Hartford's Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Hartford’s Ânn Plato

and the Native Borders of Identity

RON WELBURN

SUNY PRESS Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Welburn, Ron, 1944– Hartford’s Ann Plato and the native borders of identity / Ron Welburn. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-5577-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4384-5578-5 (ebook) 1. Plato, Ann—Criticism and interpretation. 2. African American women authors. 3. African American women educators. 4. Hartford (Conn.)—Intellectual life. I. Title. PS2593.P347Z93 2015 818'.309—dc23 2014017459

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Missinnuok of Towns and Cities

Contents

Figures and Maps ix Prologue xi Acknowledgments xiii A Speculative and Factual Chronology for Ann Plato xvii Introduction 1 1. Ann Plato: Hartford’s Literary Enigma 17 2. “The Natives of America” and “To the First of August”: Contrasts in Cultural Investment 33 3. Missinnuok at the Hartford Space 45 4. Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle 51 5. Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 71 6. Schooling: Some Speculations; Teaching: Some Records 111 7. Essays: Publication and Reception of the Book 129 8. Essays and Lydia Sigourney: The Poetics of Borrowing 133 9. The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 143 viii Contents

10. Four Women as a Cultural Circle 179 11. The Poetics of a Young Writer 195 Epilogue: After the Paper Trail 213 Notes 217 Select Bibliography 257 Index 283 Figures and Maps

Figures

Figure 1.1. Enumeration for Miss Plato. Iowa Federal Census, City of Decorah, Winneshiek County, 1870. 20 Figure 5.1. Colored [Talcott Street] Congregational Church. Connecticut Historical Society. 85 Figure 5.2. Rev. Amos G. Beman, Congregational minister, and Rev. George A. Spywood, bishop at African Methodist Episcopal Zion, Hartford. 93 Figure 6.1. Amounts dispensed to Talcott Street Congregational Church treasurers for the South African School during Ann Plato’s tenure as its teacher. Seth Terry, Seth Terry’s Book of Estates Agencies Trusts, account books, 1825–1857, Connecticut Historical Society. 123 Figure 6.2. Ann Plato’s first invitation to Thomas Robbins, inspector for the Hartford Schools Society, early May 1846. Thomas Robbins School Papers Collection. Connecticut Historical Society. 125 Figure 6.3. Ann Plato’s subsequent invitation to Thomas Robbins, 12 May 1846. Thomas Robbins School Papers Collection. Connecticut Historical Society. 127

ix x Illustrations and Maps

Maps

Map 3.1. Long Island Sound, Missinnuok Territory, circa 1840. Map created by Ron Welburn, with assistance from Academic Computing, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Office of Information Technology. 46 Map 3.2. Approximate Traditional Network of Trails to Saukiaug (Hartford). Apportioned from Hayden L. Griswold, Map of the State of Connecticut Showing Indian Trails Villages and Sachemdoms, made for the Connecticut Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Inc. Information compiled by Mathias Spiess. 49 Map 5.1. Hartford Street Plan, 1838. Adapted from Gardners Hartford City Directory, 1838, Connecticut Historical Society. 88 Prologue

Ann Plato’s poem “The Natives of America,” in her 1841 book Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry, instigated this project. I read it as uniquely personal and familial, because its voice and manner challenged me to construct this profile of her enigmatic identity as linked to the Algonquian peoples of Long Island Sound in the antebellum period rather than replicate what gives her modest celebrity in African American literary history. Doing this meant taking the responsibility of an epistemological risk: situating Ann Plato as a member of a Native enclave in Hartford, Connecticut’s colored community. Her writing as the surface of her social and religious experience reflects some of the accommodations Native people there found they had to make in order to navigate Christian salvation and traditional values and to weigh assimilation against cultural identity resistance. Their survival took place in this confusing circumstance where Colored America offered community as a safety net. The urban Indian experience in the Northeast has barely been explored, and Essays seems the device to use to begin unpacking this ethnohistory enough to introduce the fact that Native peoples of Long Island Sound continued through the nineteenth century, when they were assumed to have disappeared, into the present. Following and interpreting a cluster of social and documentary sources about Plato and her community and signs in her writing supported my idea that approaching her identity as a Native or of Native descent from eastern Long Island, New York, would be most logical and fruitful. Doing so brings into play details no more circumstantial or unsuccessful than those that assume her to be strictly an African American woman. For those who are now willing to

xi xii Prologue acknowledge her Native background, how is that to be verified? Is her ascribed identity as a black woman simply rationalized on community association? The opaque character of early nineteenth-century documents that may confirm her cultural identity and her origins are not forthcoming, if they exist at all. What seems like Natives today conducting rescue raids into African American history to reclaim people for their ancestry is disruptive to African Americans’ community building, history, and pride, disturbing the foundations of black identity. In some instances, parties may agree on sharing a biracial identity. Still, public proclamations of biracialism (and triracialism) or “mixed race” stand to be contradicted by the private self. We know her name—Ann Plato—by which we have some assurance of her footprint for posterity during a period just shy of a decade, 1840 to 1847. Religion, education, perseverance, and teaching are her pillars of grace. She was a remarkable young woman, an adolescent prodigy, yet she will always be a mystery in an unparalleled era of United States society and in political and literary history. Thinking about her legacy through any one of several interlinking designs peculiar to tribal people in Long Island Sound helped this attempt to construct her image and reconstruct Hartford’s urban American Indian community; it helps to appreciate what she wrote about as well as from what topics she chose to refrain. I hypothesize these intangibles and uncertainties as keys toward unraveling Ann Plato and her Hartford colored community. Essays is a young writer’s venture, containing nominally unacknowledged borrowings and interpolations, yet it has flashes of spiritual insight, it demonstrates an attention to craft, and it conveys an unwavering Christian faith, all manifestations of an English education attained just how we have yet to learn. Who knows but that a now-unveiled contemporary reviewer of her book who called her “a thinker” may enhance her stature? Despite Essays’ shortcomings, it was Plato’s ceremony under mentorship and religious inspiration. She was, by contemporary accounts, a commendable teacher and an enigma as an author. Although today she remains elusive, we can learn more about her if we know how to look. Acknowledgments

To undertake a project of this kind would be impossible without the assistance of others. I am particularly grateful to the University of Massachusetts Amherst for awarding me a faculty research grant, which eased my travels and access to printers and relevant computer software in various stages of this project. To the following libraries, historical societies, archives, churches, and their staffs I owe thanks for their time, unstinting assistance, and the access to records they allowed me: The W.E.B. DuBois Library, University of Massachusetts (especially reference librarians James Kelly and Melinda McIntosh); Amherst College’s Frost Library’s Special Collections; Archives and Special Collections at Mt. Holyoke College; the Nielsen Library, Smith College; the Trinity Col- lege Watkinson Library; the Beinecke Library, Yale University; Mel Smith and others at the Connecticut State Library; James Campbell, Librarian Emeritus, New Haven County Historical Society; the Hartford History Center, Hart- ford Public Library, especially Martha Rea-Nelson; the Woolworth Library, Palmer House, Stonington, Connecticut; the Mystic Seaport Library; the Noyes Library and the Lyme Historical Society, Old Lyme; the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts; the Silvio Conte National Archives Center, Pittsfield, Massachusetts; the genealogy center of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, Amherst; the Old Saybrook Historical Society; the Connecticut town records offices in East Haddam, Montville, Lyme, Salem, and Wethersfield; the Connecticut Department of Public Health; the Office of Human Rights, U.S. Department of Human Services; the Town Hall of Charlestown, Rhode Island; and the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia.

xiii xiv Acknowledgments

On Long Island, New York: the East Hampton Public Library’s Pennypack Archives; Charlotte Jacques of the Baiting Hollow Free Library; Melissa Andrus- ki and Dan McCarthy of the Southold Free Library; the Southampton Library; the Suffolk County Historical Society in Riverhead; Amy L. Folk of the Southold Historical Society; Lisa Stevenson, director, Southold Indian Museum; Pastors Ledyard Baxter and Jacqueline L. Patt, Aquebogue Congregational Church (the Old Steeple). During my visit to Decorah, Iowa: Stan Jeffers, Decorah Genea- logical Association; Duane Fenstermann, librarian emeritus, Luther College; and Harley Refsal, associate director of Scandinavian Studies, Luther College. Several individuals contributed insights or shared material through direct or telephone conversations and correspondences electronic and otherwise about locating various records: Antonia Booth, Southold (L.I.) town historian; E. Barrie Kavasch, of Kent, Connecticut; Paul Costa, Yale University American Studies, former historian on the Mashantucket Pequot Museum Committee, and curator of the Yale Indian Papers; Jason Mancini, Mashantucket Pequot archivist; Stephen Cook, archaeologist and former curator of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center; Melissa Tantequidgeon Zobel, Mohegan tribal historian; H. David Crombie, MD, retired, for his encyclopedic knowledge of the history of Hartford Hospital; Steven Lyttle, archivist for Hartford Hospital; Alan E. Green, Farmington, Connecticut; Robert Grigg, Colebrook, Connecticut town historian; Carol Laun, genealogist, Salmon Brook Historical Society, Granby, Connecticut; Hugh MacDougall, official historian, Village of Cooperstown, New York; Joan G. Packer, reference librarian, Elihu Burnett Library, Central Connecticut State University; Bernard Prue, municipal historian, Middletown, Connecticut; Anne Farrow and Steven Courtney, of the Hartford Courant; Robert Silliman, director, Windsor Historical Society; the late David O. White, Connecticut State Historical Commission; and Maria Rivero, librarian at the Hartford Women’s Seminary. Native individuals from or having to do with Long Island Sound tribes who shared their awareness of pertinent surnames and religious circumstances include Caroline Andler, Brotherton tribal historian, via Kathleen Brown- Perez, Brotherton Nation tribal attorney; Harry Bolden and Theresa Stewart (Nehantic); Keith Brown (Eastern Pequot Indian Tribe); Rae Gould (Nipmuc Nation); Tall Oak (Everrett Weeden) (Wampanoag and Pequot); George Price (Wampanoag), University of Montana; Judy Wills (Pokanoket); the late Dr. Ella Seketau (Narragansett); Marguerite Smith and Eugene Cuffee (Shin- necock Nation); Gail Revis (Chief Running Water) (Setalcott Nation); Patricia Mann Stoliby, tribal historian for the Ramapo Mountain Lenape; Trudie Lamb and Ruth Garby Torres (Schaghticoke Nation); and Howard Tredwell-Smith (Unkachaug Nation). Particular thanks to the following in Hartford: Yvonne McGregor, historian for Faith Congregational Church (successor-name to Talc- ott Street Congregational Church); Gilbert A. Turner, historian for the Met- Acknowledgments xv ropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church; Diana Ross McCain and especially Sierra Dixon at the Connecticut Historical Society; Frank Mitchell of the Amistad Center for Art & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum; and Brian Cofrancesco, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. Special thanks also to Rutherford Sheffield, clerk for The First Congregationalist Church of Old Lyme. Robert Dale Parker (Illinois) provided invaluable suggestions on a middle-stage draft. Mary De Jong (Pennsylvania State University Altoona) patiently advised on hymn literature. Barbara Mccaskill (Georgia), Heriberto Dixon (SUNY New Paltz, retired), Bernice Forrest (Montaukett) (Colorado, Colorado Springs), and English department colleagues at UMass Amherst Joseph Sker- rett, emeritus professor, and Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge, and Karen Cardozo- Kane, formerly of Commonwealth College, and Neal Salisbury, Smith College history professor emeritus, all offered great suggestions on drafts, proposals and selected chapters. The following individuals offered helpful suggestions about Ann Plato’s family connections and her fate after 1847: my friends at UMass Robert Paynter, professor of anthropology, and Rita Rienke, doctoral candidate, Department of Anthropology. Christine Cooper, my former colleague in the English department, directed my attention to British poets Amelia Opie and Felicia Hemans, which proved invaluable; and Cynthia Packard for suggesting Jacob Abbott’s Juno and Georgie books. My thanks to Charles Rowell, editor, Callaloo; John Strong, Department of History and now emeritus at the former Long Island University, Southampton, New York. Barbara Wood Brown, co- compiler of Black Roots, shared her research notes on various Plato individuals in Connecticut and their families. Joan Cohn, director of, and Michael Spell- mon, volunteer at the Indian & Colonial Research Center, Mystic, Connecticut, and Vicki Welch, genealogist and compiler, And They Were Related, Too, provided much help. A special thanks to Rev. Diane Rodriguez, pastor of the First Congrega- tional Church, United Church of Christ, in Northville, Long Island, for hosting me at the parish house during research trips, and to Lisa Barrett, a member of the congregation. To my son, Elliott, much appreciation for his patience while I stopped at archives early in my research and for helping to find pertinent census and related listings. My wife Cheryl accompanied me on several junkets and advised me about the personality emerging from Ann Plato’s writings. The following provided images and granted permission to use the specified maps and illustrations: Ancestry.com for the enumeration for Miss Plato. Iowa Federal Census, Decorah, Winneshiek County, 1870. Originally obtained at the Silvio Conte National Archives Center, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. University of Connecticut Libraries MAGIC for the Traditional Network of Trails map. Apportioned from Hayden L. Griswold, Map of the State of xvi Acknowledgments

Connecticut Showing Indian Trails Villages and Sachemdoms, made for The Con- necticut Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Inc. Information compiled by Mathias Spiess. The Connecticut Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Inc., 1930. http://www.flickr.com/photos/uconnlibrariesmagic/3332840235/. The Connecticut Historical Society for the Hartford Street Plan, 1838, adapted from Melzar Gardner, Gardner’s Hartford City Directory, 1838; the Col- ored [Talcott Street] Congregational Church, from Geer’s 1854 Hartford City Directory; and Ann Plato’s first and second invitations to Thomas Robbins, Thomas Robbins School Papers Collection. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, Amos Beman Scrapbooks HR, 1838–1857. Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, for the image of Rev. George A. Spywood. Michele Turre of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Office of Media Technology patiently configured the illustrations and maps, especially my own for 1840. Finally, thanks to SUNY Press senior production editor Laurie Searl and to copyeditor Catherine M. Chilton for their patient guidance during this project.

A Note about Sources

As scholars in this era of digitized resources already know the Internet can be an enormous convenience and also a frustrating bane. Several data like census and town records were originally accessed from microfilm at the Silvio O. Conte National Archives Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the Connecticut State Library in Hartford. Genealogical services digitized this material at a later time. Also, some online sources underwent changes in their URLs, and others are no longer extant, leaving me to rely upon print-outs containing valuable information not replicated in other and subsequent resources. I assume responsibility for information inadvertently ignored. A Speculative and Factual Chronology for Ann Plato

• Born between 11 June 1823 and 31 December 1824. • Place of birth: possibly the North Fork, Suffolk County, eastern Long Island, New York. • Early schooling: possibly eastern Long Island. • Teacher training: possibly 1838–1841 in Connecticut. • Teacher during adolescence: possibly Amos Beman. ș Education includes reading contemporary and recent poets Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, Charlotte Smith, and William Wordsworth of England; Phillis Wheatley, Lydia H. Sigour- ney, and William Wadsworth Longfellow of the United States; also Jacob Abbott and Samuel Goodrich, among others; and Comstock’s Natural Philosophy. • October 1840: poem published in The Colored American newspaper. • 4 April 1841: Accepted into Talcott Street (Colored) Congrega- tional Church, Hartford. • June 1, 1841: Rev. James C. Pennington gives this date for “To the Reader,” his introduction to Essays. • 1841: Essays published between the middle of June and the end of the year in Hartford; no imprinter information identified; no

xvii xviii A Speculative and Factual Chronology for Ann Plato

extant printer records available, but probably L. Skinner of Hart- ford, who printed a book by Pennington. • 1841: “Little Harriet,” by “Ann,” in 19 June issue of The Colored American; reprinted from the Journal of Education and Weekly Messenger of early June. ș Listed in the Catalogue of the Talcott-st. Congregational Church of Hartford, 1842. • 1841–1842 to 1844–1845: Teaching for three years acknowledged in the Common School Report of March 1845, printed in the Supplement to the Connecticut Courant, 8 March 1845. • 1844: Teaching at the Elm Street School for two years. • 1844–1847: Teaching at the Elm Street School, also called the South African School. Recorded as residing at same in Geer’s Hartford City Directory for each year. ș December 1844 to December 1845, schools inspector Rev. Thomas Robbins visits the South African School five times (March, July, September, October, and December). ș Common School Report of 8 March 1845, including evalua- tions of the two colored schools, identifies Ann Plato as teacher of Second School (35) and alludes to her as a teacher with three years’ experience who is also an “authoress” who taught philosophy well (38). ș Robbins visits Ann Plato’s school in September 1845, finding it closed; returns in October. ș May 1846 (no specific dates): Ann Plato twice invites Robbins to view her pupils. ș 21 May 1846: unnamed, but teacher of record at a school exhibition; identified in The Charter Oak, p. 2. • 1847–1870: Whereabouts unknown. Consumption rehabilitation? Relocation? Assisting and teaching in a school or schools outside of New England? Missionary work? • 10 June 1870: Enumerated for the Iowa Federal Census, Town of Decorah, Winnishiek County as “Miss Plato,” born in New York; age 46. “W” [white], but “Fer” or “For,” meaning “stranger” in Norwegian (enumerator Olson) or “foreign,” superimposed over the “k” at the end of “New York.” • After 1870: Fate unknown. Introduction

To pursue a critical biography of an author who left only a scant record of her existence invites curiosity about the need for such an endeavor and about the pursuer. Because she left so little to posterity, Ann Plato, who lived in Hartford, Connecticut, where she published Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry in 1841, is an enigma in the literary history of the United States.1 She has a modest reputation in African American literature through her membership in Hartford’s Colored Congregational Church, her book, and her teaching during the 1840s in a school operated by that church. African American literary historians determine her exclusively to be one of their own. One poem in her book, “The Natives of America,” attracts recent observers to acknowledge her as biracial, agreeing that its father-persona may be literal and personal to her, but they offer little context or discussion to support this. George Washington University professor J. Saunders Redding (1912–1988, the then “dean” of American Negro literary history) piqued my interest in Ann Plato in 1967 when, as visiting professor at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, he stated: Ann Plato “may have been part or half Indian.”2 On “The Natives of America” hangs the debate about Plato’s racial identity. Because Native lives were affected so traumatically before 1800 by European invasion and genocide in the greater Northeast, the exogamous marriages with Europeans and Africans that were necessary for tribal survival did not always meet with approval from tribal leaders. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some leaders, with the support of white overseers and trustees, could foreclose membership to racially intermarried members and their offspring. In

1 2 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity the chapters on the Plato surname and Plato’s social and religious milieu, I will discuss a few key examples. Underpinning my argument is my proposition that if we acknowledge the possibility that “Natives” is autobiographical (as if that settles Plato’s identity), we are perpetuating the critical and sociological status quo that forecloses concentration on her Native ancestry. Irrepressibly important for not simply accepting her as having Native ancestry but affirming her Native identity is how she constructs the father-daughter interaction in that poem, for the Native father gives us indisputable confirmation. From that poem, I have pursued her Native heritage as more than metaphorical or hypothetical. I do not see the father in the poem as a figment of literary ventriloquism. This book argues for two spaces for Ann Plato and Natives in the Long Island Sound region. One, I hypothesize a space and appreciation for her as a young nineteenth-century writer of Native ancestry who exhibited remarkable, if controversial, literary capabilities. I take a different approach from the orthodox perception of her as strictly African American by maintaining that signs and attitudes having to do with her and her writing can better be interpreted by putting her indigenous heritage at the center. I then construct and assert a profile that cuts across the orthodox racial grain, even though she writes with conflict about indigeneity. I self-impose caution in deploying the term mixed race to describe her. Whether used as adjective or noun, the term seems easy to misapply; it and hybridity are used in critical race theory; postcolonial theories, from which these terms derive, tend to be inadequate for discussing Native peoples and their world.3 Meanwhile, I do interpret Ann Plato as a person in conflict about reconciling a Native past and a woman of color’s present. In short, I approach her as an Indian abiding in Hartford’s colored community, where lived not just blacks but Natives from various tribes, some of whom may have been of mixed ancestry. This connects to the other space the book engages: Hartford’s urban Natives of the 1830s–1840s. Despite reckoned by historiography as African Americans, some of these families were part of or had core relations in Native tribal communities. In cities such as Hartford, some opted for identity as colored or black as the survival path of least resistance; some stubbornly held on to Native identity; a few relocated. Appropriately, to play on a Philip Deloria book title, they are Natives in a place one would not expect them to be.4 From my curiosity about Plato’s four ill-fated young women and her interest in them emerged an inextricably related pursuit: to identify a demography for Hartford’s urban Natives through surname links to tribal communities in order to illustrate that their living in its colored community did not affirm it to be racially monolithic, as is casually assumed. A proto–manifest destiny promoted the notion that Indians would be unable to survive in the world shaped by their conquerors unless they assimilated. Exogamous marriages and the presence of blacks, mulattoes, and “strange Indians” on reservation lands during Introduction 3 the eighteenth century and on reservations established on lands unsuited for the agricultural lifestyle that whites wanted Natives to adopt disrupted Native communities, setting in motion changes in appearance, mores, and attitudes yet solidifying Native sovereignty of identity. Those relocating to Hartford in the early nineteenth century to seek work opportunities and Christian community were partners in establishing and sustaining its colored churches: Colored Con- gregational and Colored Methodist Episcopal. I fully acknowledge the risks in attempting to develop a critical profile for a nineteenth-century author who left neither entry nor exit signs, who preferred self-effacement. Evidence offered as conditional can be reviled as circumstantial. But as one historian friend responded to my question about what he considered to be circumstantial evidence: all evidence in history is circumstantial. Redding pondered “Natives” enough to state the likelihood that it was personal, and who then would have accused this literary “dean” of indulging circumstantial evidence? His conditional syntax about her identity dented a stockade of sorts that I, willing to play heretic, want to explore. Although we have no vital details for Ann Plato, this does not mean we should dismiss her as a literary figure, for she was the second woman of color in the United States after Phillis Wheatley to publish a book with poems, or the second outright black woman poet, or possibly the first Native American woman book author to write in English. Her writing tells us a great deal about education for a young woman of color in the 1830s and justifies inquiries about and demonstrations of her literary craft. Ann Plato was clearly part of the early nineteenth century’s female social and literary milieu: this is clear from her devotion to teaching and her religious zeal, on one hand and, on the other hand, from her clever execution of literary strategies and her allegiance to themes shared by her contemporaries. Let me interject an example in concert with the idea of ethnic and racial apprehension of a personality. By interrogating the race and ethnicity of Emma Dunham Kelley, author of two novels in the 1890s and assumed by several scholars to be black, Holly Jackson provides epistemological tissue that can help us theorize Plato’s social and cultural identity. Kelley, Jackson points out, gained a place in African American literary history—albeit an obscure one—despite always being identified as white in public records. Her photographic image, presenting a young woman of ambiguous phenotype—deceptively “white” yet suggesting a hint of color in her ancestry—produced a “rush to judgment” to confirm her in the African American literary canon. None other than Henry Louis Gates accepted her initially as “a sister.” Gates felt Kelley’s identity as black would have been affirmed in any black barbershop. As general editor of Oxford University Press’s Schomburg Library series, he had overseen her inclusion without further inquiry, the point of Jackson’s discussion.5 At least Kelley, born in Dennis, Massachusetts, in 1863, left to posterity not one but two books—novels; enough genealogical background details to 4 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity construct an ancestral profile; and a photograph. Her vital history remained unknown to the public until 2006.6 Given the interpretation and verification of Kelley’s identity, particularly involving her photograph, her lineage may be worth further inquiry that cannot be entertained here except to point out that Dennis is still a tiny community on the north shore east-west neck of the town of Barnstable on Cape Cod, about ten miles northeast of Hyannis and facing Cape Cod Bay to its immediate north.7 To have drawn such attention about her background, and still in a black or white reckoning, the possibility that Kelley had an ancestor with a Wampanoag, Portuguese, or African background may be hidden in the record or have been hidden by the family. Meanwhile, the conversation about Kelley’s identity invites an opportunity for taxonomic comparison along the same lines as Ann Plato, played out on the grounds of identity assignation in literary criticism. Referring to the “anomalous” character of Kelley’s novels, Jackson proclaims “there is no evidence to suggest that Kelley was African American.”8 Literary scholars of Plato have assumed her identity to be African American, based upon the reasons identified. Comparing Plato with Kelley may appear a facile gesture, given the former’s apparently voluntary associations and the latter having never proclaimed herself publicly to be anything except white. But as Jackson proceeds to analyze Kelley’s authorial identity and authority, her argument creates a fulcrum by which Plato’s lack of African American literary investment can be measured, illuminating “The Natives of America” and the social and cultural backgrounds of the four young women she eulogizes. Decentering Ann Plato from her established African American identity thus counters orthodox assumptions. Trinity College in Hartford invested in her as a local black author by creating a doctoral fellowship in her name. Pri- oritizing the Native American ancestry more African American critics are now willing to acknowledge that she shares may seem reliant upon circumstantial evidence. The African American world includes individuals whose genealogy is more Native than black; for a short list: Christiana Babcock Carteaux, a Narragansett living in Boston, married the Canadian black landscape painter Edward Mitchell Bannister; T. Thomas Fortune, who worked with Booker T. Washington, was of “Spanish-Indian” (Calusa?) and Seminole descent; enter- tainers include jazz trumpeter Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham and innovative bass player Oscar Pettiford.9 Particularly in the eastern United States, many Natives felt compelled to live among blacks to protect their families, strange as that may seem when African Americans faced all levels of discrimination and violence. Finding Natives in African America and retrieving them is intended neither to assault African American unity and pride nor to deliberately test African American resentment. Neglected in rationales for asserting Native identity along the entire Atlantic coast are the legacy of documentary ethnic cleansing; the one-drop rule assigning black identity to Natives; and the attempts to Introduction 5 compel Natives to assimilate into African America, thus solving the Atlantic coast Native problem. These measures keep Native Americans and African Americans colonized in history and in the present. For the 1830s, collectively they represent a corollary to a proto–manifest destiny, creating and perpetuating the myth of the vanishing Indian in order to justify dispossessing Native people of their homelands by proclaiming them to be anything but Natives. Along with white Americans, African Americans and some Indians bought this image of disappearance. This is the colonialism that created identity afrocentricism. If lacking concrete evidence challenges the idea that Ann Plato was not Native, is there, conversely, concrete evidence other than her membership in an ostensibly black church to support the idea that she was black? As the role of culture slowly gains persuasive usage against the artifices of race and presumptions based upon complexion, families and individuals on the color line of red and black experience confusion even today as to what is home for the “mixed race” person. Resentment and pressures from family, friends, and neighbors may subvert Native identity if allowed, and this upsets a cultural ontological space. If anything, this study of Ann Plato examines the corollary of Plato families and others like them as Hartford urban Natives, considering how some Natives, whether or not of mixed ancestry, tried to hold onto their identity and how others became transformed into African Americans. In other words, just as African Americans with partial Native ancestry do not claim to be nor want to be Natives, so, likewise, Natives with partial black ancestry do not wish to be African American. Thus I hypothesize that Plato felt conflicted by her Native ancestry as she attended Colored Congregational Church and served its community as a teacher. Three principal signs in her book justify this hypothesis: the manner in which Rev. James C. Pennington, the pastor at Colored Congregational, refers to her in his “To the Reader” introduction to her book; the passionate father’s narration in her poem “The Natives of America” in contrast to the dispassionate voice in “To the First of August,” celebrating England’s abolishment of slavery in its Atlantic colonies; and the four women chosen for biographies. John Milton Earle’s report of 1859 concerns Natives in Massachusetts and serves as a template for his inclusion of a full range of Native identities of full and mixed ancestry. As a demographic study through his position as Commis- sioner of Indian Affairs for the Commonwealth, it remains unlike anything pursued for Connecticut’s Native peoples; it clearly states, as part of his criteria: “to examine the condition of Indians and the descendants of Indians domiciled in the state . . . [obtaining a count] of persons reputed Indians, who are of mixed or other race.”10 However, the report surveys Natives of tribal communities and reservations, not cities. In order to challenge the dominant paradigm of critical research and academic production reinforcing the purity of Native tribal identity, ethnohistorians 6 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity and social historians have to relinquish their concentration on Native life during the colonial era and turn a sympathetic gaze toward Native life and survival since the eighteenth century; continuing to lock New England Natives into a past affixed by the manifest destiny view will prevail until there is a greater appreciation for what shaped the persistence and survival of Native communities. Compendia such as Barbara W. Brown and James M. Rose’s Black Roots and Vicki Welch’s indispensable genealogies in And They Were Related Too cut across the grain of orthodox historiography, with Welch following a pattern associated with the writing of histories of mainstream New England families.11 Researchers face labor-intensive challenges trying to identify the reasons those who left tribal communities did so, subsequently constituting a diaspora within Missinnuok, a Narragansett term signifying “the [Native] people,” which can be applied to the culturally related Algonquian peoples of the Long Island Sound Basin.12 Natives of all backgrounds contributed to this diaspora, with families desiring to find Christian community or pursue improved economic circumstances outside homelands where indenture and slavery marked their disenfranchisement. Between 1790 and the Civil War, a period of American nation building, the cultural and social identity within Missinnuok hung in the balance as the rhetoric of disappearance stared down upon Natives; in cities such as Hartford, Natives became documented as free colored persons. My use of urban Indian or urban Native for nineteenth-century Hartford Indians takes for granted some possible degree of racial mixture that may have motivated them to settle there; they are not antecedents of twentieth-century urban Indians confronted by federal termination policies that compelled them to relocate from their reservations, although the resulting effect would be the same. Moving beyond the ethnohistoricism that colonized Native life in southern New England up to Metacom’s War of 1675–1676, an emerging scholarship has begun to take seriously the long middle history from the end of the seventeenth century to the modern rising voices in the region spurred on by Native pride in the Alcatraz takeover of 1969; the Wounded Knee action of 1972–1973; and, closer to home, the reevaluation of the Thanksgiving mythology, culminating in the protest by Wampanoags and others at Plymouth Rock in 1970 that established the “National Day of Mourning.” This latter event, perhaps more than any other, signaled how well New England Natives had prevailed despite manifest destiny. Documents of a legal nature from the period included in this study and pertinent church and town histories need to be continually examined to support any theorizing on this research. There is also principal work in the Readings in Long Island Archaeology and Ethnohistory series, such as The History and Archaeol- ogy of the Montauk (1993) and The Shinnecock Indians: A Culture History (1993), both edited by Gaynell Stone for the Suffolk County Archaeological Association; John Strong’s The Montaukett Indians of Eastern Long Island (2001), as well as his Introduction 7

