“Others destined to inhabit the lower rungs of society as servants”

An extract from Daniel N. Gullotta’s review for Providence magazine of Ownership: The Evangelical Legacy of Slavery in Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield by Sean McGever.

McGever highlights:

…the deeply hierarchical view of the world held by [Jonathan] Edwards, [John] Wesley, [George] Whitefield, and their evangelical contemporaries. From their perspective, just as God ordains some to be princes and governors, so too are others destined to inhabit the lower rungs of society as servants, laborers, and even slaves.

Slavery, therefore, was believed to be ordained by God and, in the words of Puritan clergyman William Gouge, such an understanding was “clearly and plentifully noted in the Scripture, that any one who is any whit acquainted therewith may know them to be so.”

While such views seem counterintuitive to our modern-day egalitarian norms, McGever adeptly explains why 18th-century evangelicals would have perceived our anti-hierarchical tendencies as nothing but a “hellish confusion” to borrow a description from the Puritan theologian John Owen.

Despite their divinely ordered view of the world, 18th-century evangelicals, following their theological ancestors, acknowledged that slavery was a sinful product of the fall. The question for most Christian thinkers was not whether slavery was biblical, but rather how it could be practiced biblically.

The book discusses how Whitefield promoted importing enslaved Africans as a solution for Georgia’s labor problems. Edwards wrote little on slavery for public consumption but defended and practiced it privately. As for the last of these prominent evangelists: 

Later in life, Wesley felt compelled to speak out as the abolitionist movement, driven primarily by Quakers in the 1770s, gained momentum. Readers might be surprised at how little Scripture he used in his shift to opposing slavery, favoring instead ideas drawn from natural law and reasoning. McGever…theorizes that Wesley would never have adopted his abolitionist stance had he been raised in America or even just spent more time there, arguing for the essential contingency of many deeply held beliefs.

Barbara Oberg and the Infrastructure of Early American Scholarship

Barbara Oberg, historian of early America, passed away this month. Though Oberg had the rank of professor in the Princeton History Department, she was known for a career of less visible work that benefited historical scholarship.

Primarily, Oberg was the lead editor of the Benjamin Franklin Papers and then the Thomas Jefferson Papers. Between the two series, she oversaw the publication of more than twenty volumes. In doing so, she both helped generations of scholars and readers access that correspondence and trained other documentary editors.

Dr. Oberg also edited collections of scholarly essays: Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World, Federalists Reconsidered, and Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture.

Oberg was also known within the profession for serving the non-university organizations that support scholars, research, and publication. The Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture just eulogized her this way:

Barbara was also an insightful and incisive leader. Keenly aware of the importance of institutions for scholarship, she was devoted to the organizations that support early American history, including the OI. From 2010 to 2023, she served on the OI’s Executive Board, presiding as Chair from 2014 onward. Her steady counsel, exceptional generosity, and subtle wit helped us flourish even as we navigated shifts in leadership and sponsorship and moved into our new home. We are profoundly grateful to her for her help.

The OI is not the only organization to have benefitted from Barbara’s keen intellect and energetic engagement. She helped steer the American Philosophical Society, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Society of Documentary Editors.

Indeed, at “A Life in Letters: A Celebration of Dr. Barbara Oberg”—a 2023 symposium jointly organized by the OI and the American Philosophical Society—historians, editors, and cultural leaders gathered in Philadelphia to discuss the ongoing importance of Barbara’s work. At “Barbara Fest,” as we called it, speakers and audience members alike testified to her profound impact on the organizations they cared most about.

The sessions of that symposium can be viewed here on YouTube. Historians of early America discuss Franklin, Jefferson, women, the field of documentary editing, and what Barbara Oberg brought to each of those areas.

Dublin Seminar on Disabilities, 25-26 June

The 2021 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife will take place online on 25-26 June. This year’s theme is “Living with Disabilities in New England, 1630-1930.”

The founder and longtime director of the Dublin Seminar, Peter Benes, passed away in March. As a scholar, organizer, editor, and encourager of other researchers (like me), he embodied the spirit of this annual seminar, which sought to focus on ordinary people and the stuff of everyday life.

