…looking at "The Quilting Frolic."
"The Quilting Frolic" is a work of art that is used frequently as a window into the material culture of the middle class of the Early Republic. It was painted in 1813 by John Lewis Krimmel, a German-born American genre painter best known for his paintings of middle-class families in Pennsylvania. Because of his interest in depicting the quotidian pleasures of middle class life in that time, his paintings of interiors are richly detailed, and illustrate well the booming consumer culture of the post-Revolutionary period. As Krill and Eversman explain:
Pictures provide intriguing glimpses into the material life of Americans of a more modest means than the federal elite... [This painting] depicted the interior of a Pennsylvania German home, a scene fairly bursting with consumer goods: silhouettes and paintings hang above the fireplace while the cupboards are filled with ceramics. Although sparse, the furniture includes a Windsor chair and a tall-case clock (a favorite status symbol of the Pennsylvania Germans.)
Even picking a single item in the picture can, with a little research, yield a great deal of historical information about the time. Let's look at the china cabinet.
I haven't, in the last few days' digging-around, been able to find much information about china cabinets per se. They, and other kitchen furniture like the Hoosier cabinet and the pie safe, don't seem to get quite as much attention in histories of material culture as do, say, chests, desks, or beds. They do tend to be somewhat less ornate, as they were intended for the kitchen, which was not a place for guests, so this may be the reason. Alternatively, one might argue that these objects are culturally gendered items, furniture that is associated with women's work, and this might bring down their cultural capital.
Whatever the case, a few things can be said about the china cabinet. From its rectilinear lines and simplicity of design, it can be identified as belonging to the federal style of furniture-- also known as early classical revival, Louis XVI, Adam, Sheraton, and Hepplewhite. This style avoided the curved lines and ornate designs of the earlier Chippendale and rococo styles, or the the empire style of furniture that came after it. It lacks, however, some of the characteristic ornament of that style: it has no gilt, no intricate carvings, no paintings or wood inlays. I initially thought that perhaps this meant that it's a cheaper piece of furniture. However, when I started thinking about its sliding glass doors, I reconsidered.
If you've ever taken a stroll around Beacon Hill in Boston, you likely noticed the purple window panes. These panes were originally created by accident-- the glass maker in England added too much magnesium to the glass, which resulted in the purple tint. Most of Beacon Hill was developed in the period between 1800 and 1830 by a group of Boston Brahmins that included the celebrated architect, statesman, and real-estate speculator Charles Bulfinch, and the purple panes date back to the Bulfinch Era. Or at least the originals do. It has been a long-standing statute in Boston that if you have one of the famed purple panes on your house, and it breaks for any reason, you're required to replace it with purple glass.
...At any rate, the point of this little digression into Boston History is that in 1813, flat glass panes were an expensive import item. They were fragile-- more fragile structurally than other glasswares, like bottles, and costs were driven up by the risk of damage while making their transatlantic journey. Panes of glass were also smaller-- the glass at the front of this china cabinet is much larger than any single pane on Beacon Hill. Such large panes of glass would have gone for a pretty penny indeed. For this reason, I would guess that this china cabinet must be at least a middle-price-point item, if not a relatively expensive one. It could well be one of the most expensive items in the painting.
The other reason the glass front of the cabinet is interesting is that it reveals the piece of furniture's dual purpose: the cabinet was not just a storage device, but it was also intended for displaying the china.
The china. Here's where the sources I was able to track down get a little more helpful. Apparently, the early republic was a time of great change for porcelain, both in America and internationally. In the colonial era, most ceramics were imported to America by the British, the Dutch, and from China by the British and the Dutch. American-made tableware had been produced throughout the colonial era as well-- in fact, the first soft-pour porcelain (proper porcelain, of the type that had previously only been produced in China) to be produced in America was made in 1770, only twenty years after the British first figured the process out.
