Constructing American Lives

Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America

Scott E. Casper

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780807847657, 9780807824627
• eBook ISBN: 9781469649047
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Nineteenth-century American authors, critics, and readers believed that biography had the power to shape individuals' characters and to help define the nation's identity. In an age predating radio and television, biography was not simply a genre of writing, says Scott Casper; it was the medium that allowed people to learn about public figures and peer into the lives of strangers. In this pioneering study, Casper examines how Americans wrote, published, and read biographies and how their conceptions of the genre changed over the course of a century.
Campaign biographies, memoirs of pious women, patriotic narratives of eminent statesmen, "mug books" that collected the lives of ordinary midwestern farmers--all were labeled "biography," however disparate their contents and the contexts of their creation, publication, and dissemination. Analyzing debates over how these diverse biographies should be written and read, Casper reveals larger disputes over the meaning of character, the definition of American history, and the place of American literary practices in a transatlantic world of letters. As much a personal experience as a literary genre, biography helped Americans imagine their own lives as well as the ones about which they wrote and read.

CHAPTER I

Didactic Nationalism versus Johnsonian Theory, 1790-1830

I have been reading Johnson’s lives of poets and famous men, till I have contracted an itch for Biography; do not be astonished, therefore, if you see me come out, with a very material and splendid life of some departed Virginia worthy—for I meddle no more with the living. Virginia has lost some great men, whose names ought not to perish. If I were a Plutarch, I would collect their lives for the honor of the state, and the advantage of posterity.—William Wirt to Dabney Carr, June 8,1804

With these words the Virginia attorney and author William Wirt unwittingly revealed much about the understanding of biography in the early republic. Inspired by Samuel Johnsons Lives of the English Poets to write biographies himself, Wirt suggested that the American biographical impulse derived from English models. It also grew out of peculiarly American circumstances—the honor of Virginia—as much as any desire to emulate Johnson or Plutarch. Moreover, his concern with “posterity” reflected a common theme in the new nation: implanting the virtues of the Revolutionary fathers in the rising generation. Critics called for “American biography,” the lives of subjects specifically identified with the founding of the country. At least as early as 1788, when David Humphreys billed his Life of Israel Putnam as the first such work, biographers of American subjects offered the same message. Lives of Americans could teach and inspire the young, commemorate those who had won American independence, and proclaim the new nations place beside—or superiority to—European monarchies. Biography writing became part of the multifaceted effort to create a national identity and culture.

But what sort of national identity and culture? Multiple worlds of readers, critics, and biographers existed in the early republic, as three events of 1817 show. In February, sixty citizens of Washington County, New York, founded a social library. Over the summer, the second volume of Joseph Delaplaine’s Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished Americans appeared, which rekindled a battle between critics over the nature of biography. While this fight was raging, William Wirt’s biography of Patrick Henry appeared. The Washington County library patrons, the critics who argued over Delaplaine’s work, and the Virginia men of affairs whose approval Wirt wanted belonged to different social worlds.

In all three, the picture of “American biography” was complex, for American readers, critics, and writers were attempting to assert cultural independence while British biographies and British theories of biography continued to dominate the transatlantic literary landscape. Although American-written lives of American subjects made up a growing part of library patrons’ biographical fare, many of the nation’s most heavily circulated biographies were American reprints of European works. Samuel Johnson’s theory of biography, which permeated almost every American critical discussion of the genre, stood at odds with most American biographers’ practice. Johnson and many American critics argued that private habits, not public deeds, gave the truest measure of character, and that biography should emphasize individual character over national history. Biographies of American patriots in these years concentrated on their subjects’ public careers and deeds, finding the truest signs of republican character on the battlefield and in the legislative chamber. Johnsonian theory and nationalistic practice rarely came into open conflict. But their infrequent collisions, like the one over Delaplaine’s Repository, suggested the tensions between British-derived criticism and American nationalism. William Wirt’s thirteen-year struggle to write the biography of Patrick Henry, the book he ultimately produced, and its critical reception revealed the depth of these tensions. By the time his Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry appeared in the fall of 1817, the Revolution was forty years distant and Wirt had modified his original, Johnsonian plans significantly. And he had learned that helping to create “American biography”—his own work and the genre itself—involved questions of truth, character, and his own authorial role that he did not imagine when he contracted his “itch for Biography.”