The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Island: A History (2011); The Quinnipiac: Cultural Conflict in Southern New England, by John Menta (2003), predominantly covering the colonial period; Amy Den Ouden’s highly respected Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England (2005). Three important writings by Anishnaabe scholar Jean O’Brien are worthy of note: “ ‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England,” published in the equally valuable Colin Calloway–edited collection After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (1997); her first book, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (1997); and in 2010, her second book, Firsting and Last- ing: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. Calloway’s anthology also includes “The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era,” a collaboration by Ruth Wallis Herndon and the Narragansett scholar and historian Ella Wilcox Seketau, offering excellent examples of racially motivated documentary erasure. Emphasizing Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Daniel R. Mandell examines social history, demography, and cultural changes affecting reservations and Native town life in Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880. John Wood Sweet’s study Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 also goes deeply into interracial interactions. With works by Thomas Doughton and Charles Bril- vitch (mentioned below), this group of persuasive, lengthy studies helps unlock Natives from the rhetoric of nineteenth-century disappearance.13 These authors provide perceptive overviews, social histories, and eth- nohistories whose demographics concentrate on the postcontact survivals of distinct tribal communities, families, and individuals, and they provide an invaluable foreground to the construction of theories concerning people such as Ann Plato and the Natives in her social and religious milieu. Because most of these works either deconstruct specific documentary evidence or challenge the myth of Indians vanishing from New England indigenous lives, they have limited use for the probing of social and cultural destinies of Indians in cities and “off-reservation” small towns.14 There is in general a provocative character in the dynamics of moving about in this territory, what would qualify as a diaspora: relocations by Long Island Sound Natives into coastal and interior Connecticut over roughly a century from 1760. William Apess’s parents are one example: they left their Pequot homelands and settled in Colrain, Massachusetts, where he was born. Rounding out this Missinnuok diaspora are Natives from Montaukett on Long Island; from Pequot, Western Niantic, Paugusett, and other Connecticut tribal communities; and from Narragansett in Rhode Island, all passing in a northerly trajectory through each other’s traditional territories to settle temporarily or permanently in Old Lyme, Montville, East Haddam, Hartford, and new but remote communities such as Barkhamsted and others in northwestern Connecticut. 8 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

What motivated this protracted diaspora? Was there not enough land space for too many tribal members? Did African admixture in some families bring this about? Were Natives in search of social peace of mind or ecumenical solace—or, perhaps, all of these? And did those who settled in Hartford intend to stay permanently? The Earle Report found for the sea-employed Natives in New Bedford that most from his number of one hundred and fifty hoped to return to their natal lands.15 It is one of the great ironies in American social history that in the relative terms of race survival, and despite the opprobrium faced by blacks, settling in urban areas with African Americans offered Natives protection and a community for relative social stability. With Hartford being Ann Plato’s residence and workplace, her cohorts of Native ancestry for one or more generations had to meet the new social and cultural challenge of interacting with a larger number of African Americans, helping to establish and then participating in their collective community’s social institutions. Some lived covertly while resisting full assimilation into African America; others assimilated into the identity of colored as meaning black, Negro, or African American; and still more lived amid the confusion of choice—proud of and loving their family ancestors yet ashamed of the “savage” legacy. This life was just as tough for urban Indians, social pariahs who faced prejudice as they desired dignity and human rights in a double paradigm of identity.16 With her social participation as a teacher, Plato can be viewed as an aspirant to Hartford’s tiny colored middle class, even if her status was achieved passively. Her echelon would have included Pennington and others associated with the churches serving the African American and Native community. This is the area in which theories about the identity and community of off-reservation, culturally isolated, and urban Natives in the nineteenth-century Northeast remain woefully under-researched, although there are three important studies and one cultural memoir related to one of those studies: a report, “They Were Here All Along,” by Donna Keith Baron, J. Edward Hood, and Holly V. Izard of Old Sturbridge Village, who focus on the “Nipmucks” (sic) of Massachusetts and northern Connecticut, extrapolates from the John Milton Earle report of 1859; Nipmuc scholar Thomas Doughton’s essay in After King Philip’s War, “Unseen Neighbors: Native Americans of Central Massachusetts, a People Who Had Vanished,” on Nipmuc survival in and around Worcester, Massachusetts; and chapters by Charles Brilvitch in A History of Connecticut’s Golden Hill Paugusett Tribe, which should be read with Quarter-Acre of Heart- ache, Paugusett Chief Big Eagle (Aurelius Piper)’s narrative written by Claude Clayton Smith, all stand as benchmarks for this kind of research.17 These four works confirm the need to take a proactive approach to Native mobility in southern New England. People of different tribal backgrounds within Missin- nuok constituted Hartford’s Natives. We may think about them as a diaspora, but they actually are within their cultural territory at large, and the fact that Introduction 9

Hartford was built on the site of a principal town of the Saukiaug should not be dismissed.18 In chapter 3, I will argue for the urban Native space of Hart- ford through a lens offered by Lisa Brooks’s The Common Pot, which recovers Native spaces in the Northeast. As with the scarce resources on nineteenth-century Native New England- ers, a concentrated critical (race) theory about Natives has yet to emerge. The studies cited above do not engage the social psychology of cultural survival for off-reservation Natives. Not even Jack Forbes’s Africans and Native Americans provides much in this regard, and under scrutiny and discussion, his designation “Red-Black” peoples is a problematical cultural marker.19 In nineteenth-century Hartford, the Native and Native-descended families such as those of Plato, Beman, Easton, Fish, Pell, Sherman, and Spywood pursued various options for social inclusion or social distinctiveness, struggling against the impact of cultural dissolution or going along with it. The family of Henry and Deborah Plato remained individualistic; the Bemans gave themselves to black consciousness; Betsy Fish, who followed Ann Plato at the Elm Street school, kept a low profile; Easton, like Harriet Plato Lewia along the Connecticut Sound, may have opted for African American status that was reversed in later generations; Spywood specified his parents’ tribal backgrounds, yet he became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination. Attempting a critique of these Native people must reckon with their choices for social affiliation amid the crucible of their alleged disappearance. Plato’s poem “The Natives of America” may seem like a literary monument to their disappearance if we read it superficially, but it leaves open two options: surviving away from his homeland for the narrator and the persistence of memory for his child. Not questioning the records where race is documented as black or colored further clouds the issue, when other resources, such as oral traditions, lead to those persons being Natives. The objective of enforcing Native American dissolution, a plan Anglo-Americans developed from ill-conceived yet desperate logic, must be reviewed with a gaze on the matrix Christianity created for that dissolution. Against the silenced history of Native peoples along the East Coast, Plato plays an axial role with Essays because, in her posterity, it encourages a discussion of urban Natives in nineteenth-century Hartford and elsewhere, thus contradicting historical beliefs about their disappearance. Not to be overlooked about Plato and some Natives is pastor and congregation expressive style. As early nineteenth-century African Americans invested in the encouragements of “racial uplift,” which came to dominate the content of sermons, Congregationalists would have avoided the exhortatory practices favored by Methodists. Throughout the Pequot Methodist preacher William Apess’s conversion narrative A Son of the Forest, the term exhort recurs to describe his preaching activities.20 Exhorting simply is not the Congregational style, the denomination being older than Methodism by nearly two centuries 10 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity and despite the influences of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening on its theology. We could no more see Ann Plato in Methodist temperament than we could see her following the Pope. And there is an important distinction between the Apess (and Spywood) approach to faith and Plato’s: she was born into or raised in Congregationalism; the exhortations of Methodism rescued them as young men from personal degeneration and chaos. In keeping with the view of Connecticut Natives active in Christianity, why not consider Ann Plato as a religious writer? Those scholars who focus on her piety have not placed her as important to the ecumenical life of her readers. To view her as a junior member of the milieu in which Apess and Spywood preached and wrote distinguishes their collective paths in spite of her unique literary output. Apess died in 1839, having written five books; Spywood’s conversion narrative was printed in 1842. Both authors and their writings obviously differ from the reticent content of Essays by their awakened discourses and fervent evangelicalism—and Apess’s political posture on Native history and current affairs. Considering Ann Plato as a religious figure heightens how we read her interest in Lydia Sigourney, a topic of chapter 8. Looking at Plato and Essays with an urban Native emphasis also makes visible the dynamic refractions in social and cultural identity wrestled with by her peers. By this I mean that she argues through her moralistic and religious book for identity as a Christian, not as belonging to a race or ethnicity rife with a forlorn history of being heathen or enslaved and without the promise of salvation. With death from consumption and other illnesses claiming so many in the Connecticut Valley during her formative years, and the four eulogies in Essays reflecting but a sample of those victims, she could rely upon little other than her faith to help her along life’s path. Religious identity thus became her culture. I must clarify two sometimes associated designations that will recur throughout this book: colored, in terms of Native Americans in Connecticut; and a justifiable use of Native and Indian to identify this population. Present- day Natives shun terms such as colored and people of color for Natives, yet, as we practice declaring cultural distinctions in culturally diverse settings, people of color suits discussions in which we do not know the particulars of who people are. Apess himself used this term. For Plato’s historical period and place, colored is an open-ended identifier, used in contradistinction to white, which identifies Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Colored has undergone taxonomic changes in record keeping since the birth of the United States, substituting for African and Negro. Antebellum census enumerations interchangeably designate a Native as Free Colored Person as often as Free Negro and Mulatto, especially Natives living away from tribal homelands where they would not be enumerated at all in the federal census—hence the familiar wording at the top of antebellum enumeration pages: “lists all free persons except Indians who are not taxed.” Over the three decades from the founding of the African Religious Society in Hartford, Introduction 11 its members, black and Native, appear to have discussed the cultural rhetoric of African as a nominal self-referent, coming fairly early to adopt Colored Congre- gational and Colored Methodist Episcopal. We are left to devise our own interpretations about this discussion, because the copious writings of the two major ministerial figures to emerge out of social necessity leading to the African Reli- gious Society—Amos G. Beman and George A. Spywood—say nothing about any disputatious issues of nomenclature. The preference for Colored rather than Black or African may be isolated in Hartford in time, yet intangible reckonings of indigeneity support a view of cultural preference. Still, we cannot dismiss the widespread use and application for colored among African Americans, as in the Colored American newspaper and Colored Conventions for human rights and the abolition of slavery. Use of the term prevailed by 1830, alternating with African, Black, and Negro as an identifier of African background. Here is where urban Indians probably used the term as a subterfuge to insulate their tribal identities at the mercy of social circumstances: the generalized black perception is that “we are all the same”; Natives would have used the term to say “we are persons of color, but we are not African.” I perceive Natives in 1820s Hartford raising the issue of language inclusive of themselves and their African American neighbors. When Colored Con- gregational Church in Hartford came into being in 1826, it had emerged from the African Religious Society of 1819. Adopting Colored for its name, a title sustained into the 1840s, suggests a difference of opinion or a cultural schism within its membership that was reconciled by colored being satisfactory to both Native Americans (Indians) and African Americans (Negroes) in this Christian community. Central to any cultural critique for nineteenth-century Natives along the East Coast is understanding the epistemology of colored as a general term of identification, for colored acts as signifier both of cultural loss and for protective social and cultural refuge for Natives, and it can function to isolate them psy- chologically from Native and tribal identity. African Americans and Natives did not use colored for the same reasons. Behind the signification, Natives abided by a different register of identity, using it with a totally different cultural meaning from a casual, interchangeable reference for black, Negro, or African American. African American communities wield a pecking-order empowerment over their other nonwhite neighbors; it becomes a brokerage of power that subsumes other identities, canceling those identities unless cultural resistance prevails, effecting them as subalterns to an African American majority as physical presence and as sign. Colonial conventions made that clear; Henry Harland Garnet, whose ideas about social and religious identity I will discuss in chapter 5, accepted the idea that blacks had absorbed the “weaker” Indians. Plato kept her own counsel, not just for herself alone but for other Natives in her Talcott Street church. To play off Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities, urban Natives 12 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity are projected as nonexistent entities, their identities ceded to African America without the signifiers realizing that Natives constituted a disjunctive enclave that remained vulnerable to ridicule when they spoke or behaved contrary to black racial cohesion, unity, and style. The collective Hartford community may have adopted colored for their churches, but their spokesmen and leaders aggregated around Negro for the conventions held to address the need for schools and the abolition of slavery and to demand civil rights. Although the church used colored in its name, its schools were named African. Eventually, blacks won the tug of war over the term colored, and Natives acceded to it. Meanwhile, the selective memory of Indian attacks held by colonial descendants in the new nation would make Natives in early nineteenth-century Connecticut generally vulnerable to harass- ment, to the extent that some nonreservation and urban Natives would adopt a social covert identity. Phenotype and cultural background ought not to be confused with the socializing process. Given this sometimes indeterminate identifier of colored, the matter of how to identify Ann Plato and her Native peers becomes a risk-taking issue. After musing on this and trying to avoid overly personal experiences, I choose to refer to this community simply as Native or of Native descent and qualify mixed ancestry when I must. I use mixed-ancestry Indians at times, yet it too seems superfluous and too bulky; women of several Native families, having lost men in the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812, were compelled to marry out, yet, with some exceptions, they and their children remained Native. “Black Indians,” a classification promoted by Wil- liam Loren Katz, and Forbes’s aforementioned “Red-Black People” are both problematical, misapplied terms. Native members of Plato’s Colored Congre- gational Church represent an enclave struggling to survive despite sociological challenges to its cultural identity. So sparse is the contemporary body of critical analysis of Essays that, mystery though its author may be, evaluative strategies should be carefully wielded. Structuralism approaches have been useful, with just two articles examining the religious rhetoric of her prose in historical context and one book chapter about her that combines New Criticism with structuralism. Signs in Essays bountifully reveal what she read, with intertextuality her obvious rhetorical forte, but signs further imply that hers was a covert personality. Hartford’s Ann Plato insists that a conversation about off-reservation Natives along Long Island Sound must defy the dissolution of Native identity. We must take seriously what Natives today in Missinnuok say about the balance between documentation and oral traditions in regard to tribal identities and residence locations when we reexamine and interpret census reports and church membership lists that do not identify Natives culturally. African Ameri- can resources (for example, newspapers, principally The Colored American) Introduction 13 reopen paths by which some Natives in Connecticut and on Long Island were compelled to travel. The Native experience in southern New England is not a monolithic story. Reservations and Indian towns and enclaves sparingly dotted the geography, and some were dissolved. The language used by three tribes in the Sound who vigorously pursued residence restrictions against “mulattoes and strange Indians” has to be carefully interpreted; for inquiry’s sake, this is not simply a matter of the sovereignty of tribal identity but of just what is meant by those identifiers that can reenvision demographic history. “Mulatto” when applied to residents of Indian country, may not mean the standard racial mixture of African and English ancestry but a mixture of Native and something else, and a “strange Indian” could be a Native from another region or a “Spanish Indian” from Florida or the Spanish Antilles. The Eastern Pequots, the Montauketts, and especially the Mohegans expressed such concerns before Samson Occom’s birth and after his death; his thinking on this matter coincided with that of Sir William Johnson, who brokered the Brothertown migration to Oneida in New York. The complexities embedded in these collective dispositions were affected by the losses of Native men fighting on the side first of the English colonists and then of the American rebels in eighteenth-century wars. O’Brien in Firsting and Lasting, Doughton, Mandell, and Menta have delved into the circumstances of exogamous marriages and unions in the wake of these conflicts and the tensions and disputes within tribes over this matter, which sometimes led to dismissals of offenders and their offspring from communities. Meanwhile, the record does not illuminate how tribes continued to retain their identities according to new forms of endogamy wherein marriages occurred between Natives of mixed ancestry. I have constructed this book in three parts. Chapters 1 through 5 situate Plato as part of Hartford’s urban Indian enclave, whose members contend with cultural identity. Chapters 6 and 7 act as a transition between this social, eth- nohistorical, and religious milieu and the second portion of the book, chapters 8 through 11, which concentrate on the book’s literary content. The opening chapter presents orthodox scholarship about her, largely a modest collection of commentary published since the 1980s, to form a base from which to inter- rogate the issues of racial vagueness and biracial identity. I situate her in a milieu of race identity crossings with the Montaukett and African American author Olivia Bush-Banks. In chapter 2, I lay the foundation of my hypothesis for Ann Plato’s Native ancestral ties by arguing that in her poem “The Natives of America,” she reflects a unique passion and cultural personality that coordinates with her ancestral identity in contrast to the lack of heat we find in “To August the First,” a poem celebrating the abolition of slavery by Great Britain for its colonies in the Americas. “The Natives of America” should affirm the hypothesis that she views herself as Indian; her other writings voice confusion about that identity. 14 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Chapter 3 situates a history of the Long Island Sound Native community in Hartford, considering its prehistory and the motivations by Missinnuok to gather there. In chapter 4, I propose that an ancestral milieu can be advanced based upon the legacies of certain families of color carrying the Plato surname: most Connecticut Plato families seem to be Natives who migrated into the vicinity of Lyme and East Lyme during the 1810s and 1820s from the Montaukett Indian communities on New York’s Long Island of neighboring East Hampton and Sag Harbor. The historical record shows blacks in western Long Island and one in Hartford, Connecticut, named Plato, but those Platos in eastern Long Island are Natives. Chapter 5 scrutinizes those signs and coordinates that shape the social and religious parameters of Plato’s identity. I determine her to be part of a diaspora within Missinnuok and discuss how the pastor of Fifth Hartford [Colored] Congregational Church perceived her, the legacy of racialism regarding Natives of mixed ancestry adopted in the eighteenth century by Mohegans and some other tribes of Long Island Sound, and how theological attitudes in Congre- gationalism during her youth may have affected her. This chapter thus seeks to explore, as much as documents provide, an understanding of urban Natives affiliated with Hartford’s colored churches. Because we know so little about her, the life and work of Ann Plato represents a collective of paradoxes, among them a covert personal identity involved in public activity and the publication of a book of personal expression that conveys her religious values but little else about the author herself. Chapter 6 contains the most speculation in the study, having to do with where and how she may have been educated to become a teacher. Her instruction seems to have been formal according to one of her poems, and prior to publishing her book, she taught in an infant school. Her experience was singularly extraordinary for a young woman of color, considering how opportunities for educating blacks and Natives so extensively, especially girls, were unavailable and the expectation of them unrealistic. Much of my discussion involves books of composition and rhetoric available to her contemporaries that she very likely read. I will also discuss an 1845 Common School report that mentions her. Chapter 7 focuses on the equally obscure publication details of her book of modest physical size and length. It leads to the literary analysis of Ann Plato’s work by showing her as practicing a young writer’s ceremony of aesthetic creativity. I also will discuss a review of her book published in 1848. Chapter 8 follows with a careful look at how and why she relied so heavily on Lydia Sigourney’s structure and content in The Girl’s Reading Book, in Prose and Poetry, for Schools (1838) and whether or not this is a case of literary plagiarism. In chapter 9, “The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics,” I interpret the content of the essays and identify those clusters that share particular themes of benevolence and piety, and I examine elements of her rhetorical style. Her Introduction 15 sixteen essays reveal the amount and range of her reading and that she read with some depth of understanding, which she conveys in cursory fashion. Sigourney’s The Girl’s Reading Book specifically applies here as a conduct book, and I will draw comparisons between Sigourney’s content and what Plato borrowed from Sigourney. But this book was not her only resource. A nagging question is who in the first place may have instructed her and guided her reading. The four ill-fated young women Ann Plato describes in her biographies section, who died during 1838 and 1839, are the subject of chapter 10, and I propose that they were women like herself, not simply in age and piety but in that they all seem to have shared an ancestry whose common link was Native American. They appear to have been linked to Native communities in Con- necticut, thus sharing a Missinnuok heritage. That Plato chose to be associated with them and write what are essentially the only eulogies that exist about them deepens the potential that she found community among mixed-ancestry Native women abiding in colored Hartford. In chapter 11, which is about Ann Plato’s poetry and poetics, I examine her craft as a young poet trying various stanza, line, and metric strategies. Besides Phillis Wheatley, noted early by some critics as an influence, I have identified four British and two American poets whose poem lines and phrases she interpolated for her own poetry, making broader the readings that Kath- erine Clay Bassard finds in her exclusive reliance upon Wheatley.21 I review Bassard’s deployment of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and refer to Julia Kristeva to apply a theory of intertextuality for these poems. In sum, Ann Plato represents a viable case study of a young female author likely of Native extraction living in colored Hartford in the early nineteenth century. The attitude and tenor of Essays suggests that both religious piety and ethnic uncertainty restrain her from making a thorough commitment to an identity as a colored woman embracing Africa. Too many signs in her writing show resistance to an African American consciousness, and those signs betray a covert otherness among her peers and associates. She is an enigma, a young woman without a vital history who surfaced after being educated, by parties and in places unknown, to prepare to teach, as reflected by the contents of her book, and left a record of professionalism before disappearing. After tacit agreement by scholars in recent years on the likelihood of her possessing both an African American and a Native American background, a project giving priority to the Native component initiates this comprehensive assessment situating her in Hartford’s urban Native community. It is the intention that such a project about Ann Plato, despite the open ends she left through what seems to be her diligent self-effacement, will result in plausible interpretations of urban Native experience in the Hartford, Connecticut, of her time.

Chapter 1

Ann Plato ᇺᇻᇺ

Hartford’s Literary Enigma

Because so little is known about Ann Plato, literary history has offered her investigators no choice but to consign her to a status as a writer, poet, and teacher of minor importance in early nineteenth century Hartford, Connecti- cut. Her reputation, confined to African American literary history, rests solely on the prose and poems published in her single book of 1841, Essays; Includ- ing Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry; one of its poems, “Reflections, Written upon Visiting the Grave of a Venerated Friend,” had been published in the 5 September 1840, issue of The Colored American weekly newspaper with the word “Lines” in the title instead of “Reflections.” Her place and date of birth and her family particulars are unknown; documents relevant to black Hartford applaud her reticent presence as a teacher from 1842 to 1847 in one of the city’s two schools for colored children. Since 1988, Trinity College in Hartford has offered the Ann Plato Pre/Post-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship. After 1847, Plato vanishes, and she seems to appear nowhere else in the public record until the 1870 Iowa federal census. Neither in documents nor in her writings has she provided posterity with more than the slightest circumstantial information about herself. And neither were her birth nor death officially recorded by the states of Connecticut or New York. Born in 1823 or 1824, she can only be reckoned implicitly in any federal census for New York or any of the southern New England states from 1830 to 1850. With the notable exception of her listing in Hartford’s Talcott Street [or Colored] Congregational Church catalogue of 1842,1 there are no other church records. There are no schooling records, their absence thus preventing verification of her education. Absence of both kinds of documentation coincides

17 18 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity historically with officials in Connecticut only beginning to maintain such documentation consistently. Constructing a profile of Ann Plato means paying serious attention to her discursive strategies and her activities in Hartford’s colored community. She is probably related to other Plato families of color on Long Island (most likely Montauketts) and in Connecticut (Montaukett immigrants). With her writings expressing deeply felt pieties and for her commitment to teaching children, she can be included as a young woman of color among the black women writers of the early nineteenth century who, Frances Smith Foster observes in Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892, worked “within the Cult of True Womanhood, [creating] a literature dedicated to moral improvement and social welfare.” These women wrote to a general public, Foster asserts, on themes sometimes “blatantly political” but “routinely articulated in religious terms.” Their objectives were couched in moral didacticism, even as they addressed abolitionism and the kindred social issues that came to overlap with early nineteenth-century topics such as religious conversion and piety.2 Researching this nineteenth-century author, who left virtually no personal track record other than her teaching, resembles trying to garner the sparse information on a young early nineteenth-century British poet, Susan Evance, who published two poetry collections (1808 and 1818) and was a devout Christian, yet “remains relatively unknown.” Like Plato, her poems emphasized piety and were deemed appropriate for “impressionable young minds.” The comparison stops there, for Evance married and had children, but her fate remains a mystery.3 Scrutiny of some of Plato’s poems and prose should help demystify her identity and background and enlarge the distinct likelihood of her Native heritage as well as her unsteady allegiance to it. J. Saunders Redding took this at face value in 1967, and Vernon Loggins had proposed it in The Negro Author in America in 1931 by virtue of the father in Plato’s poem “The Natives of America,” but decades passed before Ann Shockley, in the Ann Plato entry for Afro-American Women Writers 1746–1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide (1988) and Quandra Prettyman’s brief biography in Africana, compiled by Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates (1999), would echo them. Yet, none of these critics consider the complex dynamics experienced by a woman who may have come from a household where one or both parents may have been Natives but found social refuge and work in an urban black community. All of them bypass strategies that would allow them to view her in terms of being Native. Subject-area bibliographies for American literature came about later in the nineteenth century. Volume 15 of the Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America, published in 1885, lists Plato and Essays, followed by a curious comment: “The writer was also known as the colored Sappho,” probably due to Plato’s reputation as a lyric poet and teacher. No other bib- Ann Plato 19

liographies, including the Report of 1893–1894 compiled by the United States Bureau of Education and W. E. B. DuBois’s A Select Bibliography of the Negro American (1905), list her until A Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry, by Arthur A. Schomburg, the renowned Puerto Rican–born bibliophile, who may have instigated early twentieth-century attention to her with this book, which was published in 1916. Having no political stance may have kept her off early compilations; whatever reservations Schomburg may have had, he put them aside to list her as a poet, and he deserves credit for her protracted revival. In 1945, Howard University librarian Dorothy B. Porter listed Plato and Essays in North American Negro Poets: A Bibliographical Checklist of Their Writings, 1760–1944, giving the pages where her poems appear and providing five sources where the book could be found.4 In a brief evaluation of her book in the 1924 An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes (which does not include any of her poems), James Hardy Dillard does not take up this issue, referring in the “Introduction” to her poems: “her Congregational minister . . . says that she should be encouraged on account of her youth and because such efforts dignify the Negro race, but her verses are so absolutely jejune and devoid of intellect and imaginative life that their service to her race is doubtful.” Dillard was the first in the twentieth century to critically evaluate her. In their closing “Bibliographical and Critical Notes” section, editors White and Jackson summarize the quality of her poems, citing examples by title as “earnest, illiterate, and vapid, with occasional errors in grammar and spelling, and strained rhymes”; they refer to her essays as “short and commonplace and on general subjects.” Loggins also thought little of her poetry; because of her detachment and “girlish restraint,” he stated unsympathetically, abolitionists would have found her “useless in the fight for emancipation.”5 The anthology editors and Loggins may have influenced two young African American scholars in the 1930s to omit her from their respective first books on African American literary history, or they may not have learned about her: Benjamin Mays, more a theologian than literary historian, in The Negro’s God, as Reflected in His Literature(1938), and Redding himself, in To Make A Poet Black (1939).6 Sterling Brown, close to echoing Loggins in Negro Poetry and Drama (1937), described Plato’s poems as “Connecticut Methodism” counterparts to Wheatley in Boston; “her work, sponsored as showing the Negro to be ‘educable,’ ” he affirmed, “is without literary value, and was overshadowed by the literary work of really educated Negroes.”7 Mays’s omission is curious because he briefly discussed Rev. James W. C. Pennington’s writings; he must have realized that Pennington wrote the introduction for Essays. From the sparse nineteenth-century records, one senses that Plato shunned being documented by state and federal authorities; the countenance emerging from this and from the pious personality of her writing suggests that she was a young eccentric. Essays is the prominent record we have of her. That she may 20 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity be the woman enumerated in a later federal census in the Midwest is highly plausible. The 1870 Iowa Federal census lists a forty-six-year-old “Miss Plato” residing in Decorah Township, Winneshiek County, in the household of a family of seven who were also boarding two Norwegian-born women servants in their twenties. This “Miss Plato” had been born in New York and was literate but had “No occupation.”8 That this woman is identified as white does not in itself derail the prospect that Miss Plato and Ann Plato are one. Two men enumerated the town of Decorah. The principal enumerator for the F. B. Landers household where “Miss Plato” resided was O. N. Olson, of Norwegian heritage. The second, writing a bold and sharp “N” in New York for Miss Plato’s birthplace, was Cyrus Wellington. It was he who superimposed the “For” over the “k” ending New York, betraying that he perceived her as different from the white women he and Olson daily encountered. Harley Refsal, of Luther College’s Scandinavian Studies Program, never hesitated to suspect a Norwegian influence on Anglo-Iowan linguistic culture. Norwegian Fremmed signifies “stranger” or “foreigner”; “Fre” and “Fer” are interchangeable in Norwegian-Iowan vernacular, thus serving as the basis for how we interpret “For.”9 What the enumerators thought her to be is important. After this she disappears again, deepening the mystery about her. Researchers of nineteenth-century free people of color occasionally succeed when documentary records yield details of vital statistics, land and probate circumstances, and church affiliations. But the absence of records for particular individuals amid records for those to whom they may be related or who are their neighbors or associates is frustrating. A simple fact is that researchers seeking free persons of color have difficulty finding them because they are not well documented in the record, and some are simply absent. The Barbour Col- lection, established in 1928 and renowned in Connecticut among genealogists, librarians, and historians as a major resource, remains incomplete and lacks many records for persons of color. In a few particular instances, what information it does contain does not corroborate Barbara W. Brown and James M. Rose in their invaluable Black Roots in Southeastern Connecticut, 1650–1900.10 A researcher who cannot visit the Connecticut State Library will find the “Reg-

