Phillip H. Round
An eighteenth‐century American, reading a novel or religious tract by lamp light on a rainy afternoon, was more conscious than a consumer today of the circuitous journey her book had made from print shop to parlor. Philadelphia Quaker matron Hannah Drinker recorded the process in her diary for 1763: “went to Market this Morning, call’d at Uncles, and at Reeves, Silver‐smith, – bought little Books at Rivengtons – came home” (Crane 2004: 29). In fact, the lineaments of what book historian Robert Darnton (2002) has called the print “communications circuit” were quite visible in Drinker’s Philadelphia, as in most early American cities (11). The route from “the printer, the shipper, the bookseller and the reader” (11) was traced in an urban geography whose streets radiated from waterfront warehouses and wharfs toward edifices of power (the townhouse and meetinghouses), pausing briefly along the way – at Cornhill in Boston and along Market Street in Philadelphia – to open onto the shop windows of stationers and booksellers. At the dawn of the nineteenth century in New York City, a London visitor noted bookstores displayed “showboards and printed bills of every color” above their entrances (Buckingham 1841: 50). In early America, print literally advertised itself along the paths of its own diffusion.
The standard history of the English book trade in America, The History of the Book in America (1999), describes such print itineraries as “structurally interrelated with the book trades of western Europe” (Hall 1999: 7), and so they were. The first of these structures were the Atlantic mercantile trade routes, for the vast majority of books Americans read during the eighteenth century were printed in England. Once on the mainland, imported books joined other, locally printed matter on urban booksellers’ shelves. Books destined for the rural interior traveled on post roads, as hawkers fanned out across the hinterland in horse‐drawn wagons, selling pots and pans and sundries along with novels, Bibles, and other books. It was a hit‐or‐miss process at best. It was also time consuming. By the end of the eighteenth century, news took between five and ten days to reach the rural and interior backcountry settlements in the New England and mid‐Atlantic regions. In the South, the time was double that (Howe 2009: 225). Still, it was a distribution system that impressed contemporaries like John Adams and George Washington, who both felt that Tom Paine’s Common Sense (1775) was circulated widely and well, responsible for what Washington called “a powerful change […] in the minds of many men” that led to the American Revolution (Loughran 2007: 53).
In recent years, these two views of book circulation in America – as a structural extension of an efficient metropolitan book trade and an ad hoc, yet fairly coherent, system of local booksellers, itinerant hawkers, and post roads – have been complicated by research that has questioned both the coherence and the rapidity of the system. Recently, Trish Loughran (2007) has taken a closer look at how supposedly nation‐founding books like Common Sense were actually produced, circulated, and consumed. She finds fragmentation where others have claimed unity, a judgment that casts doubt on the book trade’s efficacy in constituting the class and political affiliations necessary to establishing anything resembling a “nationalized” public sphere (xix). In Loughran’s view, not only was print circulation less sure than was previously assumed, but its role in providing a critical venue for public opinion – something Michael Warner’s groundbreaking Letters of the Republic (1990) had championed – was also suspect.
Increasingly, scholars like Loughran have come to believe that print was just one among many communicative practices that enabled social formation in the colonies. Indeed, Robert Gross (2010) has uncovered an informal set of institutions of affiliation that supplemented the official English trade. His introduction to the second volume of A History of the Book in America outlines a “multifarious” American print marketplace, where the purchase and sharing of books in the social settings of “colleges, academies, and district schools; athenaeums, libraries, lyceums; gentleman’s learned societies, women’s reading circles, mechanics’ institutes, young men’s debate clubs” appears to have “heightened both national attachments and sectional resentments” through its integration of the transatlantic trade into more casual social circuits (4–5). David Shield’s Civil Tongues and Polite Letters (1997; see Further Reading), moreover, reveals the critical role of scribal publication systems in the colonies. Manuscript book circulation paralleled that of print, encouraging new forms of sociability constellated around manuscript coteries, salons, and literary societies. In addition to these newly discovered reading and writing communities in Anglo‐American civil society, Sandra Gustafson (2008) has pointed out the central role oratory played in the production of print and manuscript texts. “What if oratory and not print was the defining genre of political modernity[?]” she asks (471). Finally, many scholars have begun working to expand the field’s demographic areas of study, taking into consideration ethnic and class outsiders who participated in “systems of combined written/oral literacy” for whom print and manuscript also played significant roles in social formation (McHenry 2002: 35). As Joanna Brooks (2005) observes, “it is no longer possible to theorize about the eighteenth‐century American public print sphere without acknowledging the emergence in this era of a distinctly black tradition of publication […] premised on principles of self‐determination and structured by black criticisms of white political and economic dominance” (68). What was true for peoples of African descent was equally true for Native Americans.
