Sacred Relics

Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America

Teresa Barnett

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226059747
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A piece of Plymouth Rock. A lock of George Washington's hair. Wood from the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born. Various bits and pieces of the past—often called "association items"—may appear to be eccentric odds and ends, but they are valued because of their connections to prominent people and events in American history. Kept in museum collections large and small across the United States, such objects are the touchstones of our popular engagement with history.In Sacred Relics, Teresa Barnett explores the history of private collections of items like these, illuminating how Americans view the past. She traces the relic-collecting tradition back to eighteenth-century England, then on to articles belonging to the founding fathers and through the mass collecting of artifacts that followed the Civil War. Ultimately, Barnett shows how we can trace our own historical collecting from the nineteenth century's assemblages of the material possessions of great men and women.

PART ONE

Origins and Meanings

ONE

Beginnings

The Reverend William Bentley (1759–1819) was among the most learned of the American republic’s early scholars. A Congregationalist minister who resided in Salem, Massachusetts, he read twenty-one languages, according to one biographer, and “his knowledge of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Persian was probably unexcelled in America.”¹ His learning extended far beyond topics connected with Christianity and the ancient world where it had its genesis. The notebooks he bequeathed to the American Antiquarian Society, for example, included volumes on mathematics, ornithology, and natural history; meteorological observations; and “general statistical notes relating to the United States during the years 1806–1811.” In addition to these scientific and mathematical pursuits, Bentley was also interested in subjects we might now think of as anthropological, archaeological, or historical. From his somewhat secluded station in Salem, he participated in the larger world of his time, uniting an interest in antiquity and its venerable traditions with a knowledge of the specific flora, fauna, and human history of his own locale.

Although Bentley’s library was reputed to be second only to Thomas Jefferson’s, his studies were by no means confined to the written word.² As testified by the voluminous diary he kept for over thirty years, he was passionately interested in material objects and the meanings they could impart. He collected natural history specimens from around the world, donating most to the museum of the East India Marine Society.³ His diaries also contain numerous references to American Indian burials, which he often visited and examined for himself. Finally, he was fascinated with New England’s European American past as it persisted in old buildings, cemeteries, and artifacts, and his entries enumerate such finds as excavated fragments of Dutch delftware, furniture handed down as heirlooms in local families, a gun from 1698 found in the ruins of a blacksmith’s shop, and quaint caps and shoes that had survived from an earlier time.

Bentley’s fascination with the material world was not peculiar to him, nor was it uniquely American. The practice of assembling cabinets of natural history specimens was well established in England and on the Continent, and individuals such as Pierre Eugène du Simitière, the founder of one of America’s earliest natural history museums, and the better-known Charles Willson Peale only continued that tradition with American specimens. Likewise, an interest in objects from the past can be traced back several centuries before Bentley began collecting to British antiquarians’ fascination with classical antiquities, implements excavated from Anglo-Saxon barrows, old coins, armor, seals, and objects of daily use. In their investigations, as Graham Parry has noted, “the method of enquiry moved from the study of texts to the study of objects” and from “a position where the past was recovered mainly by means of ancient authors . . . to where material objects became of greater significance and could be used to interact with the written record.”⁴ And in a very real sense Bentley simply continued these practices, with the signal difference that instead of excavating Roman or Anglo-Saxon remains he sought out American Indian burials, and rather than tracing the history of British royalty, he marveled over the evidence of the Puritan forefathers and their times.⁵

Like his predecessors in England, Bentley exhibited what one commentator has identified as the typical antiquarian’s “fanatical obsession with the historical significance of the individual object” and a sense that the peculiarities of these objects offered a wealth of enigmatic meanings about the past.⁶ When he visited sites of Indian burials, he inevitably sought out whatever information he could gain on the circumstances of their discovery, noting the direction the skeletons had been facing, whether they were sitting or lying, and the artifacts found with them. Similarly, when he described the remains of a European American past, he sometimes displayed an almost inordinate fascination with the minutiae of physical characteristics. Looking at a woman’s shoe from the seventeenth century, for example, he took care to note in his diary that “The heel and square toe were of the same length 2-1/2 inches. The sole leather was of the common thickness of English soles. The Straps were cut for Clasps. The heel tap of the same leather with the sole 1/2 inch.”⁷