Figure 1.1. Enumeration for Miss Plato. Iowa Federal Census, Decorah, Winneshiek County, 1870. Ann Plato 21 istry of Deaths,” for example, retrievable in the Barbour Collection, yet these resources complement one another for completeness. Outside Connecticut is a similar example involving another female writer of color, Julia C. Collins, a schoolteacher, of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, whose unfinished novel, The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, was serialized in the Christian Reporter during 1864 and 1865, when she died of consumption, leaving a husband and children. As editors of the first-time book version explain, everything known about her dates strictly from twenty-one months of literary visibility.11 Hypothesizing Plato’s life as a Native woman should help scholars appreciate some complexities in the nexus of Native and African American social relationships. Her literary and teaching activities occur during an eight-year period of the antebellum era, when northern blacks continued to organize politically and create social institutions, a period coinciding with state and national gov- ernments accomplishing the removal of Indians from the Southeast, with those Natives surviving in eastern North America skeptical about “Americanization.” Her life and identity raise questions of how race made an impact on her social choices, her education, her desire to teach, and her religious orientations. Plato’s writings in fact neither assert nor celebrate any discernible African ancestral allusions or African American consciousness, but because Penning- ton introduces her book by identifying her as a “colored lady” of his Con- gregational Church, literary historians view her strictly in terms of African American writing and assign to her an identity that is strictly that of a black woman. For example, Katherine Clay Bassard, Shockley, and Prettyman, all of whom reflect the sympathetic turn in Ann Plato scholarship, contend that her specific audience was black schoolgirls. Bassard formulates her as part of a female black literary community in which the members were dialogically involved with each other’s work, with Phillis Wheatley being their influential and major intertextual inspiration. In my estimation, Plato’s legacy, if not her identity alone, is much more complex; her literary posture and some of the signs in her writings suggest rather persuasively that African American religious and teaching venues were but a social refuge for a young woman in Hartford’s 1830s and 1840s who possessed some perhaps vague ties to a Native community that survived by “hiding in plain sight,” which characterized many such communities in the Northeast and along the mid-Atlantic coast. Based on my personal knowledge of Native ancestry, I would say that she seems not fully committed to an African American identity. Her writing betrays a separation of public presence and private disposition. Writing during the height of the fervent debate in Connecticut and New York over abolition and civil rights, she left to literary posterity virtually nothing from which to glean the information that the excitement and tensions of a struggle for black freedom swirled around her; nothing in Essays alludes to specific persons such as William Lloyd Garrison, the Hartford-born Maria Stewart, or David Walker or events such as the public 22 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity pressure levelled on Prudence Crandall and her school in Canterbury (1833) that led to Connecticut’s Black Law (1834), physical attacks against persons of color, and, more immediately, the cause célèbre of the Amistad Africans in New Haven during 1839–1841, whose defenders also were Congregationalists with missionary objectives. Hers is a remote, virtually disembodied voice: although her poem “To the First of August” acknowledges the end of slavery in the British Caribbean, the father she addresses in “The Natives of America” in turn narrates to her with great passion an intimately painful investment. In fact, although her “Natives” poem projects an Indian’s sadness and his will to survive, comments in her prose reveal her as unsteady and ambiguous by contrast. Meanwhile, she observes in her biography of Julia Ann Pell how school children of a “station inferior” to their mates “had their rights trampled upon” and were deliberately neglected. To emphasize that Native or black pupils in southeastern Connecticut would have experienced this schoolroom abuse overlooks how Plato covertly embeds her disdain for their condition in carefully chosen rhetoric (see chapter 10). Plato is far more reticent about identifying herself racially or biracially than Olivia Ward Bush-Banks (1869–1944), who wrote prose, poetry, and skits. Bush-Banks, born in Sag Harbor in eastern Long Island, claimed parents of Montaukett descent and attended the Poosepatuck [Unkechaug] Indian Res- ervation school in Mastic, where some of her father’s relations lived. Taking on a biracial identity, Bush-Banks described herself as a “colored person,” and while she participated in Indian affairs, writing a poem titled “Morning on Shinnecock” and a drama titled Indian Trails; or Trail of the Montauk, she “con- currently retained a Montauk Indian and Afro-American ethos” according to her great-grandniece and Montaukett member Bernice Forrest (Guillaume), editor of The Collected Works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks. Guillaume asserts that Bush-Banks’s “protest poetry and essays mirror her acceptance of an official, if inaccurate, social categorization as an African American.”12 In the manner of intellectual and social activist sisterhood, for Bush-Banks, it was the Harlem Renaissance that attracted her vigorous participation; three-quarters of a century earlier, Plato had responded by teaching in one of Hartford’s African schools after publishing her book. Plato’s writings demonstrate how piety encourages acquiescence to the status quo. Very brief notices distinguish critical scholarship on Ann Plato, and scholarship may be too generous a term. Justifying why an unknown writer of quali- tatively questionable significance should be taken seriously simply because she is a woman of color betrays academic gatekeeping. David O. White gave Ann Plato’s teaching experience its first deserved discussion in a 1974 article: “Hart- ford’s African Schools, 1830–1868.”13 Since the 1980s, however, as more women writers, including those of color, have gained critical attention and classroom reading, Plato’s obscurity has begun to lessen in relative terms as some atten- Ann Plato 23

tion has been given to her literary topics. Still, there is no book-length study, and only Bassard offers one lengthy chapter about her. An attempt at critical discussion early in the contemporary period was made by Shockley in 1988. Kenny G. Williams’s introduction for Oxford University Press’s Schomburg reprint of Essays gives general information, careful in its speculations about her life and parents and pointing out Plato’s debt to Wheatley. Bassard evolved her 1992 doctoral dissertation, “Spiritual Interrogations: Conversion, Community and Authorship in the Writings of Phillis Wheatley, Ann Plato, Jarena Lee, and Rebecca Cox Jackson,” into a book in 1999: Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing. Perhaps because her focus is strictly on an African American literary ethos, Bassard does not consider any influence by other poets on Ann Plato.14 Prettyman closed her Africana biography by saying that although her poems “clearly show the work of a young person . . . [they also] show a lyric gift.”15 Katharine Capshaw Smith’s entry, “Ann Plato,” in the Dictionary of American Biography offers the fullest literary biography in a dictionary or encyclopedia, reproducing Plato’s two notes to a Hartford schools official, as did White, but by neglecting to mention “The Natives of America,” it betrays Smith’s dismissal of this Indian dimension in her subject’s life. Michelle Diane Wright, in Broken Utterances: A Selected Anthology of 19th Century Black Women’s Social Thought, echoes the points of view and assumptions made by Williams, Shockley, Foster, and Bassard.16 Journalists, particularly in Connecticut, have written about Ann Plato in ways pro forma to her significance as a black woman author defying presumptions of ignorant and unlettered nineteenth-century persons of color.17 All these commentaries bear similarities in presumptive details about Plato. They tend to agree on 1820 as her year of birth and that Hartford, Con- necticut, is her birthplace; Smith differs by guessing that her birth year is 1824, assuming Henry and Deborah Plato are her parents. Bassard and Wright also insist on this couple as her parents, and Wright and Smith overlook the household of Alfred Plato, an African American, as an unreliable sibling alignment. Shockley and Prettyman appear to take seriously the possibility of Ann Plato having Native ancestry, but Shockley, like Williams and Bassard, insists that she nevertheless wrote specifically for black schoolgirls. Two critics who consider Plato’s Native ancestry in a more serious light but do not develop this thesis include Judith Ranta, who mentions her in her book on Betsey Chamberlain, an Algonquian mill worker and journalist of unspecified tribe, and Jonathan Brennan in the introduction to his edited essay collection When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote. Kiara M. Vigil and Tiya Miles pursue this in “At the Crossroads of Red/Black Literature.”18 Theorizing an identity for Ann Plato according to race and ethnicity demands strenuous inquiry of a depth these critics have not attempted; perceiv- ing her solely as African American thwarts an epistemology they could have 24 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity pursued for a new method that would take her into account as an Indian girl who sought refuge in an urban space while she tried to exercise a demeanor exclusive of race and to embrace God’s grace for humanity. Plato and the four young women she writes about appear to come from a milieu best understood as Missinnuok, a Narrangansett term signifying “the [Native] people” of southern New England and eastern Long Island.19 Forwarding such an analysis means entertaining an identity paradox: an Indian adolescent, perhaps mixed racially, eschewing self-ascription to being either Indian or Negro, but accepting community by publishing in the Colored American newspaper and becoming part of a Colored Congregational denomination that administers an “African School” where she will teach for six years. I have emphasized the above terms because in early nineteenth-century America, they denote a slippery deployment in official documentation and casual designation parlance that exerts hegemony over, first, how Natives may lose their identities unless they consciously resist such a change and, second, how Natives who felt resistance to being seen as futile passed into mainstream white and black society. Throughout the eastern colonies and states, Natives were not simply displaced from their traditional homeland territories: especially, but not exclusively, if they moved outside of those territories, they were witness to and experienced being socially overwhelmed by peoples of European or African background. Adding Christianity’s promises to their condition resulted in many off-reservation Indian families and individuals accepting, fully or tentatively, their new identities as “colored” people, risking the loss of their Native tribal cultural integrity and identity yet still uncertain about how they were expected to fit in and adjust to African American identity, a conundrum that continues for some into the twenty-first century. Urban refuge invited some who felt disenfranchised by tribal communities or voluntarily moved away, and these families established urban Indian enclaves in Hartford and other cities. Colored Congregational, presumed to be a “black” church, was interracial, with blacks and Natives, thus unsettling the research expectation for black exclusivity and creating a new paradigm for Hartford’s nonwhite community. Advocating that an allegiance to her Native American background is what drew Plato to pay attention to her father and the ill-fated young women, because they were Natives, is to interpret that allegiance as expressing community formation. Under the influence of Holly Jackson’s thesis about the cultural identity of late nineteenth-century novelist Emma Dunham Kelley, this means taking a risk to determine a Native quality hovering over Essays, to (theoretically) balance critical opinion that Plato wrote her book for black girls. Just as Jackson fields theories of “the representative blackness of African American authors,”20 an epistemology can be advanced to affirm that Essays is counterintuitive to an exclusively African American sensibility. Plato’s “Natives of America” poem is the best indicator of a conscious Native expression, despite Ann Plato 25

Francis Foster’s curiously insistance on it as a metaphor for the black experience. The eulogies must be read more carefully. Then, should Plato’s poem “To the First of August” be the agent that essentializes Plato as African American despite its shallow emotional investment in its subject? Despite lacking specif- ics about Plato’s tribal relations, I will use “Natives of America” to underpin her status as an author, and I will place in the abstract a social and cultural responsibility that her woman’s voice takes on with respect to other Natives in her community. Her father’s story, as I will delineate in the next chapter, is expectedly male centered, yet, recast through her composition, it is an origin story, and its unfolding narrative renders, perhaps unwittingly, if we want to argue the consciousness of this creative act, the preservation of an immediate legacy shared father to daughter. The poem holds a central, even pivotal place in the philosophy and theology contained in Essays. Although its author was limited in her life experiences by her youth, she still attempted to convey her book’s importance to Christianized urban Indians. The kind of failure Jackson pronounces as “the breakdown of racial leg- ibility,” pertaining to research on Kelley,21 also unsettles Plato from African American exclusivity, for even those few scholars who in recent years seem willing to acknowledge her Native ancestry have not known where to look to justify their claims, nor have they considered how that aspect of her background leads her to indulge in the lives of young women who may be like herself.

A Curious Narrative by “Ann”

In the 19 June Colored American newspaper, almost three weeks after Penning- ton dated his introduction to Essays, a narrative, “Little Harriet,” was reprinted from the Weekly Messenger, a title likely abbreviated from The Journal of Edu- cation and Weekly Messenger, published in New York City and geared to the interests of “Colored Teachers.”22 At approximately 960 words, it bears the simple authorship of “Ann” and piques one’s attention because of its reflexive and allegorical nature. Here is a synopsis:

The third-person narrator describes Little Harriet (sometimes referred to as “Little H.”), the nurse for Mrs. Perkins’s youngest child. Mrs. Perkins instructs Harriet to tell an expected visitor she is not at home. Being instructed to lie affronts Harriet’s conscience; her Sabbath-school teacher had admonished her students that lying in childhood becomes habitual. When Harriet tells her employer that she cannot lie, Mrs. Perkins upbraids her, chastising the Sab- bath school teacher and telling Harriet that her own children obey her. Harriet’s high moral character absolves her conscience, but Mrs. Perkins fires her. Harriet’s mother, “an intemperate, worthless 26 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

woman,” had long forsaken her, and shows no sympathy for her plight. Wandering the streets, Harriet encounters a Mrs. Jewell, who befriends her because she needs a young girl for domestic help. In the Jewell household, Harriet receives an English education and deeper religious teaching from Susan Jewell, the daughter. The narrative ends with two stanzas from Isaac Watts’s poem “Against Lying” (not included in the word count).

The narrative exhibits a matrix of relationship around Harriet representing variables of power. That Mrs. Perkins and Harriet’s mother offset Mrs. Jewell and Susan is easy to determine, but the axial power dynamics are subtle. All are presumably Christians and their names are probably substitutes. Mrs. Perkins, stern and dramatic, expels Harriet; the serene and patient Mrs. Jewell accepts her. Harriet’s unsympathetic mother contrasts with Susan filling the void of instruction with love and sobriety. Great is the temptation to find Ann Plato’s signature in this allegory, for its properties align with her personality, and the book is consistent with her youth, piety and education, and poetics. She very likely read British author Amelia Opie’s taxonomic collection of stories and philosophy of truthfulness and falsehood in Illustrations of Lying, in All Its Branches, reprinted in Hartford before Essays. She would have read the chapter “Lies of Convenience,” which opens with a “Not at home” example.23 “Little Harriet” is an allegory partner to Plato’s essays “Diligence and Negligence” and “Two School Girls.” Harriet is probably six to ten years old. Although a school setting is never specifically identified, Harriet lived by the instruction of her “pious teachers,” not parental or employer guidance. She is put out by her employer for refusing to abandon her conscience and tell lies. Instruction in an English education would not mean grammar and rhetoric alone, but also history, geography, arithmetic, and Bible study. Why not send Harriet to school? Public education cost money, but she has become a ward of the Jewell household—it would be cheaper for Susan to teach her. Her race is unidentified, another practice Plato followed, especially in self-reference. Since Ann-the- narrator leaves us with the assumption that the Perkins and Jewell households are white, should we not risk presuming that Harriet’s mother is too? Just because the narrative’s original publisher, The Weekly Messenger, was created for the benefit of colored teachers does not guarantee exclusive race consciousness in its narrative content. Even Colored American editors did not adhere to exclusivity by race. But if Harriet was a colored child, even of fair complexion, schools might not have welcomed her, which leads to the question of what streets in which city or town this narrative is set or projected. By the time she was about the (speculated) age of ten, in 1834, Beman had started teaching at the school Colored Congregational operated on Talcott Street, but she may not have been there at that time. Other possible locations, such as New Haven or towns on Ann Plato 27

eastern Long Island, should not be discounted; Plato has an affinity for New Haven, a site in the title of one essay and implied by one poem.24 Harriet would have deemed cutting herself off from her “intemperate, worthless” mother the right thing to do, as she was shown no sympathy by her and felt wronged by her severity. The mother is given to strong drink, a sot, and she turns from her daughter as though Harriet had made her own problems. Being disposed of by employer and mother compounds the necessity for her becoming homeless. In fact, with no father mentioned in the narrative, does being jettisoned by her mother make her an orphan? Being schooled by Susan Jewell is Harriet’s extraordinary good fortune, and Essays demonstrates an earnestly learned English education. Plato’s essay “Obedience” is a forerunner of or companion piece to “Little Harriet” by virtue of Plato’s admonishment to her readers that God will bless dutiful parents, “but he will punish, in the most signal and terrible manner, all those who, by parental negligent conduct, set at defiance his written law, and violate that holy and just principle which has been implanted in every human breast.” Going on, she says, “the greatest loss that can befall a child, is to be deprived of pious and affectionate parents.”25 People who do not know obedience cannot expect it to be learned from them. I read “Obedience” as the lesson and “Little Harriet” as the allegorical illustration. Closing with stanzas from Isaac Watts’s poem also shows her propensity to quote and interpolate. The narrative’s absence of a husband-father figure provides dramatic effect. Speculation tempts us to consider that all the male counterparts to these three women are either at work or deceased, have left their families, or do not contribute to their families’ well-being. Harriet’s absent father holds a pivotal position because of how his identity contrasts with Plato’s active father figure in Essays; he is the equivalent of the book author–persona’s nonexistent mother. Plato’s Indian father left for other environs but not before gifting his child with a story she asked him to tell in “The Natives of America.” Harriet’s “intemperate, worthless” mother exhibits bitterness and a determined lack of concern for her child’s fate; she virtually throws her daughter away. Because she is saved by the Jewell household, we can read her identity as the Ann who literarily forsook her own mother in Essays and, in a final stroke, covertly used the public venue of the new teachers publication to relate her circumstances, which the Colored American then reprinted and brought to a wider audience. I suspect Plato omitted her mother from Essays because the woman ver- bally abused her, degrading her loving father and her because of him. Both parents’ dispositions must have affected Plato indelibly, although vestiges of her bond with her departed father would be reconciled in Hartford, but her mother had to have created a deeper rift in her sensibility, which her writings took into account with adroit subtlety. Likely she spoke ill of the father as a heathen refusing Christianity and lived out her contradictions. The pieces of 28 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity this puzzle dovetail, fitting together well enough for me to propose Ann Plato as a candidate for Ann the fictive narrator with the character Harriet as her covert identity.26

Ann Plato: A Theory of the Stranger

I want to articulate here a theory of the stranger as a strategy for approaching what this book will surmise about Ann Plato’s opaque biography. By using this theory, we can encompass Reverend Pennington’s evident need to justify her as a colored woman but foreground his perception by means of the milieu in which Natives found themselves as they were forced to move around in the Missinnuok territory. Any nonwhite person and his or her community in nineteenth-century North America would be or was destined to become a stranger in the land. The alienation this status belied affected Indians and blacks in some ways similarly but more so very differently. The comparison is familiar: blacks were strangers in a land far from their ancestral Africa, yet, by the second and succeeding generations, they had adapted to and reconciled with their new space; Natives were made strangers in their own lands, invasion and colonialism transforming their homelands into wilderness and their life circumstances into poverty. Relocations of various kinds ensued. People of the African diaspora sought social and religious stability in a new land, ever mindful of the faraway home they adapted into their religious songs and ecumenical language. Those Natives who left reservations or defined Native territories among the Missinnuok stayed in that territory. Out-marriages and unions produced this protracted exodus, as did the hope that one would be accepted in another tribe’s territory. As will be shown, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Mohegans in Uncasville, Connecticut, to a greater extent, and the Eastern Pequots of nearby Stonington and North Stonington complained to their overseers and the courts in Connecticut about there being too many “mulattoes” (Indians mixed with black) and “strange Indians” on their lands. Individuals and families directly or indirectly pertinent to Ann Plato research likely experienced this social pressure to leave those unfriendly surroundings. Natives in early nineteenth-century Hartford would have been strangers to European American urbanity, and they would have had to adapt to it if they intended to stay or realized they could not be part of a tribal enclave. Residing in Hartford placed them in a condition of being strangers in colored society. We may never know the range of tensions Hartford’s Natives experienced in the 1820s as they faced becoming part of the African Religious Society that led to the founding of first the Colored Congregational Church and, in the next decade, the breakaway Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. Certainly this social enclave negotiated the fitting of their Native heritage into black Hartford, Ann Plato 29 as they adopted “colored” identity as the workable solution. Members of this enclave were equivocally clannish, eccentric, and might be individualistic in asserting their social distinctiveness. Ann Plato’s choice of women for eulogies reflects this; correspondences about Gertrude Plato, who may or may not have been her relative, also lead us to this assumptive conclusion; but George A. Spywood, a Wampanoag and Narragansett Indian, served as a minister and then bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion faith.27 A theory of the stranger can be applied to Ann Plato in three instances: Pennington’s “To the Reader,” the attitude of her writing, and her enumeration in the 1870 Iowa census. These three will be elucidated throughout the text, but this immediate discussion establishes a précis for an applicable theory. We have to entertain older critical theories about strangers to avoid the recent predominating theories contextualized in postmodern and postcolonial paradigms.28 In fact, a treatise from 1769, The Stranger Unknown’s Call to Holiness of Heart, bears influential sentiments for Plato. Although its anonymous author narrates the experience of seeking faith and finding it in terms far more dramatic than Plato exhibits in Essays, his admonition to “diligently enquire and rightly understand” the “saving Knowledge” resonates in her book.29 The parable of the Levitical stranger bears relationship to Pennington’s description; Leviticus 19:3430 reads: “But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.”31 Penning- ton’s introduction of Plato treats her as a stranger, not an outcast, but consistent with the Levitical embrace, he accepts her by bestowing praise on her example. She may not be outside his sense of the colored families in his congregation, but something about her caused an initial caution, which he overcame. However long she resided in Hartford, she arrived there a Congregationalist predisposed to worship at that particular church. If she could have passed for white, what motivated her to join this community? What sense of belonging drew her to it?

Studies of Rhetoric

Plato’s problematic racial and cultural identity and the heretofore mentioned presumptions of her black racial exclusivity and social commitments continue to preoccupy scholarly references about her and to distract serious inquiries about the content of her writing. That selected essays are discussed in two studies of early nineteenth-century rhetoric illustrates a turning point of sorts in Ann Plato scholarship. Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen, in Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States (2002), briefly describe Ann Plato’s rhetorical strategies as found in her “school compositions,” and Silvia Xavier’s “Engaging George Campbell’s Sympathy in the Rhetoric of Charlotte Forten and Ann Plato: African-American Women of the Antebellum North,” in Rhetoric 30 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Review (2005), discusses Ann Plato’s prose strategies through rhetorical high theory but otherwise falls short because Forten seems to be the preferred subject.32 The structure and content of Essays facilitates interpreting it as a kind of conduct book for the middle of the nineteenth century, as Plato’s reading audience was whomever she conceptualized as young misses of color: black girls, urban off-reservation Indian girls, or, in general, white girls. At this important time in the survival of people of color during antebellum anxieties and looming threats and actual cases of Indian removal, Plato does make a case for the uplift of school-aged children by means of tools written by and about role models provided to her judgment. That judgment betrays its youth and her times, of course, when she extols legendary European conquerors and speaks unflatter- ingly about the world’s inhabitants outside of Protestant Western Europe. Plato’s persistent reliance upon pieties and the earnestness of her ethereal didactic manner justify reading Essays as a conduct book. She implores her readers to live according to the dictates of religion and education and to better themselves in youth in order to lessen the impact of life’s vicissitudes while maintaining and strengthening the wisdom of lessons offered by religion; this represents her form of the model. The ideal of “true womanhood” ensconcing the teaching of girls and young women to prepare them to refine their lives for the domestic sphere is not Ann Plato’s intent, nor are feminist politics. Her adaptation of the eighteenth-century nonfiction conduct book to Congregation- alist pieties based on her adaptation of New Light Congregationalist thinking can also be overlooked when Ann Plato scholarship seeks this political realm. Before closing, there is another matter related to composition to which I want to call attention. In the one review of Essays written, apparently, during her lifetime, the editor of the Knickerbocker magazine in 1848, for all his condescending tone (I will return to this review in chapter 6), momentarily lets down his guard to call her a “thinker,” and I believe him to be sincere in doing so even as he found a pun in her name. Her racial identity, I admit, will preoccupy much of this book just as others extol her, but her prose—and it was to that he emitted his remark—reveals a religious mind, and “thinker” is the most generous one-word accolade ever given her. We presume that editors have read widely but perhaps not too deeply for their bibliophilic miscellanies; this editor recognized an engaged and organized intellect, qualified as of color, as he saw it, enough to praise her for having the interpolative skill to put Lydia Sigourney’s influence into her own ideas. I say there is nothing wrong with presenting her as a religious writer. The enigma of Ann Plato invites an interdisciplinary approach to text analysis, religion, race, and culture. She borrows from other authors with impunity according to the convention of her day. The principal object for discussion in this book is Essays, for it follows the text arrangement of Lydia Sigourney’s popular The Girl’s Reading Book, in Prose and Poetry, for Schools, first published Ann Plato 31 in1838 and reprinted a dozen times by 1841.33 Although borrowing freely from Sigourney’s essays, the youthful Plato was smart enough and self-motivated enough to diverge and pursue her own thoughts. Authorial piety not only is self- evident, it determines both her content and her cultural restraint. The Almighty is her answer to life’s issues and responsibilities, the spiritual backbone to the part of her education that was not confined to the classroom. In social consciousness, religion and piety prefigure her effacement within her ambiguities. Plato is a father’s daughter left with a lesson in culture history, a mother’s daughter forsaken, and God’s child in a community for whom she teaches and writes.

Chapter 2

“The Natives of America” and “To the First of August” ᇺᇻᇺ

Contrasts in Cultural Investment

What draws Ann Plato scholars to consider her as possessing some degree of Native American heritage lies with her poem “The Natives of America.” This is where I begin my hypothesis that not only did she possess Native ancestry, she felt conflicted about it yet honored it enough to invoke an actual father, not a hypothetical or metaphorical father projected from the vanishing Indian literary genre of her day. Except for Judith Ranta, in a passing critical assessment of this poem, and Vigil and Miles, scholars have not seriously responded to Plato’s voice in either it or “To the First of August,” her only two poems concerned directly with racial and political themes. In the second of these poems, she certainly exhibits no passionate or elated response in writing about the end of slavery in the British Caribbean, an event that drew considerable abolitionist celebration and applause in 1838. Anthologists White and Jackson were accurate in drawing attention to her praising “British emancipation of slaves, but with no specific allusion to America.”1 Line sixteen in the fourth stanza, “You’re free,—You’re free,—resounds,” lacks exclamation; in fact, in this poem’s seven quatrains, Plato uses one exclamation mark, “And oh! when youth’s extatic hour” (l 21), as though acknowledging the homecoming of a long-departed youth rather than being genuinely ecstatic about someone finally emancipated from chattel bondage. Critical readings of “The Natives of America” essentially eviscerate Plato’s voice from the poem as one of the poem’s Indians, promoting the child’s persona as that of a young African American daughter. This is obviously contrary to the poem’s focus, intention, and setting. Frances Smith Foster, for instance, wants us to read the poem as including blacks in its historiography, asserting that a few lines “are applicable to her African ancestry as

33 34 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity well. Ann Plato expected these comparisons to be made. She wrote for, and her book was marketed to, black people, especially young black girls.”2 Given the indigenous voice and the disrupted land sovereignty issues the poem possesses, Foster would be hard pressed to justify this statement. Absence of proof of marketed readership aside, when we juxtapose Fos- ter’s insistence upon an exclusive interpretation of this poem with her finding celebration in “To the First of August,” the possibility of their author as a Native American within a black community becomes apparent and conversely increases the plausibility of Plato’s cultural background difference. August 1 in 1840 marked the end of the probationary period voluntarily followed by most British Caribbean colonies, and not only did many North American urban blacks celebrate the 1834 event and its anniversaries, the Colored American published anticipatory articles about it and, in its 8 August 1840 issue, reported widespread effusive celebrations in Pittsburgh, Wilmington, Newark, Albany, and Buffalo.3 Avid reader of this paper though Plato seems to have been, she still may have been nudged or pressured into writing the poem. Foster missed her restrained voice. On “The Natives of America” rests the hypothesis of Plato’s Native ancestry and the foundation for her voice as a young female leader of her city’s urban Indian community, unsettled about her heritage though she might have been. When read with scrutiny and depth, the poem defies the idea that it has an abstracted voice in the father’s presentation of history as he knows it to his dearest daughter Ann; she will, with Essays, assume a role in Hartford in which she is cognizant of, yet unnerved by, her Native heritage; she will also take up the role of Christian spokesperson for her Indian brethren. Hers is a responsibility filled with the risk of the possibility that these kindred may have expected more from her, in the manner of William Apess. Trusting Plato’s imagery for literal meanings can be risky. She tells us so little about herself; can we assume she speaks directly about others? Are her characters and personae to be taken literally, or does she express feelings held by people she loves? We can include “Little Harriet” in these questions. Is the child Henry, in her poem “I Have No Brother,” her relative or someone else’s? Is the name pseudonymous? Her settings are realistic, but are her figures idealized? (I will pursue this poem further in chapter 11.) The influence of British poet Amelia Opie can be introduced here, for several poems in her collection Poems (1802) and eleven in The Warrior’s Return (1806) address a Henry or are about him.4 Contrasting Opie’s passionate love, expressed in these poems, with Plato’s piety, Plato’s usage of the name suggests something more than coincidental. For her own poem, did she use the name for the shortened life of her persona’s brother, a child, as a strategy to not replicate Opie’s Henry, an adult who is often portrayed as departing or indicated as dying or dead, the only theme the two poets share? As a woman in her twenties, Opie (then Amelia Alderson) “The Natives of America” and “To the First of August” 35

frequently attended civil court proceedings and struck up a friendship with a venerable judge, Henry Gould, nearly eighty years old, who gratified her vanity with considerable solicitude.5 She may have been infatuated with him, even at his advanced age, reason enough to project him as the gallant, adventuring Henry of her poems. We should consider this Plato poem and the Opie poem under discussion in light of the dying Indian poem themes of the Romantic era and their relationship to the pastoral elegy. And the narrative structure of Amelia Opie’s chapbook-length poem The Black Man’s Lament (1826) suggests Plato may have followed it while composing “The Natives of America,” her longest poem.6 Dying Indian–theme poems, such as Philip Freneau’s “The Indian Bury- ing Ground” (1787)7 and others by his immediate literary descendants, per- petuate the pastoral elegy but filter the subject through an inevitable lens of political necessity and proto–manifest destiny imbued with Christian purpose. Ironically, Freneau’s poem appeared the same year the U.S. Constitution was ratified. The elements that characterize this theme can be attributed to a broad definition of the pastoral, as proposed by Ann Messenger, which acknowledges the elusiveness of pastoral character: nature, landscapes, and the bucolic life of shepherdry.8 Becoming a genre as they did, dying Indian poems provided Americans with the opportunity to mourn the threatening but imagined noble savage. They also served the perverse objective of reflecting on the conquered wilderness of the original colonies, projecting that image onto the westward trajectory of empire that required the fading away and erasure of the land’s primitive inhabitants in fulfillment of a divinely endowed conquest. The dying Indian poem is an heir to Augustan and earlier pastorals and also serves the pastoral by retroactively emptying the landscape for the development of white civilization. Freneau’s poem, by objectifying the dead and buried Indian chief, is a veritable template for the genre; the path toward civilization and empire can be realized and those in the way will, alas, experience the same fate as the chief. In his epistemological analysis of colonials mourning “savages” whose ways of life they destabilized, Renato Rosaldo casts vanquishing settler societies who pine for the people and ecologies they destroy in a role in which they practice “imperialist nostalgia.”9 The dying Indian literary genre is about this. But Plato does not allow her Indian father to wallow in self-pity and irresolute nostalgia, for he cannot be accommodated to the Freneau model of destruction. In his nostalgia, he has a right to the bitter memories of his legacy that the projected Indian voices created by white authors cannot share. Of the twenty poems in Essays, only this one, “The Natives of America,” represents a plausible connection to an indigenous American lineage.10 It exemplifies the milieu of poems composed in the 1830s that expressed sympathy with Indians because of the ways they were being treated and over the dispossession of their lands yet presenting the common popular attitude that the disappear- 36 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity ance of Indians was inevitable. Between the 1820s and 1840s, magazines for female readers such as The Ladies’ Pearl, The Ladies’ Companion and Literary Expositor, and Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine published poems and prose sketches expressing the theme. The abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1838 carried letters and anonymously written poems about the impending plight of the Cherokees. Pocahontas, according to Emily Stipes Watts, is the one consistently “genuine” American heroine presented at this time; Lydia Sigourney published a collection, Pocahontas, and Other Poems, the same year as Plato’s Essays. Her book-length poem Traits of the Aborigines of America (1822) was inspired by her genuine and sympathetic interest in the nearby Mohegans, but the poem was “singularly unpopular, there existing in the community no reci- procity with the subject.”11 As an avid reader, Ann Plato would have been exposed to this genre; for example, in the first number of The Ladies’ Companion and Literary Expositor from 1834 and in her perusals of that magazine’s first and second volumes she would have found narratives such as “The Last Indian of the Narragansetts,” and “Tahmiroo, the Indian wife” and poems such as “The Dying Indian” and “Our Native Land.”12 Key characters in novels by Lydia Maria Child (Hobomok, 1824), James Fenimore Cooper (Last of the Mohicans, 1826, and other books), and Catharine Maria Sedgwick (Hope Leslie, 1827) embody this prototype, and the landscape paintings by Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and others of the Hudson River School that flourished between 1828 and the Civil War project manifest destiny as de-Indianized spaces. In “The Natives of America,” however, Ann Plato departs from the conventions of the dying and vanishing Indian genre in significant ways. Its thematic structure evolves from her father’s recollection of an idyllic past to the impact of European arrival that compels his protest. If we adhere to one critical distinction between pastoral and nature poetry, it must be that the realism of the latter genre dominates the poem’s content. As Plato proceeds to close her poem, her feelings move through the genres of elegy, threatened nature, protest, and lament. The poem is not about the death of some exalted person but the demise of a way of life. Because Plato, through her persona, beseeches her father to tell her a story, we presume that storytelling plays an important role in their relationship. The child’s act of requesting a story and the parent’s act of responding certify their loving filial interaction; he has indulged her before, yet this time, the story, the atmosphere of whose narration implies a rushed necessity, will be different. With poet-daughter setting up the poem, deference is paid to the father as the dominant persona. We might expect no less from a child, perhaps in particular a Native child, and as her father assumes the principal voice, the poetics of pastoral elegy shift to the near-polemical statement contained in the poem. Plato deploys no frame for her structure—once the father commences his “The Natives of America” and “To the First of August” 37