The British considered the American colonies as something of a dumping ground for old and unpopular designs. However, by 1800, tariffs on British ceramics had become prohibitively high on the continent, and the US had become the primary target of British china exports. Porcelain exports from China shifted dramatically in this period as well. In the seventeenth century, European export from China was dominated by the Dutch East India company, but this near-monopoly was lost at the end of the 1600s with civil war in China. In the next century, the British would come to dominate the shipping of goods from China. This period of dominance came to an end soon after the American Revolution, when the US became the main supplier of Chinese goods to Europe, aided by their status as a halfway-point. (In fact, one of the oldest museums in the country, the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, was founded in 1799 by the elite import/export men of that city-- which was at that time one of the largest trading hubs in America. It has an amazing collection of East Asian art from that time period.)
Styles in china patterns shifted quickly and radically in the early republic, enough so that we can glean a little bit about the pieces in the painting that one might not expect. Look again at the porcelain in the china cabinet and on the table.
The dinnerware and the teaware patterns don't seem to match. This would be in keeping with Miller et al.'s assertion that it was likely more common for families to have mismatched tea- and dinner- wares, as they were manufactured by different processes and marketed differently. Moreover, when one compares the patterns, as best they can be discerned from the painting, to a chart of popular china patterns from 1750-1840, something surprising emerges.
The china in the cabinet most resemble the the feather-edged bisque, which was popular between 1760 and 1790. The tableware in the painting would probably be seen at the time as quite old-fashioned, and was most likely actually fairly old. The teaware, seen most clearly on the table, looks more like a combination of the blue shell edge pearlware and the brown-line creamware-- having the lined and rounded edges of the latter and the white and blue coloration of the former. The teaware was likely newer, and more stylish.
It seems logical that the teaware might be newer than the tableware: teaware was used in entertaining guests (as we see here in the painting,) and as such can be seen as occupying a nominal position between domestic and public, where the plateware was much more firmly part of the domestic sphere. However, as Diana diZerega Wall has noted, the domestic sphere was a rapidly morphing beast itself at this time, and this affected china and table service.
As the economy shifted away from households and more men began to work outside the house, dinner took on a whole new cultural meaning in America. The meal hadn't been thought of as particularly important in the days when most production was done within the house-- the family saw each other all day long, and dinner was merely the largest meal that happened around midday. As men began working outside the house, dinner was held after the end of the work-day, and took on a whole new set of rituals. It became a symbol of the values embodied in the new "cult of domesticity." Around this time, plateware fashions shifted to the more and more ornate, embodied in the complex patterns of chinoiserie.
...This is all getting quite long-winded, but I think I've definitely proved that with sufficient deep digging, (which this blog entry is not pretending to represent) there is a lot you can dig out of this painting. Honestly, you could probably put together an edited volume, thematically linked by items in this book-- it would probably be more interesting reading than one might initially think.
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Works Consulted:
"John Lewis Krimmel - An Artist in Federal America" by Milo M. Naeve
"Changing Cunsumption Paterns: English Ceramics and the American Market from 1770 to 1840" by George Miller et al. and "Family Dinners and Social Teas: Ceramics and Domestic Rituals" by Diana diZerega Wall, both from Everyday Life in the Early Republic, edited by Catherine E. Hutchins
In Praise of America : American Decorative Arts, Sixteen Fifty to Eighteen Thirty by Wendy A. Cooper
…On Suzanne Lebsock's The Free Women of Petersburg…
You know how when you're watching a movie that takes place in, say, King Arthur's time, and you can't stop noticing those little things that give away that the film was made in a certain time period? Not even necessarily anachronisms, just little markers of the time that the film was produced-- the colors used in the set design, a hair style, a certain type of make-up... Why does Lancelot have a perm? Why is Guenevere wearing blue eye shadow? Why is the castle court in almost the same color scheme as my grandmother's kitchen?
That's the rough equivalent of the feeling I got reading Lebsock's The Free Women of Petersburg
Free Women of Petersburg is a product of an author at a particular moment in time-- specifically, she is coming from the world of academic feminism in the early 1980s. It was a heady time, to be sure-- momentous, even. But it colors the text in ways that seem strange to someone like me, who grew up in the age of third-wave feminists and post-queers. The main conclusion that Lebsock draws-- that women's social conditions in the antebellum South improved in some ways despite the lack of overt feminism-- is something that I wouldn't have thought to bat an eye at. Of course social conditions change, with or without overt activism-- both for the better and for the worse. Social conditions are inherently fluid, and any study over time will reveal shifts, advances, backsliding... it's just the nature of the beast. Overt activist approaches can have amazing power to affect change, but they are not a precondition to change, nor are they always successful-- they can have negative or positive results. Backlash is just as much a part of social protest movements as positive change.