Though objects from the past often inspired interest because of their inexplicable strangeness, their very peculiarities might be a tantalizing source of meaning. In his sometimes detailed musings, Bentley showed a desire to develop a more systematic knowledge that would build on and account for the sometimes anomalous physical specifics before him. A glass demijohn unearthed in Salem and bearing the name Philip English, for instance, was “one among the many proofs” that English’s “style of living was the best of his day.”⁸ And delftware and glass in an Indian grave showed Bentley that “this Indian must have been buried about the time of the Plymouth settlement which came from Holland.”⁹ In an address to the American Antiquarian Society in 1816, he offered detailed information on the physical particulars of seventeenth-century settlers’ housing, inventories of their possessions, and an elaborate discussion of the tonnage of their ships, all as proof of his argument that, contrary to popular belief, these early settlers had not lived in austere poverty and that antiquarianism had much to contribute to an understanding of the colonies’ early economy and material prosperity.¹⁰ Though Bentley clearly loved old things for the connection to the past they inspired, in general his task as an antiquarian was not simply to accumulate objects or use them for nostalgic reflection but to marshal them in the service of a more methodical historical knowledge.

Bentley’s intense involvement with things from the past continued throughout his life. In 1819, however, toward the end of his life, an object appears in his diary that, at least in retrospect, can be seen to be qualitatively different from most of the things he had collected up to that time. As the entry notes,

Lt. Armstrong gave me a walking Cane said to be made out of the bottom plank of the old Ship Resolution in which Cooke went around the world. It has an ivory head & silver ring below it & silver at the holes through which a leather string is braided. It is colored black & has a ferrel of brass, plugged with iron. Mr. Felsh, the Chaplain, warrants for the wood & the worm holes prove it from some ship or other. So I receive it.”¹¹

Bentley explicates the cane as he would any other historical artifact, proceeding from its physical particulars to inferences about its origins and significance. But in this case the artifact does not admit of such empirical investigation beyond a certain point. As he ironically observes, the many wormholes tell him the wood is indeed from some ship, but the posited connection to Captain Cook must remain an article of faith. And in any case, the cane cannot supply any new information about Cook or his voyage.

Bentley’s ironic tone, along with the fact that he had been given this particular article rather than actively seeking it out, suggests that he did not prize this ship-turned-cane or consider that it could engender a meaningful relationship with the past. If so, however, he was at odds with the collecting tradition that was taking root in both Europe and the United States in the early nineteenth century and that signaled a new conception of how objects embodied the past and brought that past into the present.

No one better epitomized the new breed of collector than Philadelphian John Fanning Watson (1779–1860). Born twenty years after Bentley, Watson continued many of the passions and preoccupations of an earlier generation of antiquarians. Like Bentley, he was fervently attached to any manifestation of previous times—to old buildings, old texts, old artifacts. And like Bentley he spent time copying inscriptions from graveyards, peering into excavated foundations, and collecting a multitude of objects that had survived from past eras. Yet Watson’s preoccupations also differed significantly from the generations of antiquarians who preceded him. Early nineteenth-century members of the American Antiquarian Society were often doctors, lawyers, and ministers who, like Bentley, had university educations and were well versed in the knowledge appropriate to the educated man of their time. Watson, on the other hand, epitomized the early nineteenth century’s rising commercial class. The son of a sea captain who had served in the Revolutionary War, he worked his way from clerking for the War Department to owning several book and stationery stores in Philadelphia to serving as cashier of Pennsylvania’s Bank of Germantown and finally to a position as secretary-treasurer of the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad. Watson showed little interest in some of the subjects that had traditionally engaged learned antiquarians, including natural history and classical antiquity. He was primarily interested in the history of his own locale—Philadelphia and its environs—and particularly the remnants of its earlier Euro-American history. He was one of the founders of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, established in 1824; he championed the preservation of sites connected with William Penn; and—the accomplishment that brought him the most renown—in 1830 he published his Annals of Philadelphia, a compendium of anecdotes and observations on Philadelphia’s past based on research in archival sources, examination of earlier eras’ material culture, and questionnaires and interviews soliciting the memories of the city’s oldest inhabitants.¹²