narrative, the daughter who introduced him recedes to the place of listener and asks no more, for to do so would exhibit ultimate disrespect by an Indian child. The first-person narrator distinguishes “The Natives of America” from other dying Indian sentimental poems because its speaker does not present himself as an object, and he has the advantage of his own voice; dying Indian poems do not afford an Indian the voice to respond to his or her circumstances without reeking melodramatic sentimentalism, if at all. Soliloquy tends to be the dominant vocal form in the genre, as found in “The Indian with His Dead Child” by Felicia Hemans, “An Indian at the Burial-Place of His Fathers” by William Cullen Bryant, and Charles Sprague’s “The Last Indian.”13 In this condition, Plato’s father laments and mourns the loss of his traditions and the legacy of what his ancestors knew prior to what resulted from European invasion, the impact of colonization on his people’s dignity, and the westward removals. Masterfully, even if she has committed herself to representing her strategy in an unwitting manner, Plato promotes the father’s losses as spiritual ones, taking the place of the monarchs and exalted figures celebrated in elegies a century before. Amid public tolerance and tacit approval of women publishing books, the issue of their professionalism as poets, which Messenger proclaims was denied them in the Augustan period,14 might have changed somewhat, but perhaps women’s exclusion from the right to express personal feelings in pastoral elegy lingered. Not Plato as the opening voice of the poem but her father in his principal voice expresses his disdain for what has happened to his people. Speaking to his daughter, not to a generalized and opaque audience, his story becomes her lesson in Native American cultural history. Plato breaks from the convention of romanticizing the Native heroine in favor of a political approach. The father in “The Natives of America” does not report forced removal in the manner that instigated the letters to the Liberator, but through his teaching his daughter a fatalistic view of the American Indian, Plato creates a feminine strategy in which the daughter is present to listen to and record her father’s woeful narrative recollection. In this poem’s dramatic monologue of nine stanzas (eight of irregular length), the daughter asks the father to “Tell me a story, father please, / And then I sat upon his knee,” and he proceeds to relate, in his narrative voice, “ ‘the words of native tone, / Of how my Indian fathers dwelt / And, of sore oppression felt’ ” (ll 1–6). Plato sustains her rhyming couplets over sixty-six lines, the longest poem in her book and one of three describing some relationship to her father. In a tonal borrowing, this poem’s opening lines resonate with those of Sigourney’s “The Ark and Dove” from The Girl’s Reading Book with its biblical flood context: “Tell me a story, please,” my little girl / Lisp’d from her cradle. So I bent me down, / And told her how it rain’d.” This twenty-seven–line, three-stanzaed verse closes with the admonition that all the rest of humanity “were drown’d, / Because of disobedience.” Plato may have shared such a fatalistic opinion, but she never 38 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity dramatized it in a poem for her young readers. Each poem’s opening differs in voice, with Sigourney’s parent never relinquishing her adult persona and preferring to quote her child’s question. Plato’s child is active in the narration. “The Natives of America” is an angry poem, and although Plato never mentions Apess in her book, selected vocabulary from his Indian Nullification and Eulogy for King Philip resonate in it.16 Apess preferred the term Natives; sophisticated knowledge characterizes both authors; and he mentions Natives being dispossessed and reduced to beggars. These tropes may have been standard in the era, but Apess’s latent impact appears in the character of Plato’s composition. Plato assumes the role of objective reporter unable to prevent her father’s passionate distress from erupting. The storytelling format and the dramatic structure are also unusual for her poems. The story is a narrated history rendered by an adult who not only inherited the story but lives in the immediacy of his legacy. The daughter encourages the narration to produce the truth of her father’s revisionist historical account: “ ‘In history often do I read, / Of pain which none but they did heed’ ” (ll 13–14), meaning the pain history’s scribes failed to record because of their white point of view. Although “The Natives of America” does not convey Plato’s protest directly concerning the plight of Indians (as does Sigourney, writing emphatically in her memoir Traits of the Aborigines of America—“Indeed, our injustice and hard- hearted policy with regard to the original owners of the soil has ever seemed to me one of our greatest national sins”17), it has proven to be Ann Plato’s most incisive political and historical statement, but it bears no resonance of Christian piety, which conversion would aid. It sustains its oratorical tone as the speaker insists at the close how he can bear to tell no more, impressing on his daughter that she must “ ‘Seal this upon thy memory; . . . / Remember this, though I tell no more’ ” (ll 63–66). As I will soon delineate, reflected by this closing statement, the Indian father invests in his child the responsibility of remembering. Two vocabulary characteristics distinguish this poem in its genre. A minor element involves the subtle customary second-person pronoun “thy,” which appears but once, as an adjective, when the father tells the daughter firmly to “seal this upon thy memory.” The Indian speaker is busy narrating the story his daughter asked him to tell, doing so from the first-person plural perspective. On the other hand, not once in the poem does Plato have him use “thou” as a direct address form. Next, and more important: in the entirety of Essays, Plato uses the word oppression only in this poem, twice with “ ‘sore’ ” and “ ‘cruel’ ” and once as “cruelly us oppress”; three times, considering the noun and verb forms. This is extraordinary for her otherwise public tone in literature, a matter to which I will return shortly. The milieu of manifest destiny discourse allows no place for the term oppression to betray its domestic racism. In Indian Nul- lification, Apess relates the story of Rev. Phineas Fish advising him not to use the term even though the Marshpee believe it defines Fish’s treatment of them,18 “The Natives of America” and “To the First of August” 39

and the petition of Ebenezer Attaquin and Israel Amos to Harvard College uses “oppression,” with which they indicate that they pay sympathetic attention to the Cherokees but not to how the Marshpee are “oppressed.”19 In Plato’s writings, any form of the word oppression sticks out like a rhetorical explosion. The father in “The Natives of America” summarizes a not too romanticized portrait of the pre-Columbian era when the Native peoples lived peace- fully: “ ‘Our brethren, far remote, and far unknown, / And spake to them in silent, tender tone’ ” (ll 19–20). Plato’s rendering of this as idyllic is more a product of her era, for it lacks the apparent purpose of nostalgic indulgence, instead heightening the effect that her father’s ancestors lived as “ ‘Beggars’ ” as a chief foretold would happen to them after the whites came, surviving at the mercy of “ ‘foreign hands.’ ” She thus is able to avoid deploying the idea of a European discovery of an America abounding in ignorance as she opens her third stanza; a careful reading of the phrase indicates how woefully the Indian continues to see the long-range ill effects of being “discovered” by foreigners:

But then discover’d was this land indeed By European men; who then had need Of this far country. . . . And thus before we could say Ah! What meaneth this?—we fell in cruel hands. (ll 27–31)

After this, “ ‘Wars ensued,’ ” the Native people lost their lands and fled: “ ‘Into the dark, dark woods we rush’d / To seek a refuge’ ” (ll 37, 42–43). Note that only here are Europeans the antagonists. The poem’s “Beggars you will become” clause piques the reader’s rhetorical interest, for it echoes and interpolates two sources. One is a little-known eighteenth-century Montaukett petition to the New York colonial governor, presented by Silas Charles, an obscure eighteenth-century Montaukett teacher and minister, shortly after 1754. On behalf of the tribe, it summarizes settler encroachments on Montaukett lands, such as having their firewood stolen with impunity; complains that Charles’s people faced being “crowded out of all their ancient inheritance, and of being rendered vagabonds upon the face of the earth”; and finishes with a request to know “what lands remain unsold” east of Sag Harbor.20 With “Beggars” and “vagabonds” as complementary terms, had Plato had access to the petition, that particular phrasing may have intrigued her, but more likely, the conditions the terms connote make them plausibly easy to deploy in the “vanishing Indian” rhetorical context. Charles’s ministry and Montaukett identity would not have been remote to her, as they are to Native studies scholars today; his legacy would conceivably resonate with her. The second influence looms provocatively over the poem because access to it was more immediate: Apess again, from the Eulogy. Here, Plato’s skill 40 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity at poetic construction synthesizes the language in the last sentence of Apess’s rendering of King Philip’s speech: “these people from the unknown world will cut down our groves, spoil our hunting and planting grounds, and drive us and our children from the graves of our fathers, and our council fires, and enslave our women and children.”21 Before ending his speech, Apess will refer to this as Philip’s “prophecy,”22 Plato adapting it as “foretold our chief” (l. 33). Plato’s subsequent images contain the idea of oppression by invading strangers who “destroy’d / The fields” (ll 62–63). Apess’s influence lies embedded in “The Natives of America.” We suspect it owes its obscurity to Plato’s covert deployments and adolescent restraint—as a young woman, she wrestled with social expectations to temper her political judgment; indeed, reading Apess might not have been advised by pious teachers, but Plato lets this poem speak for a community in language not always intended to be subtle. Up to the close of the fourth stanza, Plato did not express the then familiar “dying Indian” theme. Her Romantic era contemporaries projected the fate of Indians as dying out because they resisted “civilization,” but Plato’s narrator-father speaks of withdrawal for safety into nearby forests or in the trans-Appalachian territory. When we acknowledge her setting and her father’s disposition as situated around the time of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, her awareness of the conditions faced by Natives is all the more covert. His intention to withdraw rather than convert or be absolutely fatalistic is a significant element in the poem, affirming a singular Native disposition and worldview. The fourth stanza smartly concludes the third section of her father’s oratory, mounting in passion while ever possessing a mask of reserve. The following three stanzas, all quatrains, with the first marked by an a-b-b-a rhyme scheme, describe current conditions with a melancholy lyricism. In the first quatrain, stanza five, the father tells her of the silence and invisibility experienced by Native survivors. Plato would live this invisibility in the congregation of a Negro minister who saw her as a “colored lady.” The second quatrain reca- pitulates the third and fourth stanzas to create an effective prelude to the next quatrain, in which her father grieves over the changes in his people’s land and his people’s fate in becoming uprooted wanderers. How Plato ends this poem deserves close attention. The father begins his closing remarks by stating, “ ‘I love my country,’ ” that being an unflinching love for the land of which he has been dispossessed, not the political idea of the United States. In its five concluding lines, the poem reinforces the time-honored practice by Indian parents of investing in a child the responsibility of memory when the father instructs her:

“Now daughter dear I’ve done, Seal this upon thy memory; until the morrow’s sun Shall sink, to rise no more; “The Natives of America” and “To the First of August” 41

And if my years should score, Remember this, though I tell no more.” (ll 70–74)

The pain of recollection compels him to relate this narrative just once; under these circumstances, cultural practice demands that the Native child accept the responsibility of listening carefully and dutifully to the teaching, particularly to teachings that contain significant historical information about Native people, and most of all, the child must remember. The poem thus reinforces this mode of instruction.23 This final admonitory stanza, despite its redundancy, embodies the father’s reticence and preference to avoid repetition. He had wanted to share his immeasurable grief with those gone in the flow of time. America’s original inhabitants, grieving losses of traditional homelands and culture and hounded by whites’ cruelty, now roam without relief. Plato, of course, offers no resolution to the Native predicament except to impress upon her readers that the father reconciled himself to wandering. The father in this poem affirms his strength through resistance aided by memory. His wandering, a subtheme in three poems about her personas’ father(s), continues his resistance and is conceivably a metaphor for the mobility of Plato family members. She thus contributes her own twist to the motif of “a traveler’s yearning for home” found in early nineteenth- century American women’s poems.24 Rather than wander at this time in her life, Plato escapes detection as an Indian by becoming obvious—“hiding in plain sight”—in a colored community. To reiterate Foster’s misinterpretation of this poem, the lines “In history often do I read, / of pain which none but they did heed” express what she finds “applicable to her African ancestors as well.”25 Neither the theme nor the content of “The Natives of America” support this, nor is there any reason for a Native who knows both his identity and his people’s history to bemoan the fate of captured Africans when he wants to concentrate his daughter’s attention on the Natives of America. The poem’s dramatic qualities suggest Plato’s intimate memory of or experience with a parent or Native elder narrating this story of cultural destruction. Her contemporary reader would not have been able to avoid the intensity of her theme and may have been in a better position than that of twentieth- century readers to appreciate the social metamorphosis faced by Natives. The contrast between this poem and the moralizing pieties of her other verses cautions the reader about the relationship between her and her father, who addresses her without needing to affirm that she too is Indian. This history is astutely recounted, but it is all we learn about what we feel compelled to accept as her personal statement. Literal interpretation would facilitate the readings of the other two poems about a father figure. On a compositional level, stock melodramatic phrases and events and bitter tragic ends generally mark poems in this genre. Plato’s narrating father, however, avoids physical or full spiritual tragedy; he bemoans the loss of his country yet leaves his fate open. The tone 42 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity of his answering his child on a personal level makes the poem one of the more realistic and original discourses of its kind. And certainly, as Judith Ranta points out, its sentiment betrays Plato’s internal conflict involving Columbus, criticized in this poem but praised in an essay26; Plato’s father would surely have scoffed at Plato’s remarks in “Decision of Character” for stating that Columbus “displayed those traits of character which proved the greatness of his mind.”27 Despite this conflict, the topic of “Natives of America” apparently means much more to her in an intimate and familial way than does the idea of the abolition of slavery in the remote British Caribbean and Atlantic islands and also, perhaps, in the United States. “Daughter’s Inquiry”28 uses the persona of a young woman imploring her father to return home:

do resign This ever roaming life, Oh, do not spend your life in this, An ever mournful strife. (ll 9–12)

The speaker had asked her father to “guide the ship no more” (l 6). He is either a navigator or, possibly, a ship’s captain if the lines are read literally, and his only thematic connection to the father of “The Natives of America” is his restless roaming. The “mournful strife” is the uncertainty of a seaman’s life; shipwrecks cost lives. Risky conjecture here would take us afar, but as I will mention in chapter 4, Long Island Sound Natives in the nineteenth century were reliable crewmen aboard commercial ships and were expert whalers. Less in need of conjecture is “The Residence of My Father,”29 a poem expressing the speaker’s delight in her childhood home. But the absent father knows his groves in the present tense, suggesting a temporary absence or possibly that he lives in heaven. If the father in “The Natives of America” had read the various histories of America with the acumen to distinguish their truths from his own knowledge, his daughter (assuming she is Ann Plato) feels comfortable with books and Christian piety, for in the essay “Benevolence” she extols John Eliot’s preaching to Indians; honors Columbus in “Decision of Character” for his determination; and in “Death of the Christian,” she claims that stalwart fighters, a tortured Indian warrior included, could never die with the “genuine dignity [of] the death of the real believer.”30 In her introduction to the Schomburg reissue of Essays, Kenny J. Williams does not assess Plato’s tone in “To the First of August,” which she describes as “one of her few ‘racial’ poems,” pointing out that Plato was not the only poet of color to use this event as a subject. Plato consistently restrains her “we” persona throughout its seven quatrains. Distance between the speaker and the subject “The Natives of America” and “To the First of August” 43

of emancipation seems more than an aesthetic problem here for Plato, for by contrast, “The Natives of America” evinces a definite emotional immediacy. Williams does not read “The Natives of America” as a poem invoking personal or paternal reality, stating only that it “addresses the seldom discussed issue of the reasons for the downfall of the American Indian.” Glibly she pronounces how “in some ways and with some obvious changes, the ‘cruel oppression’ suffered by the Indians could be transferred to the subjugated blacks.” Her interpretation simply compounds the misreading of this poem and the history it reflects, and most of all, it fails to find common ground between the destruction of indigenous culture and land loss and African enslavement in America.31 We see no Christian sentiment in “The Natives of America,” but neither do we gain impressions of savagery and paganism. The poem instead tries to make an impact on readers’ sense of human decency and fairness. If read as a Native poem of protest, it can be viewed as contemporary to the relatively new genre that includes Apess’s essay “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” and articles published in the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper between 1828 and 1834.32 Plato’s predisposed piety and her adherence to the expectation that women did not write protest literature are likely to have tempered the language of this poem. The poem’s structure and the sentiment of its lesson give it an enigmatic character. The occasion of the lesson apparently left Plato with more than superficial impressions. That her father’s lesson and admonition contain no Christian influence implies that he had none to give her. Possibly his own allegiance to Christianity was dim. He had followed the path of traditional knowledge, which would affirm that Christians were central to Indians’ loss of their country; Indian charity to Christian colonists did not nullify Indian removal. With “The Natives of America,” Plato may have elected to indulge some memory of her father despite her references to Indians in disparaging terms in her essay “Education,” from which she may be willing to exempt him and his paganism. But the hoary elder of “Lessons from Nature” (which, like “Educa- tion,” will be discussed in another chapter) withholds opinionated evaluative remarks about the races. To exempt her father is not to split hairs or promote contradiction. Based upon poetical references to him (assuming any of these fathers are meant to be her own and the settings of the encounters autobiographical), Plato had a closer and evidently more endearing relationship with this parent than with her mysterious mother, a parent who never figures in the father’s monologue and is never invoked elsewhere by the author. “The Natives of America” proves to be Ann Plato’s most incisive political and historical statement. Its speaker oratorically sustains its tone by impressing his daughter with the wisdom of his pride in all its wounded passion and the rightful history he relates to her; these speak for themselves. What Marlon Ross describes as the “feminine incidentalism” of British poet Felicia Hemans’s book-length The Forest Sanctuary (not a poem about 44 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Indians) applies to Plato and her poem. Plato, who read Hemans, elevated her father’s rhetorical style and the reality of his impending displacement above the expected poetical sentiment associated with the circumstance, purging, as Ross says of Hemans, “all metaphorical and allegorical intent, focusing the language totally . . . on the emotional state portrayed in the poem” as it would affect the reader.32 Plato’s rhetorical strategy in “The Natives of America” runs counter to the genre’s patriarchal conventions. That her male persona-within-the-female speaking at her bequest closes this poem is, too, a gesture of feminine power. The father’s voice is not circumscribed by the daughter; her very behavior is intended to honor his teaching without any qualification of her providing closure. The daughter, meanwhile, does not capitulate to patriarchy but honors and empowers her father’s story, assuming the power to create the space for his narrative, and in doing so, she as a Native child does not undermine his respected position as her elder. The tenets and strategies taken for granted in literary criticism would be at odds with such a Native cultural value. Chapter 3

Missinnuok at the Hartford Space ᇺᇻᇺ

By approaching Ann Plato’s heritage based upon “The Natives of America,” the women of the four biographies in Essays, and the Iowa census, I am proposing that she and her sphere were part of Long Island Sound Indian communities. Modern ethnographers and historians writing about Indians in southern New England and eastern Long Island have adopted terms Roger Williams recorded from the Narragansett signifying people as in Native people: Nínnuock and Ninnimissinnuok.1 James Hammond Trumbull lists the second term in his Natick Dictionary of 1903.2 Nearly a century later, independent scholar Steven F. Johnson used Nínnuock with the parenthetical subtitle “The People” for his eponymously titled book of 1995 about “the Algonkians of New England.” Kathleen Bragdon followed, then Faren N. Siminoff, respectively using Nin- nimissinnuwock as a southern New England cultural marker, with Siminoff adapting it to include Indians of eastern Long Island.3 Both use a derivative term, Missinnuok, when discussing the activities of “common people,” those socially not among the sachems but who contributed to decisions, witnessed documents, and appear “only in birth, death, and marriage records.”4 Ninnimissinnuwock fundamentally “connotes people who share a broad common heritage, familial, social and political organization, yet does not necessarily connote membership in a unified polity.”5 Long Island Sound peoples are Algonquians, closely associated through diplomacy, intermarriages, and a wampum economy, with language dialects as principal interacting properties.6 They are not the “strange Indians” decried in tribal petitions against interlopers. Of the Narragansett identifiers, Missinnuok will help us reset ideas about nineteenth-century Algonquian survivance and diaspora in the Long Island Sound Basin, which in turn will facilitate our interpretation of Plato and her biography subjects.7

45 46 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Map 3.1. Long Island Sound Missinnuok Territory, circa 1840. Ron Welburn with assistance from Academic Computing, UMass Amherst Information Technology.

In Native Hubs, her study of twentieth-century urban Indian communities around California’s Silicon Valley, Reyna K. Ramirez offers interstitial meanings and connotations for a hub as “a geographical concept [that] also incorporates activities on the reservation.”8 Using a transnational structure to define movements, whether between California cities and North American reservations or between California and Native enclaves in Mexico, a constant factor is that those urban residents have communities at home where people know them; their activities in nearby cities are extensions of reservation or Mexican enclave life.” Hence, I am restoring as much of my wording as possible from the Track Change exchange. However, intermarriages between Indians and Mexicans or Chicanas/os (or Puerto Ricans) come under the dictates of white (Anglo or Spanish) patriarchal standards of cultural identity and citizenship, and tensions over Native cultural beliefs, practices, and even skin complexion have ensued. Ramirez adds to her explanation the term diaspora, filtered through race theorists James Clifford, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy. “Native hubs” is an attractive concept, Missinnuok at the Hartford Space 47

but the term Missinnuok seems more appropriate for Plato and nineteenth- century urban Natives in Hartford. Within Missinnuok, the displacements brought about by eighteenth-century English colonial contact differ more than superficially from Ramirez’s hub. Two centuries ago and more in the Long Island Sound territories, dramatically different community separations affected tribal citizenship and tribal/Native identity. For some, this effect was mitigated because they had partial non-Indian, sometimes African, ancestry. In a new Mis- sinnuok paradigm, a plausible epistemology would include Suckiaug descendants, with their Wangunk and Podunk neighbors, who were not taken in by other tribes or who followed the Brotherton path. By 1730 for the Suckiaug and by 1764 for the Wangunk, after their reservation was closed, some families had dispersed to Hartford, Farmington, and Mohegan.9 By Plato’s time, many of those tribal descendants continuing to reside in central Connecticut homelands were not documented as Indians, which does not mean they were not Indians. Adapting Ramirez’s reasoning concerning nineteenth-century urban Natives in Hartford, “urban” is a flexible modifier, because not all Natives who moved about in these colonial lands resettled in cities such as Hartford and New Haven. The Mohegans were one tribe that predicated the relocations of some Indians by railing against “mongrels” and “mulattoes” in their midst; taking advantage of this, English colonial authorities exploited the distinctions of blood quantum or part–non-Native heritage to create a purist Indian nomenclature. The resulting displacement of many tribal people with or without mixed ancestry effectively transformed them into documented and public colored people, as they turned to urban environments to survive, often in communities that became African American by default and in which de facto or deliberate seg- regation practices in education and church membership took hold. Here, I want to establish a link between Plato’s Hartford and the ancestral lands of the Suckiaug (or Sociag). The English initially called the space that became Hartford Suckiaug as early as 1633; the name Hartford was affirmed by 1638 with the treaty intended to confirm the final destruction of Pequot identity after the horrific massacre of that people. According to Trumbull, a reservation at the “South meadow in Hartford” was home to a “remnant” band of Suckiaug through the middle of the seventeenth century. Eight Suckiaug men fought for the English during King Philip’s War, at which time, Trumbull said, “the ‘Sicaog tribe’ was already extinct.”10 Let us briefly review the research mentioned in the first chapter by Doughton on Worcester and Brilvitch and Big Eagle/Smith on Bridgeport with the lens Lisa Brooks provides in The Com- mon Pot. Brooks’s thesis is, by her subtitle, “The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast,” and with the exception of William Apess’s protests in Boston on behalf of the Mashpee Wampanoag, her discussion concentrates on Natives working out problems of change in their traditional lands. With unequivo- cal wisdom and autochthonous authority, she recasts northeastern indigenous 48 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

history, deploying the languages in this cultural geography to analyze, describe, and decolonize the deep-pocketed histories of river communities.11 Let us add urban adaptation, a later development under colonization, to Brooks’s discernment. The urban Native experience in early nineteenth-century Connecticut may not be unique in comparison with, say, Natives’ experiences in Middle Atlantic coast cities or even Los Angeles, for what lends it exceptional status are the dynamics by which the urban environment attracted Native immigrants as they tried to accommodate themselves under the attitudes, pressures, and doubts their parents experienced in the midst of converting to Christian- ity. We must accept Native and tribal identity in these cities according to a broad-based reasoning to affirm how Natives abided there and “made a living.” These families, having already adapted to European possessions, surely brought cooking utensils and farming tools with them upon relocating. From fieldwork at four eighteenth-century Mashantucket Pequot sites, we can extrapolate the social process of relocating to a city like Hartford, where Natives often had to live at the rear of particular dwellings. Some Native families may have had to adapt their farming tools for laboring work.12 Nineteenth-century Native families settling in Hartford, invisible when not documented as Indians, are actually less phenomenal when one interprets this settlement as a reclamation of that space. These families and individuals adapted to a range of activities from, ostensibly, European-style farming (some in Hartford’s population of four thousand in 1820 had small farm plots) to working as laborers, seamstresses, hotel workers, and washerwomen. They contributed to Hartford’s social and civic life beneath the veneer of working and worshipping with their African American neighbors, and thus they contributed to its political economy. Brooks does not include the experience of the Paugusetts, who were given a reservation around which the city of Bridgeport grew, engulfing it and compelling its relocation to nearby Trumbull, where it survives in the eponymous vernacular as Big Eagle/Smith’s subtitle, A Quarter-Acre of Heartache. The obverse bold relief of the Paugusetts’ Bridgeport example illustrates a fixed tribe in a specific area, not people from several tribes relocating to a chosen place. Natives settling in Hartford from elsewhere were simply moving around in their Missinnuok territory. When we avoid thinking about them as outcasts, we can perceive them in an entirely different social picture. The resettlement of Hartford by Natives has a metaphysical significance; it is a vindication of sorts in accordance with its deep history. Those Indians who moved there and joined its colored churches essentially reclaimed it as Native space. Why Hartford? Was there anything special about it that would have attracted Natives from the Sound? It plausibly held some significant history as a cultural space. Although so little has been written about the Suckiaug, with their main town situated along the west bank of the river and across from the Map 3.2. Traditional Network of Trails to Saukiaug (Hartford). Apportioned from Hayden L. Griswold, Map of the State of Connecticut Showing Indian Trails Villages and Sachemdoms, made for The Connecticut Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Inc. Information compiled by Mathias Spiess. The Connecticut Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Inc., 1930. University of Connecticut Libraries Map and Geographic Information Center (MAGIC). http://www.flickr.com/photos/uconnlibrariesmagic/3332840235/ 50 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity main town of the Podunk, they must have held cultural and trading roles that belied their small space and number.13 The Suckiaug homeland attracted my attention, causing me to muse over why Hartford became situated where it is and what that space reclaimed by Natives in the times of the colony and statehood meant in the echoes of memory. Suckiaug (Hartford) sits at a hockanum (a hook-shaped river formation) on the west side of the Connecticut River.14 Trails connecting Native communities crossed through Suckiaug, facili- tating diplomacy, trade, and probably the enactment of ceremonies. In 1931, Hayden Griswold mapped Mathias Spiess’s narrative descriptions of the tribal territories throughout the Connecticut colony, using 1626 data; both confirm that the Hartford area (Spiess’s Sicoag) was a hub of activity in the southern Connecticut Valley.15 With a relatively small geography, they were situated at a crossroads of diplomatic encounters, trade, and hunting trails, just as Hartford is a modern crossroads of highways, government, and commerce built upon those same trails. I have found that nineteenth-century Natives in Hartford resonated with the Suckiaug space. By 1840, Natives had joined people from other tribes who had gathered before them. Nineteenth-century Missinnuok also moved to Hartford for religious fellowship, work opportunities, and education. Adding their numbers to the developing educational initiatives under the aegis of the Talcott Street Congregational Church made them civic participants, and some managed not to lose their identity within the colored population. Throughout North America, Native people remember the significance of particular spaces, and Hartford no doubt possessed an ineffable racial memory understood by early nineteenth-century Natives from the Sound. Belonging to land gives indigeneity the kind of time-out-of-memory relationship Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday articulates as “the remembered earth,” or a sacred space invested with sacrifice, in this case, the treaty of 1638 (and who knows what other activity from pre-European times).16 It matters little, then, that the Native presence in Hartford is in the context of a colored religious and social community. Chapter 4

Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle ᇺᇻᇺ

How Indians fared on the Atlantic coast under pressure from European, especially English, violence and diseases is not in the standard narrative of United States nation building, nor is how they prevailed despite the disruption and fragmentation of their homelands. This chapter on the surname Plato among Indians in Long Island Sound will not reiterate the cant of this disruption. As English settlements mushroomed after King Philip’s War, Natives faced the choice of staying in the minimized portions of their homelands colonial authorities allowed them or leaving; over time, some persons and families relocated to safe havens, such as Schaghticoke or the Lenape stronghold in the mountainous Ramapo country along the present-day border of New York and New Jersey. In research, as in genealogy and as recounted in family and tribal oral traditions, following the transition from indigenous name to European surname proves difficult without deep knowledge of ancestral history, but once the surnames are adopted, their documentation becomes a powerful tool. In regard to those Indians who gathered in Hartford, following the local origin and migration of surnames is a valuable if occasionally imperfect methodology. Plato individuals in Long Island Sound Missinnuok contributed to a distinct enclave in nineteenth-century Connecticut’s colored population, and the surnames in their circle produce a Venn diagram of interacting families such as Freeman, Randall, and Pell. A biracially conscious America threatened their collective cultural identity in Hartford, denying them the sovereignty of their own identity in order to enforce their disappearance. Throughout the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, Mis- sinnuok in Long Island Sound continued their centuries-old social and cultural

51 52 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity interactions. Mohegan preacher Samson Occom (1734–1792) led his followers from the Sound to a place safe for Christian Natives. Natives from Long Island Sound who did not or could not join Occom on his journey to Oneida and Wisconsin continued to experience mixed promises of cultural refuge and social opportunity. Several found employment at sea as whalers and fishermen, others as artisans, farmers and laborers, or as washerwomen and seamstresses; many who were land bound owned their properties. To appreciate this cultural alignment in terms of a Native epistemology about the identity of Ann Plato and where the surname Plato appears and who bears it, we need a conceptual framework for the location, displacements, and relocation preferences and ties that influenced adaptation to changing social and cultural patterns within the Missinnuok. But from 1790 to the present, many Natives resisted and continue to resist being enumerated for the federal census, compounding the difficulty of racial enumeration research on those who were enumerated. Especially among Natives in the eastern United States, this is common knowledge. Researching Native history in the Northeast and in general and attempting to pursue an epistemology for the historiographies and social histories of Native people along the Atlantic coast and inward is less arduous when information can be attained through tribal documents from reservations or local enclaves or from town or newspaper documentation. Additionally challenging is the attempt to follow those individuals and families who, motivated by various circumstances, settled in rural areas, small towns, or urban communities. The three centuries after King Philip’s War are distinguished by intratribal identity issues and by pressure from white overseers and trustees to ethnically cleanse Natives of mixed ancestry from tribal rolls, providing little recourse for any Natives whose status had been recorded in federal and state census enumerations as mulatto, colored, free negro, free person of color, or black—if they were listed at all. As “real” Indians declined in number, Natives who left tribal communities ostensibly enlarged the American mainstream, especially the African American population, in which their cultural heritage also became precarious and vulnerable. Ethnohistory and social history researchers of these “vanished” Indians must sift Indians from African American records, a sometimes daunting task involving family surnames and the migration of surnames, oral traditions, and intangible markers such as mobility, clannish adherence to particular neighborhood friends, reported personal eccentricities, participation in civic organizations, and church denomination affiliations. Town histories demand close readings and cross checking for discrete details. For example, the writings of a Shelter Island, New York, minister contradict the popular notion that all the Manhanset Indian inhabitants vacated his locale after selling it to colonials in the seventeenth century—by the close of the Revolution, said Rev. Mallmann, “there still lived quite a large number of Indians on the island,” in “quite a village on Sachem’s Neck,” until their numbers gradually declined.1 Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle 53