But to Lebsock and others in her time and milieu (academic feminists of the time) this was a surprising result-- so surprising it bears repeating multiple times throughout the book. When you're still near the high-water mark of second-wave feminism, and haven't yet encountered the lion's share of the backlash against the advances of the Civil Rights Movement through the 80s and 90s, social activism doubtless seems the necessary tool to affect social change. It was a different world, and the lenses they looked at things through were different.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the reading of gender relations in the book. Lebsock often seems to assume that the natural state of affairs between genders is one of barely-concealed competition and animosity. Men are sometime vilified unfairly, and women are sometimes just as unfairly valorized.
In one chapter, we hear the story of the widow Eliza Ruffin, who, while legally independent, was horrible at running her affairs, resulting in her repeatedly and frequently having to turn to her brother for loans. Lebsock, in taking account of the situation, looks at the brother's role in this relationship and sees him as part of the problem, for reinforcing her "diffidence." In the same chapter, Lebsock describes the somewhat better situation of Mary Strange, another widow, who when made the administrator of her late husband's estate, found it a "most lucrative task." While she quotes Strange's collecting over $200 in 1811, as her legally-sanctioned administrator's 5% of collections made for the estate, she fails to comment on the fact that 5% of the collections that year would have only constituted around $157... either Strange was skimming off the top or she was mismanaging funds-- either dishonest or incompetent, two traits ascribed to a goodly number of men in the book, but seldom any women.
Likewise, in a section on women's organizations, she looks at the rise in active engagement in what had previously been "women's" causes by men, and sees more an attack on women's autonomy and public voice than, say, a growing concern on the part of men, who may have actually been prodded to the task by their wives, or at least made conscious of the cause by the women around them. Cooperative and general-cultural hypotheses are pushed aside for ones that support a vision of open gender conflict, of men as active agents who sought to suppress women's rights and their autonomy. And I won't even get into her spiel about antebellum slaveholding women as crypto-abolitionists...
It's forgivable, of course-- the book is a product of the time in which it was produced. In an age of consciousness-raising and "political lesbianism," Lebsock was hardly an extreme voice. Nevertheless, it's an interesting window into two time periods at once.
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All in all I liked the book, despite this criticism. But it got me thinking about the nature of the old "New Social History," and about its limits.
Lebsock is taking hundreds upon hundreds of documents, here, and weaving them into an analysis of the time. She paints a surprisingly vivid picture of Petersburg's women, of their lives and their struggles. She is able to find historical trends in the town, of certain types of freedoms being increased over time, or certain kinds of wills becoming more or less common. But it got me thinking-- something that I've never really thought about reading other social historians, for some stupid reason-- can any of these trends be trusted to be true anywhere other than Petersburg? Does the book really tell us that much about the antebellum South? The sample size is very small. And of course the sample is very geographically isolated.
The real problem here, is not that Petersburg may or may not be historically "typical" of any particular time or place, but simply the depth of research. Would anyone want to put the years of research into another small Southern town, with an eye to similar historical questions, when they knew they ran the risk of coming to the conclusion that, yes, Petersburg was pretty typical, and that there is little that can be said about their town that Lebsock hasn't already said about Petersburg? Moreover, would anyone bother to support a grant to fund research where that was the possible outcome?
I guess that what I'm wondering here isn't whether or not if this book presents any definitive answers about the time and the area, other than the specifics of Petersburg; but whether this type of research can possibly have the effect of inhibiting similar research, becoming one of the only works on the topic, and thus de facto authoritative.
I'm starting to wonder if the "New Social History" might not be the History field's equivalent to "New Criticism"-- insightful and in-depth, but sometimes slightly myopic.
…On what started out seeming like a simple assignment…
(N.B.-- There's a scrapbook that accompanies this post. Check it out, as it'll make things a bit clearer...)