Peter and his colleagues held their first seminar in 1976 in Dublin, New Hampshire (hence the name). For over three decades now, the seminar has been hosted by Historic Deerfield. Last year’s meeting had to be postponed because of the pandemic, and this year’s will be online, but it will still come to us through Historic Deerfield.

The full schedule of presentations is available here. Among the papers that caught my eye:

• Casey L. Green, “The Language of Impairment: Disability among New England Men, 1690-1800."
• Andrew J. Juchno, “‘The Fancies and Whimsies of People over-run with Melancholy’: Melancholy and the New England Church from Cotton Mather to Jonathan Edwards”
• Ross W. Beales, Jr. “‘either insane, enthusiastical, or in Liquor’: An Eighteenth-Century New England Minister’s Response to Mental Illnesses”
• Katherine R. Ranum, “Hearing the Gospel in a Silent World: Understanding the Intersection of Theology, Disability and Religious Practice in the Early Modern British Atlantic”
• Ben Mutshler, “For Service and Suffering: Invalid Pensioners in Colonial Massachusetts” 
• Benjamin H. Irvin, “[‘A] number of Toes & a quantity of good health’: The ‘Black Regiment’ and Veterans’ Disability after the Revolutionary War”
• Jennifer W. Reiss, “‘Pity That So Fine a Man Has Lost His Leg’: Gouverneur Morris and Early American Disability”
• Jerad Pacatte, “‘Fitness for Freedom’: The Lived Experience of Disability, Enslavement, and Emancipation in Early New England”

Other sessions focus on the Civil War and later periods, and I might have missed some papers with eighteenth-century content because I didn’t see that in their titles.

Among the other sessions are a conversation with Laurie Block, Executive Director of Straight Ahead Pictures and the founder and Executive Director of the Disability History Museum, and a summary address by Nicole Belolan on “Folklife and the Material Culture of Disability History in Early America.”

There will be live captioning provided by CaptionAccess, and K-12 educators can sign up for professional development points.

Registration for the 2021 Dublin Seminar costs $75, $65 for seminar members, and $45 for students, and is available online. Registrants can request complimentary lecture abstracts through e-mail. The goal of the Dublin Seminar is to produce a volume of the best papers on each seminar’s topic a couple of years afterward.

(The picture above shows Gouverneur Morris’s artificial leg, courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.)

A Common-place Sampling

The online history magazine Common-place just released a new issue featuring thirteen essays by young scholars on thirteen varied texts from or about early America. Each short essay is accompanied by a link, so it functions as an introduction to that work. Here are the pieces on eighteenth-century material.

Early America’s Guide to Sex: Aristotle’s Masterpiece
Sarah Schuetze
It is not hard to imagine the allure of such a work for readers—modest or otherwise—for it provided a rare detailed discussion of sex.

Poetic Order in Sarah Kemble Knight’s Journal
Kimberly Takahata
By liberating her thoughts from the space of prose and her account from the limitations of physicality, Knight can transform the landscape through her narration, using poetry to “divert” and contain the threat of the unfamiliar.

On Virtue: Phillis Wheatley with Jonathan Edwards
Michael Monescalchi
Wheatley’s saying that her soul touched by Virtue can “guide [her] steps” is thus more than just a metaphor for God’s ability to change a converted person’s life: it is an acknowledgment of the immense power that God’s virtuous character can have over a person’s body and soul.

Samson Occom’s Missionary Correspondence and the Common Pot
Lauren Grewe
Creating a literary genealogy linking Occom and Wheatley could change conceptions of early American Indian and African American writing and missionary work.

America, the “Rebellious Slut”: Gender & Political Cartoons in the American Revolution
Stephanie McKellop
Combining Revolutionary politics with the social and cultural valences of gender, race, class, nation, and power, this political cartoon serves as a multidimensional cipher which people at every knowledge level can participate in analyzing.

Introduction to The History of a French Louse
Julia Dauer
The satire’s narrator is a louse who has lived on a series of heads in and around Paris and been witness to the political maneuverings happening behind the scenes of the American Revolution.

Gallows Respectability
Ajay Kumar Batra
Sentimental reformist oration, fugitive confession, and the personal epistle are all represented in this text [the address of a African-American man named Abraham Johnstone being hanged—unjustly, he says—for murder in 1797].