1.
When Americans hear the name Wedgwood, they tend to think of weddings or official commemorative occasions. A Wedgwood platter is a perfectly appropriate gift for a young couple starting out, just as a baby-blue Wedgwood saucer, with a girl in a swing surrounded by appliqué white flowers, is just right—or used to be—for a girl’s first communion or her graduation from high school. Wedgwood comes in more severe patterns as well. Among our own wedding gifts, my wife and I received, from fastidious architect friends, a tea set in the “black basalt” Wedgwood line, unadorned and with a metallic industrial finish prefiguring Bauhaus designs.
But Wedgwood for me, when I was growing up in Indiana, was neither finicky nor austere. The only Wedgwood piece I knew was a weird octagonal bowl, about five inches in diameter, of the most flamboyant design. The bowl was made of bone china, according to the recipe that Josiah Spode first developed for a porcelain strengthened with an admixture of bone ash, and was an iridescent orange on the outside and a variegated purplish-blue within, like mother-of-pearl. It had a gilt rosette in the center and a gilt checkerboard around the exterior rim. Winged dragons circled the outer perimeter, and if you looked closely,
preferably with a magnifying glass, you could make out little Chinese figures riding impishly on their backs. The bottom of the bowl bore the Wedgwood “Portland Vase” trademark, a sketch of the best known of all Wedgwood vessels, also in gold.
The octagonal bowl was a wedding gift for my parents, given to them by an elderly mathematics professor, long retired from Haverford, named Albert Wilson. Wilson had all but adopted my parents during the early years of their marriage. He invited them to occupy his house on College Avenue and retreated to the third floor. When my mother thought that their relationship with the old man had become uncomfortably close and suggested they move out, Wilson moved out instead, and gave my parents all of his furniture, including an Arts and Crafts dining-room table that now graces our living room. He also helped support my parents financially at a time when they were really on their own.
My father’s tenure decision at Haverford had been particularly fraught. The chairman of his department, a man of older methods and perhaps anti-Semitic as well, spread the word that my father was delusional, and suffered from a persecution complex. The president of the college called my father in and questioned him in a peculiar way that my father later realized was an amateurish test of his sanity. My father insisted on proceeding with the promotion process and, with my mother’s fierce support, resigned immediately upon being granted tenure.
These frightening events, which foreshadowed in uncanny ways some aspects of my own academic career, inhere for me in the octagonal bowl, a fragile survivor of those precarious years in my parents’ early life. The bowl, I have since learned, was designed by an eccentric Wedgwood artist named Daisy Makeig-Jones around 1920 as part of a series called Fairyland Lustre. Makeig-Jones was one of a long line of interesting artists hired by the Wedgwood firm, including, early on, both the poet-painter William Blake and George Stubbs, the painter of horses. Makeig-Jones’s fairy world, partly inspired by the illustrations of Edmund Dulac, was a radical departure from the neoclassical designs the firm had become known for. It introduced an element of dream into porcelain production. A triumph of iridescent glazing techniques, the bowl required as many as seven successive firings, with the gilt stenciling applied last. Makeig-Jones made similar designs with hummingbirds and butterflies. Such escapist motifs had a huge vogue in both England and America during the hopeful years after World War I, but they were discontinued during the Depression.
Because of the bowl’s outlandish colors and whimsical patterns, I have never thought of Wedgwood as some hyper-English totem of conventional respectability. For me, Wedgwood connotes an exotic realm of dreams, reached by journeys on flying dragons and magic carpets. These associations, as it turns out, are just right for the participation of the famous founder of the firm, Josiah Wedgwood himself, in the quixotic quest for Cherokee clay.
The flurry of excitement in England concerning Cherokee clay could hardly have escaped Wedgwood’s attention. He was the greatest of all European potters, but he was also a consummate master of manufacturing techniques and global marketing. A religious dissenter with close ties to influential Quaker merchants in Liverpool and London, Wedgwood had built a ceramics empire in the pottery region of Staffordshire, where his ancestors had made pots since the early seventeenth century. Six straggling villages devoted to making pots, including Wedgwood’s native town of Burslem, had sprung up around abundant local deposits of gray and yellow clay. The countryside was pockmarked with pits and piles of drying clay; the skyline consisted of church steeples and bottle-shaped kilns, belching smoke into the heavens like live volcanoes.