This growing recognition of the roles performance, social practice, gender, and ethnicity played in colonial American print circulation has rendered an exclusively market economy model of its circulation obsolete. In its place, scholars like Matt Cohen (2010) advocate studying the processes of social formation constellated around “communications systems.” In colonial America, Cohen finds “evidence for a multimedia, continuous topography of communication techniques” rooted in “networks of signification” that expose the “mutually constitutive” relationship of material textual practices with “language, literary history, the immediate conditions of production of a text, and things like ideas, belief, and tradition” (2, 4, 6, 7). Cohen’s view is shared by a new generation of book historians who understand the codex as an object with a biography and its materiality as a function of the social relations between members of its reading and writing communities. Drawing on provocative work by Latour (2007), Lisa Gitelman (2014), and Jane Bennett (2010) (see Further Reading for details of all three), these scholars conceptualize textual materiality as assemblages of human and non‐human activities, live‐wired circuits of exchange and meaning formation. The new history of the colonial book is in some ways a history of books without books in the traditional sense. The codex has become an actor, and it and its readers mutually constitutive agents of change.
Certainly, the colonists’ recorded experiences of print center on groups and performance. Hannah Heaton, a rural Connecticut New Light Congregationalist, treated reading as a devotional act. Books were always at her side, even in “the barn, the cow house, the woods or swamp” (Lacey 1988: 287). Yet while her probate inventory lists a Bible, a Watts Psalm Book, and several other “small” tracts that probably followed Darnton’s circuit, most of her reading came to her through loans from friends and fellow travelers in the evangelical movement – that is, a social network. Mohegan minister Samson Occom similarly relied on social connections for his books, writing to London missionary philanthropist Benjamin Forfitt in 1771 to request “a few little Testaments to Dispose of among our Young people […] [and] Little Hymn Books Design’d for the Negroes, Printed by John Oliver in Bartholomew Close near West Smithfield” (Brooks 2006: 95). Occom had spent two years in England and had been introduced to the richness of the English book trade on its home soil and in its metropolitan center, but living on the colonial periphery and pursuing the calling of an itinerant minister left him especially removed from the main circuits of the trade.
Dr. Alexander Hamilton, traveling through the colonies in 1744, several times noted in his journal the performative, networked nature of print in America. One morning in Pawtucket, while awaiting a breakfast chocolate at his inn, Hamilton commented on the way broadsides created a public space of collective reading when he “observed a paper pasted upon the wall, which was a rabble of dull controversy betwixt two learned divines, of as great consequence to the publick as The Story of the King and the Cobbler or The Celebrated History of the Wise Men of Gotham” (Hart 1907: 182). On another occasion, he was “entertained” by a lively story of book burning: “one Davenport, a fanatick preacher […] told his flock in one of his enthusiastic rhapsodies, that in order to be saved they ought to burn all their idols. They began this conflagration with a pile of books in the publick street, […] and sang psalms and hymns over the pile while it was aburning” (197). During a stop in Boston, Hamilton witnessed a street‐side book sale in which the young auctioneer demonstrated how print encouraged wit and sociability when he barked out his patter: “This book, […] gentlemen, must be valuable. Here you have everything concerning popes, cardinals, anti‐Christ, and the devil” (133). The collection of books was nearly as diverting as the auctioneer was entertaining: “Pamela. Antipamela, The Fortunate Maid, Ovid’s Art of Love and The Marrow of Modern Divinity” (133).
In each exchange, colonial American readers (listeners, viewers) display an acute awareness that print culture went far beyond its mere printedness to include social circuits where metropolitan and colonial printing and binding, reprinting and importing, paper making and press operation were inflected by very distinct human interactions in the colonies. For these readers, print was not simply an abstract space of public debate but a very tactile set of material practices, and it is this new avenue of exploration in book history – what Cohen (2010) terms “publication event[s]” (7) – that has changed the way we understand book circulation in the colonies and early republic.
Although publication events were initially centered on local “controversies” like the one Alexander Hamilton observed in 1744, over time they took on more predictable contours that at once reflected and refracted the expansion and evolution of the metropolitan book trade. From 1620 through the first decades of the eighteenth century, their chronologies are varied and discontinuous. Along with fowling pieces, pots and kettles, shovels, spades, augers, chisels, gimlets, and hatchets, the first English settlers to America brought books. Within a few years of the Virginia Company’s settlement of Jamestown, for example, London bookseller John Budge began buying books for the Company. In addition to copies of the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible, Budge’s list includes some “91 copies of two tracts which were employed mainly amongst the settlers in Virginia to teach the craft” of raising silkworms (Quinn 1969: 355). The 1644 probate inventory of William Brewster, an original settler of the Plymouth Colony, lists “no fewer than 400 books” (Dexter 1890: 81); remarkably, 25% bear publication dates after August of 1620, when the group set sail for the new world. A close reading of the list also shows that Brewster bought books from Europe in all but two of the 24 years he lived at Plymouth. Clearly, the book trade was imbricated in the social lives of the earliest colonists, even before they had put down roots in the New World.