Watson’s zeal for uncovering the history of his own environs was characteristic of antiquarians in general, who typically focused on a limited local past rather than on a larger national history. Thus William Bentley’s historical investigations, for example, were largely confined to sites in and around Salem, and he was generally concerned with artifacts’ ability to illuminate everyday life in that region rather than with their status in a larger national narrative. In concentrating on the history of Philadelphia, Watson continued this tradition. At the same time, his investigations of local history were strongly marked by the celebratory patriotic narratives that had emerged in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. His earliest commemorative work in the 1820s and 1830s focused largely on William Penn, who was obviously central to Philadelphia’s own history. But Penn’s status as a founding father for the state of Pennsylvania meant that Watson was promoting a type of historical figure that had not appeared prominently in earlier antiquarian discourse but was very much a feature of national patriotic rhetoric and commemoration throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, precisely by celebrating a local hero when a national history of the United States was emerging that gave pride of place to New England, Watson and the group of Philadelphians who promoted Penn’s reputation were implicitly championing a local founding father whose deeds could be set against the Pilgrims and the heroes of the Revolution and could thus position Pennsylvania within the pantheon of states.¹³ Similarly, when Watson collected souvenirs from nearby Revolutionary War battlefields or arranged for the reburial of officers killed there, he was commemorating local historical sites only as arenas where the nation’s founding event had been played out. Watson’s interviews with elderly Philadelphians and his fascination with the minutiae of the city’s built environment may have evinced a concern with the local and the quotidian, but in accordance with the uses increasingly being made of the past in the early republic, his history making also promoted very different tendencies: the subordination of local history to the grand narrative of the nation-state, an extreme investment in the lives of great men, and a fascination with the dramatic individual event rather than with the ongoing patterns of daily life.

If Watson’s practice differed from earlier antiquarians’ in the kind of history it purveyed, it also differed in the means used to portray that history. Like Bentley, Watson was an inveterate collector and connoisseur of things from the past. But the objects that interested him were seldom the kinds that could yield more knowledge about the past through patient examination and explication. Instead, they were “association items.” Like the cane given to Bentley, they were valued not because of the information encoded in their physical particulars but simply because they had been associated with—had been owned by, participated in, or merely been physically contiguous to—an illustrious person or a major historical event. Among many other treasures, Watson preserved a chair that had belonged to the Penn family; a lock of Washington’s hair and a button from his uniform; cannonballs, bullets, and other objects from Revolutionary War battlefields; and pieces of wood from various trees, ships, and buildings that had witnessed monumental events of the past. In each of these things he sought a connection to the past, but it was not the same kind of connection earlier antiquarians had sought. His mode of preserving history was highly specific to the nineteenth century and was thoroughly structured by his age’s concerns and by the emerging relation between past and present that characterized his time.

Collecting objects that can be described as association items certainly predated the nineteenth century. Like so many of the articles eventually exhibited in museums, association items trace their descent to the curiosity cabinets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In those collections, most objects connected to some past event or person seem to have been religious artifacts, such as the proverbial fragments of the true cross, vessels from Solomon’s temple, or pieces of Noah’s ark. Such objects could be seen as historical in that they commemorated events that devout Christians believed had actually occurred. But they were presumably valued largely because, in the tradition of the religious relic, they transmitted some of the sacred power of their origins, not primarily as reminders of “history.” Similarly, in an age that still believed in the divine right of kings, the apparel and possessions of royalty that appeared with some frequency in curiosity cabinets may have had a potency that had little to do with the way they symbolized an earlier era. This is not to say, however, that the kinds of association items that would eventually make their way into history museums never turned up in curiosity cabinets. Objects owned by Erasmus were preserved in a Basel cabinet after his death in 1536.¹⁴ The Tradescants collected a fair number of things associated with famous people, including—along with gloves that had belonged to Edward the Confessor, Anne Boleyn’s veil and gloves, and Henry VIII’s gloves, stirrups, hawk’s hood, and dog collar—a “trunion” from Captain Drake’s ship and a knife that the catalog asserted had been used to kill Henry Hudson.¹⁵ And at the Bodleian Library in the mid-seventeenth century, visitors could see a lantern that had purportedly belonged to Guy Fawkes.¹⁶

By the early eighteenth century the range of objects preserved in the cabinets of the wealthy and learned had also made their way into more popular venues. According to a catalog published in 1732, a collection on exhibit at Don Saltero’s Coffee House in London boasted such wonders as the four evangelists’ heads carved on a cherry stone, a petrified oyster, and a fifteen-inch frog, along with a smattering of objects that marked a range of supposedly historical occurrences—a rose from Jericho, manna from Canaan, Queen Elizabeth’s strawberry dish, and William the Conqueror’s flaming sword.¹⁷ By midcentury, Adams Museum at the Royal Swan tavern was displaying thunderbolt stones, Chinese chopsticks, and a corn mill in a bottle that ground without wind, water, or clockwork. But it also displayed Charles of Swedeland’s boots, Henry VIII’s spurs, and a tobacco stopper made from the Royal Oak where King Charle...