I have to say that this first assignment for the Doctoral Research Seminar was more complicated than it had initially seemed. We were each assigned three pages of the 1880 manuscript census for Fredericksburg, Virginia, and directed to the 1886 Sanborn fire insurance map for the city. One of the goals was to see if there was any data we could add to the map that we had gleaned from the census. I was assigned pages 57-60, the last three pages of the census. I think that this was part of the problem.
After downloading the census pages from Ancestry.com, I began by transcribing them. This, already, proved more difficult than I had expected. I'm much more used to working with printed materials-- I'm quite comfortable dealing with the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of antiquarian printers than I am with the complexities of old handwriting. For that matter, I'm not even that good at interpreting a lot of modern handwriting. It took me half an hour of staring at this:
...before giving up and using the wonderful tool that is the Internet to find a helping hand... It turns out, it says "George Street." I still don't quite see it. (And let me quickly give a thank-you to Audrey for helping a fellow out in his time of need.)
After transcription, I turned to my map. And that's when the real confusion began. The town of Fredericksburg had yet to number houses, so the census-taker was unable to record house numbers. This made figuring out anything other than the streets the houses were located on tricky. I turned to the 1889 City directory, but I was only able to locate a couple people from my sample group-- all of whom seemed to have moved in the intervening nine years. All others, seemingly, had left the area.
Trying not to be discouraged, I went to the record of property taxes for 1800 which even listed some tenant's names, hoping it would prove more fruitful. Unfortunately, I couldn't make any positive matches-- there were some common surnames that I found in the records that also appeared in my sample group, but without first names, I couldn't say with any certainty if these were the people I was looking for or not. I was running out of ideas.
I went to classmates' blogs, hoping to find something-- a hint about method, perhaps, or something indicating how one might go about plotting a single locus on the map, assuming that I could then retrace the census-taker's footsteps, and figure out the locations of the other houses by logical deduction. Unfortunately, this was only dispiriting, as I discovered that Tamara had already figured out the location of the people in her sample group, and that her people seemed to live along Hanover Street-- the same street on which 82% of my sample group lived! And Jennifer mentioned in her blog that she had people on Hanover Street in her group, too!
Somewhat discouraged, I returned to looking at the Sanborn maps. Looking at the maps, I noticed something that I hadn't previously noticed. The Sanborn maps included both a smaller, general map of the town of Fredericksburg and a set of more detailed maps that accounted for each building-- houses, commercial buildings, and public structures. Comparing the two, I realized that there was a large portion-- the majority, even-- of Hanover Street that was not accounted for by the larger, more detailed map. The map of the area shows Hanover Street as a long road, leading out into the country. The more detailed map, however, showed just three blocks of the street. Moreover, my three pages of the census show 19 households on Hanover Street-- not to mention the houses on Hanover accounted for in my classmates' blogs-- whereas on the Sanborn map, there are only 11!
Some demolition may have happened in the intervening six years between the census and the map's being made, and some buildings may well have been adapted to commercial purposes that had previously been homes. However, it seems less likely that there was such a radical shift in the town, and more likely that there are simply certain structures and households on that stretch of Hanover beyond the three blocks downtown that for some reason were omitted from the Sanborn maps. Given that the Sanborn Map and Publishing Company was making these maps for fire insurance purposes, perhaps this section of town was omitted because it was on the outskirts of town, where land use was likely less dense, and fire would spread less easily.
I had initially assumed that the section depicted in the detailed maps was the section reflected in my portion of the census, primarily because there was a single household in the section on Main Street, on the easterly side of town. However, after looking more closely at the census data, I have begun to suspect the obvious-- that my section of the census was in fact in that unaccounted-for area of Hanover Street, on the western fringes of town. The three households on George Street could easily be on the area of the street, also unrepresented in the detailed maps, near where it joins with Hanover. If this is the case, the house on Main Street may have simply been a case of "cleaning up"-- the census-taker backtracking to an abode at which he had previously not found anyone home.
There are several reasons for this inference. The sample includes two men whose occupation is listed as "farmer"-- people I would expect to be on the geographic periphery of the town.