Biographical Production and Biographical Reading

The opening of a new century provides a capital opportunity to look back at the one just concluded. Or so the New York minister Samuel Miller believed: in 1803, his A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century appeared, containing “a sketch of the revolutions and improvements in science, arts, and literature during that period.” Among those improvements Miller numbered the proliferation of biographies. Since 1700, “every literary country of Europe has produced a greater number of biographical works than at any former period. There certainly never was an age in which Memoirs, Lives, collections of Anecdotes, &c. respecting the dead, were so numerous, and had such a general circulation.” Miller then described the various forms of biography that had multiplied: biographical dictionaries, collective biographies about “particular classes of eminent persons” such as naval officers or physicians, book-length lives of individual figures, and most recently “Accounts of distinguished Living Characters.” Only in the notes in the back of his second volume, where Miller added items he had omitted, did he mention an American book: “The American Biography, by the late Rev. Dr. Belknap, … is a work honourable to the compiler, and highly useful to the student of American history.”¹

Between 1790 and 1820, American periodicals repeatedly called for biographies of illustrious Americans, which could announce the new nations place alongside Europe. The American Law journal sought “memoirs of the eminent men of this nation, who have challenged a place on the rolls of fame, and taught an envious world that America is not less the nurse of liberty than the cradle of glory.” The Portico wrote that no other nation had produced so many deserving subjects of biography in its first forty years. American lives of American subjects had long included works of local interest, often published in pamphlet form and circulated only locally or regionally, ranging from sermons and orations on the life of a departed minister to sensationalistic, confessional lives of condemned criminals. When critics talked of “American biography,” however, they meant something different: lives of individuals clearly associated with the history of what had become the United States. Biographers responded to these entreaties, echoing the magazines’ rhetoric of national assertion. The introductory message in John Maxwell’s 1795 memoir of George Washington was typical: “Gratitude obliges every nation to transmit to posterity the memory of these personages, who by their patriotic and heroic virtues, have distinguished themselves from the rest of their countrymen and fellow-citizens, that their name and fame may be perpetuated from one generation to another, and that others may be animated and excited to imitate them in their virtues. And … no nation in the world has more reason to perpetuate the memory of their patriots and heroes, than the United States of America has to perpetuate theirs, especially their amiable and beloved Gen. Washington.”²

Many of these American biographies were collective in form: magazine series, volumes of collective biography, and biographical dictionaries. The Columbian, one of the earliest magazines in the new republic, ran Jeremy Belknap’s biographical essays as the “American Plutarch” in 1788 and 1789. After 1800, such series multiplied. Only book reviews and poetry appeared more frequently than biographies in magazines of the 1810s. The best known were the naval biographies in the Analectic Magazine, written initially by Washington Irving, which proved so popular that the editors renamed their product the Analectic Magazine and Naval Chronicle. James Jones Wilmer’s American Nepos (1805) and Thomas Woodward’s Columbian Plutarch (1819) offered essay-length sketches of American figures, much as the ancient biographers of their titles had sketched the deeds of classical worthies. The most ambitious collective biography, Delaplaine’s two-volume Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished Americans (1816-17), contained engraved portraits and brief biographies of recent American subjects. At least three biographical dictionaries composed solely of American entries appeared between 1809 and 1815. Their entries suggested the dual motivation of New England Congregational religion and American patriotism. William Allen’s An American Biographical and Historical Dictionary (1809) included sketches of almost seven hundred figures: nearly three hundred had achieved prominence in religion, including the first ministers of every town in New England, and over two hundred more had won political or military fame in the colonial or early national years. Most of the rest were physicians or educators; scattered entries described travelers, writers, and citizens noted for longevity.³

Only George Washington stood above the spate of collective biographies, earning numerous book-length biographies of himself alone. The historian and geographer Jedidiah Morse’s “A True and Authentic History of His Excellency George Washington” (1790) also included biographical sketches of Generals Montgomery and Greene, but at least five biographies devoted solely to Washington appeared in the decade after his death in December 1799. Mason Locke Weems’s became the most famous and almost certainly the best seller. Perhaps because no copyright laws prevented its piracy, the biography by the English author John Corry was printed in the widest variety of places: not just Philadelphia, New York, and Boston but also Poughkeepsie, Baltimore, New Haven, Trenton, Pittsburgh, Wilmington (Delaware), Bridgeport (Connecticut), Barnard (Vermont), and even a German edition in Lebanon (Pennsylvania). The two most widely circulated lives of Washington, Weems’s Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington and Chief Justice John Marshall’s five-volume Life of George Washington, had more centralized printing histories. Printers in several locations produced early editions of Weems’s work, first published as a memorial volume just months after the first president’s death. But once Weems expanded his book in 1806, adding for the first time a dedication to “my young countrymen” and the story of young George and the unfortunate cherry tree, all of its editions were the product of Mathew Carey’s Philadelphia firm. Marshall’s work, a more ambitious undertaking because of its length and consequent expense to publisher and buyer alike, was also the product of one publisher, Caleb P. Wayne of Philadelphia. Sold by subscription, Marshall’s Life of Washington had more than 7,000 subscribers who hailed from every state and territory, from over 650 cities, towns, and counties. Entire communities whose members had not subscribed individually had access to the volumes: libraries purchased forty-three subscriptions, and firms (perhaps booksellers operating circulating libraries) another forty-eight.⁴