Wedgwood’s life played out between age-old customs of village craftsmen on the one hand and the explosive energies released by the Industrial Revolution on the other. Always open to improvements and the latest scientific ideas, Wedgwood’s instincts for innovation were cultivated among a distinguished group of enterprising friends, including the philosopher-poet Erasmus Darwin, the chemist Joseph Priestley, and the inventor James Watt, who met each month to share ideas on the night of the full moon and called themselves the Lunar Men. These men would be responsible for some of the major discoveries of the age, in steam power, industrial chemistry, and evolutionary biology. It was Wedgwood’s quest for something comparably transformative in the field of ceramics that led him to join the romantic—and increasingly dangerous—quest for Cherokee clay.
Josiah Wedgwood was born in 1730, the youngest of seven surviving children. His father, who molded pottery for a living, died when Josiah was nine. Two years later, Josiah contracted smallpox, which weakened his right knee and gave him a distinctive limp. Apprenticed to an older brother, he contracted to learn “the Art, Mistery, Occupation or Imployment of Throweing and Handleing” of pots, but found himself unable to kick the treadle of the pottery wheel with his injured leg.
“Mistery” probably referred to mastery, but it also suggests the closely guarded secrets of the ancient craft. Hobbled by injury, Wedgwood developed, by way of compensation, an insatiable interest in new techniques of production and decoration, mystery in the service of mastery. All potters were experimental chemists of a kind, learning by trial and error effective ways to prepare and mix clays, apply glazes, and fire their ware. But Wedgwood was unusually systematic in his experiments, nearly five thousand of which he carefully documented during his working life.
Staffordshire potters made two kinds of pots, earthenware and stoneware. Low-fired earthenware was porous and had to be fired twice, first to dry it (the “biscuit” firing) and second to receive the glaze that made it watertight. Stoneware, fired at a much higher temperature, was made of clay mixed with flint, which vitrified in the kiln. Salt-glazing was also popular among Staffordshire potters. A breakthrough came around 1740, with the development of cream ware, a lustrous glaze over a refined clay body that bore a close enough resemblance to porcelain to be used as fashionable tableware. Improvements in cream ware occupied Wedgwood for many years; in 1765, he was invited to make a tea set for Queen Charlotte, an extraordinary honor that made him even better known internationally. He was granted
George Stubbs, portrait of Josiah Wedgwood
permission to call himself Potter to Her Majesty and to rename his cream ware queen’s ware.
By the 1760s, Wedgwood ran the most successful pottery operation in the English-speaking world. He marketed his mass-produced cream ware to middle-class families in Europe and the American colonies. But Wedgwood had greater ambitions. He wanted to move from tableware to more expensive and aesthetically exacting luxury products, progressing from what he called merely useful to ornamental vessels. Archaeological finds in Pompeii and Herculaneum fired his imagination. If he could make vases like those extracted from under the layers of volcanic ash and published in luxury editions by Sir William Hamilton, perhaps he could develop a whole new market for pottery.
Wedgwood had monitored the various English experiments with porcelain during the 1740s, when Andrew Duché brought his samples of white clay to show off to potters and chemists. But like other potters in Staffordshire, Wedgwood considered fragile porcelain too costly for mass production. There was simply too much waste and breakage in the kiln, too much of a gamble for such a limited result. What did interest Wedgwood, however, was the possibility of locating a clay body white enough to imitate Chinese porcelain. A few samples he purchased on the sly, including a lump from South Carolina, “surprised me a great good deal,” he reported in 1765. Not only was the clay whiter than any he had seen, but more important, it retained its whiteness even when fired at relatively high temperatures. His subsequent experiments convinced him that the Carolinas might be the source of the vibrant and luminous white clay that he was in search of, allowing him to “turn dirt into Gold.”
What Wedgwood wanted, above all, was exclusive rights to the wondrous white clay. Applying for a patent, he feared, would simply disclose the special properties of the clay to the world. If he could somehow corner access to the sources of the fine clay instead, through a deal with the Cherokee Nation, he could prevent competing potters in the American colonies and in England from using it in their own products. The ornamental pots that he made from the clay could then be advertised as exotic artifacts with Cherokee origins.