The books of Budge and Brewster were commodities and thus shared with other “marchentable” objects a cognate place in the supply lines of transatlantic mercantilism. Unlike shovels and spades, however, books also forged or maintained social and familial linkages across the Atlantic. An inscribed family Bible recalled those left behind; a controversial tract, the doctrinal reasons for one’s having emigrated to the New World in the first place. Books linked the colonists to booksellers, agents, and printers, and through these actors to the trade as a whole. In this way, print consumers like Brewster maintained a virtual social presence in a nascent transatlantic public sphere where book lists and advertisements enticed them to stay current on political controversies and literary fashions back home even as they forged new lives in the colonies.
But books also represented social capital in the colonies themselves, and the fact that several duplicate copies appear in Brewster’s inventory suggests that part of his library was also intended “for the general use” of the fledgling community (Dexter 1890: 82). Throughout much of the seventeenth century, the circulation of printed matter adhered to actors like Brewster, often concentrated in the private libraries of elites and circulated in exclusive print coteries of borrowing and exchange. Yet, especially in these early years, printed works shared their cultural work with an equally potent body of “scribal publications,” handwritten books similarly circulated among select social groups. Until at least the middle of the eighteenth century, handwritten texts continued to enjoy unique social power, because, as David D. Hall (2008) notes, although “many printed texts were also associated with patrons or a specific group of readers, […] the connections between text and social context were much more immediate in the world of handwritten texts” (33).
Even so, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, perhaps the most avid of colonial scribal cultures, imported an English‐language printing press in 1638. Its purchase cemented what Hall has called a Protestant vernacular print culture that worked to “quench […] sparks of contention” in the fledgling community (158) by employing public print alongside manuscripts to manage complex issues of governance and social disorder. The other colonies would have to wait until the eighteenth century to experience this level of integration of locally printed matter into the machinery of authority. New York remained a Dutch province until 1674, and Pennsylvania would not be made a proprietary colony by royal charter until 1681. It wasn’t until the 1720s that the eastern seaboard finally coalesced into a viable, coherent market for the English book trade. Even then, the northern and the southern colonies soon diverged in the rate and depth of their participation in the print marketplace. With Benjamin Franklin’s arrival in Philadelphia in 1723, the city could boast three printers, while the presses of William Bradford and John Peter Zenger served New York. The Chesapeake colonies, however, could not support more than one printer until the 1760s. By that time, an inter‐colonial trade had taken shape, one in which the northern booksellers supplied southern printers what they could not produce for themselves.
The configuration of colonial print systems shifted again in the 1750s, as America witnessed an invigorating influx of printers from across the Atlantic. Hugh Gaine in New York and David Hall and Matthew Carey in Philadelphia arrived to help transform American print culture into a system as nearly mature as that of the mother country. Local printers imported English books, set and printed local almanacs and “controversies,” and often founded their town’s first newspaper, thus integrating most aspects of civil and personal life into the book trade. Carey went on to become the most successful printer of the period, founding the first great “national” literary publication, The American Museum (1787–1792). In its pages, Carey reprinted the US Constitution, Common Sense, and the poetry of Philip Freneau and Anna Boudinot Stockton. By the final decade of the eighteenth century, American printers had begun to produce editions of belletristic texts like Richardson’s Pamela (1740), adding them to their lists of Bibles, religious steady sellers, almanacs, and “small” books they had subsisted on during the decades before the Revolution.
In addition to the historical forces that shaped print networks, growing and shifting with the needs and interests of successive generations of colonists, the topographic and demographic peculiarities of the colonies lent the American book trade singular features. The 13 British American colonies (and after them, the United States) were geographically distinct enough to warp the networks of the metropolitan book trade into paths that forged an unusual degree of local publishing autonomy. Unlike England, where 80% of the population was concentrated in urban areas by the end of the eighteenth century, the American colonies were far and away rural societies, with only a scant 4% of their citizens residing in cities (Gilmore 1992: 23–24). This rustic topography not only encouraged itinerant peddlers to include printed material among their wares, but also the development of backcountry print centers which served as “multiple function cultural institutions including printing, publishing, bookselling and advertising.” These, in turn, promulgated “distinctive shipping routes and distribution systems for printed matter imported into the area, a weekly newspaper, sometimes a periodical or a lending library, and often an attached post office” (Gilmore 1992: 24).
Such distinctive, decentralized country print centers proved especially adept at quenching the local public’s thirst for English books, this time in the form of reprints made by homegrown printers. As James N. Green (2010) explains, “the established paths of trade and transport were east‐to‐west across the Atlantic, not north‐to‐south among the American seaboard towns,” thus forcing small printers to focus on “the old colonial staples of newspapers, almanacs, government printing, and pamphlets relating to current events. The only books it made sense for them to print were those written locally” (78). After the Revolution, this dynamic remained largely intact, in spite of the efforts of an American intelligentsia, flush with cultural nationalism, to harness local production centers to the printing of American‐authored books. American printers and booksellers, Green maintains, “put a higher priority on building American manufactures than American writers. In their calculations, an American book was a book printed in America, employing American laborers, preferably on paper from American mills with American‐made type” (79).