Still, Wayne found that the work’s sales could not make up its expense: they were so disappointing that, according to Weems, he was unlikely to “do much more at the printing business.” In the early American book trade, every new biographical project involved some form of financial risk; the more ambitious the endeavor, the greater the chance of financial catastrophe. If even a life of Washington could ruin its publisher, other works were even riskier. The distribution history of Belknap’s American Biography (1794) was probably typical: sales were slow in Charleston and presumably even slower in less metropolitan areas of the South. The biographical dictionaries, heavily weighted toward New England subjects, probably had largely regional circulation. The American Quarterly Review, published in Philadelphia, criticized Allen’s dictionary as “attractive only to the New-England race:—the book abounds with clergymen, whose labours and qualities were either trite or jejune.” Subject matter alone does not explain these works’ limited circulation. Book distribution in the early republic divided markedly along regional lines. Carey and Weems twice tried and failed to cultivate the book trade in the South through networks of incipient booksellers. Selling books in the South involved difficulties in transportation and credit that even the most enterprising Philadelphia publisher could not overcome, and no comparable publisher emerged in any southern state. When an 1825 American edition of Lempriere’s Universal Biography sold 1,344 (87 percent) of its 1,548 subscriptions in New York and New England (and 520 in two cities, New York and Boston), its concentration may tell us as much about the nature of the book market as about regional tastes.⁵ The truly national distribution of the lives of Washington—Weems’s and, even in commercial failure, Marshall’s—was the exception, not the rule.

The risks associated with new publishing ventures help explain why American imprints of European biographies, many of them originally written decades earlier, remained far more numerous than American-written lives of American subjects. The book trade in the early-national United States was in transition between the colonial predominance of European-imported books and the indigenous, centralized publishing industry that would develop by midcentury. The American Revolution had encouraged domestic publishing in several ways. Publicizing and promoting the Revolution had given printers a new prominence and expanded the number of printers in the states and the number of towns with print shops. The suspension of Anglo-American trade, too, provided an impetus for domestic industries, including printing. Nonetheless, as the nineteenth century opened, printers still bought most of their equipment from abroad, and many of the books they printed were new editions of European works. In the absence of international copyright protection, American printers could republish even the most recent London books with impunity. The origins of Americans’ reading fare, which varied for numerous reasons of access and interest, fell into three large categories: books actually imported from Europe, American imprints of European works, and American-written works, virtually all of which were the products of American printers and publishers. The third category, which had long included almanacs, sermons and other religious works, newspapers, and governmental publications, expanded during the early republic to include an increasing diversity of literary, historical, didactic, and scientific productions. But in these latter genres, American imprints of European standards continued to outnumber American-written works throughout the first quarter of the century. When the English critic Sydney Smith caustically asked, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” he might as well have been referring to the relatively small number—not just what he perceived as the inferior quality—of American works.⁶

Because local printers generally made their money in job printing (stationery, legal forms) and steady sellers (like almanacs) and had limited distribution networks, most American editions of belles-lettres appeared from the presses of urban printer-publishers like Mathew Carey in Philadelphia and Isaiah Thomas in Worcester, who worked with other printers, agents, or booksellers inside and outside their own cities. There were exceptions: the most popular American novel, Susannah Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, competed successfully with European works, and numerous printers outside the large cities produced their own imprints of it. But most of the best-selling fiction in the United States was European-written, and most American editions came from the major print centers, Boston and Philadelphia (and increasingly New York after 1810).⁷ American imprints of European biographies followed the same pattern. No European-written biography in the early republic promised enough profit for numerous local printers to attempt editions. The standard works, which appeared in libraries around the nation, included Plutarch’s Lives, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Philip Doddridge’s Some Remarkable Passages in the Life of Col. fames Gardiner (“the Christian soldier”), and John Aikin’s A View of the Life, Travels, and Philanthropic Labors of the Late John Howard. Many of these books, as well as Henry Hunter’s Sacred Biography, owed their American circulation to their connection with the transatlantic growth in evangelical religion through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though these works seem to have been widely read, none sold steadily enough to justify a local imprint. With very few exceptions, their American editions were the products of printer-publishers in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York.

Biographies produced outside these primary print centers were more likely to tell the lives of locally prominent figures, from ministers to murderers. At least one such volume offers evidence of the audience it sought to reach. In 1802 the Bennington, Vermont, printer Anthony Haswell compiled the Memoirs and Adventures of Captain Matthew Phelps, a traveler who had descended the Mississippi River to New Orleans but now lived in the Vermont town of New Haven about eighty miles north of Bennington. The list of 627 subscribers in the back of the book reveals that more than half lived within forty miles ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Biographical Mania: Toward a Cultural History of Genre
• Chapter 1. Didactic Nationalism versus Johnsonian Theory, 1790-1830
• Chapter 2. Representative Men and Women, 1820-1860
• Chapter 3. Truth and Tradition, Nation and Section, 1820-1860
• Chapter 4. The Inner Man in the Literary Market, 1850-1880
• Chapter 5. Publishers, Pantheons, and the Public, 1880-1900
• Conclusion. The Dawn of Biography Is Breaking
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index