4.
Wedgwood’s romance with Cherokee clay played out during a particularly intense period of his life. Unease in the American colonies contributed to his impatience to explore and exploit the resources there. He and his fellow Lunar Men admired enterprising Americans like their friend Benjamin Franklin. Despite their distaste for slavery, which Wedgwood in particular abhorred, they tended to sympathize with the upstart colonies against the Crown. Nonetheless, Wedgwood knew that his markets in America were threatened by any decisive break. In any case, speed was of the essence. What he needed was an agent willing to travel to America who was sufficiently trustworthy to keep his mission secret and sufficiently capable to get the dangerous mission accomplished without spending too much money or time along the way.
After a sustained search, and with some lingering misgivings, Wedgwood settled on Thomas Griffiths for the job. Ralph Griffiths, Thomas’s older brother, was the respected founder and editor of the Monthly Review. A Staffordshire man, Ralph Griffiths had made a fortune by publishing Fanny Hill, and he kept a stylish house in London; among his circle of friends was one of Wedgwood’s brothers.
A point in favor of Thomas Griffiths was that he knew the Carolina outback firsthand; he had participated in a financially strapped venture to farm maple sugar in the Piedmont region, using a method that he had supposedly learned from the local Indians. But Wedgwood was afraid that Griffiths might unscrupulously funnel the funds allotted for acquiring white clay into his maple-sugar operation. By the end of May 1767, Wedgwood had received sufficient assurances to go ahead with the plan. He would send Griffiths on his errand into the wilderness, even as he imposed some restrictions to prevent his emissary from “doing too much mischief.”
5.
If Andrew Duché’s embellished travels sound like something out of Marco Polo, Griffiths’s account of his adventures is more like the plainspoken realism of Daniel Defoe. Written to fulfill his obligations to Wedgwood and to justify his expenditures, the report is blunt and devoid of literary flourish or posturing. The journal reveals what this adventurous young man noticed and what, despite Wedgwood’s injunctions to collect botanical and mineral “curiosities” along the way, he overlooked.
Griffiths had no illusions about the risks he was running; what he mainly registered was danger at every turn. On the Atlantic crossing aboard the ship America, lookouts scanned the horizon for Algereens, pirates from Algeria. A six-foot shark proved “middling well” for dinner when skinned and boiled. “Nothing Materiall happen’d till our arrival in Chas Town Bay, on the Twenty First of September, being a miserable hot and sickly time.” Charleston, South Carolina, was a thriving port of about ten thousand inhabitants when Griffiths stepped off the ship to begin his journey into the interior.
After outfitting himself with such necessities on the trail as a good horse, a saddle and bridle, sufficient tea and coffee, “three quarts of spirits,” and a tomahawk, Griffiths “went off for the Cherokee Nation” on October 4, 1767. The first stage of the journey, with a stopover at a rice plantation fifty miles from Charleston, involved nothing more dangerous than treacherous swamps—or holes, as Griffiths called them. But things quickly assumed a darker cast as he rode toward newer settlements to the northwest. The weather turned “very hot and fainty”; Griffiths’s horse fell lame; and at an outlying plantation, he found “the People almost all dying of the ague and feaver.”
Griffiths moved slowly through the next perilous stages of his itinerary. He was careful to rest his horse. He slept under the trees, spending the night one evening “very near the place where five people had been Rob’d and Murder’d, but two days before, by the Virginia Crackers and Rebells.” These, he said, were “a sett of Thieves that were join’d together to Rob Travillers and plunder and destroy the poar defenseless Inhabitants of the New Settlements.”
For a man like Griffiths, traveling alone through the woods, there was more to fear from renegade white men than from Indians. The Cherokee War that ended in 1761, with devastating results for the Indians, had opened the way for white settlers, who farmed the land with wheat, indigo, and tobacco, relying heavily on black slaves for manpower. Settlers cleared land where nomadic hunters had once roamed freely, and a new conflict had sprung up in the region, pitting hunters against farmers. The hunters were of varied background: unemployed militiamen, orphans of the Cherokee war, mountain men, and drifters. They stole livestock, sheltered escaped slaves, and had “a reputation for killing and torturing their victims.” It was into the heart of this “Cracker War” that Griffiths and his injured horse made their nervous way, through thick woods in which, he noted, it was “a thing very Rare to see either Person or so much as a poar hutt for Twenty or Thirty Miles Ride.”