The federal census shows no record of the Manhansets in its enumerations of 1790 or 1800. Around 1740, a change in British documentary practices for nonwhites in the American and Atlantic colonies complicates today’s attempts to distinguish Indians in the record: recorders of these documents begin collapsing all slaves and indentured nonwhites into the classification of black or negro, or else they used the identifier “slave” whether such persons were African or indigenous. Town probate and land records will sometimes identify Natives individually, but those bound out to service tend to lose their identities in colonial rolls. To illustrate this with a pertinent Hartford example, in her African Americans and Native Americans in Hartford 1636–1800, Barbara J. Beeching’s summary charts for 1790 and 1800 include “Negroes, including free Indians, free Blacks” and the number of slaves. The names listed in her Appendix II offer no cultural affiliations. In fact, the only Indians she does identify by name as living in Hartford are in the years 1695 (two), 1714, 1721, 1723, and 1732 (one each).2 The reality is much more complex in Hartford in the nineteenth century, and following the Plato surname reveals that its holders continued to interact within Missinnuock. The scant paper trail to Ann Plato, which leaves so much to guesswork, deserves reconstruction. Discourse on her is unavoidably redundant and cursory, with commentary glossing over the futility of research and, until Foster’s and Bassard’s work, marked by surface descriptions of her poetics. About so elusive a personality, much emerges from research ephemera that are temptingly easy to dismiss. Black Roots offers data useful to reconstructing a history of particular Native families.3 Perhaps the earliest record of an Indian named Plato appears in the records of the town of East Hampton, Long Island, for 15 January 1675, when “Thomas Talmage exchanged a horse with Plato an Indyan servant.”4 Possibly this is the same individual who signed on as a whaler in 1678,5 as the latter reference, dated “Aprell ye 20th: 1681,” is otherwise worded: “Bee it knowne to all men by these presents that I plato Indian doe bind and ingeage my self to go to sea for phillip Leeke . . . for to kill Wheals and other great fish.”6 He was probably Montaukett or Shinnecock. A Plato appears in the 1698 census among the Shinnecock, whose lands presently are on the western boundary of the town of Southampton, approximately twenty miles west of Sag Harbor and East Hampton. This census lists males fifteen and older.7 Among Natives, the Plato name and surname appear modestly in records of East Hampton, Long Island, and later in southeastern Connecticut. In nearly all seventeenth- and eighteenth-century instances in those two regions (including Rhode Island), those identified as Indians are Montauketts, Shinnecocks, Niantic-Narragan- setts, or Narragansetts. The inclusion of Natives of eastern Long Island needs no explanation in regard to the interaction this data suggests; throughout the Sound, all levels 54 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity of social and cultural interaction continue today. This is Missinnuok in action. For example, Narragansett individuals or descendants living among the Shin- necock, Unkechaug, and Montaukett are not unusual; some Narragansett survivors found refuge in these communities after the devastating Great Swamp Massacre of 1675. Also, Narragansetts, Mohegans, and Montauketts moved among each other’s communities, with a central locus in eastern Long Island during the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century. Occom preached among his own Mohegan people and among the Montauketts, who played a significant role in wampum production and economy.8 However, no one holding the name Plato is listed in the 1806 Montaukett Indian census, which could be for any one of four reasons. One is that the Platos, now more numerous, were mixed with African Americans, making them vulnerable to exclusion from any Indian reckoning that might endanger Montaukett reservation status and identity; despite their absence in censuses, however, nineteenth-century maritime documents variously identify them as Indian, Negro, or mulatto. Another plausible reason for their exclusion is that by 1806, they were Narragansetts and no longer Montauketts through their matriarchal line. The official status of these Platos as Indians could thus have been in limbo. The elders among them could have held on to a belief in their particular Indian identity with a passionate dedication offset by their offspring’s casual regard for losing that identity. Fourth and last is that the Platos remained Indian but voluntarily moved off the reservation lands. Before proceeding to identify further holders of the surname Plato in eastern Long Island and Connecticut, I will state my deductions about the name’s possible origins. The name Plato is, of course, originally Greek; however, as a surname it was brought to British North America in the second half of the eighteenth century from Germany, where it is a cognate surname with Plat, Plate, Plath, Platow and others. It thus does not appear in historical directories and encyclopedias as a name for British families during the eighteenth century.9 English landowners, gentry, and slave owners in the colonies from the latter quarter of the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century bestowed upon their servants and slaves not only names from the Bible but names from classical Greek and Roman mythology and history and from classical Egyptian figures, of which Pompey, Plato, Hannibal, Jupiter, and Scipio are examples. Indians as well as Africans in Connecticut and Long Island experienced slavery and indentured servitude, but far fewer Indians in the historical record possess these classical names. Indians in these socioeconomic circumstances tended to use, although not exclusively, tribal names as surnames; English names adopted to denote particular skills such as Hunter (a name common at Shinnecock); baptismal names from the Bible, such as John or Isaac; surnames resulting from indenture and intermarriage; and Anglicized approximations of their names from their own languages.10 The historical record offers no indication about Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle 55

how an Indian originally acquired the name and surname Plato. The name could have been given to an Indian man, presumed to be an uncivilized savage, by an English colonist impressed by his philosophical outlook, reasoning talents, or countenance. Some demonstration of having gained literacy may also have left an impression, for the Indian mentioned above who signed aboard the whaling vessel in 1678 wrote his initial or mark as “P.”11 I am going to take, however, an epistemological risk about this onamastic phenomenon involving Indians attaining the name and surname Plato. I propose that this name, as given to an Indian man or as appropriated by him, is the epenthesized version of a name or word originating from the Montaukett and Shinnecock language. This phonological possibility is enticing, and I am not ignorant of the caveats it holds for substantiation and romanticism. The Algonquian language family, enormous in geographical range, consists of innumerable languages, historically spoken from throughout eastern Canada south into North Carolina, from the Atlantic westward through Alberta and Montana, and more southerly, through the Ohio Valley. The Cheyenne and the Arapaho, historically in present-day Wyoming and Colorado, speak an Algonquian dialect, as do the Yurok of northern California. The sounds l and r are not universal in Algonquian languages.12 Linguists have noted that the r sound predominates in southern Algonquian among the peoples of the Chesa- peake into North Carolina. The term Renape, by which the Powhatan-Renape of the Rankokus community in central New Jersey identify themselves, is an example of this.13 In eastern upstate New York, New England, and eastern Long Island, the l and r sounds occur here and there and are recorded in the lexicons developed for them by early missionaries, but they seldom appear together in the same lexicons. Roger Williams, in his Key Into the Languages of the Americas, based almost entirely upon Narragansett, lists no words or sounds containing l or r except in a dialect comparison of the word for dog spoken by four southern New England tribes: alùm he heard among the Nipmuc(k)s of east-central Massachusetts and northeastern Connecticut; arúm among the “Quinnippiucks” of central Connecticut; and ayím, spoken by the Narragansetts.14 Meanwhile, a Montaukett word list taken down in 1798 contains but one word in eighty words and phrases with this r sound.15 During some obscure moment in the negotiation of word or name pro- nunciation exchanged between Native and English in eastern Long Island in the later part of the seventeenth century, the original name for “Plato an Indyan” or possibly his ancestor may have resulted in a phonological metamorphosis to the Plato it was to remain. According to the Narragansett and Montaukett lexicons, Algonquian P-words and names have no PL– sound, but some do have PT(D)– or P–t(d)– sound constructions. Conceivably, a word or name that began Pt(d)– could be sounded as P-(-)t(d)–, and with an aspirated P sound, it could have been pronounced P(h)aht(d)o, which the English ear could easily 56 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity have epenthesized to Plato.16 Such a sound did occur in the Montaukett language. English explorer Waymouth, in a journal entry in 1605, gave powdawe as the word the Long Island Natives designated for whale. The “Montauk Vocabu- lary” of 1798 offers potedaup. Williams’s Key has, for whale, Pótop-pauog.17 Both the “Indyan Plato” and an Englishman may conceivably have found a corrup- tion of these or similar sounds for the English approximation “Plato” to their mutual and then general satisfaction, as the English attempt at something close to powdawe or potedaug with one or more additional syllables might signify “whaler” or “whale hunter,” both to the English mind and to that of a man of the “Indyan Plato’s” tribe, to whom it would be an important designation, although it would not be exclusive to him, and he might have found it mutu- ally satisfying to himself and to his employers. English jurisdiction began early. By the middle of the seventeenth century in East Hampton, deeds identify Indians as being “allowed the fins and tails of all drift-whales” and at Montauk Point, what was to be divided equally.18 Southampton, on 28 November 1672, formally regulated whaling and codified the terms of employing “Indyans”:

That whosoever shall Hire an Indyan to go a-Whaling, Shall not give him for his Hire above one Trucking Cloath Coat, for each whale, hee and his Company shall Kill, or halfe the Blubber, without the Whale Bone under Penalty therein exprest.19

Probably as an effort to reconcile the growing hegemony of the English with being employed at a cultural practice, this Plato did hire out to a whaling crew, customarily a three-year contract. In 1670, one entrepreneur was based at Shinnecock Point, and by 1687, there were seven whaling companies on eastern Long Island alone, including one at Sagaponack or Sag Harbor20; Sag Harbor would remain an active whaling port into the early nineteenth century.21 Others named Plato in the nineteenth century, possibly this Plato’s descendants, made their living at sea. Numerous coastal northeastern Natives have done likewise. I am advancing the thesis that the epistemological circumstances of Natives named Plato seem rooted in the misapprehension of the name or that the name represents the intellectual prowess of a particular individual sometime before 1675. Except as family lore, the origin and meaning of Plato may gradually have become vague or lost to its Indian possessors. An eighteenth-century Plato in Connecticut is listed simply as “Plato, servant of Deacon Thomas Miner of Stonington,” born 2 July 1736.22 Blacks certainly may have lived in Stonington, an area abutting southwestern Rhode Island, but Eastern Pequots resided on a reservation community there, and Niantic/Nehantics and fugitive Narragansetts lived to their east. A “Free Plato” appears in the 1790 New York Census in the township of South Hempstead, Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle 57

then a part of Queens, as the head of a household of seven. The New York documents show how the race category for the Platos underwent change between the end of the seventeenth century and one hundred years later, when they were no longer designated Indians but free people of color and, more often, blacks. This may reflect the mother’s status, slave or free, as was the practice for social category. Such categorization by British colonists thwarted Indians’ efforts to avoid being lumped together with others of color. Joseph Fish records no Plato surname in his diary; he states in late 1765 that among nearly 250 Narragansetts, “besides these there is a considerable Number of mixtures and melattoes and mustees which the tribe Disowns, and Sundry families of Indians which prop- erly Belongs to other tribes.”23 On Long Island, Isaac Plato and Martin Plato begin to appear at this time. John Lyon Gardiner, a wealthy landowner in Sag Harbor, records both these Platos in 1799 in his ledger “Book of Colours” or “Mulatto book,” as well as two additional entries simply for “Plato.”24 The name of Isaac Plato was recorded in April 1790 in East Hampton when the death of his child was acknowledged, although not as a “negro child,” like the deceased offspring of other black men. Isaac Plato lost another offspring in 1820.25 In 1796, Isaac Plato was a witness to a property transaction. Any facile designation that he was a slave, such as that found in volume four of An Index to the East Hampton Town Records, is contradicted by an affidavit of 1814 in which a court of common pleas judge certifies that Isaac Plato, black, about five feet and nine inches in height, and around forty-seven, “was born free and . . . is now a free man.”26 At some point, Isaac Plato married Phebe. Brown and Rose identify them inconsistently, first as Indians (229) and then leaving readers with the assumption they are blacks.27 In what could be a literal residential shifting between southeastern Con- necticut and eastern Long Island are other Platos from or near Native communities. One question arises as to whether or not Isaac Plato is “Copt” Plato, whom Brown and Rose identified with his wife Phebe as Narragansett.28 The 1790 census for New York lists a “Free Isaac” in the township of Jamaica with four persons in his household, but this local enumeration provided no ages for persons of color. In the censuses of 1800 for Suffolk County, Town of East Hampton, the full name Isaac Plato is listed as head of a household of seven; again in 1810; in 1820, with presumably a spouse between twenty and forty- five and three sons under fourteen; and finally in 1830, when both he and his spouse were over fifty-five and there were two males and one female between ten and twenty-four in the household. Another reference for 1816 identifies Isaac Plato of East Hampton as co-owner and master of a fourteen-ton sloop, the Lady Washington.29 A Phebe Plato is never named in a census until 1850, when, enumerated in East Hampton, she was identified as sixty-six years old, black, and a native of Connecticut. She was perhaps a daughter of Isaac and the elder Phebe, if she is at all related, or she could be Isaac Plato’s widow Phebe, 58 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity nearly twenty years his junior. Complicating matters is a Connecticut Gazette notice by another Isaac Plato for 2 October 1816, stating: “my wife Huldah, has eloped from my bed and board, with her male child, 6 months old, without any reasonable cause.”30 So we have two Isaac Platos, contemporaries, one for Connecticut and the other for Long Island, not an unusual circumstance in reckoning the period’s vital statistics for genealogy. Martin Plato is enumerated with a household of seven in 181031 and of four in 1830. The earlier census sheets fail to indicate the township, but the later one identifies it as East Hampton. By 1830, the older male and female adults are between thirty-six and fifty-five; there is a boy under ten and a woman between twenty-four and thirty-six. The Martin Plato household does not appear in the 1800 or 1820 censuses or in any other New York census after 1830. There is yet no way to distinguish whether the “Free Plato” listed in the town of South Hempstead for 1790 is Martin, Isaac, or someone else. Other free people of color are listed in tandem (the “Free Plato” is the second on the list), and all are listed, names indented, under the name Samuel Martin, who has a household of ten with seventeen slaves. Isaac Plato died in 1832 and Martin Plato in 1834. A “John Plato, a man of coller,” died in October 1837.32 Two Huntington, Long Island, manumission cases in 1822 involved an Isaac on April 1 and “a Certain black man Slave named Plato” on October 15, the conditions being that, having belonged to Jonathan Gardiner, they were under forty-five and could sufficiently provide for themselves.33 Finally, although there are several other Platos, those who were peers of Ann Plato include the John Plato who died in 1837; Nathan Plato, a “cold. [colored] man” (note the missing apostrophe), who died in 1838; and Silas and Julia Plato. The 1850 census for Hartford records the members of this couple as both being twenty-three years old; she was listed as Juliette here and in the birth record of their son, Silas, born 3 June 1851 and listed as “Coulourd.” Silas and Julia returned to Southampton, Long Island, by 1860, where they were listed as having been born in New York and as thirty-five and thirty-four, respectively; Julia died in Bridgehampton in 1869. In the birth record for his son, Silas Plato’s occupation was listed as “Coaster,” meaning he worked as a teamster or, more likely, in the merchant service between New London or New Haven and East Hampton or Sag Harbor. Meanwhile, an infant Silas Plato, who died of smallpox at age three months in February 1851, cannot be aligned with anyone. Another mariner, Edward Plato, was listed as twenty-five in the 1850 census for New London and was called Edwin in the Hartford census of 1860. This Edward or Edwin might be the father of Frank Plato, the cousin to Gertrude Plato referred to in her obituary in 1925. Although 1830 was the last federal census recording of Isaac Plato, a free person of color named Charles Plato was enumerated in Easthampton for 1840, when he was between twenty-four and thirty-six, and in his household were Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle 59

two females, one less than ten and the second between ten and twenty-four. Charles’s occupation was listed as “navigating the ocean.” Charles Plato may have been twenty-nine at this time, if his age, listed as thirty-nine in the 1850 census, is accurate. He may have been a son to either Isaac or Martin Plato. He was likely the Charles Plato who was one of the Montaukett cofounders (with Lewis Cuffee) of St. David’s AME Zion Church in 1840 in the Eastville section of Sag Harbor.34 His wife’s name, too, was Huldah, age forty in 1850, and they had a daughter, Harriet, age sixteen. He also is likely to have been the Charles Plato referred to, with Amos G. Beman and others, in a 20 August 1853 newspaper as a delegate to “a council called by the colored citizens of Greenport” (a village in the North Fork town of Southold, Long Island), to organize a Congregational Church.35 In 1860, Charles, Huldah, and Harriet were listed as forty-seven, fifty, and twenty-five, respectively, and for the first time were identified as mulattoes. In the 1870 census listing for Charles and Huldah, he was a sixty-year-old “Seaman” and she was seventy and “keeping house.” Neither was literate. This census also listed, in the village of Bridge- hampton, town of Southampton, two black domestic servants, Harriet Plato, age seventeen, and Annie Plato, age twenty-two. Yet another Harriet Plato, six years old, was recorded in 1870 as the second and youngest child of Silas and Julia Plato, blacks, in Southampton. Records show that the two James Platos were Massachusetts island residents. One was a free colored man on Nantucket in 1800 and 1810. The second James Plato shows up in the 1850 census for Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard, as a mariner aboard the ship Almira; he was thirty years old and listed as having been born in “Easthampton.”36 Another Massachusetts island resident worth mentioning is Betsy B. Plato of Salem, Connecticut, a town north of New London. Betsy Plato was listed there as a party in a divorce case in 1832. The spurned wife, Sebria L. Ransom, purchased a property worth $400 from John S. Ransom, possibly the father or brother of her estranged or former husband Clark Ransom, on 27 December 1832.37 The Ransom family is one of Salem’s oldest distinguished families, and several Ransoms were land grantees during the nineteenth century. Clark and “Sabra” were married in Salem in Febru- ary 1818, and he was granted a mortgage on 18 June 1825. Sabra accused him of committing adultery with different women in Salem, particularly during August 1831 “with one, Betsey B. Plato of said Salem,” and that he aban- doned her and their children and removed to New York.38 There is, however, nothing in this deposition to identify Betsey B. Plato as a woman of color or that she removed to New York with Clark Ransom, as Brown and Rose surmise.39 Still, she may have been the same colored Betsey Plato bonded to marry David Hawkins on 24 August 1837 on Nantucket, but the record does not clarify whether the “color[e]d” after her name pertained to her alone or to both.40 60 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Eastern Suffolk County enumerations for 1860 and 1870 contain several women or girls of color named Phebe. The repetition of names among the Plato families seems bewildering. And because of insufficient details, any relationship Ann Plato might have had to the Abraham-Jason-Henry-Harriet Plato group born on Long Island but relocated to Connecticut, or to the families of Martin, Isaac, and Charles Plato of East Hampton, cannot be verified. These Platos are as likely to have been Natives as was Ann Plato’s father in her poem. Any of several male Platos could have been her father, but scholars have put forth Henry as the strongest, although unverified, connection to her through church association. I consulted Black Roots by logical design of its leading handily to archives and document repositories. Also, Native individuals and families would be included in the documents Brown and Rose cite. They point out how “the regularity with which intermarriage between blacks and native [sic] Americans occurred has necessitated the inclusion in this study of many Indian genealogical records.”41 These intermarriages did occur, but for some families, they have been conveniently overdramatized. Several names Brown and Rose list are unques- tionably identified in Connecticut Native history, namely Shantup, Occum, and one surviving into the twenty-first century, Tantaquidgeon. Where census recorders de-Indianized families and individuals by enumerating them as “free colored persons” or “free blacks,” family oral histories and tribal listings clarify the racial community for their progeny. Indians who found themselves outside of their tribal network and isolated in non-Indian communities, often urban, stood the greater chance of undergoing this demographic racial transformation. The resulting socialization, continuing into the twenty-first century, makes racial allegiance and genealogical research daunting for people of mixed ancestry. Brown and Rose’s demographics are especially informative regarding these Native families’ employment, indentured servitude, religious membership, and relationship to property and land. They find that most Natives in southeastern Connecticut lived within the town limits of Lyme, Montville, and Stonington, with some families listed in Norwich and Colchester. Phebe Plato stands as an important figure, due to her having been born in Connecticut and her likely relationship to Plato young adults who crossed Long Island Sound from eastern Long Island. The location of her birthplace in Connecticut would have great bearing upon Native Plato genealogy for the nineteenth century. That she was identified as Narragansett cannot be treated lightly, because she may have volunteered her identity, and Isaac’s mother may also have been Narragansett. Phebe may possibly have come from one of the Niantic/Nehantic or Niantic-Narragansett communities in southeastern Con- necticut: one group lived west of the Thames River in the Saybrook–Lyme–East Lyme region; another lived historically in the Stonington–Rhode Island area. Until 1886, when it was dissolved, a cluster of three Niantic/Nehantic families Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle 61

resided on their reservation at Black Point, situated in the town of East Lyme. That four young Plato men and one newly married Plato woman would leave East Hampton to settle for a short time near this reservation is a provocative issue, but the Niantic/Nehantics at Black Point followed the Baptist denomination.42 The young Plato men were baptized into Old Lyme Congregational Church and carried on their lives in Old Lyme until they dispersed to other parts of Connecticut. Thwarting research is the absence of passenger lists for travelers from Sag Harbor to New London. Ferries and whaling vessels departed the village of Greenport on the south shore of the Town of Southold, the ferries carrying passengers and freight to Stonington, Connecticut.43 Black Roots mentions Ann Plato just twice, because of Essays, which served Brown and Rose as a resource for Julia Ann Pell, one of her subjects for a biography.44 A risky presumption by literary historian Ann Allen Shock- ley, among others, advances Plato’s place of birth as “possibly” Hartford,45 but this has never been substantiated. Brown and Rose could not connect her with any other persons surnamed Plato. The value of Brown and Rose’s book for Ann Plato research lies in their acknowledging individuals pertinent to future relationship inquiries. For one, they mention the marriage between a James Lewia and Har- riet B. Plato, born in East Hampton, Long Island, in New York, “daughter of Copt and Phebe, Narragansett Indians.” James Lewia, or Lewis, born in Lyme, was the son of Lewis Lewia, listed as a “Negro servant of Col. Parsons,”46 and Margaret Griswold Lewia, the daughter of Eunice Crosley, Native, and York Griswold, black. Margaret’s deposition of 1838 regarding the service of her brother Prince Crosley (née Griswold) in the Revolutionary War states that the two were slaves of Governor Matthew Griswold and, furthermore, has her name rendered as “Lewia” in her opening identification and her conclusion.47 From 1672 until 1885, the Niantic/Nehantic reservation was set aside for the Western Niantic/Nehantics in East Lyme on a part of the peninsula known as Black Point. They had their own Indian agent, enlisted for service in the war, occasionally intermarried, and flocked to the white churches; their number declined after the war.48 Realizing this situation undoubtedly pressed them to move on. The Lewias lived in what today is called Old Lyme; Brown and Rose provide no date for their marriage, but their family enumeration for Lyme in 1850 identifies them as black, with Harriet B. Lewis (or possibly Lewia), born about 1805, listing Connecticut as her state of origin, not New York. She was probably born on 8 October 1806. With the oldest child, Livingston, being twenty-three years old in 1850, presumably the marriage took place sometime between 1822 and 1826, when Harriet was between sixteen and twenty years of age. Harriet B. Plato Lewia/Lewis was listed as forty-five and black in the 1850 census. She died in Colchester, Connecticut, on 15 February 1884, aged “77 yrs. 5 mos. 9 days.”49 62 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Brown and Rose also suggest that Harriet’s brother may have been Abra- ham Plato. In this later context, they do not identify Harriet as an Indian as they did previously; they in fact mention this alleged brother and a Jason Plato found in the August 31, 1817 baptismal records of the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme as Negroes.50 Marriages listed in the Barbour Collection at the Connecticut State Library indicate that Abraham Plato married Abba Mason on 1 April 1821 in East Haddam.51 Bearers of Mason as a family name who were persons of color are listed as having resided in New London, Ston- ington, and Preston; many are listed as having been born in Preston, Groton, and Lyme. Not a few persons of color in East Haddam between 1754 and 1900 carried the surname Mason or “Meason”; records identify them as “native,” “Indian” and “negro”; some previously resided in Stonington, which suggests they were Eastern Pequots. In a 24 April 1819 “Report of Committee, Groton and Stonington tribes of Indians” written in Groton and pertaining to land sales are two women, Sarah and Betty, with the Mason surname.52 Another report, from 1832, confirms this Pequot connection, recording that half of the forty Pequots at Groton bear the name Meazen and describing this population as racially mixed “with white and negro blood; but still possessed [of] a feeling of clanship,” especially in its anti-Mohegan attitudes.53 A Joseph Mason is described in the 1850s as having been born in East Haddam; he is “Yellow” in complexion, with black hair. Mary Mason Bouge, born in 1876, is described as Indian and as residing with her husband Israel Bouge in North Stonington.54 Abba Mason, meanwhile, cannot be specifically linked with any of the Mason families of East Haddam, but, given the genealogies and places of origin of other Natives there with this family name, her marrying Abraham Plato should not be a surprise.55 Eighteen individuals bearing the surname Mason are listed in the Barbour Collection for East Haddam between 1743 and 1857, but only one, a woman named “Axe” Mason who married a negro man named “Punch, alias John Cammel,” a native of the town, is identified racially; Bar- bour identifies this couple in parentheses as “People of color but free.”56 Black Roots lists the couple as Achsah, a daughter of Cooley and Clorinda Mason, born in 1784, and her husband “John Commel (Campbell).” Black Roots also identifies Abba Mason as “Abby” Mason in conjunction with her marriage to Abraham Plato. “Abba” could be an informal rendering of “Abbie,” from Abi- gail, yet Barbour lists a white woman named Abba A. Burdick (or Burdict) in eighteenth-century Stonington. This might eliminate the spelling discrepancy. The 1870 and 1880 census enumerations for an Abbie A. Platt in the town of Washington in southeastern Litchfield County could be mere coincidence. She is listed respectively as a 65- and a 79-year-old widow, also white and a native of Connecticut like her parents.57 The Connecticut census for 1830 lists an Abraham Plato in Colebrook in far northern Litchfield County, with a wife and one male offspring less than Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle 63

eight years old. This is likely the Abraham Plato formerly of New London County, and he may have decided to relocate after being discouraged about mortgaging his house in East Haddam. Four possible mixed-ancestry communities in northwestern Connecticut may have attracted him. One is Colebrook. Another is known as the Lighthouse, begun by a Narragansett man and his white wife in Barkhamsted, which abided for a century, ending roughly in the 1840s. A third is Danbury Quarter in the town of Winsted, believed to have been predominantly African American. Negrotown, the fourth, was occupied over the long turn of the nineteenth century, and despite its moniker, was made up of Natives, blacks, and mixed people. All these communities, situated in traditional Mahican territory, broke up as discrimination brought on by white settlement, land speculators, and industry intruded upon their remote location.58 Records document Abraham Plato’s early adulthood, and his housing and financial problems in East Haddam are just one instance of this intrusion. After or during his work as a blacksmith’s apprentice in Lyme in 1819, he acquired his own shop there in 1821,59 already situated on land he purchased from William Condol, a Narragansett Indian and possibly Margaret Crosley’s brother-in-law.60 Condol was compelled to sue him in 1823 for an outstanding $100; Condol’s deposition of 15 February 1825 avers that in addition to nonpay- ment for certain portions, Abraham Plato “ ‘mortgaged’ [those] premises” to another Lyme resident.61 However, Abraham Plato is not listed between 1825 and 1845, neither in Colebrook’s landowner records nor as a nonlandholding resident, who would have been required to pay a poll tax.62 This same Abraham Plato of 1819 and another Plato youth of color, Solomon, share the distinction of having been posted as runaways from their communities in New London County. Both are described as indentured and black; Abraham was a blacksmith’s apprentice, “born on Long-Island, state of New-York,” and “not very black.”63 Additional information about Abraham Plato reveals that his fugitive status might have ended amiably: before he and Jason were baptized, they were listed in the church’s records as “dead,” an ecumenical designation for unbaptized parishioners. After they were baptized, they were listed as “dismissed,” a term which at that time indicated their voluntary removal to another parish.64 The documented chronology for Henry Plato eventually specifies where he was born. He is a plausible yet not the best paternal link to Ann Plato. The federal census of 1850 for Hartford lists him as a forty-nine-year-old gardener born in Rhode Island. Black Roots finds Abraham and Henry Plato in Lyme as apprentices within a year of each other: Abraham, nineteen in January 1819, was apprenticed to a blacksmith (they never mention his short-term fugitive status), and Henry, twenty in 1822, the year after Abraham purchased his own house and shop on a three-quarter acre parcel in the town on 12 April 1821, worked in an unspecified capacity.65 Inexplicable is that Abraham was born 64 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity on Long Island, as was his presumed sister, Harriet, but Henry’s origins are a mystery, unless he was previously known as Jason Plato, the youth who was baptized with Abraham in 1817 and admitted to Old Lyme Church, or he may have gone by the name Solomon. Brown and Rose never speculate on whether Henry is brother or cousin to Abraham, but he was born at Sag Harbor on Long Island and was there for the 1820 census enumeration, if he is one of the four members of Isaac Plato’s household (see above). The 1860 Mortality Schedule for Connecticut identifies New York as his place of birth. Although neither his cemetery inscription, which shows his birth and death dates as November 9, 1801, and July 31, 1859, respectively, nor death notices identify where he was born, his daughter Gertrude’s death certificate identifies the location as Sag Harbor, Long Island.66 Sag Harbor continues to have a Montaukett presence. This discrepancy of place of origin as listed in census rolls is yet another daunting problem in Plato family research. In 1850, the enumerator of Henry Plato probably apprehended Long Island instead of Rhode Island. There should be a linguistic explanation for this. Depending upon how far Henry Plato was from speakers of Montaukett in his youth, he may have enunciated the L in Long Island as an R sound, which a careless listener would assume meant Rhode Island. This R sound prevails in the Montaukett form of eastern Algon- quian.67 Also, either Harriet B. Plato Lewis was in fact born in Connecticut, or she for some reason provided her enumerator with Connecticut when she was in fact born on Long Island. In the 1840 federal census, the last to name only the heads of households, Henry Plato is a “Free Colored Person” in whose household are one male under ten years and six females: three under ten, two between the ages of ten and twenty-four, and one between thirty-six and fifty-five. Names of all persons residing in a household are listed in the 1850 census, which also lists Henry Plato’s employment in agriculture and the names of Deborah, whom he married in 1824, and two children noted as attending school: Gertrude, fifteen, and Benajah, a son, ten. Plato’s property stood valued at $800, a respectable amount for any man of color at that time. Thus, this particular household of four persons had gained the son in 1840, after the enumeration of that year. One of the young Plato females in Henry and Deborah’s 1840 household was Nancy, who died on 30 November 1846 at the age of twenty.68 If Ann Plato is the unnamed female in this age category and thus Henry and Deborah Plato’s oldest child, Brown and Rose’s Plato family listing does not include her.69 Katherine Clay Bassard hastily asserts that this connection is determined by the Hartford City Directory, for 1828, which lists Henry, a “labourer,” and Deborah, a “seamstress,” residing at 23 Elm Street, near where the Col- ored Methodist Episcopal Church would be situated after a fire destroyed the original building.70 Bassard may have guessed accurately; however, the names of the Platos’ children are absent from this directory, as they customarily are Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle 65

from all the different directories for Hartford through 1855, leaving such guesswork unreliable. Meanwhile, the 1828 directory does list a “Freeman Harriet, Wash woman, bliss 7.”71 Bliss Street, whose name was changed to Trinity Street in the early 1900s, ran perpendicular to Elm at that time72; if Harriet Free- man was Deborah Freeman Plato’s mother, they lived around the corner from one another. Deborah’s father Henry Freeman73 is absent from Hartford’s city directory for any year. Whether and how laborers Julius Freeman and Samuel Freeman, in the 1838 city directory, and Thomas Freeman, in the 1839 city directory, all residing in houses but not on Bliss Street, are related to Henry Freeman is unknown.74 They appear to be men of color; Samuel R. Freeman was a member of the “Society” of Colored Congregational Church on Talcott Street. It may be coincidental that Deborah and Harriet both had the Freeman surname. Deborah Plato’s vital records in Connecticut at her death identify her as having been born in Montville, the daughter of Henry and Deborah Free- man. Again, the sameness of names, although very common in the nineteenth century, befuddles the researcher attempting particular identifications. Plausi- bly, any of these Freeman men could be descended from the Caesar Freeman exploited in an eighteenth-century case over the legality of whether or not he could have been surreptitiously sold into slavery in Rhode Island and Connecti- cut when, as an indentured servant, his mother Betty, a Pequot Indian, was tricked into slavery against the colony’s law.75 Deborah Plato’s Montville origins allude to a probable indigenous genealogy. She may have been born there, her parents later moving the family during her youth, because Henry Freeman is listed in Connecticut’s federal census for 1820. Her daughter Gertrude’s death certificate leaves blank her town and state of birth, although it gives Edwards as her maiden name!76 Henry and Deborah Plato are not listed in later Hartford city annual directories for 1838 through 1855. Nor were they the only adult Plato household of color in the city at that time, the other being that of Alfred Plato, also spelled Plater in the city directories. This man was born in 1818 and is listed in Geer’s 1843 and 1846–1850 Hartford directories as a waiter in the City Hotel. His son David I. Plato/Plater was born 1 March 1848.77 There may be a link between Ann Plato and Henry Plato through church affiliation, for Henry Plato not only became a member of Rev. James C. Pen- nington’s congregation but rose to the deaconry. He was accepted into Colored Congregational on 13 May 1838, nearly three full years prior to Ann Plato’s acceptance, and on 19 March 1841 he was chosen to be a deacon.78 He is among the seven deacon signers, along with Pennington and his wife, of a letter dated 29 August 1843 to the Patriot, a London newspaper, published on 2 October 1843, expressing the group’s appreciation and gratitude to the English for the respect accorded the minister during his visit and for his hosts supporting the cause of abolition.79 The letter in its original may not have survived, but the 66 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Patriot’s editor does not indicate an “X” beside any of the signers’ names, leading us to presume that all were literate. This would show that Platos from three distinct Plato families were members of this church: Alfred Plato, African American; Henry Plato, Montaukett; and Ann Plato. Hence, Henry was not a member at the time he engaged in some work for the African Religious Soci- ety, which is documented as early as 1828. Seth Terry was the attorney who managed the finances for the African Religious Society, and in this capacity, he doled out payments to members for services rendered. Henry Plato received a payment in 1828 and six more during an eighteen-month period between 1840 and 1842. The first of these payments, a small one in 1828 of $2.44, was probably for work he did for Colored Congregational Church, but the work or reasons were never specified; the rest of the payments, with the exception of the 11 October 1841 money received, are marked “School Committee”:

Nov. 13, 1828: $2.44 Oct. 11, 1840: $50.84 Dec. 1, 1840: $32.41 Mar. 18, 1841: $145.27 Oct. 11, 1841: $47.25 Dec. 31, 1841: $25.30 Mar. [no day], 1842: $141.7580

A crucial event lies with Gertrude having inherited her family’s estate in 1863.81 Benajah would have been on the verge of serving in the Civil War, and Gertrude would have been, at twenty-seven or twenty-eight, the only one of Henry and Deborah’s surviving girls. If Ann Plato stood to inherit any portion of this Plato estate, she might have refused the offer, relinquished it, or been far from Hartford and unresponsive. Following the records for Gertrude and Benajah Plato yields some provocative results. For one, the Plato household, even while Henry was alive, and until the demise of Gertrude, were identified (with one key exception) as blacks residing in a white or predominantly white neighborhood in Hartford’s Fourth Ward. Benajah (1840–1904), who in the 1850 Connecticut federal census is identified as Bellagia, graduated from Hartford High School in 186182; this achievement is proudly mentioned by Amos G. Beman in his correspondence, dated 25 October 1862, to Martin R. Delaney’s Weekly Anglo-African newspaper, in which he identifies Benajah as “B.H. Plato.”83 Benajah eventually enlisted in the Union Army. Subsequent census enumerations identify his employment as follows: physician (1870); clerk (1880, where his name is spelled Benjamin); and simply as boarder (1900). In a letter to his sister Bell in 1867, Nelson Primus referred to him as “Dr. Plato,” who traveled between Hartford and Boston Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle 67

“teaching, preaching, and practicing medicine” and running a school behind the Primus house.84 The choice of the name Benajah provokes interest of a religious sort (perhaps of an ephemeral nature) and may provide an insight into Henry and Deborah’s commitment to Christianity. The King James version of the Bible renders Benajah as Benaiah, which would probably be pronounced “Ba-nay-ah.” One website for infant names offers its meaning in Hebrew as “God has built.” The Old Testament Benaiah or Benajah was one of King David’s select thirty warriors, and it “was a name favoried [sic] by many early American settlers.”85 It is, however, an uncommon name in nineteenth-century American records. At least six men named Benaiah or Benajah appear in the Old Testament: in II Samuel and in I and II Chronicles.86 In the King James Bible, in Ezekiel 11, the prophet names a son of Benaiah, Pelatiah, in the first verse, proceeding to state, “And it came to pass, when I prophesied, that Pelatiah the son of Benaiah died” (Ezekiel 11:13) because Pelatiah dared question Ezekiel’s prophecy that Jerusalem would be destroyed. A perhaps too free transliteration of these passages, found in Christology of the Old Testament and a commentary on the Messianic Predictions, finds the German theologian Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg using Platjah for Pelatiah and also using the Benajah spelling. This commentary, whose interpretations are characterized by visionary rhetoric, was published in English translation from German in “Washington, Alexandria” (Washington, DC), between 1836 and 183987; it may appear of dubious value but for the possibility that it may have appealed to Rev. Pennington, who, upon acquiring it, may have used parts of it in sermons. Henry and Deborah Plato may have opted for the Benajah spelling, which would have been common in North America, and the association of “Platjah” as the son of Benajah may have resonated with them, having a sonorous appeal with their own surname, Plato, and affecting their decision to name their son Benajah. Gertrude, of course, was, in 1840, under ten, and two other children of this household were between 10 and 24: Nancy, listed in the Hartford Regis- ter of Deaths as about twenty when she died on 30 November 1846, and an unnamed child who died in October 1846. Gertrude died a spinster on 1 March 1925, having been born during the 1835–1837 period.88 Her death certificate, however, identifies 1836 as her birth year. In her commentary in Beloved Sis- ters and Loving Friends, a collection of letters between two Hartford African American women, Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, written between 1854 and 1868, editor Farah Jasmine Griffin mentions “the Platos” as a prominent Hartford black family, unrelated to “other Platos in the city, among them the essayist Ann Plato.”89 She never names Henry and Deborah, nor does she identify them as Gertrude’s parents. Both Gertrude and Benajah are mentioned in letters exchanged between the two friends, Brown in Hartford and Primus of 68 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Hartford, who was teaching at Royal Oak on Maryland’s Eastern Shore during the late fall and winter of 1866–1867.90 In fact, between December 1866 and January 1869, letters they exchanged and Rebecca Primus’s letters to her parents make passing mention at least nine times of having received letters from Ger- trude. One of those letters contains an offhand yet striking comment. Writing to her family on 14 December 1866, Primus alludes to sharing a letter from Gertrude with a Mr. Thomas, “who laughed heartily when I delivered your message, he thinks she may belong to that tribe.” Primus’s eye-catching emphasis on “tribe” may allude to something other than Natives, but although neither the letters by Gertrude nor those of her parents to Rebecca were preserved, we may surmise that this was a slur on Gertrude.91 Some Brown and Primus correspondences suggest an aloofness by Gertrude that is more eccentric than haughty, and some of her contemporaries may have viewed her with derision. Addie Brown’s letters to Primus betray Brown’s attitudes and willful gossip about Gertrude Plato; she was not just offering views of her Hartford circle, as Beeching implies. Besides commenting on Gertrude inheriting the family estate by 1863 (her mother was still alive), as presented by Beeching, “in Addie’s view she reveled in her standing as a wealthy woman.” To note a few examples from the Primus Papers of what Addie Brown wrote to Rebecca Primus about Gertrude: Gertrude left for Boston with Benajah and his wife— “Perhaps she is looking for a husband” (28 October 1866); Gertrude appeared in church wearing a new dress and announced she was going to Boston (14 January 1867); Addie referred to Gertrude as “ ‘her ladyship’ ” when she said that Gertrude had not been able to attend a party being planned. Beeching thus interprets Gertrude Plato as “a slightly pompous presence in Hartford black society.”92 A final note on Primus to consider is that Primus’s father lived in the Eastern Pequot homeland before moving to Hartford. The house that Gertrude, her brother, and her mother lived in on Wood- land Street was valued at $4,000, generally equal in value to those of their neighbors. With Deborah’s death, the fortunes of her adult children change, compelling them to board with William Pease, Jr., a white, sixty-year-old widower. The 1910 census reveals a provocative oddity. Gertrude, now the sole survivor of Henry and Deborah, is lodging with a woman identified as black in a neighborhood of blacks and mulattoes, and at seventy years old, she is clearly identified as Indian.93 Then, for the 1920 census, the enumerator appears to have corrected his (or an) initial designation of her by superimposing in a dense ink the letter “B” for black over “C” for colored. There is no artifice at work in determining that to her 1910 enumerator, Gertrude Plato either looked Indian or that her self-identification as Indian was accepted. The enumeration of 1910 lends clout to Henry Plato’s origins as eastern Long Island Algonquian, and with Deborah Freeman Plato and her parents coming to Hartford from Montville, little effort need be exerted to comprehend that this family was Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle 69

Missinnuok. We can plausibly determine that through her census enumerator, Gertrude Plato returned the Henry Plato family, at least temporarily, to Native identity. (Her death certificate, however, identifies her as black.) The prevalence of the Plato name on eastern Long Island’s south shore begs the question of whether there were Plato families on the North Fork, where Ann Plato’s father may also have lived. Pertinent documentation is not forthcoming, due to tribal communities on the North Fork being unable to retain ownership over their homelands, with remnant families facing dissolution and adaptation or emigration in contrast to the relatively more stable south shore communities of Montaukett, Shinnecock, and Unkechaug. The entire North Fork was traditionally Corchaug, corresponding with the present-day towns of Southold and Riverhead. Before the English came, the Dutch held European jurisdiction over the North Fork from their New Haven Colony. Settlers alternately referred to the whole area as Southold or by its “Indian name,” Yennecock or Yennecott.94 The western half of Southold broke away and established the town of Riverhead in 1792. Prominent Corchaug villages were situated in the vicinity of Greenport, near the east end and facing Shel- ter Island, and at Aquebogue just east of the village of Riverhead, where the Aquebogue Congregational Church, colloquially referred to as Old Steeple, was erected nearby in the eighteenth century.95 The Yennecocks had an experience about which Ann Plato may likely have known and found analogous to the Babylonian exile of the Hebrews to Egypt to escape the Chaldeans, described in 2 Kings 25. The Records of the Town of Southampton contains this entry: “Within the memory of old people in 1667, [the Yennecocks] had been conquered and driven out by the neighboring Shinnecock, but after a brief period of exile on the mainland, had returned and gained permission to ‘sit downe and plant.’ ”96 Motivation for the Shinnecock action is unknown, but the Yen- necocks eventually were absorbed into the Shinnecock, as were other groups of Corchaug.97 Later (in September 1764), the colony’s attorney general responded to a year-old petition by Southold Indians complaining about encroachments, so either Corchaugs or Indians resettled from elsewhere presented it.98 In the deep recorded history of the Corchaugs’ relationship to the South Shore tribes, the Montaukett sachem Wyandanch claimed their lands from his father.99 These summary details serve for Plato name research on eastern Long Island and Connecticut. They serve the argument of identification variables and inconsistencies for Indians in the Missinnuok country. Several Plato families appear in New York census listings between 1790 and 1870. Those in the upstate regions of Albany, Herkimer, Batavia, and Oneida are listed as white. The downstate New York Platos, in Suffolk County, Queens, and New York City, are exclusively people of color, and although the census never distinguishes Natives from blacks, many town and ship working records do. The federal census enumerates all Platos in Connecticut as black or colored, but as we 70 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity have seen, most are Natives. Firm documentation of other Platos on the North Fork is elusive.100 From this paradigm, we may proceed to the next chapter, part of which discusses how Ann Plato shared membership in Colored Congregational with other Indian families invisible in the record and outside the methods of orthodox research. Chapter 5

Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality ᇺᇻᇺ

Essays’ young, self-effacing author abided in the awkward space between a declared ethnicity and a Calvinist citizen of her nineteenth-century world. The book, clear on religious personality, reflects a contradictory sensibility for Native ancestry coordinates, and fair as can be said, any reliable reflection of African American community. Ann Plato prepared to teach children—boys and girls— and the audience for Essays being girls of color does not verify that they were African American. This chapter examines Plato as part of Hartford’s colored community, into which I interpolate the social dynamics of Native inhabitants living in peer relationship with African American neighbors. I am arguing for a critical race study placing nineteenth-century Connecticut Natives at the center. Except for “Natives,” Plato gives self-effaced attention to race distinctions when she wishes to do so as context demands. A careful reading of how she wrote what she wrote reveals her sensibility, commingling privacy, an intense religious devotion, and careful selection of language when she made racial references. The “Natives” poem justifies reckoning her ancestry as Native. She seems to realize that she was in an awkward position according to racial self-assignation, and to fit in with Hartford’s Colored Congregational Church, she chose the path followed by most of those of her era in refraining from earthly political issues. The price of this avoidance is felt in her absence in the African American human rights struggle, yet with it, she stood to gain more from her intended audience of religious-minded readers and educators, whoever they were. Ambiguous feelings about Hartford’s black or colored community may explain her social stance in the city and, in part, her decision to leave the church-run Elm Street School in the winter or spring of 1847 and disappear into literary and social oblivion.

71 72 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

A Woman of Color

Rev. James C. Pennington’s note about Ann Plato’s race in her book’s introduc- tory “To the Reader” is a cautionary yardstick for the reader to use in interpreting how he means to describe her. His second paragraph states

I am not in the habit of introducing myself or others to notice by the adjective “colored,” &c., but it seems proper that I should say here, that my authoress is a colored lady, a member of my church, of pleasing piety and modest worth.1

For some, reading this statement as literal would invite neither guesswork nor presumptions about what Pennington means regarding this “interesting young authoress,” but the key term bearing rhetorical weight is “colored,” and that adjective is neither simple to interpret nor as innocuous as readers then and since may take for granted. In this excerpt, Pennington’s first clause points out that instead of using racial identity when introducing individuals, he prefers to allow an individual’s humanity before the implied court of God to stand on its own merits. When Plato mentions her pantheon of exemplary luminaries throughout the essays, she does not need to identify them racially because their backgrounds are European, with whiteness hegemonic on the world stage of religious, industrial, and creative ideas. What is important is “the content of one’s character,” as Pennington’s twentieth-century ministerial successor, Martin Luther King, Jr., would express this laudable preference. In the close of the sixth paragraph can be found his rationale for injecting race identity, for he intends “to show the fallacy of that stupid theory” that as “a credit to her people,” she succeeds contrary to the popular notion “that [and here his emphasis begins] nature has done nothing but fit us for slaves, and that art cannot unfit us for slavery!” “Colored” lends itself to broad interpretation, for, as I argued in both the introduction to this book and in the Plato surname chapter (chapter 4), it can mean not just African Americans but Natives who were determined by town, state, and federal officials to be “mulatto,” “free Negroes,” “free people of color,” or “colored people.” These terms connote slippages in meaning; in Connecticut of the 1830s, any of these terms, as well as “black,” could have been applied to Natives. As I discuss below, one judge in the Prudence Crandall case of 1833 included Natives in this category. “Colored people,” or, in its alternate form, “people of color,” is open-ended enough to embrace Natives and African Americans. William Apess, too, used “colored people,” “colored or white,” and “people of color” when referring to Natives in his Eulogy for King Philip.2 This identity slippage language precipitates my alternate interpretation that Pennington’s description harbored uncertainty about Plato’s racial heritage and appearance; he felt compelled to be circumscriptive enough to describe her Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 73 as “colored” while simultaneously feeling that he has to justify her identity as one of “her people.” Henry Plato and his family, or their absence, are important here, because although they were members of Pennington’s church, he would have cited them in this introduction if Henry and Ann were related. Her enumeration in the 1870 Iowa census betrays doubts about her whiteness. Complexion added to mixed ancestry may explain Pennington’s stance regarding her identity and her own literary reticence about “her people.” The mystery of Plato’s parentage deepens her enigmatic literary personality. Of her age, Pennington implies nothing other than youth, and we know next to nothing about how she composed her book, but she would have been around seventeen or eighteen when Essays was published, extraordinarily young to us in the twenty-first century for authorship and professional teaching but not unusual for its time. The standard view of Plato and her four women subjects perceives them in strictly African American terms. Williams, in her introduction to the Schom- burg Oxford University Press edition of Essays, and Bassard, in her chapter on Plato in Spiritual Interrogations, present major and lengthy arguments supporting this thesis. Their interpretations both overlook and dismiss significant signs in her writing that make clear that her background includes another race, of which she is conscious. I have delineated Bassard’s argument as having some merit, especially given Plato’s role model and pupil dialectic, yet I find it difficult to sustain as an exclusive cultural marker. By choosing to ignore virtually any importance in “The Natives of America,” with the initial narrator’s father persona telling her the story of Natives, she perpetuates the idea of Plato’s personal social dynamics as part of an orthodox African American sphere and uses the same criteria to read the identities of Plato’s four biography subjects. The lives and families of these women are more complex than that; we cannot simply refer to them as African Americans. I pursue here a heterogeneous reader-response strategy in discussing the identities of Plato and her Native peers. My approach takes into account surnames connected to communities of origin, as well as other signs, to illustrate how issues of cultural status and racial mixture affected these deeply Chris- tianized urban Natives coming to terms with surviving in a colored environment. I view them as Missinnuok, whose mobility kept them loyal to the Long Island Sound region. Such families and individuals, moving from tribal lands or undergoing outright exclusion from tribal status, embody a social and cultural displacement that deserves closer comprehension than that allowed by researchers insisting upon a “one drop” application as a casual justification of the African American community’s absorption of Natives. The general practice followed by colonial and American officials from early in the eighteenth century to recent times dictates that Natives are Natives so long as they reside on designated Natives lands—reservations or recognized communities—and, most of all, so long as they have no other racial admixtures. 74 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Missinnuok Identities

Since the eighteenth century, many eastern Natives leaving their immediate homelands, motivated by better employment, fear of forced removal, or feelings of cultural dissolution, were documented as any race besides Native (the term Copper is a curious code that usually means Native). This taxonomy is a corollary practice of the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790 and its emendations, which stated that Natives on their own lands are not subject to taxation. The United States’ objective lay in sustaining a Hegelian, biracial society with a class of people of color and slaves subordinate to the new Americans. Tribes making pariahs of mixed ancestry people unwittingly played into the rhetoric and belief of “vanishing Indians,” the best way for whites to absolve their consciences and acquire Indian land. The resulting displacement created new enclaves, in which Natives found themselves living at the margins of the European and African mainstream, becoming part of those communities and their social institutions but viewed as a social caste by the whites or blacks among whom they lived. No tribe’s practices are exactly like another’s regarding members of mixed ancestry, and instances of inclusion and exclusion among tribes in the same general region are not monolithic, with some tribes tolerating white or black intermarriage at differing generation-related historical times. Traditional matrilineal descent practices determine a child to be exclusively its mother’s culture and clan. In the early years of contact with Europeans and Africans, Natives accepted casual, sentimental, and marital unions more willingly; by the middle of the eighteenth century, they began to find those relationships adversely affecting the cultural integrity of tribal identity. When fugitives entered Native homelands, cultural integrity on some levels became vulnerable. Ojibwe historian Jean O’Brien’s study of the survival of Native women in New England describes how the overwhelming losses of men who died or were severely injured as soldiers in the Seven Years War and the American Revolu- tion led women to marry exogamously.3 Some tribes absorbed the offspring of these unions; others tried to expel tribal members, particularly if they married or had offspring with black men. Commencing in 1717, a provocative trajectory for influential colonial reg- ulations determined how at least three tribes—the Montauketts, Mohegans, and Stonington Pequots—would have to defend their cultural integrity and their Missinnuok homelands. In what amounted to a series of enclosure acts beginning with the Montauketts, trustees for them and for the Mohegans enforced endogamy in their kinship practices. As outlined by John Strong, one reason the Montauketts’ trustees encouraged endogamy was to stabilize the tribe’s population, to prevent it from significant increase, and they approved a proposal of their own in 1719 directed at preventing “strange Indians” from entering Montaukett lands for settlement or marriage.4 No petitions over the course of Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 75

a century define “strange Indians”—it would not have applied to Missinnuok tribes, whose cultural ties and social relations extended back, as the Natives say, “time out of memory.” Likely, Natives from the South—the Spanish colonies, including Florida, Iroquoia, or Transappalachia—would be strangers to Long Island Sound, and they might be slaves or indentured servants, ship’s crew members, or wanderers. References to them predominate in the early eighteenth century.5 Occom’s female relative, who came from Tunxis at Farmington to live at Mohegan, was excluded from that designation.6 Restrictions morphed to accommodate the growing cultural integrity concerns of the Native leaders themselves, who were appropriating colonial racialized attitudes. In eighteenth-century New England, the presence of “strange Indians” evolved to include blacks, mulattoes, and whites as categorical associates residing on tribal lands, dogging some tribes into petitioning the colonial and, later, state legislatures for some kind of protection in order to maintain their cultural integrity and tribal identity. In Connecticut, this anxiety’s roots formed early in the eighteenth century, when the colonial government, in shrinking the size of the Mohegan reservation in 1721, precipitated sentiments of the vanishing Native by couching that sentiment in self-fulfilling legal rhetoric. As Amy Den Ouden perceptively observes, between 1717 and 1723, the Mohegans’ guardians, not without Mohegan scrutiny and challenge, finagled sequestration of the eastern quarter of Mohegan land for colonial expansion. Motivating the colonial government’s determination was the prospect that the town of New London, in which Mohegan land was situated prior to the creation of the town of Montville, would receive the remaining reservation land “when the whole nation or stock of the sd [sic] Natives are extinct, and none of them to be found.”7 This proceeding was reaffirmed in 1743 and again in 1769, when it was published in London as Governor and Company of Connecticut, and Mohegan Natives, by their Guardians. Certified Copy Book of Proceedings before Commissioner of Review, 1743, 1769. With this disposition directly circumscribing Mohegan sovereignty and citizenship, one should not be surprised that it motivated petitions to the Connecticut colony authorities from Samson Occom and later Mohegans complaining about the presence of non-Mohegans on their land as threats to Mohegan racial identity. The Eastern Pequots would face the same kind of directives threatening their land holdings through the language of race identity and present their own petition for recognition of their community integrity in 1723.8 It is important to understand when considering reckonings of who is Native and who is not that white overseers of tribes determined Native identity. Frances Manwaring Caulkins’s History of New London (1852), in describing the numbers of Pequots at Mashantucket, is preoccupied with the blood quantum of its few tribal members, recognizing that “only sixteen of the tribe, in 1850, were regarded as regular Pequots, that is, inheriting by the mother, which is the Native law 76 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity of succession, and on that side of full blood.” Such an attitude confirms how traditional Pequot identity fell victim early to white efforts to exploit mixed ancestry in order to invalidate claims of tribal identity. Thus a progression leading to disappearance not only ensued but continues to dog Pequot identities as Natives. In the next paragraph, Caulkins identifies thirteen of forty-six adult women as widows by stating, “Several of these had undoubtedly been bereaved by the French War, in which a number of the tribe had served as soldiers.”9 What Caulkins says next when speaking of the Stonington Pequot community proves the nefarious objectives of white power over Native lives in Missinnuok:

Several families from these two reservations have at different times removed to the west, and settled among other Indian tribes. In 1850, certain Natives dwelling in Wisconsin, and bearing the surnames of Charles, George, Poquonup, and Skesooch, applied to the Connecticut legislature for a share of the rental of the Groton lands; but they were not able to prove the purity of their descent.10

By determining an Indian’s inability to prove descent, the federal government was able to make the “Indian problem” gradually disappear, as these Natives lost their identities in the social order and in documents to that of African Americans or to the ambiguous categories of mulatto or “colored person,” which conventional historiography treats as black. These essentially legal exclusions contributed, as a consequence, to the formation of Native enclaves in Hartford, New Haven, Groton, and Bridgeport, some with members acqui- escing to identity as “colored persons” and thus becoming fully absorbed into African American cultural identity.11 When Samson Occom visited England on his now famous mission to raise an endowment for Wheelock’s Charity School, being described in Brit- ish newspapers as “a Black” probably rankled him enough to remember the language of the Act of 1721 and transform it with deliberate specificity toward part-black Natives among his Mohegans and toward other Native communities. The Mohegans were particularly vocal about maintaining the integrity of their cultural identity in some of their petitions to the Connecticut Assembly in the second decade of the nineteenth century. In October 1817, they expressed apprehension that “they [should] soon cease to be a Tribe of Indians—that instead of this land sequestered to the Mohegan tribe continuing it . . . it shall soon belong to a race of Mongrels and Mulattoes.”12 At the time, there were thirty-two persons claiming tribal membership whose mothers were of the tribe, but not the fathers, who were “principally mulattoes.”13 One of Occom’s sons, Benoni Occom, led a petition submitted to the Connecticut Assembly in May 1819 stating “that they do not want negroes or any mixed races to have their lands but wish to follow the rule of inheritance.”14 It takes little to comprehend Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 77

that these Mohegan petitions stressed the exclusion of part-black Mohegans as well as that of black family members among Mohegans. Let us factor in the predisposition of Sir William Johnson, who wielded considerable influence in the Iroquois confederacy and who brokered the Broth- erton appeal by Occom and the Montauketts in its early stage. Johnson and Occom shared the attitude that Natives possessing any African ancestry should be prevented from being part of the then nascent Brotherton community of Christian Natives at Oneida. Upon Johnson’s demise in 1774, his nephew, Guy Johnson, succeeded him as superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Department and cosigned the certificate of 1774 approving the Brotherton land grant and its stipulation to deny access to part-black Natives, meaning those of the Missinnuok communities.15 Occom’s bias against blacks and mulattoes among his Mohegans and his wife’s Montauketts is ironic when we realize that Eleazer Wheelock, in a 1761 letter to Rev. George Whitefield, referred to his Mohegan protégé as “My black Son Mr. Occom.”16 The only stipulations against whites had to do with them encroaching on Mohegan fishing grounds.17 We must deal with the loose applications of negro and black and definitions of mulatto and mongrel. The first pair, as signifiers deployed interchangeably without regard for cultural identity, are part of a longer taxonomic history by which travelers and writers alike in early modern western history used “Moor” as an alternative. For Anglo-Americans, this pair of terms attained a role in the hegemony of language empowerment that was useful in de-Indianizing Natives, at least on paper, so they could be divested of their lands or taxed. Examples in records and anecdotes include the early eighteenth-century case of Sarah Chaugum, a Narragansett woman described as non-Native in order to deny her indentured status so she could be enslaved; this was in violation of a law in Rhode Island colony prohibiting the enslavement of Native mothers.18 The term mulatto, as understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, differs from the customary, science-based definition of the offspring of one African and one European parent. Recent studies that have focused on this term in the parlance of Anglo-American colonial social demography reveal that mulatto was used as an umbrella term for any person of mixed heritage and that Native and black persons would be so identified. A racial mongrel could also be a mulatto or tri-racial.19

The Question of a Native Critical Race Theory

Attempts to create a profile of Ann Plato must entertain mixed ancestry as a point of departure, one founded on indigeneity. The circuitous routes of public and private identity lead to provocative considerations about community and how two cultural backgrounds compete for prominence. The dissolution of Native communities over two centuries in eastern North America and the 78 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity assumed disappearance of Natives as communal peoples remains, early in the twenty-first century, an entrenched perception. Indeed, scores, even hundreds of individual Natives, in order to survive in the vicinity of their ancestral homelands, did so as ostensible members of another race, gaining social advantages if they appeared white or black and suffering the common indignities experienced by “colored people.” In a sense, the possibility of physical harm remained, but a stronger, psychic pain would have come from losing homelands. The social metamorphosis to Negro identity happened on a standardized, assimilative path of least resistance. As seen in a disposition embedded in her writing, Plato seems motivated to view herself as “human.” Some Natives of mixed ancestry without tribal connections described themselves publically as “human beings” rather than as Natives or Negroes or Negro-Natives (or they vigorously preferred to be called “Americans”). Social layers of identity can be very complex, for even as mixed- ancestry Natives continued marrying among themselves, the choice, even on an ersatz level, of a Negro or “colored” public identity and participation in black and colored social life and institutions became their viable alternative for reasons of public safety, avoidance of ridicule and resentment by blacks, ability to fit in with blacks, and escape of a humiliating history. This identity was assumed gradually over generations. Individuals and families might exert a passive resistance to African American identity and legal status. They might not publically refuse to be identified as African Americans, but they might not fully accept such an identity. They held themselves apart and aloof, bringing forth accusations from African Americans of being conceited or “stuck up,” as noted in how Addie Brown perceived Gertrude Plato. Natives with European ancestry might encounter resistance from whites for their attempts to enter white America; they might also be derided as “half- breeds,” who were not “Indian enough.” On the other hand, they, as well as their Native counterparts with African ancestry and full-blood Natives, were never fully and unconditionally rejected by the black race, which would accept them as “among our own.” Here, Pennington’s remark in his preface to Essays looms significant, for Natives could virtually “pass” as African Americans with tremendous ease. Whites’ perceptions of anyone non-white caused that person to be reported or enumerated in various correspondences, advertisements, or official documents as Black, Negro, Colored, Copper, or Mulatto. African Americans had socialized Natives, Hispano and Lusitano peoples, Asians, and southern (“non-white”) Europeans into black identity—although they might ridicule them to keep them as part of their community. African American communities preemptively absorbed people who might otherwise be referred to as “mixed-race Others.” Ann Plato frequently uses the personal pronoun, but never in Essays does she identify herself as a woman of color; only by her identifying her father in Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 79