By 1800, one could find books in the Kentucky and Ohio backcountry with some regularity. Probate and tax inventories suggest that 50% of the richest third of the regions’ inhabitants owned some books, and even the poorest owned at least one. General stores did a brisk business in writing paper and the odd textbook. John Davis is typical of backcountry dwellers who owned no taxable property, yet acquired printed books. In addition to thread, linen, needles, scissors, coffee, and calico print fabric, Davis purchased “writing paper, a spelling book, and spectacles” from the Louisville general store owned by James McDonald and Charles Thurston. In their account books, the merchants also recorded that Davis paid for these and other items with “eleven loads of wood, two planks, one pole, and a small amount of cash” (Perkins 1991: 498).
This would be the shape of the American book trade, save the disruption of the Revolutionary War, from 1750 through 1820. From the commercial centers of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, the print market “retraced the original embryonic skeleton” (Amory 1999: 315) of the colonies’ original settlement patterns. Westward from seaport centers, up waterways and makeshift post roads, accumulating materials and consumers in more remote print centers, the trade veined the colonies with official routes of commerce and unofficial networks of kinship, social relations, and entrepreneurial storekeeping and peddling. Eventually, the print hubs of Philadelphia and New York would merge, creating a print nexus that, by 1790, eclipsed Boston’s preeminence in the business. By 1820, the American states were on the cusp of a communications revolution in which government‐funded waterways and roads, and privately capitalized paper mills and steam presses would establish proper western print hubs in distant but growing urban centers like Cincinnati and Lexington.
These broad outlines of the print circuits that served the dominant cultures of early America, however, must be overlaid with another set of transmission pathways, ones forged by Africans and Native American peoples, colonial and US diplomats, and Christian missionary societies. American demography, skewed toward a high number of semi‐illiterate and unconverted Africans and Native Americans, drove the expansion of a sub‐market for evangelical and missionary print much faster than in the mother country. These demographics, coupled with the 13 American states’ uneasy relationship with the colonial dominions of France, Spain, and England that hemmed them in on all sides, also drove a peculiar manuscript and print distribution system centered on diplomacy. Like the missionary system, this one relied on Native Americans as mediators, as well as producers and consumers of texts across the backcountry and borderlands.
The missionary print trade involved books specially targeted at Africans and Indians and developed a unique hybrid system of patronage and market capitalism to drive its print productions into the hands of these prospective readers in America. When he was baptized in London, February 1759, the enslaved African Olaudah Equiano received a gift book that was typical of the genre: Bishop Thomas Wilson’s An Essay Towards an Instruction for the Indians (London, 1740). The book’s preface proclaimed the tract as suitable for both “the Indians […] a tractable People” (v), and “the very Hottentots, who are supposed to be the dullest of Mankind” (ix). It also describes the specialized book trade that sustained its publication and circulation. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) had perfected a system for “the dispersing of [books] more effectually,” and by signing up Corresponding Members, who were “intitled [sic] to have a Supply of [books], to be disposed of among such of the Neighbouring Clergy or Laity as desire them” (ii). The SPG offered “bound books” to Corresponding Members “at the prime Cost in Quires, […] and the Stich’d Books, at one Half of the Price there set down, as the prime Cost of each” (ii–iii). Wilson’s language here is drawn from the mercantile side of book publishing and distribution that is so well documented in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Amory and Hall 1999). But what is especially interesting is the way that it imagines a kind of evangelical instrumentality for this otherwise neutral business apparatus.
For his part, Samson Occom considered his peripheral location within the British mercantile system an integral part of the trouble he was having in crafting an intertribal Christian Indian community woven together with the help of tracts such as Bishop Wilson describes. Writing to Benjamin Forfitt, Occom explains, “I live near a Center of five Towns of Indians and they Come to me for Books – We used to be Supplyd in Some measure with Books from Dr. Wheelocks Indian School, but he is now removed with his school far up into the Country to the distance of 150 miles; and Boston and New York are a great Distance from us” (Brooks 2006: 94–95). Throughout Occom’s journals (1743–1790), the reader encounters commentary related to themes of time and distance, itinerancy and marginality that jeopardize his relation to the dominant communication circuits. Clearly, the print centers that served the rural Anglo‐American public were not sufficient for the needs of Native Americans.
In response, missionaries and Native and Black congregants developed ways to extend the English book trade proper, relying on what Robert Warrior (Osage) (2005) has called “intellectual trade routes” of intercultural exchange (181). Wabanaki scholar Lisa Brooks (2007) has described the way books and manuscripts flowed through “Native space,” following woodland information networks that existed before contact. Stretching from Montauk villages on Long Island to Mohegan towns in Connecticut, Narragansett settlements in Rhode Island, and on up the Connecticut River Valley to Deerfield and Stockbridge, prayer books, treaties, and hymnals made their way from print centers to the seaboard interior before turning west to the upper Ohio River, where Mohawk and Oneida communities staked claim to the western “door” of the Iroquois confederacy. The dynamism of this northeastern portion of Indian Country was not only geographic, but also intercultural, and Brooks reminds us that a profound intermingling of tribal ethnicities was “a prominent feature of Native space” (27). Within this intertribal topography, Brooks notes, “writing was operating as a tool of communication […] independent of colonial institutions and even in direct opposition to the colonial project” (43).