Then came a stroke of luck. Griffiths encountered a friendly trader on the trail. After about six miles of travel together, as the sun was setting, the trader noticed two suspicious men up ahead. Asking to borrow one of the brace of pistols Griffiths carried, the trader advised him to keep his hand “Ready cock’d” with the other.
As my new Companion expected, they [the suspicious men] soon gallop’d up a Deer Track into our Road, with a “how do you do Gentlemen, how far have ye cum this Road? Have you met any horse Men?” and then wish’d us a good Evening; but Soon stop’d and asked if we had heard of any News about the Robers, which we answer’d in the Negative & so on: my Companion then said it was well we were together, and that we had fire arms as he had some knowledge of one fellow, and believed him to be concern’d in the late Murder, which proved too true.
The men went their separate ways. But in Charleston, a few months later, Griffiths witnessed the public hanging of the cracker his companion had identified.
Griffiths stopped at a settlement called Coffee Creek, where “the people were all sick and Lay about the room like Dogs, and only one Bed amongst ’em.” Then, he came to the town of Hard Labour, about two hundred miles from Charlestown, which, despite its name, boasted “fine Rich Red Loomy [Loamy] Land famous for Raising Corn, hemp, flax, Cotton,” and so on. At Hard Labour, Griffiths had another piece of extraordinary good fortune, without which his errand to secure Cherokee clay would almost certainly have been a failure. He was approached by white intermediaries and asked to escort, as far as the Cherokee towns, “an Indian woman belonging to the Chiefs of the Cherokees.” He was informed that she had been held captive by a rival Indian tribe and ransomed through the efforts of John Stuart, superintendent of Indian affairs in the region. Griffiths agreed to the task. Continuing along the heavily wooded trail, he escorted the woman safely to the Indian town of Old Keowee, the gateway to Cherokee country. Several Cherokee chiefs happened to be gathered there to choose representatives for a peace conference in New York. Griffiths realized that this was a perfect opportunity for him to make arrangements for acquiring Cherokee clay.
Griffiths ate, drank, and smoked with these “Strainge Copper Collour’d Gentry,” as he called them. He waited patiently for the right moment to state his purpose. Portraying himself as an idle adventurer who had come to their land “in search of anything that curiosity might Lead me to,” he mentioned, as though in passing, his interest in collecting some of their “white Earth.”
It must have seemed a harmless enough request under the circumstances. But to Griffiths’s dismay, an interpreter was called for, and there was a great deal of debate about the wisdom of allowing permission to dig white clay.
This they granted, after a long hesitation, and severall debates among themselves; the Young Warier [warrior] & one more seem’d to consent with Some Reluctance; saying they had been trubled with some young Men long before, who made great holes in ther Land, took away their fine White Clay, and gave ’em only Promises for it: however as I came from their father [the superintendent of Indian affairs] and had behaved like a True Brother, in taking care to conduct their Squaw safe home, they did not care to disappoint me for that time.
The Cherokee chiefs were used to deception by white people and understandably wary of negotiations. They were dismayed by Duché’s high-handed behavior twenty-five years earlier, when he made “great holes” in their land and broke his promises for payment. But they were also moved by Griffiths’s brotherly deed in bringing the captive woman safely home.
In granting the request, the Cherokee chiefs stipulated that the agreement was for this occasion only. If more clay was to be taken later, they insisted, additional arrangements would have to be made, “for they did not know what use that Mountain might be to them, or their Children.” They also asked whether the clay “would make fine punch Bowls, as they had been told.” If so, “they hop’d I wo’d let ’em drink out of one.”
Deal in hand, Griffiths still had a long way to travel before reaching the white clay beds in the mountains. He made his way along the Savannah River, from one Cherokee settlement to another, through what he called “very daingerous” country. “I was a little in fear,” he wrote, “of every Leafe that Rattled.” In one of the villages, he encountered the woman he had brought back from captivity—“my old Consort the Queen.” He was told that she had been subjected to a purification rite “according to the Indian Custom,” and “was obliged to undergoe Eight days Confinement in the Town house… and after that to be strip’d, dip’d, well wash’d, and so Conducted home to her Husband.”
