resentation and investigation, 17–18. See Townsend, George, 100–102
also didacticism; government; print statism Trade Union Act (Britain), 166
State of Education in Wales, Commission trade unions, 165 –66, 197
into, 15, 160, 167, 196 Treasury statistics report (U.S.), 84 – 85
State Papers and Public Documents series, 90 Tremenheere, Hugh Seymour, 149, 155, 163,
Stationery Office (Britain), 47–48, 58 –59, 164, 177, 197– 99
63, 70 –71 Trollope, Anthony, 65
Statistical Abstract, 66 Tufnell, Edward, 153, 154, 155
Statistical Associations, 6 –7 Tufnell, Henry, 61
Statistical Department of Board of Trade, 141 Tyler, John, 118
statistics: authenticity of facts and, 154; com-
parisons and, 144 – 45; as difficult to obtain, U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers,
162, 248, 258; estrangement and, 216; as ex- 118, 126
pensive to print, 48; Indian tribes and, 248, U.S. Constitution, 82– 83, 92
249, 251, 255– 56, 257, 258; representation U.S. Exploring Expedition, 112
and, 146; slavery and, 228 –30; state knowl- U.S. General Land Office, 101–2
edge and, 141 U.S. Government Printing Office, 74, 81, 99, 101
Statutes at Large, 72 U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission, 124
Stephens, John Lloyd, 121 U.S. Patent Office, 83– 84, 101
Stevens, Henry, Jr., 72, 73, 74, 91–92 U.S. Sanitary Commission, 207– 8
Stockdale, John Joseph, 53 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 7, 81– 82, 212–13,
Stockdale v. Hansard, 18–19, 53, 55, 68 218
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 7, 81–82, 212–13, 218 utopian communities, 288 – 89
 370 Index

Vardon, Thomas, 65 Wentworth, John, 86

voice: anecdotes in reports and, 183–84; au- “What Shall We do With Our Blue Books?
thorship and, 4; cutting and pasting and, Parliament the National School Master”
182– 83; in journals, 183; oral expression, (Stanley), 62–63
print culture, and, 37; policy investigation Whipple, E. P., 226
and, 4–5; quotations in reports and, 181– “white trash,” 219
82; in reports, 174, 185, 190 –91 Whitman, Walt, 236
von Egloffstein, F. W., 127 Wilkes, Charles, 30, 105 –6, 112–18, 114
von Humboldt, Alexander, 107, 265 Williams, Jane, 196
Williams, Melissa, 18
Wade, Benjamin, 228 Wilson, Joseph, 101
Wales. See State of Education in Wales, Com- witnesses: AFIC and, 209 –10; bystanders as,
mission into 149 –50; cooperation of, 159; cross investi-
Walker, Isaac P., 82, 88 gations and, 162– 64; distrust and, 160 – 62,
Walsh, John, 181–82 258; editing of testimony by, 55–56; re-
Warner, Michael, 9, 92 ceipt of reports by, 193; selection of, 148 –
War of the Rebellion, 102–3 51; testimony of in reports, 42
Warren, William, 261 Wood, William John, 174 –76
Warren Commission, 307 Wood, William Rayner, 143, 146, 185, 189
Washington: Outside and Inside (Townsend), workhouse test, 171–72, 262, 310
100 –102 Works (Hamilton), 92
Washington Monument, 93 Wright, Marcus J., 103
Webb, Beatrice and Sydney, 139, 143– 44 Wyld, James, 53
Webster, Daniel, 77, 291, 294 Wynn, William, 56
Webster, James, 153– 54
Weekers, Cyrus, 251 Young, John, 290
Weld, Theodore, 212–13
Wellington, Duke of, 66 Zelikow, Philip D., 307