Books were exchanged and writing debated in geographic and political hubs that emerged at critical nodes in the interface between British (and later, American) colonial administration and Native space and the Black Atlantic. Much like the coffeehouses, bookshops, and taverns that supported the Anglo‐American public sphere along the eastern seaboard, places like Buffalo Creek in New York; Detroit; the Ohio River Valley; New Echota, Georgia; and the Shawanoe Mission in Kansas became communication hubs that intertwined print and colonial policy. Yet importantly, they remained (as Richard White [1991] has reminded us) profoundly “non‐state world[s]” (xxvi), where the traditional council ground in the woods, or a kitchen table in a Native cabin or slave quarters, might serve just as well as the center of written sociability as the salon of the colonies’ urban centers.
If we construct a few biographies of the books used by people like Samson Occom and Olaudah Equiano, a more complete picture emerges of the interweaving of patronage, mercantile capitalism, and individual innovation that comprised this other print distribution system. As an itinerant missionary for much of his life, Occom was required by the Christian societies who funded his operations (usually inadequately) to keep journals of his activities. Diaries like those Occom penned over a 40‐year period took the form of humble, homemade books, “crafted from letter paper bound with sewing thread or small nails” (Brooks 2006: 241). Of the 25 journals or journal fragments catalogued by the Occom Circle Project at Dartmouth, none is a manufactured blank book. We can imagine Occom, like Davis in the Kentucky backcountry, buying paper and needle and thread to make his own journal books when ready‐made ones were not available. In December of 1772, Occom’s protégé, the Mohegan convert Joseph Johnson, also made up for his inability to access printed books – in this case hymnals – by stitching together handwritten paper copies of a print book and distributing them to his congregation. Although he could readily go into town to procure six testaments, singing books were not to be had, and within two weeks he managed to construct eight handmade manuscript books (Murray 1998: 162–163). This suggests that because hymns were often sung in Native languages, Johnson may have relied on printed English testaments and homemade Mohegan language hymnals. Thus, a potent combination of material want and cultural need coalesced into a makeshift system for the circulation of scribal copies of print texts. Manuscript books and journals flowed from Montauk, Long Island to the Oneida country along the Canadian border. This method of transmittal soon became the norm across “Native space” in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Printed books, some handsomely bound and beautifully engraved, were also part of Occom and Johnson’s written world. A case in point is Occom’s Hebrew grammar (Dickbook Leshon Gnebreet), authored by Judah Monis and printed by Boston’s Jonas Green in 1735. Handwriting on the flyleaf shows that Occom received this book on 25 November 1748, and later inscriptions indicate that he purchased the book himself from “Mr. Kneeland of Boston price Thirty schillings.” Samuel Kneeland was one of Boston’s major publishers, and Occom’s interaction with him suggests how the young Mohegan minister had begun to navigate the main arteries of the colonial book trade.
Between the chapter headings of his grammar, Occom practiced his name in a broad, clear hand. From pages 18 to 23, he wrote successively: Samson Occom / “an Indian” / “of Moyauhegonnuck.” Later, he inscribed a Latin proverb in the same style: Jure Hunc/Librum Tenet (“the book holds this right”). Most interesting of all, it appears that Occom added some 25 blank pages to the end of the printed book and then bound the whole work himself in an elaborate leather binding. Among the verb declensions and theological musings that cover these appended pages, there is a paragraph of Mohegan language script written in Occom’s hand. In these elements, Occom’s book seems typical of the circulation of most books in the metropolitan trade. He bought it from a local bookseller who had gotten it from a local printer. As a cultural object, the codex functioned for Occom much the same as it did for his Anglo‐American neighbors. Within its pages, he found a space for individual performance and private musings. His purchase of the book in Boston’s central marketplace signaled his entry into the broader republic of letters.
But the Hebrew grammar’s biography also describes other print circuits, ones that underscore Occom’s essentially marginal position in the trade a whole. A later inscription on the title page indicates that Occom soon gifted the book to New England Congregationalist minister Samuel Buell (1716–1798), a close friend of Occom’s who delivered the sermon at the Mohegan minister’s ordination, in 1755. Throughout his journals, Occom notes the many gifts of books and requests for books that were offered and sought throughout his lifetime. In the 1760s, when Occom visited local ministers as a newly minted missionary, the Reverend Graves of Connecticut gave him “9 books and one dollar” (Brooks 2006: 258). After traveling the 250 miles from Montauk to Schenectady in 1761, Occom was gifted a book in the Mohawk language by a Roman Catholic priest. During his 1766–1768 tour of England, a “Mr. Dilley gave [him] 4 Books for [his] own use.” On his return, he carried with him “a number of […] Charitable Society Books […] for the Indians” (Brooks 2006: 94). In 1771, having gotten to know Phillis Wheatley and her mistress Susannah Wheatley, he addressed the elite Bostonian slave owner in a PS: “Madam I have a favour to beg of you that is, to get me a Singing Book, I think it was Printed at Salem lately” (97). Even late in his life, along his ministerial circuit rides in the back country, Occom encountered books in the strangest places, and in 1786, was shown a book he had left at a household some 20 years before. Clearly Occom and his congregants relied much more on philanthropic networks and chance than did his non‐Indian counterparts.