Mindful of potential dangers lurking at every turn of the trail, Griffiths had little time to appreciate his natural surroundings. Only once did he take the trouble to notice the many kinds of trees around him: “fine white and black oak, ash, Maple, Hickory, Birch and many Lofty Pines.” As Griffiths made his way into the mountains the weather turned nasty, with “Cold and heavy rain or Sleet from five in the morning till nine at night.” There was “scarce Life in either me or my poar horse,” he noted, but every day brought him closer to his destination.
Finally, on November 1, he had made his way to Cowee Village on the Little Tennessee River, where he knew the white clay was waiting nearby. He rested for a few days at Cowee and outfitted himself with tools, blankets, and a slave to help him with the considerable labor of digging and preparing the white clay. He also secured the services of a local Indian trader named Patrick Galahan to guide him to the clay beds. And there, to his dismay, the real work began.
6.
Three full days of backbreaking labor were needed to clear away the twelve or fifteen tons of rubbish that had piled up in the pit, evidence that clay had been dug there before. On the fourth day, the pit was finally clean and the white clay “appeared fine.” But just at that promising moment, with the long-sought treasure seemingly in hand, several Cherokee chiefs suddenly appeared on the scene and took Griffiths prisoner as a trespasser on their land. With the help of an interpreter and four hours of patient negotiation, the misunderstandings were resolved, and the hard labor resumed.
Four days later, Griffiths finally had a ton of fine white clay ready to load on the packhorses. But again, luck was against him. The weather took a sudden change for the worse, with disastrous results.
Such heavy Rains fell in the night, that a perfect Torent flow’d from the upper Mountains with such Rapidity, that not only fill’d my pitt, but melted, stain’d and spoil’d near all I had dug and even beat thro our wigwam and put out our fire, so that we were nearly peris’d [perished] with wet and cold; this weather proved of bad consequence another way, as it wash’d the Strattums of Red earth that Run Skirting thro the pitt, which stain’d and spoil’d a vast deal of white clay.
When Griffiths reports that the red earth has overrun the white clay and spoiled it, we can feel the symbolic aptness, as though red men and white men do not mix harmoniously.
Like Sisyphus, Griffiths resumed his seemingly endless task, clearing, digging, and drying the white clay yet again. To palliate the Indians, he invited them to share rum and music with him. By December 18, working steadily, he finally had prepared the five tons of clean clay that he had promised to bring back to Wedgwood. He arranged to have horses sent to the pit for loading.
Griffiths had never experienced such cold; twice, in the morning, he found the river frozen over despite the strong current, and “the pott Ready to freeze on a Slow fire.” While waiting for the packhorses to arrive, he took a few days to “fossil and Botanise,” another request from Wedgwood. Not surprisingly, given the season, the results of his frigid excursions were “very short of my expectation.”
Two days before Christmas, Griffiths finally left “this cold and Mountainous Country,” and retraced his steps over hundreds of miles of slippery paths. The valuable clay was transported first on horseback and then, from Fort George, by wagon. He reached Charleston in early February. There he watched “severall Thieves executed that were Lurking about the Woods I had Travill’d thro” and, “a far pleasanter Sight,” a good horse race. His precious cargo of white clay was loaded onto a ship; man and clay survived another rough passage to London, where the clay was transported by land to Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery, along with a shocking bill of £500.
7.
Soon after Griffiths’s return, Wedgwood’s bad leg, weakened by smallpox and aggravated by a coach accident, was giving him so much trouble that he could no longer walk. On the advice of doctors, he decided to have the leg amputated. On May 31, 1768, fully conscious and numbed only with laudanum, Wedgwood sat in his chair and watched as two surgeons applied a tourniquet and sawed off his leg above the knee.
By the fall, with his peg leg in place, Wedgwood was sufficiently healed to go vase hunting with his friend Matthew Boulton. They visited private collections and public museums, looking for ancient models for their own productions. The idea they were developing together was a synthesis of metalwork, in which Boulton specialized, and ceramics. Boulton would supply silver or gilded “mounts” for Wedgwood’s vases, thus creating a new kind of ornamental objet de luxe. Porcelain was too fragile for the heavy ornaments, and Wedgwood continued his search for clay bodies, dramatically white or, alternatively, dramatically black for his “classic” vases.