“The Natives of America” do we have any information substantial enough to presume her racial ancestry—if, indeed, the poem is based upon her personal experience. Perhaps she opts for “humanness,” or personal reasons may have compelled her to remain racially anonymous in her book even though she was, presumably, a member of a colored church and had accepted the assistance of its preacher for her book’s introduction. What does mixed race mean, especially for Native people? How is the term used, and what are its rhetorical dimensions and limitations? Does it modify an identity and therefore become a hyphenated construct, or does it, by itself, signify a specific identity? Is it a slippery term empowered by whomever uses it for any particular application and purpose? Are issues and criteria that include Natives or Native ancestry in a mixed-race formulation different from other heritage markers—persons who are European and Asian, say, or Puerto Rican and Irish? In other words, does mixed race imply a one-size-fits- all reckoning of identity construction? And since these questions provoke more possibilities, how does mixed race register in the realms of society, culture, and political economy? The standard black and white binary narrative defines critical race theory, and brokers its application, especially for the Americas, resulting in indigenous Americans finding themselves perpetually marginalized and demographically absent. As the object of this neglect, Natives examine their places and roles in the construct of race. Cultural identity facilitates this for Natives and makes any taxonomy of Nativeness unnecessary, particularly in a matriarchal identity construct. Without serious effort being made to place Native cultural identity, regardless of heritage, at the center of a critical race theory discussion, there is no understanding of northeastern Natives; the Native role in critical race theory is, in other words, nonexistent, ancillary at best. Like Jack Forbes’s term “Red-Black,” mixed race is problematical language when used without serious qualification. Forbes often deploys his term glibly to include anyone possessing western hemisphere indigenous and Afri- can diaspora-in-the-West ancestries. Broad application of Red-Black encom- passes anyone with two or more cultural and racial inheritances regardless of cultural orientation, and this is why the issue of what community claims a person plagues the glib and slippery application of the term by self and others. In the end, Red-Black simply undermines the integrity and very sovereignty of cultural homeland orientation and belonging. Some Cherokee and Semi- nole freedmen descendants may attest to, at one end of the spectrum, a Black Native identity determined by Native culture, but their historical and cultural circumstances differ from Missinnuok; in another eddy of the conversation, eastern seaboard Natives who are racially mixed still follow their culture. In the literal middle of this whitewater strait are people who typify the traditional “half-breed” of Native and white and who feel a part of both worlds but are 80 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity harassed by both, yet who manage to navigate through life with one foot in each world. Perhaps a Native critical race theory breaks down because if mixed-race blacks want to be black, why shouldn’t mixed-ancestry Natives be Indian? The questions obscured by their very perpetuity remain: where is home for the mixed- race person, and what beliefs and practices characterize it? Do persons proclaiming Red-Black as their identity reside in a Red-Black home environment, or do they go home to find themselves negotiating the separate identities and cultural values of racially different parents and orientations? Do they follow a line of least resistance, identifying themselves according to popular expectations in a community but presenting a different face at particular cultural events? Mixed- race identity creates a space inhabited by innocent shape-shifters, many of whom do not play the appropriate cards that suit particular occasions. Mixed-heritage Natives tend to consider home to be their tribes and the cultural communities that acknowledge them. The eighteenth-century Native women O’Brien described how those marrying out and their offspring—and their offspring’s descendants—lived according to as much tribal culture as they and their tribal groups maintained. Because their female lines tended to be Native, the integrity and safety of their tribal identity was assured. Simply put: they were Native. Thus, families and persons who found themselves outside the sphere of their particular cultures located other Natives with whom they constructed or contributed to a community. Ultimately, they defied the antagonistic biases of other Natives and of whites and blacks by refusing to buckle under proscribed pressure. An alternative existed for Natives who chose to relinquish their cultural identities—they assimilated to a social choice or promoted themselves as “Amer- icans”; also, Christianity, washing them clean of the sin of being heathen and providing heaven as a reward for their escape from paganism, offered a raceless veil for their psychological safety in the Lord’s human and holy family. This seems to be what happened to Ann Plato. She made religion her culture and nationality, as if she had jettisoned the cultural identity of her beloved father in her poem. A mixed signal erupts from this choice. As much as she loved and honored him, she held no appreciation or pity for the kind of life he wanted to live, in spite of “Natives of America” dominating the book’s poems with its secular moralism. Her extolling of conquerors for their decision making overlooks how much they made others suffer. Assuming the universality of cradle-to-grave that her book’s trajectory espouses, would she not justify her Alexander and Caesar, pre-Christian cornerstones of western civilization, to juxtapose Christianity with Native paganism and Asian idolatry? Little matters to her except faith and its two pillars, benevolence and education. To instruct young females in the population of colored Christians, be they Native or black or mixed thereof, is to ensure the salvation of an audience for a future of enlightened Christian culture. Yet, she could not deny friends akin to herself Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 81 in ethnic background, and the personas in her two poems on the theme of race betray her. Neither race nor ethnicity nor caste and class would ever be rescued by religion, manifesting pronouncements underwritten by Christian faith to a status of the rhetorical bromide of invisibility as “human.” Plato lived on identity’s shifting sands. If we argue for her as a mixed-race person, what sort of mixed-race person was she: mixed-race Native or mixed- race African American? Mixed-race people tend to gravitate to one group over the other, which they either ignore, give lip service to, or run sorties to from their chosen foundational frame of reference. Wanting it both ways and some status outside of what for her must have been a conundrum, Plato effaced her Native identity but honored her Native father; she allowed her pastor to refer to her as “colored” and perhaps found that more acceptable than Negro or black. She embodied and navigated through two citizenships: that of a culturally effaced Native who embraced four women (who were likely to have been mixed- ancestry Natives like herself) and that of a woman of mixed ancestry who gravi- tated toward an ostensibly black church whose membership was racially mixed. Among that membership were Henry Plato from the Montaukett community and his wife Deborah, a southeastern Connecticut Missinnuok from Montville. Component weaknesses soften the core of a theory of the meaning of mixed race within critical race theory. Confusion results when a third race or culture, such as Native American, enters a presumptively binary genealogy. The most obvious disturbance in a theory of mixed race for Ann Plato lies in her never alluding to a personal mother. To dispute an interpretation that the father in “The Natives of America” is not literally her own, then not to ask any question about her mother belies a desperation to justify circumstantial evidence favorable to interpreting her in strictly African American terms. By identifying her father or using a father’s persona and never mentioning her mother, Plato can be read as seeking to obstruct questions of identity, leaving her identity to presumption and to the rhetorical status of a universal “human.” She seems to adhere to the advocacy of St. Paul’s Christian “new man” universalism, which will trump race distinctions, succinctly put forth in Colossians 3:10–11: he that is “neither Greek nor Jew, [circumcised or not], Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ is all, and in all.” Still, her abjectly mean and worthless mother inhabits the same space as Plato herself in the critical view that objects to her Native parentage having any role in her personality and citizenship. Her mother is, for practical purposes, an absent yet semiotic sign in the book, but the absence of reference to her is a trace element, for Plato has divested her mother from orality and memory, and Plato herself is the only activation of her mother’s shadow.20 What Plato leaves to supposition and the presumption of any identity thesis enables us to theorize about her identity according to a trickster paradigm. Evident are some but not all the elements associated with a trickster, her 82 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity lack of humor being a principal flaw. If we apply Gerald Vizenor’s theory of “trickster hermeneutics” to come to terms with Plato’s identity, we can achieve intimacy with the silence in which she cloaked herself, which would leave her fellow church members to accept her, as Pennington so stated, as merely a member of the church. What can be viewed as both a handicap for her and a source of curiosity in the nineteenth century enlivens her personality in the twenty-first; to Pennington she allowed the presumption of a “colored” identity for her in 1841, the authorities presumed her a foreign yet American white woman in 1870 Iowa, and twentieth-century literary criticism presumed her to be an African American woman. Creating a dialogical experience with one of Wheatley’s poems is no guarantee of Negro affiliation, nor is where Plato taught. The hermeneutical value lies in Plato’s silence about self and mother, a silence fostering collective assumptions about her race and community. Where Vizenor’s interpretation of Ishi includes “the absence of his stories of survivance, the wild other to those he trusted in silence,”21 Plato concomitantly is the perceived absence of the Native survivor, the black woman to those she relies upon in her own silence and reticent Native identity. She would be a mixed-race Native woman who casts a shadow embraced by the viewer for its “obvious” black ethos. Her life during her time and today disorders presumption and renders a safe conclusion chaotic. Her early life especially must have been marked by a conflict over cultural identity and a devalued self-worth in regard to Native background. Her mother may have regretted ever becoming involved with an Native and bearing his child; if he refused Christianity in favor of heading to western parts unknown he would, in her eyes, ever be a heathen. Plato’s mother then would see to her daughter’s Christian upbringing partly in order to de-Indianize her and train her to eschew all things of heathen Native lineage. And even if the intemperate mother in “Little Harriet” had possessed a modicum of parental responsibility, she still would have tried to ensure her child’s Christian adherence. The few casual and cryptic references to Natives in Plato’s essays contradict the father’s sentiments in “The Natives of America,” betraying an authorial psychic discontent. Plato would have nothing to do with a Native’s lack of industry; she would not rationalize his character in the way that Daniel M. Tredwell would write about Long Island Natives in 1912, that “with the first contact with the white man degeneracy and decay began, and there is a vast difference in the Long Island Native in his native state and the Indian as we know him.”22 The Iowa census enumeration raises the specter of possibility, affirming Pennington’s cautious description of her, that Ann Plato’s mother could have been white, or a light-complexioned woman of color. Tredwell quotes his grandfather’s recollection that in his youth (circa the mid-eighteenth century), young Native men “ ‘frequently married into white families; very few whites married squaws. These facts are attested by our ancestors.’ ”23 Tredwell Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 83

gives the example from his own youth that a Jim Tom of the Merikos Indians (Merricks) “married a white woman from Patchogue.”24 To push again for identity evidence ignites an epistemology that wants to resolve criteria “beyond the shadow of a doubt.” A distrust of cognition marks Pennington’s apprehension; the unknown enumerator in Iowa completes the bookending of cognitive ambiguity. Because Pennington and the enumerator’s mutual subject defies their classifications, they feel the necessity to qualify their descriptions: Pennington must never have encountered a person like Plato, who avowed being colored; the enumerator had likely never encountered a white woman whom he felt was necessary to justify as white, and being a Nordic Iowan, he may not have met Mediterranean or Latin American complexions.

Hartford’s Colored Churches and Urban Native Life

With all this in mind, we can better appreciate the selection of mates and friends among nonenrolled Natives along the eastern seaboard. The nuances of this demography have not been adequately researched, likely because intangible circumstances are excluded from empirical deliberations. I propose, however, that part-black, off-reservation Natives asserted degrees and levels of identity resistance when they found their neighborhoods gradually overwhelmed by blacks seeking friendship and community with other “colored people.” A remarkable consistency can distinguish several generations of “colored people” who possessed strong knowledge of Native ancestry but who might have been at the fringes or outside of tribal heritages or who had lost accurate identity of their particular tribal backgrounds. These individuals nevertheless bonded together and married within their group and sometimes within families; they counted on and relied upon each other as special friends; they knew one another and constituted an undeclared Native community invisible to neighbors and other friends who assumed them to be fellow blacks, or colored people of the community, even if they held themselves aloof from some general community involvements and endeavors and were clannish in the manners described by anthropologists who have studied eastern Native communities since the late nineteenth century. These Natives became black by default. They were black or colored as perceived by their black neighbors, although, interestingly enough, whites in their towns and communities viewed their blackness as exceptional. Often, to avoid problems of various sorts that their neighbors and friends may have instigated in response to personal claims of Native ancestry or identity, they went along with a black or colored ascription of identity.25 These determinants run counter to the Williams and Bassard model for Plato and her four eulogized women. The shared exclusion or placement at the periphery of Native identity resulting from mixed ancestry seems likely to have influenced Plato’s interest in the four as constituting a unique enclave among Hartford’s colored population. 84 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Recent critical interpretations of this ethnohistory that rely upon genealogies and social histories that Atlantic coast tribes have been asserting all along offer valuable insights into the processes of cultural resistance, accommodation, and assimilation. What Charles Brilvitch has determined about Paugusett communities in Connecticut surviving while witnessing the dramatic shrinkage of their lands forces reinterpretation of ideas about reservation and off-reservation Natives. Implicit to his study of the Golden Hill Paugusetts are the dynamics of those whose Native cultural identity has slackened and those who have exerted their efforts in maintaining it. Brilvitch structures his commentary around a core of Paugusett extended families that became reckoned as “colored people” or Negroes but retained their reservation and tribal network. They exemplify the fusion of demography and culture because the shifting location of their reservation within the towns of Bridgeport and Trumbull precipitated the leadership of Joel Freeman, who preceded his two sisters in coming from nearby Derby in 1828 to join other earlier-arrived Freemans in the southern section of Bridge- port (newly separated from the contiguous town of Stratford in 1821) known as Ethiope, a name imposed upon a colored community. To be sure, these were Paugusetts (perhaps with other Natives) who happened to gather at the site of a precontact village from which excavations after 1870 and up to World War II uncovered shell heaps, artifacts, and burials. Brilvitch believes that the Paugusetts were drawn to Ethiope by racial memory. Is this not fundamentally similar to Natives adhering to Hartford, once known as Suckiaug? Joel Free- man and these fellow members helped to establish and maintain its churches, such as Zion Colored Methodist Episcopal, whose cornerstone was laid in 1835, and continued to reside there through the 1850s, when the community became known as Liberia. By the time a schism erupted, the church was known as Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church, and in 1843, the Native faction broke away, leaving the smaller African American segment to use another name. Over time, African American immigrants from the South able to take advantage of available improved housing affected the cohesiveness of the Native community in Bridgeport by influencing many to relocate to nearby towns.26 The subthesis would be striking if northeastern Native life were not so consistent: off-reservation Natives in southern New England and eastern Long Island—the Missinnuok—tried their best to remain close to or within their traditional ancestral lands or at least near culturally related tribes within their ancestral sphere. Traditional Paugusett lands were in the greater Housatonic Valley, from Long Island Sound north to the Litchfield Hills. English colonial and Anglo-American Connecticut authority determined its shrinkage, the creation of the Paugusett reservation, and that reservation’s shifting locations. But the rest of their ancestral lands transformed into a border of artifice where tribal members continue to reside. The breakaway Zion AME congregation of Paugusetts remained AME until subsequent generations aligned with Episcopal, Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 85

Methodist, and Congregationalist churches. In the 1930s, Natives in Bridgeport were continuing to do just that, because they felt overwhelmed by the growing African American church membership.27 What ensued ideologically from this shift exposes a wrinkle in Connecticut’s nineteenth-century reservation system as to whether or not tribal members who do not live on reservations have the privilege of identity and entitlement. African American migration into Con- necticut notwithstanding, the Paugusett experience in Bridgeport can be applied to other cities for a study of sociological demographics and cultural identity for Natives in those locales. Reviewing the history of Hartford’s Colored Congregational Church from its establishment, through Plato’s involvement with its school on Elm Street, up to 1847, and the historiography of the church and its members and

Figure 5.1. Colored [Talcott Street] Congregational Church (circa 1850). 86 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity teachers yields important components for a Native and black color-line narrative. Hartford’s 1840 population stood at 9,468, with the census enumerating 404 free colored persons. Even with that number not including Henry Plato’s household and so being misleading, free persons of color constituted a quarter of one percent of the population, and Missinnuok numbered between 30 and 50. The preeminence of African Americans overshadows the identity and role of Native people in Hartford’s early nineteenth-century history, at least according to casual interpretation of the documentation. It is a history deserving greater attention. From the earliest meetings in 1819 through the period shared by Plato and the Reverend James Pennington, the name of the collective of worshippers and the church they established vacillates between African, African Ameri- can, Colored, and Talcott Street, provoking both inquiry about this moniker and speculation on the possibility of a cultural schism. In 1820, after a history of enduring segregated seating in Hartford’s churches, a congregation formed and “established The African American Religious Society of Hartford,” which resolved to open a church without segregated encumbrances. Shifts in the name of this church may confuse historians. Having determined on a Congregational denomination in 1826, the group of worshippers opened its own church at 30 Talcott Street that year in the city’s northern section. The church became known in 1839 as The First Colored Congrega- tional Church.28 A mild bicultural or intercultural discussion must have taken place during its first two decades. Names like Colored Congregational Church and Talcott Street Congregational Church were used interchangeably from its inception until 1860. In strict Congregational nomenclature for Hartford, it was identified as Fifth Congregational, although it was commonly referred to as the First Hartford Colored Congregational Church. Its catalogue of 1842, which identified its precepts and members, used Talcott-st Congregational in its title. Not until 1860 did the members officially rename the church after its location, Talcott Street. The Talcott Street School was situated in what was then the First District, and it became known as the North African School; when the Elm Street School opened, it was located in the Second School District and was referred to as the South African School. The Hartford school officials may have determined these nominal designations, for according to its own history, the church remained Colored Congregational until 1860.29 Note that these schools were African in title. Enhancing this speculation is whether or not Pennington, who was installed as its pastor in 1840, insisted upon referring to Plato as “colored” due to a larger cultural suasion taking place in the milieu that included the cultural diversity of presumably African American social and religious institutions. For “African” to prevail as the name for the schools and “Colored” to be adopted and maintained by the church meant that the Native members had to choose between spiritual and educational well-being and a cultural identity beset by conflicting and cultural valences and public expecta- Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 87

tions. The second school that opened, on Elm Street, met on the premises of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, where Plato would begin teaching in 1842. Of interest, and to avoid the confusion of name similarities, the Col- ored Methodist Episcopal Church’s beginnings figure in the denominational divergence within the African Religious Society in 1835, when Colored Con- gregational assumed its own identity as a Congregational church. Hosea Easton led what became Colored Methodist Episcopal, dedicating himself to seek a new place of worship after a fire in 1836 destroyed the original building. His followers proceeded to purchase land on Elm Street for their church in 1842, the year Easton died. Under Easton’s successor, Rev. George A. Spywood, “the Colored M.E. Society conveyed its 37 Elm Street property in trust in 1844.” That church moved to Pearl Street in 1852 and continues today as Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal. The Hartford church known as Mother Bethel Methodist is unrelated to Metropolitan AME and was established in 1916. This is the church that merged with Talcott Street Congregational in 1953, becoming Faith Congregational Church, which is what it continues to be called.30 Elm Street, by the way, was where Henry and Deborah Plato and other Natives lived during the early 1830s. Significant to these changes is the wording of the hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebration brochure of 1976 for what had become Faith Congre- gational Church, United Churches of Christ:

The founders of this Church were desirous of obtaining the benefit of Christian civilization. . . . Slavery, in mild form, still existed in Connecticut: but those engaged in this work were free people and natives of New England, some of Indian blood. Nearly all could read and write, some were fairly well educated and could fitly and forcibly express their ideas in public.31

With the black identity movement having not yet fully crested by 1976, the reference to “some of Indian blood” was a daring assertion of an exceptional reality that some African Americans outside the church’s congregation might have protested in the name of racial solidarity. Connotative and denotative interpretations emerge from this phrase as to whether it literally means Natives who have become urbanized or people of mixed ancestry. In the vernacular, persons identified as “of Indian blood” tend to have made some impression about themselves in regard to their Native heritage, whether or not it might fly in the face of social expectations by and the conventions of black or white neighbors and peers. So, whom does the author or authors of the 1976 brochure have in mind as a historical member of the congregation being “of Indian blood”? That question is rhetorical, for Faith Congregational née Talcott Street Congregational née Colored Congregational was coestablished by Native people, Missinnuok. 88 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Map 5.1. Hartford Street Plan, 1838. Adapted from Gardner’s Hartford City Directory, 1838. The Connecticut Historical Society.

The church’s membership from the 1820s to the 1840s included Natives and descendants from disparate Native communities, a few emerging as key figures among Hartford’s colored people. An early member of the church was Pri- mus Babcock, who bore two names signifying Niantic-Narragansett heritage.32 As an urban Native enclave within Colored Congregational seeking social and religious refuge, it deepened the complexity of the church’s membership, and its presence may have drawn Ann Plato to the church. Henry and Deborah Plato, for reasons already explained, are one family. Another is Amos G. Beman, who David O. White describes as “the son of a black minister”; Beman taught at the Talcott Street School run by the church for five years, beginning in 1833, but left it when he became licensed as a Congregationalist pastor himself.33 Vicki Welch, in her remarkable genealogical history of the Bolden family’s Nehantic ancestry, found that Beman was maternally descended from the same Nar- ragansett family as the William Condol who sold property to Abraham Plato, which led to Condol taking him to court for failing to make full payment.34 Beman’s wife Elizabeth was Montaukett with Narragansett ancestry.35 Beman’s Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 89

sister Sarah married a Jeffrey, another surname from the early Nehantic reservation at Black Point36 and also associated with the Mashpee Wampanoag. In other words, despite being identified in the historical record as black, and perhaps in spite of his inclination to identify himself as Negro or Colored, Amos Beman’s Native ancestry was not far away, and that of his wife was closer. Other Natives and Native descendants affiliated with Colored Congrega- tional and other churches display a range of identity markers. A photographic reproduction suggests that Amos G. Beman was of light complexion, yet does that have any bearing on retention of Native family memories? And Gertrude Plato, a correspondent with Rebecca Primus during the latter’s teaching sojourn in Maryland, identified herself as an Indian for the 1910 Connecticut census, an act bringing her identity full circle, however momentarily, with her parents Henry and Deborah. That her female peers in early life considered her and her brother Benajah eccentric stokes the perception of individualistic tendencies exhibited by many urban Natives. In 1842, the church compiled its Catalogue of the Talcott-st. Congregational Church in Hartford, Together with its Articles of Faith and Covenant and Rules of Order and Discipline. The church’s eleven “Articles of faith [sic]” are printed on pages 3 through 5, followed by the “Covenant” and “Rules of Order, Discipline, &c.” A “Communion Hymn—L.M.” closes the catalogue. As summarized in the “Covenant,” living “a life of piety towards God and benevolence towards your fellow man” distinguishes Plato’s sentiments and literary character throughout Essays. It lists its members, even those identified as deceased or excommunicated, in which we find Ann Plato listed as a member and when she was admitted.37 The eight original members at its August 1833 organizational meeting are identified, but neither Henry Plato nor Amos Beman are listed; Rev. Amos G. Beaman [sic] became a member on 14 January 1836 and Henry Plato and Louisa Seabury on 13 May 1838. Ann Plato was admitted on 4 April 1841, along with Alfred Plato, who was listed third in that date’s enumeration, and Ann Plato and Mary Seabury are listed thirteenth and fifteenth, respectively.38 With Native individuals and families traceable according to English surnames, and their mobility among the Missinnuok, other firm and suspected Natives listed in the catalogue include

Mary Ann Mason (Pequot), on an unspecified day in April 1838 Rosella Apes (Pequot), 22 July 1838 John Randall, 7 March 1841 Hannah Randall and Benjamin Randall (all likely Pequot or Nehantic) are listed separately on the same date, as is Ann Plato Louisa Apes (Pequot), 2 May 1841 (washerwoman) George Cisco (Narragansett or Delaware), 2 May 1841 Charles Condall and Julia Condall (Narragansett), 4 September 184239 90 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

A William Daniels joined on 13 May 1841; that the surname Daniel was carried by three Narragansett males listed in Joseph Fish’s correspondence may be a coincidence.40 The Randalls were a particularly large name group that relocated from the Pequot territory in southeastern Connecticut; its members had households of three to nine. Most persons with the same surname are listed in random order.41 Others in the community may have attended services but not joined, or they were with the A.M.E. church. A Dean Randall appears in 1830; there are two Jabez Randalls listed in the 1830 Connecticut census, with one listed as Jabe in 1840; William Randall appears in both 1830 and 1840 and Hanabel Randall in 1840; and church member John appears as Jack in 1840. The last person listed—who applied for admission by letter—is Margaret Primus (possibly a Pequot or Niantic descendant), 6 November 1842.42 Despite the separate listings for persons of color in Geer’s Directory of 1845, we have an insight about the demography of this community.

Benjamin Babcock [Narragansett]. Windsor Road. Susan Babcock [Narragansett]. Washerwoman. Bliss Street. George Cisco [Narragansett]. Tailor. 10 Talcott Street. Lester Hazard [Narragansett]. 90 Front Street. Amos Mason [Pequot]. Cook. 8 Talcott Street. Hannah Randall [Pequot or Eastern Niantic]. Washerwoman. Bliss Street. Hannibal Randall [Pequot or Eastern Niantic]. Cordwainer [shoemaker, with a shop at 105 Front Street; resided on Meadow Street]. Henry Randall [Pequot or Eastern Niantic]. Cordwainer. 5 Commerce Street. Rev. George Spywood [Mashpee Wampanoag and Narragansett]. “Hudson Street Continued.”43

Worth noting are the following: Samuel Sebra, a laborer who lived on Grove Street and a relation of Louisa Seabury or Mary Seabury or both; Ray- field Sands, a waiter at the Atheneum Hotel who also lived on Hudson Street Continued, may have been Mohegan. Gardiner’s Hartford City Directory 1838 lists a Lois Apes (Pequot, also recorded as Louisa and possibly William Apess’s sister), washerwoman, and Geer’s Directory of 1843 and 1845 list a Gilbert Apes, waiter, living in a house at the rear of 10 and then 2 Ann Street.44 If we go by later federal censuses for Hartford, Benjamin Babcock is the only one remaining in the area: in 1850 he lived in Granby and in 1870 in Windsor. However, in 1850 a Susan Babcock was listed with a white family. Other Natives may have returned to southeastern Connecticut or have been scattered elsewhere.45 Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 91

An aforementioned figure in Hartford and elsewhere in southern New England was the peripatetic Rhode Island–born Spywood, a former whaler. Spywood performed many marriages, including that of Leverett Beman, an older brother of Amos Beman. In 1842, he began a four-year tenure as pastor of the Colored Methodist Church in Hartford. In 1833, he was one of a small group who signed a letter opposing the back-to-Africa proposal of the American Colonization Society.46 On the first page of his memoir, a pamphlet published in 1843, he avers being of a “Marshpee” Wampanoag mother and a father descended from Pumham, a Narragansett leader and compatriot of King Philip. Exhibiting another example of aspersions cast on the veracity of, this time, a self-claim of Native background, the author of the Between the Covers Rare Books, Inc., website, which lists an original copy of this autobiography for sale at $7,500, states: “It is possible that Spywood fabricated his Native American heritage for the purposes of this pamphlet, anticipating more sympathy if he hid his African ancestry. Perhaps more likely is that he was of mixed Native American and African ancestry.”47 But Spywood made no spurious claims that would divest him of his heritage, for his natal village of Sha- womet or Shawomock was inhabited by Narragansetts within their territory. The disputed sale of the lands, known as the “Shawomock Purchase,” included the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay in 1642, and once the region became the Colony of Rhode Island, the place name Shawomet was changed to Warwick.48 Spywood hence was born right on the land where his ancestor Pumham lived until he was slain in a fight with the English in Dedham in July 1676. Also demonstrated here is the persistence of Spywood’s forebears in staying on their ancestral land, although Spywood himself departed from it as an adult. However coincidental, the city of Warwick has a block-long north- south street named Spywood Avenue.49 Spywood participated in Negro conventions as early as 1833; he assumed the CME/AME ministry from 1842–1846; and he was a bishop in the New England African Methodist Episcopal Zion Conference during the middle 1850s and, at the same time, an agent to the denomination’s national board. Hosea Easton’s background is also pertinent to this discussion. Born in 1798 in Massachusetts, he was the seventh of James Easton (1754–1830) and Sarah Dunbar’s eight children. According to his nephew George R. Price, James was born free in Middleborough, Massachusetts, and, based upon family evidence, was of Wampanoag, Narragansett, and black heritage; his wife, Sarah, born in Braintree, was of indeterminate racial heritage, possibly of Nipmuc background. James Easton and his household gained considerable local respect in the region’s colored community. James Easton himself was respected as an iron worker, an engineer serving under George Washington, and a business- man, giving him an elite public stature. Hosea emerged as an abolitionist orator and writer before his early death in 1837 and was pastor of Hartford’s Colored 92 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Methodist Episcopal Church in 1836 when a mysterious fire, in the wake of racial violence, destroyed the premises.50 Examination of one of Beman’s many letters to Martin R. Delany’s Weekly Anglo-African, printed circa 1862, provokes additional curiosity about Ann Pla- to. In summarizing the progress Connecticut blacks made since 1830 through establishing churches and schools and through state conventions, lectures, and petitions, he includes “some of the best minds among our race which the country produced,” naming first Hosea Easton as “a giant of his day” (yet not identifying him as the first pastor for Hartford’s Colored Methodist Episcopal Church), then following his name with other black luminaries, such as Henry Bibb, Samuel Ringgold, Rev. James C. Pennington, and Frederick Douglass. Partial to Hartford, Beman cites “Scipio Augustus, our Cooks and Babcocks, Fosters, . . . Platos, Masons, Freemans, . . . and not in vain as school teachers have the Hansons, the Washington [sic] and Freemans labored; [then] ‘the noble women’ not a few,” naming “Miss E. [Betsy] Fish” and six others—but specifically no Ann Plato among the “noble women” or the teachers! Beman may have been exercising a rhetorical rationale for this categorical omission by including Ann Plato with the male Platos who did not exercise their talents in vain. Scipio Augustus and Elizabeth Fish he placed in distinct groups, as he knew well that they taught school at the then recently renamed Talcott Street Congregational Church (the school was still under the church’s former name, Colored Congregational); Fish succeeded Ann Plato at the church’s Elm Street school in 1848. The Connecticut Census of 1850 for Hartford identifies Mas- sachusetts as her birthplace but identifies neither her profession nor her race. Her ancestors may have been part of Rev. Joseph Fish’s Narragansett community in Rhode Island. The male Platos Beman would have deemed exemplary to improving the conditions of Hartford’s black or colored community would have included the late Henry, who had been a deacon at Colored Congrega- tional; Henry’s son Benajah; and Alfred, an African American more than a decade younger than Henry and unrelated to him. Beman’s gender separation (he did not specify Ann Plato with the Platos) is plausible within the historical circumstances, if that is how he thought about such categorizing; omitting her from his “ ‘noble women’ ” is provocative. Did he do so because she carried her political restraint beyond her book to social and political nonengagement while teaching at Elm Street and on into the 1850s, if she was still known to be in Hartford? Or did he learn, or felt compelled to presume, that Ann Plato was not a black woman but something else, prodding the issue of Pennington’s description? Did she publically and outside her book assert Native ancestry in being “colored” or anything else? Nor does Beman mention Spywood, who was exemplary in his own right. Several black ministers performed their offices of duty in Beman’s three-decade span, yet it is curious that Beman does not include Spywood for all his ener- Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 93 gy and hard work; could it be that he vigorously differed with the man for political, social, cultural, or personal reasons? Omitting Ann Plato and Rev. Spywood together from his listing of the preeminent suggests that Beman possibly harbored some feelings about their identities that have not come down to present-day historiography. William J. Brown (1814–1885), a lifelong resident of Providence, was another individual whose life exemplified the mitigation of one’s identity. Early in his autobiography, he describes his mother, Alice Prophet, and her relatives, who descended from Chief Jeffery and “who belonged to the Narragansett tribe,” and after the funeral of his grandmother, Chloe, he never outright mentions Indians. He believed his paternal grandfather was taken from Africa. A key detail is that despite his widowed mother (before she married William’s father Noah, her deceased husband was a Greene) having a black ancestor, she was recognized by the tribe.51 What Joanne Pope Melish states in her introduction to the 2006 edition of The Life of William J. Brown explains identity

Figure 5.2. Rev. Amos G. Beman, Congregational; Rev. George A. Spywood, Bishop at African Methodist Episcopal Zion, Hartford (Right). Beman image courtesy of Scrap- book of Amos G. Beman. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Spywood image courtesy of Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 94 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity options for some: Brown never fully forgot his Narragansett origins; he preferred to use “colored” as a self-referent rather than simply “black.” According to Melish’s situating of Providence’s mixed ancestry Natives in a post–Civil War vanishing Indian consciousness, Brown chose black for its social advantages. Melish’s leveraging of the historical context through her interpretation of that choice explains Brown’s attitude and may apply to others but not everyone: “the widespread use of ‘colored’ and ‘of color’ by people of African descent in the antebellum period may in part reflect their recognition that so many of them were of mixed ancestry and their desire not to obliterate one lineage in claiming another.”52 Theologian Stephen G. Ray made an important observation when he challenged the monolithic approach to early nineteenth-century black religion in New England according to a slave-era southern plantation model. “This reductionism does not take seriously these persons and communities. Consequently, the opportunity to learn of the strivings of African American Congregationalist[s] in New England as they express themselves in readings of the sacred text, hymnody, and theological formulations is compromised”; more research, he says, is necessary.53 Then, of course, Native Congregationalists are missing from Ray’s otherwise rigorous equation because theirs constitutes an invisible identity that becomes a fifth wheel in the dominant African American sector. Despite his caveat to avoid a monolithic black religious history, however, he proceeds to determine that the differences between southern black slave religious practices and New England black Congregationalist practices are an “ethnic” difference. This might satisfy the ethnological understanding of the term, but in his paper, he seems unprepared to take on the meaning of “Indian blood,” which he must have found in the church’s anniversary bulletin. The research Ray calls for should include the nature of religious and worshipping responses in southern New England by Native Americans; it should not be an appendage to black congregations but a distinct topical entity. For over a century and a half, Congregationalism held dominant appeal in the region and was characterized by written-down sermons and toned-down emotional restraint by pastors and congregants alike. Native reservations had had churches for several decades, usually Congregational or Presbyterian, yet lending evidence to what appeared to be the haphazard nature of Christian worship for blacks and off-reservation Natives up to the early nineteenth century is that denominations vied for converts from small isolated enclaves. Particular denominational affiliations were a late eighteenth-century phenomenon, starting with Richard Allen’s black Methodism. Shall we risk the assumption that these Missinnuok peoples had a single Christian psychology? For Ann Plato and the other Native Platos in Connecticut, Congrega- tionalism was a relocation of their Long Island worship. Beman asserted a black Congregationalism, and Spywood was active in African-named Methodist Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 95

Episcopalism, whose spiritual foundation helped him make sense of his rather dramatic youthful experiences and visions, just as William Apess found Meth- odism appealing. They all had accepted Christianity, but their experiences were not exactly the same. Although the Great Awakening of the previous century influenced the later “New School” of Congregationalist thinking, the religion was more philosophically affecting than exhortatory. With local pastors rather than itinerant evangelical ministers (such as Apess), Congregational churches offered Native worshipers a stability they needed for their continuing transitions and adaptations to urban life in Hartford. We may never know what exactly made A.M.E. and A.M.E. Zion attractive to other Natives. “P[rince]. Loveridge, the Agent for Colored Schools in New York” who supported the periodical in which “Little Harriet” appeared, objected strongly to using the word African and, in 1843, engaged in a strenuous exchange with the editor of the African Methodist Magazine in which he justified the change of name for schools in that city from African to Colored because “We are Ameri- cans.”54 If anything, Loveridge’s position reflects a disputatious environment concerning this nomenclature. In the chapter “We Do Not All of Us Think Alike” in her Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought 1776–1863, the way Rita Roberts unpacks the dynamics leading to the preference by northern African Americans in the 1830s for colored over African or Negro can be considered for the context of Native urban survival. She describes people of color as a term of distinction in the eighteenth century, carrying over into the next, with colored assuming priority usage during the 1830s, especially to identify new institutions, newspapers, and social and civic organizations; Afri- can prevailed for the older organizations. Colored, chosen by Samuel Cornish, editor of the Colored American, and his staff in 1837, was less reproachable and reflected a broad, distinct group.55 Plato may have submitted her poem “Reflec- tions, Written on Visiting the Grave of a Venerated Friend” (see chapter 11) to this paper instead of to The Liberator because the name Colored American suggested a broad cultural, ethnic, and racial range. African American community leaders at the turn of the nineteenth century, according to Roberts, would “strategically ignore the diversity among people of color, particularly in New England,” where Native and black marriages were occurring in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. “Many of these New Englanders identified more, or as much, with their Indian Amer- ican past.” Other mixed groups, including Natives as one of these mixtures, “had little interest in viewing themselves as ‘African,’ ” an important point, had Roberts clarified it by discussing Native marriages.56 “Blood memory,” an intangible that defies empirical measurement, draws individuals to form community around a common denominator of what they share, its strongest component being Missinnuok. Amid the conflicting social signals challenging Native sensibility and temperament, urban and other off-reservation Native 96 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity people negotiated their survival according to the environments in which they found themselves. Hartford and Bridgeport represent distinctly differing options regarding Native cultural survival. Those Missinnuok who attended Colored Con- gregational were a constituency of diverse tribal backgrounds—Montaukett, Pequot, Narragansett, Paugusett, perhaps Quinnipiac and Hammonasset—that came together as Congregationalists but were in a social minority compared with African Americans. Their choice for colored reveals there to have been more Native Americans involved with “people of color” than are documented in urban northeastern America. Something else was happening in Bridgeport: Paugusett families were supported by the fact that tribal cohesiveness magnified their cultural integrity as a people.