Occom’s print world was not only based in consumption. He was a print producer in his own right, credited with being the first American Indian author of a printed book, Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, first published by Timothy Green in New London, Connecticut, in 1772. As with his use of books and paper, however, Occom’s role in this key node in the communications circuit also differed from those of his Anglo‐American peers. The sermon’s internal rhetoric indicates a mixed audience for its oral performance – magistrates, African Americans, and American Indians are singled out by Occom as he moves through the stages of the popular execution sermon genre. Paratextual evidence also suggests that the book existed in a rarified and sensational corner of the book market, produced, as its author notes in the Introduction, from “an uncommon quarter.” Extant copies show that it was owned by many non‐Native clergy over several generations, and the Latin notes in pastor Joseph Lyman’s copy intimate that he and other elite readers considered the book to be evidence of God’s providence as much as anything else (Round 2010: 69).
We also know, however, that literate Native people read it and that the Mohegan teacher Joseph Johnson was inspired to print his own commentary on the Moses Paul affair, Letter from J – h J – n … to Moses Paul (1772). In 1772, Joseph Johnson convened a group of fellow Christians in Farmington, Connecticut, “that [he] might read the Revd Samson Occoms Sermon” (Murray 1998: 151). Later, on a missionary trip to the Mohawk, Johnson again gathered a group together to hear him read the sermon. Johnson’s diary notation suggests that this reading may have been at the request of the Mohawk community: “I being desired to make a Short stop here, in order to read unto these Indians the Sermon” (Murray 1998: 187).
Occom authored another book, A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1774), which yields more insight into the circuits of this “other” book trade. Joanna Brooks has described the ideological elements of this work, especially present in the hymns Occom himself composed, as an amalgam of Euro‐American Christology and Mohegan sacred migration traditions that establish “the base text for a new, common Christian Indian culture” (Brooks 2003: 70). What remains to be explored is the information topography that this hymnal and other books like it both followed and forged, for the book was not merely a product to be consumed by the colonial public, but also the foundational text for the migrant intertribal Christian community that Occom led into upstate New York to live on land purchased from the Oneida. There is scant, but suggestive, evidence about how this book circulated. After 1774, it was reissued in 1785, 1787, and 1792 – twice in New London, Connecticut, and once in Hudson, New York. Brooks has found that it served as a “template for some of the most popular hymnals of the early nineteenth century, including Joshua Smith’s much reprinted Divine Hymns, or, Spiritual Songs; for the Use of Religious Assemblies and Private Christians (1791) and African Methodist Episcopal Church founder Richard Allen’s A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors (1803)” (Brooks 2003: 69). As its popularity grew, income from its sales allowed Occom to release new editions, which he circulated among his intertribal community at Brotherton, New York in the 1780s. The social fabric of New Light Congregationalism, which still shone in Occom’s old stomping grounds in Norwich, Connecticut, continued to sustain reprints and outright copying of the Choice Collection well into the nineteenth century. Signature evidence from a 1785 edition of Occom’s hymnal shows that Phebe Woodward owned the book at one time. Could this be the same woman who was married by the Connecticut Congregationalist Augustus B. Collins in 1840? Collins was an active member of the American Tract Society and showed a great deal of interest in evangelizing Native peoples. Did Occom’s book symbolize a bond of friendship and a seal upon his and Phebe’s commitment to missionization? The other signature that appears in this American Antiquarian Society edition is that of Betsey Vale. There is a Betsey Vale listed in the US Census for 1860 in Unadilla, Otsego, New York. That is the neighborhood where Occom settled, but there is no evidence for her religious affiliation or her ethnic identity.
Like Native Americans, blacks who lived in the British Atlantic world found their place in the English book trade routed through a non‐state world Paul Gilroy has termed “the Black Atlantic,” a field of cultural production similar to Lisa Brooks’s “Native space.” As with Native space, print materials across the black Atlantic followed intellectual trade routes and the biographies of black writers and readers trace similar narratives of purchase and borrowing, patronage and self‐publication. As we have seen, Olaudah Equiano received Bishop Wilson’s Essay as a gift at his baptism, and throughout his autobiography, we get glimpses of the way that his presence at the center of Atlantic mercantile exchange as a sailor on several different vessels gave him unique access to all sorts of commodities, including books and writing paper. Alongside the oranges and glassware that he and a fellow enslaved seaman traded for other saleable goods, Equiano bought a Bible: “At one of our trips to St. Kitt’s I had eleven bits of my own; and my friendly captain lent me five bits more, with which I bought a Bible. I was very glad to get this book, which I could scarcely meet with any where” (Carretta 1995: 103). As with other book purchases and exchanges in the British interethnic book trade, Equiano’s participation needed the patronage of a sympathetic white Briton, and access to a marketplace (St. Kitts).