In June, 1769, another of Wedgwood’s dreams came to fruition when he opened a new factory that he named Etruria. It was there that he manufactured “Etruscan” vases and urns in an austere black stoneware that he called basalt, in forms derived from ancient Greek patterns. On June 13, the day of the official opening, Wedgwood sat at the wheel, with his business partner Thomas Bentley turning the treadle, and threw six perfect vases in the distinctive black clay body that he had developed. Wedgwood was in advance of public taste in the ways that he chastened rococo curves and flourishes in favor of the more restrained style that came to be known as neoclassical. A growing Quaker clientele was particularly drawn to the unglazed surfaces and simple geometric forms, and Wedgwood’s black “basalt” came to be known as Quaker ware.
The 1760s had marked the height of the aristocratic craze in Britain for collecting fine ceramics, as “vase mania” swept the country houses. Upscale collectors like Horace Walpole filled “china rooms” with their prized acquisitions, and Wedgwood’s ornamental vases fit right in. For Walpole and his fellow collectors, a whole worldview was summed up in the two meanings of curiosity. On the one hand, a curiosity was a rare object—something odd, exotic, recherché—to be placed with comparable treasures in a “cabinet of curiosities.” Anything connected with American Indians or ancient Etruscans was curious in this sense. But Wedgwood’s intellectual circle was also fueled by curiosity in the other sense: an insatiable hunger to find out how things really worked, in nature or in the new world of industry and manufacture.
By around 1770, the upper-class demand for fine china seemed saturated. Wedgwood realized that he needed to create a new market as well as new products.
He determined that something new was needed to capture the imagination of the middle class. Producing vessels for use, especially for serving food and drink, was a steady and lucrative market, but Wedgwood wanted these “middling” people to acquire luxury objects as well. During the summer of 1772, he wrote to Bentley:
The Great People have had their Vases in their Palaces long enough for them to be seen & admir’d by the Middling Class of People, which Class we know are vastly, I had almost said infinitely, superior in number, to the Great, & though a great price was I believe, at first necessary to make the Vases esteemed Ornaments for Palaces, that reason no longer exists.
To entice new buyers, Wedgwood needed new clay. It was as simple as that.
8.
In late 1774, Wedgwood had a breakthrough: He finally discovered a use for his dearly acquired white Cherokee clay. He used it to manufacture his biggest innovation since his popular cream ware: a blue-tinted stoneware that he named jasper ware. In his promotional materials for jasper ware, Wedgwood stressed its origins in the Cherokee lands of Carolina. The exotic origins of the clay enhanced its market appeal. Just as his earlier vases had drawn on archaeological excavations in Greece and Italy, jasper ware summoned images of American Indians in the great forests of the New World.
At the same time, the prohibitive expense of acquiring more Cherokee clay made its future use at Etruria uncertain. The outbreak of the American Revolution made further excursions to Cherokee country impossible. This presented a conundrum. As Wedgwood steadily exhausted his store of Cherokee clay on his popular jasper ware, he knew that he would not be able to replenish his supply from the same distant source.
Then came the news that William Cookworthy, the Quaker potter and scientist whom Andrew Duché had visited thirty years earlier, had discovered abundant kaolin deposits in Cornwall, on the southwest coast of England. Cookworthy and his partner, another Quaker named Richard Champion, sought to corner the market for the clay and use it for porcelain production. With stiff resistance from Wedgwood and other Staffordshire potters, Cookworthy managed to acquire a patent for using Cornwall clay in porcelain but not in earthenware, a significant qualification.
And so it was that in May 1775, Thomas Griffiths, the adventurer and clay-hunter who had braved incredible danger to bring his precious cargo safely home to Wedgwood, made a final journey in search of white clay. This time he did not have to cross an ocean to do it, and his wary employer, walking carefully on his peg-leg, accompanied him on the westward excursion. Wedgwood contemplated the prospect from the rocks of Land’s End in Cornwall and gazed “with a kind of silent awe, veneration, & astonishment” at the Atlantic Ocean. “It was with a transport of awe,” Wedgwood wrote, “that I now set my face homewards towards Etruria.” It was the end of Wedgwood’s ten-year romance with Cherokee clay.