Another reason is the socioeconomic profile of my sample. The group is largely of the lower class. Many of the men working outside the house have fairly low-income jobs--there are many listed simply as "laborers," as well draymen, sailors, and a "preacher" who I assume since he is living with a carpenter is probably itinerant. Of the 109 people listed in this section of the census, only nine are servants employed in the house. As the South at this point is still fairly early into industrialization, I would assume that a large portion of the town's wealth would congregate in the center of the town or city, as it tends to in preindustrial societies.
Likewise, the group is fairly racially mixed. Of the 23 households in my sample, about one in three are listed as black or mulatto. While the black houses are exclusively so, they don't seem to be in any way "clustered"-- they are scattered throughout the group. If one imagines the census taker walking down the street, knocking on each door he comes across, one must imagine that every third house he comes across is a black household. I don't know much about patterns of settlement in the South at this period, but I would assume that such a pattern of mixed settlement might be indicative of a poorer neighborhood. This is more speculative, but I also thought it relevant that the western side of town is the location of the "colored cemetery." This is purely speculative, but one can imagine in the context of the 19th century South, living "out on Hanover, past the colored cemetery" might not be the type of thing that drives up property values.
Interestingly, as one gets to the last page of the census, the situations of the individuals seem to get worse and worse. On the last page, you have William Hunt, a single man who repairs watches, and shares his house with two boys-- five and three years old-- who do not share his name. This is followed by John Lewis, a drayman who lives with his wife and his two adopted sons. Then there's several houses full of unmarried working class men-- a cart-driver who lives with two laborers, a household of three sailors, and the previously-mentioned carpenter who shares his home with an itinerant preacher. (The preacher does not show up in either the 1889 town directory or the 1885 business directory, making me even more sure that he was probably a traveling evangelist.)
There are also, however, several rather prominent people represented in this sample. These are wealthier men who probably have larger houses on the outskirts of town, not out of necessity, but for the space-- "country homes" outside town, if you will, almost proto-suburbanites. To be more precise, there are four such men.
There's the lawyer Samuel Brooke, who lives with his wife, his three children, and two domestic servants. Brooke doesn't show up in either of the later city directories, and it seems likely that his legal career took him on to a larger town. Likewise, you have Irish immigrant David Fleming. Given the location of his daughters' births, it can be inferred that Fleming had moved to the town some time between 1875 and 1877, probably for his job as the Superintendent of the Citizen's Gas Company. Fleming had two in-house servants by 1880, and by 1885, was a prominent member of the Home Building Association, the Opera House Syndicate, and an officer in at least three Masonic organizations. Then there's John Berrey, a retired hardware merchant-- and the only retired person in the sample. Berrey lives with his five children, all unmarried, who range in age between 28 and 44. Of the three sons, the 28-year-old is listed as "at home," as young children and dependent women tend to be, and the older two sons have very nice middle-class jobs, as a clerk and a commercial trader.
The final person of wealth in my sample group is the one that really makes me suspect that I've successfully located the correct section of Hanover Street, and that's Charles Richardson, proprietor of the Windsor Manor Pickle Company. While one wouldn't expect a factory owner to live next door to his factory, one would expect that he would want to be relatively nearby, in the days before the automobile. Looking again at the map of the Fredericksburg area, notice the location of the pickle factory, at the bottom of the map. The western section of Hanover Street would present the most convenient commute, avoiding the traffic of Main Street and the commercial districts to the East.
Ultimately, of course, all this is speculation and inference. I did a quick search in a couple databases, but I couldn't find any articles about 19th century census-taking patterns, so the entire assumption that these houses are in any particular order may be false. (It's a tough search-- try it! There's all sorts of false correlations and strange hits that have nothing to do with what you're looking for...) I certainly wouldn't bet any money on any of this. But I have a fairly good feeling about it, and I've definitely learned a bit about process, and how one might go about such work. If I was going to go further with this, (which would be silly since it's just an exercise) I would probably start looking at the court records and the police blotters next, looking for some sort of clue that could help me confirm or disprove my suspicions. I would also likely go to later Sanborn maps, and other maps of Fredericksburg, to see if they offered any clues as to what was over on the outskirts of town, on Hanover Street.