Similar stories of print circulation by other members of the black Atlantic suggest that this nascent social sphere was highly contingent – perhaps even more fragile than that of Native peoples. The life story of Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833), a former indentured servant and Revolutionary War veteran who became a Congregationalist minister, is typical. In his rural youth as a servant, Haynes found himself physically far removed from the public spheres of the seaport colonies and ethnically marginalized as a mixed‐race person without property. His nineteenth‐century biographer singled out the book trade as central to his success:
A general scarcity of books was one of the severest difficulties which he had to encounter. There was no public library in the place. The Bible, Psalter, spelling‐book, and perhaps a volume or two of sermons, comprised the library of the most respectable families. Hence he remarks – “I was constantly inquiring after+ books, especially in theology. I was greatly pleased with the writings of Watts and Doddridge, and with Young’s Night Thoughts. My good master encouraged me in the matter.”
(Cooley 1837: 38)
In 1787, during his time ministering to a white congregation in Torrington, Connecticut, Haynes got to know Samson Occom, who recorded in his journal that Haynes was “an Extraordinary man in understanding, & a great preacher” (Brooks 2006: 366). The two men must have hit it off, because some time after their meeting, Haynes purchased from Occom a copy of Thomas Horton’s Forty‐Six Sermons upon the Whole Eighth Chapter of the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Romans (London, Parkhurst, 1674).
Missionary networks like those Samson Occom exploited to gather print for his Indian congregations also supported fledgling black Christian communities after the Revolution. When John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, visited Canada in 1784, he encountered a small seaside village called Birchtown, which was inhabited by Loyalist refugees of African descent. “We will send some books to be distributed among them,” Wesley told his British correspondents, “and they never need want books while I live” (Brooks and Saillant 2002: 9). Not long after Wesley wrote these remarks, black Loyalist ministers John Marrant and Moses Wilkinson opened “a bitter Calvinist‐Arminian debate” that spilled over into the English book trade (Brooks and Saillant: 11). John Marrant soon removed himself to the mother country and published a self‐vindicating book, The Journal of the Rev. John Marrant (London, 1790). Its preface imagines the Christian afterlife as a kind of public sphere: “we must all appear at that day, where I shall be permitted to speak for myself, where might will not overcome right” (Brooks and Saillant 2002: 95). Yet Marrant’s Journal was not a success. In fact, few copies saw print, and to this day only one copy survives in a US library. In a recent study of Marrant’s efforts within circuits of the metropolitan book trade, Joanna Brooks offers a plausible explanation for why his Journal failed. The main problem seems to have been that Marrant attempted to handle the publication of his journal virtually on his own. He solicited subscribers, employed a printer, and eventually sold the volume “from his home on Black Horse Court” in Islington, England, where he had relocated during his Nova Scotia exile. Marrant’s other book, A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (London, 1785), by contrast saw five editions in just its first three months of sales. Although the title page sensationalizes the narrative as created by a “black,” and as “Printed for the author,” it also reports that the narrative was “taken down from his own relation, arranged, corrected, and published by the Rev. Mr. Aldridge.” Later editions simplify the formula even further: “The whole Authenticated by the Rev. Mr. Aldridge.” The difference between the circulation of Marrant’s two books seems to lie in the fact that, as Brooks cogently observes, “books by black authors without firm connections to social movements” were not likely to find circulation (Brooks 2012: 50).
Thus for blacks, as for Native Americans, readership and authorship depended a great deal more on personal relationships and specialized social networks than it did for whites. Phillis Wheatley, for example, did not engage the book trade directly, but rather enlisted the aid of merchant and customs collector David Wooster when she feared her London‐published Poems on Various Subjects (1773) might be pirated by the “Printers of New Haven.” “It will be a great hurt to me,” she told Wooster in a letter she wrote while still enslaved, “preventing any further benefit that I might receive from the Sale of my Copies from England” (Shields 1988: 170). The situation for Lemuel Haynes was only slightly better. A freeman, and male ordained preacher, Haynes’s publications took more traditional market routes in their circulation among the American faithful. The 1807 edition of one of his sermons, which was bound together with the response of another minister, indicates that this reprint originated at the country print center of Rutland, Vermont and was sold both at the printer’s shop and “by the post riders.” Still, it was only within the context of devotional literature that his works circulated at all. Only Benjamin Banneker, among all colonial authors of African descent, enjoyed anything like a “normal” relationship to the local book trade. As a mathematician and creator of almanacs, Banneker was instrumental in the production of one of the most lucrative genres published by American printers, and thus his works appear in great numbers and across wider geographic areas than nearly any other colonial black author.
By the nineteenth century, the evangelical print consortium of local printers and metropolitan missionaries that supported the writing and reading of Occom and Equiano had matured into a full‐fledged national distribution network, as missionary printing concerns like the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society were founded in major eastern seaboard cities, with satellite publishing hubs in Lexington, Kentucky and Cincinnati, Ohio that facilitated expansion into the American west. The missionary print system embraced cutting‐edge technologies like stereotype printing, steam presses, and paper making, thereby keeping down costs to realize the SPG’s vision of Christian books “always at hand.” In 1810 the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was formed to extend these networks worldwide, their yearly fund‐raising publications featuring maps that located their missions in a world system of Christian print circulation.
For their part, individual Native communities and African American congregations began to create scribal communities and print readerships of their own. Elizabeth McHenry charts the rise of efforts by African Americans to establish “societies to promote literacy and to ensure that, as a group, they would not be excluded from the benefits associated with reading and literary study” (McHenry 2002: 3). Building on black fraternal and mutual aid societies started after the Revolution – groups like the Massachusetts General Colored Association – institutions like the Colored Reading Society of Philadelphia were founded across the northern states in the 1820s and 1830s. In a similar way, the Cherokee writer and editor Elias Boudinot worked hard to found the Moral and Literary Society of the Cherokee Nation in 1825, and went on to edit the first American Indian vernacular language periodical in the United States, the Cherokee Phoenix. Although most Native communities did not follow the Cherokee nation’s lead, by the 1840s, Indian newspapers, temperance societies, and Congressional memorials found a place in the civil societies of countless Indigenous polities, and in these ways, the presence of Indigenous people in North America transformed the British book trade as it took shape in the colonies and the United States.
This was largely the state of the trade through the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Even though the US Constitution codified limitations on the political freedoms of women, blacks, and Native peoples, the circulation of print proved to be a much more democratic affair. Supported by a philosophy of civic humanism, the printers and booksellers of the early republic were encouraged to produce printed works for all of these audiences. Although ministers often publicly chastised American women about their penchant for novel‐reading, women like Hannah Drinker in Philadelphia and Hannah Heaton in Connecticut consumed books with a freedom similar to their male counterparts. Free blacks in the North and Native Americans throughout the states and territories of the United States availed themselves of interpersonal networks often based in missionary societies for their print staples. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, even these formerly marginalized readers and writers would freely partake of the market‐driven print culture of their Anglo‐American neighbors.
By 1820, the United States would become the epicenter of a communications revolution that forever changed the nation and the world. Daniel Walker Howe, in his Pulitzer Prize‐winning history of the period, What Hath God Wrought (2009), argues that information exchange, “rather than the continued growth of the market economy,” proved to be the most salient feature of the period. “During the thirty‐three years that began in 1815,” Howe observes, “there would be greater strides in the improvement of communication than had taken place in all the previous centuries” (Howe 2009: 33). Beginning with the invention of the telegraph, the century witnessed the deployment of a transatlantic transmission cable, coast‐to‐coast railroads and postal networks, as well as the gradual implementation of the telephone by century’s end. Itinerant hawkers gave way to organized battalions of colporteurs, whose solicitation and circulation of books in the hinterlands was managed by major print centers in Cincinnati and Lexington. Electrotype printing of images and stereotype plates (reusable and cheap), and steam printing presses soon completely transformed the circulation of print in America. There would still be local job printers, and local “controversies,” and newspapers would still roll off hand presses in rural areas and the western territories, but the age of improvisational print and circulation practices was rapidly coming to an end. By the time of the Civil War, print had merged with other media to create new publics whose “rowdiness” played an important role in building borders between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” and male and female readers (Lehuu 2000: 7–10), finally establishing a national print culture history whereby the boundaries of class and gender were marked by the circulation of different kinds of print, and print in turn supplied the narratives and opinions that called forth the first nationwide public sphere.
Future histories of the production, circulation, and consumption of print in this period of early American history will no doubt engage with the many questions still unanswered in this summary of our current understanding of these issues. For one, new work in the production of presence that books enable may lead us to a clearer sense of how new media technologies meshed with (or contested) traditional print culture by the end of the nineteenth century. Such explorations will also no doubt yield more insight into how image and text were related. We may then be in a position to answer the question art historian W.J.T Mitchell has recently posed: “What do pictures want?” Finally, as we improve our ability to “see” a more diverse set of people engaged in print culture networks (as printers, readers, performers, distributors, and authors), how will that knowledge change our communications models – not just for the earlier periods, but also for the twentieth century as well? How did socioeconomic diversity and gender roles set forth the groundwork for modern media? Are there more extensive hidden or “shadow” print circuits, like those Leon Jackson has described for the African American poet George Moses Horton? Finally, what of the extra‐alphabetic sign‐making explosion that occurred during this period? Is there a coherent media theory waiting in the wings that would help explain the contemporary rise of the Mormons’ Deseret alphabet, the Cherokee syllabary, Morse code, American Sign Language? Or is our search for coherence a chimera, and like the print networks described in this chapter, unthinkable for a republic in its infancy, with a population decidedly unequal in its access to print and authorship and of divided minds as to their proper roles in the advancement of human societies?
See also: chapter 12 (early native american literacies to 1820); chapter 14 (benjamin franklin); chapter 19 (early american evangelical print culture); chapter 20 (the first black atlantic); chapter 23 (revolutionary print culture, 1763–1776).