Religious and Literary Coordinates

For Rev. Pennington to describe Plato as “colored” does not have to finalize what she may have taken the term to mean. She could have become a part of Hartford’s African American community so she would have a social and spiritual life, as some Natives would do when feeling alienated or cut off from their own communities or when forced into a choice because of mixed ancestry. Her writings provide no doubts that a religious community would be her place to abide. In her poem “Advice to Young Ladies,” she reveals, “At thirteen years I found a hope, / And did embrace the Lord.”57 Christian pieties are the only common denominator of these competing racial identity values and personal choices and restraints. The years preceding Ann Plato’s probable birth and those coinciding with her early life saw an internecine struggle in the ranks of Congregationalism that apparently affected Native communities on eastern Long Island. Its context was the Second Great Awakening, as church historian Donald R. Broad summarized it: “The Old School was Scotch-Irish, anti-revival, strictly confes- sional and pro-slavery. The New School, with Lyman Beecher and Charles Finney as prominent leaders, was New England Puritan, pro-revival, liberal interpretation of the Confessions and anti-slavery.”58 New School characteristics probably encouraged the young Platos to leave eastern Long Island for the vicinity of Lyme and East Lyme, Connecticut. Either as product or biproduct of this struggle, key Montaukett families who remained helped to establish the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Sag Harbor in 1838. Racial coordinates indirectly determine these affiliations, and understanding their historical background proves a context for Plato’s social identity in Hartford. In the wake of internal racialism and complexion disputes, some eastern and southern Algonquians who experienced the sting of prejudice and insult because of it probably felt the path of least resistance to be more beneficial for them in the Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 97

confusing ideologies of the early nineteenth century. Following that path put Native identity at stake by weakening one’s place and image among Natives. To worship in an African Methodist Episcopal church was to cast one’s lot with the twice-shunned Other. Race might have been a factor motivating sectarian differences among eastern Long Island Natives and might help explain why those Platos who migrated remained with Congregationalists. Viewed broadly, this kind of sectarian motivation plays at least one role in the decisions of Abraham and Jason, and later Henry Plato, to go to Connecticut, where Isaac Plato’s wife Phebe, possibly their mother or a close relative, had been born. Ann Plato, however, perpetuates surprises. If she was raised on Long Island as a Congregationalist with some sense of Native community and consciousness, she subordinated that identity but remained Congregationalist in so far as she lived a life of piety and sacrifice, both teaching colored youngsters that her father’s community might not have welcomed and writing for them and young off-reservation Natives like herself. Natives who relocated to Hartford motivated by work opportunities or social or religious amenities or all of these found they would be living in two worlds, one Native, a cultural identity that they would eventually learn to hide or suppress, and one African American or colored, as the number of African Americans increased and state authorities lumped all citizens of color into one category. Here, then, we enter into complex demographic nuances tricky to interpret. When Henry Plato signed the petition to Connecticut to enfranchise its “citizens of color” and, in 1843, as a deacon of Colored Congregational, cosigned a letter thanking the English for so cordially receiving Reverend James Pennington, what did he hold privately of his origins and identity as Montaukett? Plausibly, he was like many twentieth- and twenty-first–century urban Natives, active in the African American community and social milieu where they lived while maintaining their Native identity, often in secret. He and his wife handed down to their surviving children some degree of Native identity. Hartford’s appeal to nineteenth-century Natives may have carried the vestiges of the praying towns or praying villages of the previous centuries. Mas- sachusetts colonial authorities established Natick, as one example, and used it during King Philip’s War as a refuge for those not desiring to participate in it. During the height of the conflict in the winter, however, they removed the village’s inhabitants to Deer Island in present-day Boston Harbor, where many died of exposure and malnutrition. Christian conversion thus came at great cost.59 Twentieth-century examples can provide a window to this history. Ramapough Lenape Natives who migrated from their home community straddling the mountainous border between New York State and New Jersey to resettle in Orange and East Orange, New Jersey, attended churches according to clan affiliation.60 In West Philadelphia, discreet Native elders reminded their grandchildren always to pay deferential respect to particular individuals. 98 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

The personal values and composure Plato displays throughout Essays reflect criteria for the early nineteenth century’s idea of “true womanhood.” Bar- bara Welter describes this “cult” according to the era’s inducements in education and theology, which tethered women to patriarchal homes, their lives gauged by the attributes and roles of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity in accord with the roles of mother, daughter, sister, and wife. Perhaps Plato fulfills these generalities without being mother or wife or acknowledging any sibling except the dead child in her poem “I Have No Brother.” Piety is the province of her “woman’s virtue, the source of her strength,” as we find in “Religion,” her opening essay.61 Notwithstanding the deployment of any cult of social identity, we should ask, what kind of Congregationalist was Ann Plato? This question is not spurious, because her Calvinist literary mien is not monolithically strict enough to be a seventeenth-century anachronism in the nineteenth century. A Congregationalist in the 1830s lived in the time of the New School of Calvin- ism, whose principles and attitudes emerged from New Light precepts of the First and Second Great Awakenings. Her book reveals her to be a child of her era, advocating that benevolence be exerted to serve utilitarian and charitable objectives as humankind replicated the spirit of a loving God. This theological attitude will be more fully explained in the chapter discussing her essays according to their religious and spiritual values. In Wheatley and Occom, Ann Plato had two key religious, social, and literary antecedents. The writings of one, Wheatley, we know she read. What John Wood Sweet says of the two is obversely instructive about Plato: When they

discovered that the more completely they mastered English culture, the more successful[ly] they displayed their refined sensibilities, and the more public recognition they won, the more they found themselves defined racially, as prodigies, examples, or exceptions. Wheatley would always be noted as the African poet, Occom as the Indian minister. This racial narrative of conversion was not so much false or forced as it was the key to their celebrity.62

The proper context for this observation is generational, for by the time Plato was born, comparatively more Natives and African Americans had greater facility in speaking English, even if they were not literate, and literacy itself was on the increase. Adopting Congregationalism made Plato a symbolic grand- child to both predecessors and less inclined to evangelicalism. Because she was the child of both the indigenous and some other world, it is remarkable that her book may have been ignored or dismissed by politically inclined religious leaders and literary people or may never have reached the editorial offices of journals such as The Advocate of Moral Reform and The Monthly Miscellany of Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 99

Religion and Letters, which might have listed it soon after publication. Why, in a United States with nascent emerging writers of color, indigenous and African descended, should journal and newspaper editors be interested in her book in 1841, as it was not a personal memoir and its author raised no objections based upon religious precepts to slavery and Native removal? Wheatley and Occom were perfectly situated by history to be exemplary. Race did not aggrandize Plato any more than “The Natives of America” would express; “To the First of August” would win her no serious political appreciation. In her poems, she is a latter-day Wheatley of sorts, whose poems could unwittingly spout a pro- digious breadth of knowledge, but she is more inclined to experiment in style while embodying intense piety and making but few race-directed judgments. Her literary countenance was unspectacular, and later, one school inspector described her teaching as prepared but impatient. Keeping a low profile may have been her decision, as she directed her writings to younger readers; she was too piously reticent to draw attention to herself by virtue of a book that might have conferred a status on her as it did on the pedagogue Jacob Abbot. Had she, rather than Wheatley, been the first woman of color to publish a book during Wheatley’s time, Essays would have been remarkable because of the range and influence of its contents, and for those very same attributes, she might later have been attacked as a fraud. However, Essays was published in 1841, and thus Plato would not gain the “star quality” Sweet ascriptions to Wheatley63; nor did her book earn her serious accolades in the twentieth century. Yet, Ann Plato must have known that publishing a book expressing her thoughts had some potential to bring her notoriety, putting her in a league with Wheatley by being the second woman of color in the United States to publish a book and perhaps the first woman of Native American descent to do so. Pennington affirms her attitude about publishing when he says: “She is willing to be judged by the candid and even to run the hazard of being severely dealt with by the critic, in order to accomplish something for the credit of her people.”64 Also, in Connecticut and Long Island in 1841, Plato would not readily have been subjected to enslavement. Wheatley’s freedom within the Wheatley household and Occom’s ministerial role during a time of colonial rebellion insulated them both from being kidnapped by southern slavers on hiatus from revolutionary zeal. Plato might not have been so fortunate had she lived in lower New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, but she also might have appeared too southern European or exotic to cause concern about her being black and free. Religion, piety, and education, as foundations for the personality that created Essays, led her only into the roles of benevolent writer and school teacher. The years of her youth, education, literary production, and teaching were difficult for Natives and African Americans. Her book reflects near-exclusive interest in creating a benevolent society, and its apolitical nature gives her subjects 100 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity a pastoral quality reeking with bromides. From the two decades leading to the completion of the book, Plato could have written about troubling social issues and circumstances, the greatest of which were slavery and abolition and Indian Removal. In what could be considered a précis for the absence of American referents in the study of literature and other forms of cultural expression in the American academy at the end of the eighteenth century, European exemplary figures dominate her essays. Her topical foundations rule and project her persona. Essays never mentions David Walker or abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, and she only alludes to the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Apess, she would have realized, stood for human rights and Christian responsibility, and she did covertly acknowledge him in Essays. All the exemplary men she cites in her essay section belong to the previous century and before, suggesting her investment in a classically defined education that extolled figures from the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and this investment would thus nullify contemporary figures a generation her senior, such as Garrison and Apess, although it fails to explain her rationale for omitting Occom. Apess’s five books, in their original printings or subsequent editions, should not have escaped her awareness. She would have admired conversion narratives, such as his editions of A Son of the Forest of 1829 and 1831 and The Experiences of Five Christian Natives of the Pequot Tribe (1833), which includes his wife Mary’s self-composed “The Experience of the Missionary’s Consort.” Unlike Maria W. Stewart, of Apess’s generation, born in Hartford in 1803, who as a young widow in Boston emerged as an orator and writer of political speeches and politically inspired religious meditations, Plato was no activist, preferring to avoid any protest about human rights except in her “Natives” poem.65 Plato raised no voice against the poverty, ignorance, or degradation Fred- erick Douglass was to identify in 1853 at Rochester as constituting the “social disease” of the free colored people.66 She trained her sights strictly on exercising piety for salvation through good earthly works, getting an education and using its skills and knowledge wisely, and growing in personal wisdom. Her moralisms reflect good judgment and common sense and speak out against negligence of character. The conditions of not having access to public freedoms and deni- als of justice for civil and human rights did not find their way into the book. Pious blacks meeting in Philadelphia in 1832 advocated for all blacks to lead good moral lives to show whites they were wrong about black depravity, and in 1840, shortly after he arrived in Hartford, Pennington echoed this call in his A Text Book of the Origin and History of the Colored People, which he published the next year. Plato, with her own book close to completion, would certainly have heard him and perhaps have adopted his ideas to the extreme by avoiding topical issues. In keeping with this, Monroe Fordham identifies a dualism in northern black ministerial practice that Native Congregationalists may also have adhered to and that may explain aspects of Plato’s reticence. Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 101

Namely, “there did exist in the religious thought of northern blacks an emphasis which does not indicate any particular concern with effecting change in . . . society, [an emphasis reflected most noticeably in messages that promised peace, hope, and tranquility through Christ]. The sermons and writings on that theme suggested that the solutions to the problems and difficulties of life lay not in man or worldly phenomenon, but in God.” In short, colored Christians should leave all to God. Running counter to this position were exceptions such as an editorial in The Colored American newspaper on 6 May 1837 admonishing the Christian church for failing to condemn the brutality of slavery.67 Apess, in speeches such as the Indian Nullification and “The Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” criticized similar hypocrisies.68 Perhaps Plato represents a study in youth uncertain about how she should respond to critical social concerns, however obvious those responses were to more mature readers. There may be little significance in the relative rareness of her mentioning or alluding to Natives and blacks in Essays. In her essay “Education,” she mentions directly “the late inhabitants” who wander but refers to “the inhospitable shores of Greenland” with the same oblique descriptive language used in “[carrying] a message of love to the burning climes of Africa” and “[braving] the sandy regions of Africa.” The only occurrence of the word slavery in an essay is in “Obedience,” when she discusses Roman fathers’ options for punishing their children.69 She describes passionately the circumstances of Natives through an intimate parental persona in “The Natives of America,” even though it contrasts with how she treats Natives and indigenous arctic peoples in five instances in the essays. To not refer specifically to either free or enslaved blacks in America but to allude to geophysical conditions in Africa twice would, except for “Descrip- tion of a Desert,” seem remarkably unusual for a young African American poet taught from childhood that Africa was the ancestral home of blacks. In contrast, her Native references, though they be cast as rhetorical asides except for “The Natives of America,” should convince the discerning reader that Ann Plato’s sensibility is not that of an African American.

Social Coordinates and Vanishing Natives

Urban Natives of the early nineteenth century provided a test case for the kind of cultural identity loss policies the federal government would pursue both toward the end of that century and with the 1956 Relocation Act. Only in response to this later program were Natives less the victims of the profound rhetoric of projected disappearance that dogged Natives in 1830s southern New England. But this differed in degree rather than kind. For all that Charles Eastman, Zitkala-Ša, and Luther Standing Bear tell us about the assimilationist period of the turn of the nineteenth century in their Dakota autobiographies and 102 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity is clear in the successive artistic responses to termination and relocation legisla- tion by authors such as John Joseph Mathews and others, evident in this broad swath of Native modernism is a critical mass of identity consolidation exerting greater cultural consciousness to protect identity sovereignty. In contrast, southern New England Algonquians a century before found themselves at the mercy of the new American nation, whose sense of its (male) citizens being the “new Adam” brushed aside the experiences of Natives confronting the consolidation of northeastern settlement, intellectual enlightenment, religious mission, and nation-building enterprises. A not too subtle rhetorical shift distinguishes the two historical periods. Post–Civil War calls for assimilation or extermination became the extension of antebellum romanticized pronouncements of and belief in the vanishing Native. To allow Natives no alternatives but to abandon their homelands, assimilate, or die out actually expresses an inverse tribute to defiant Native nation survivals (a perverse basis for the twentieth-century Native mascot issue). Social, political, and legal forces in early nineteenth-century America put pressure on Native removal before and after the Act of 1830, with the result that literal survival meant staying on reservation lands at the Pequots, at Narragansett, at Schaghticoke, and at Paugusett, for example, living in the town of Mashpee on Cape Cod, or moving away from those spaces, whether voluntarily or because during the early reservation period, biracial Nativeness would have been anath- ema to some tribes, resulting in those Natives becoming ersatz members of Anglo American or African American communities. Deconstructing and reconstructing the historical record after around 1750 should thus make clear the Native identity foundation of many who passed as African Americans or bided their time in black communities or who assimilated into African American society and identity and therefore into American society. Something just as important occurred, as displaced Missinnuok tended to stay close to their tribal homelands. Akin to the homing instinct in reaction to the disruption of Native communities in California’s Silicon Valley, which Reyna Ramirez calls a “hub,” are the exemplary families that remained in Connecticut and that relocated to Connecticut from eastern Long Island. To what extent did Native cultural retention prevail after this period of relocating? In many respects, a researcher can only measure the intangible elements such as racial memory, eccentric behavior attributed to “Native blood,” or accounts by parents or members of older generations. Space prohibits deeper speculation toward a full theorization of this syndrome, but reading Ann Plato’s book and acknowledging the heritage of her Native-descended contemporaries places us squarely on the threshold of a new identity formation and its retention and losses for Native life in nineteenth-century urban New England. If one entertains postcolonial theorizing, the post–Civil War Gilded Age in Native country features a limited cosmopolitanism, consumerism, and boarding Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 103

schools; the generations of Samson Occom and William Apess struggled in the blatant face of settler colonialism, religious fervor, righteous expansionism, and early industrialism. The old colonial settlers founded colonies that confronted the Natives, then flexed young muscle to eviscerate Native homelands or to compel Natives to seek solace and respect through Christianity, a new land-holding consciousness, housing, and economic behavior intended to reinforce memory loss and cultural and community disassociation. Is it any wonder that more southern New England Algonquians spoke English at this time rather than their respective languages? or that urban Natives lost so much of those spiritual practices that were tied to everything their ancestors did on a daily basis? The extent to which urban Native families such as the Freeman-Platos could acknowledge and practice their ancestral cosmologies and understand their reliance upon and interaction with the natural world may never be known. When Henry Plato prepared his garden plot in the spring and harvested his yield in the fall, did he practice any ceremonies? Benajah, his son, is identified in the Connecticut census of 1870 as a “physician”; does that suggest that he possessed some botanical knowledge and attempted to practice it as a neighborhood or community “Indian doctor” or “root doctor,” a forerunner of those who advise about, sell, or freely dispense elixirs and cures in cities well into the present?70 Benajah’s pursuits may be the reason letters between Hartford-born schoolteacher Rebecca Primus and her correspondents mention him whimsically. Urban residence, which often meant becoming part of a colored or black community, exacted a psychic toll on people of Native background. In the antebellum years, a tribal resistance to losing cultural identity would have made a strong impact on Paugusetts in Bridgeport and on the Western Nehantic reservation at Black Point to the east. Knowing one’s kinship to neighbors who shared the same history helped prevent those Natives from being psychically swallowed up into African America. Belief in the dying Native thesis was standard; its representation in literary works supported the political work it was meant to perform. A later work of fiction can be added to those by Cooper, Child, and Sedgwick—Margret Howth (1862) by Rebecca Harding Davis, whose character Knowles, the owner of a mill, bears the despised Native blood, which happens to be Creek. The influential black abolitionist and orator Henry Highland Garnet, for whom the term Colored meant people in the complete African diaspora and who, it should be added, was given to presumptions sometimes grandiose, supported the idea that, as Roberts rephrases, the Indian was dying while the African diaspora was increasing worldwide: “The Red men of North America are retreating from the approach of the white man. . . . But the Colored race, although . . . transplanted in a foreign land, have clung to and grown with their oppressors.” Garnet justified his Afrocentrism by brashly stating: “At this moment . . . our 104 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity blood is mixed with every tribe from Cape Horn to the Frozen Ocean.”71 His reputation and enormous influence as an Afrocentrist would plausibly affect some urban Natives to don the public face of being African American or colored to avoid ridicule and social isolation. One biographer, although he affirms Gar- net’s perspicacious reading in classical literature about African history, describes him as a “many-sided, often contradictory person; . . . arrogant [and with] tremendous confidence in his intellectual abilities and usually believed himself to be right.”72 Beneath the superficial veneer of Negro identity, urban Natives such as the Platos constituted a caste network. Those who could respond to tribal enrollment opportunities did so and may otherwise have had few reasons to reside in a city, but those who stayed faced becoming socialized as blacks or whites; still others, such as Henry and Deborah Plato and their offspring, maintained public and private lives, typified by Gertrude’s census listing as Native in 1910. If Garnet and other black and white abolitionists believed any amount of African ancestry would compel individuals to oppose slavery, Ann Plato did not correspond with this, and her tepidly voiced poem presuming to celebrate the end of British slavery in the Caribbean would not convince anyone of her true feelings. An anecdote from Kentucky by a Mammoth Cave spelunker anticipates Garnet’s assumption and underscores the sheer disbelief that Natives remained east of the Mississippi at the time when The Colored American printed the narrative in 1841. One of two guides hired by the narrator is “Stephen” (the “best”), who “in appearance resembles an Indian, having long black hair and a copper-colored skin” (emphasis added). The descriptive verb “resembles” reflects the likelihood that reporter and reader would affirm that Stephen is not really Native, he only resembles one, which makes him not extraordinary because there are no actual Natives in his Kentucky environ, and the rhetoric of disappearance supports the racial cleansing of Natives by removal or assimilation. In this logic, Stephen’s appearance, so clearly stated, is coincidental to what a Native looks like; the description serves to nullify his cultural integrity, for the crude rhetorical sleight of hand conveying this description uses the very attributes noted to inform the reader of the narrator’s blind sense of truth: Stephen cannot be a Native, he can only “resemble” one, despite possessing the qualities popularly acknowledged of Natives by writers since the Puritan era. As printed in a newspaper operated by African Americans, the reference in the article exposes a perverse irony of American visual delusion.73 With respect to the cultural milieu and rhetoric about vanishing Indians, how did Natives in Connecticut who read this article react, not just to its disappearance- impounding rhetoric but to the very description that many may have shared or at least been aware of through reservation Natives who fit that description? Although the newspaper may not have intended to include a political agenda in the article, the effect of its publication would depress anyone sharing Ste- Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 105

phen’s qualities, encouraging them to forget about being Native, as you only look like something you are not. In Hosea Easton’s An Address: Delivered before the Coloured Population, of Providence, Rhode Island, on Thanksgiving Day Nov. 28, 1828, we find the rhetoric of the vanished Native quite early in the speech, contextualized according to the progress made by colored and white Americans; “prosperity” is his often- repeated word: “prosperity has graced our train. Prosperity has opened the door of the forest for the reception of our forefathers; granting them opportunity to display their superior knowledge in the use of fire arms above that of the natives: by which means the latter were drove out before them, being slain by thousands, thus, leaving them [the forefathers] in peaceable possession of the soil.”74 Plato would essentially agree with this attitude, and so would Garnet, although the father in Plato’s poem reflects no strictly stated occlusion. Easton’s remark embraces, indeed celebrates, the master narrative of United States history, shutting out Natives with disappearance rhetoric that he might not have realized compounded the shame and frustration that surviving families and communities must have felt. Easton’s language, despite his lineage, brings closer an epistemology for the transformation of Native-descended New Englanders to colored/black Americans. The examples given by Easton and Garnet and the spelunker’s story of “Stephen” actually betray African American investment in the dominant absurd and twisted logic of Anglo-American rhetorical genocide. Active motivations for this investment constitute a process involving cultural identity navigation, retention, resistance, and loss. Patriarchal influence would be very strong when exerted by black fathers raising their mixed children to toe the line of least resistance and become Negro. Natives not as inclined to assimilate the colonial and national standards and practice of individual prosperity would potentially steer colored aspirants to the middle class to ridicule or avoid them. Price and Stewart deploy uplift as the rhetorical term describing upward mobility and race improvement for the colored Americans of this historical period, which, in a parallel way, contributes to an epistemology for a Native American identity posture in early nineteenth-century Connecticut:

Behind the concept of personal “uplift” lay the seldom-questioned assumption that in order to achieve equality mixed people of color must subdue their cultural distinctiveness to conform to Anglo- American norms. [They would] turn away from distinctive ethnic customs whose roots were in African and Native American cultures. Most New Englanders who remained categorized as Native Americans, by contrast, generally showed scant interest in adapting to the dominant patterns of Anglo-American life. To them, “uplift” recalled all too vividly the oppressive “praying towns,” territorial dispossession, and economic dependency to which Anglo-Americans 106 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

had for so long subjected them. They elected, therefore, to preserve their traditions . . . in spite of the cultural fusions taking place around them.75

While their perception is generally accurate, would that the choice of “turning away” had prevailed so easily; Price and Stewart are here overlook- ing particular conditions. For instance, the figurative term uplift had become cultural rhetoric for African American achievement, to the extent that Natives would try to avoid assimilating to this ethnic association. Natives in Hartford reflect a range of responses to colored identity. One preferential cultural orientation does not fit all, but persistence in protecting cultural integrity seems to have kept some urban Natives from toeing the line of cultural least resistance. Comments by Garnet and other African Americans who supported the dying Native thesis serve colonialism and assimilation and assert colonial division-and-conquest strategy, as well as its land acquisition imperatives in North America. Black historiography’s fixation on the black/white racial paradigm misses how many African American social advancements came at the expense of Native American cultural erosion and pressures to assimilate into either black or white America. For this discussion, the examination Chickasaw scholar Jodi A. Byrd presents about internal colonialism in North America illuminates this Hartford Native context. Examining the thinking of several non-Native scholars with a penetrating gaze, Byrd argues the following: “Internal colonialism then, in the U.S. context, refers primarily and originally to African American oppression that then over the course of time serves to erase indigenous peoples altogether as it is thought to account for the indigenous within the racial paradigms it critiques.”76 The subtext of Garnet’s haughty reinscription of the vanishing Native agenda lies both in his pecking-order oppression of Natives, to the point of absorbing them into the Africans’ new world, and in the fact that people having “Indian blood” went along with the idea before and after his pronouncement. Byrd also applies Kevin Bruyneel’s postbellum “third space of sovereignty” to the antebellum period, within which she views Natives residing in a liminal position “in the border neither inside nor outside the United States.”77 This leverages an epistemology that can be used in theorizing how Native identity in Missinnuok during the century up to the Civil War survived for some and why and how others lost touch with it. Those Natives who belonged to and were acknowledged as citizens by particular tribes seem to have fared best through a homeland orientation that encouraged their cohesion as a community of families and clans sharing kindred identity and retaining ceremonial practices. The Western Nehantics present another example: their reservation at Black Point near Old Saybrook dwindled, yet they managed to persist, although they were not obvious to Connecticut’s general population. Those Natives who, Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 107 on the other hand, opted for Hartford and New Haven, had ties, although they may have been remote, to tribal bases and identities. We are talking about the early nineteenth century here, when attitudes about intermarriage with “negroes, mulattoes and strange Natives” were much more rigid, compelling mixed-ancestry Natives to relocate to cities and towns. What then happened to them gives historiography another layer for the epistemology. To reiterate Barbara Beeching’s report, Natives in Hartford were enumerated as Natives until their identities were enfolded into the black population. The surname Apes/Apess proves the oversight in “colored” and African American reckonings. With Christian denominational preferences also motivating relocation, why did the young Plato men leave East Hampton, Long Island, for Lyme, Connecticut, and then leave Lyme for Hartford and Colebrook? Beyond that rhetorical question, Natives identified in Connecticut as black married women much like themselves in principal cultural background: off-reservation or perhaps nonstatus Natives. In keeping with Ray, what we know of deconstructed “colored” families can be related to their church participation, and Henry and Deborah Plato and their family exemplify this perfectly. If “The Natives of America” invokes a personal father, his intention to leave for the presumably western forests suggests shunning conversion to Christianity. Clearly, his daughter accepted the white man’s religion, and if we imagine his grandchildren, we can assume that they would also. His refusal to convert aligns him and other Natives in a Bruyneel kind of liminal third space, neither inside the social fabric and parameters of either colored Hartford or Christian America nor beyond the frontier where the colonizer plans to enclose them. They would avoid the kind of churches nominally associated with African. If they chose to convert and relocate, the Brotherton path beckoned. Given these examples, the hidden corollary in vanishing Indian thought, prospect, and rhetoric inferred white and especially black—“colored”—Amer- ica as going to absorb this disappearance of Missinnuok. That some urban Natives lost their cultural identities and languages while others precariously retained aspects of them reflects the social tightrope that Native families and individuals walked in order to practice cultural resistance or to give up being Native and become part of the broad phenotype of the Negro race.

The Prudence Crandall Case as a Race Determinant

History, genealogy, and attraction between two people will always betray the kinds of exclusions that will avoid the blood dissolutions Occom opposed. Through the first four decades of the nineteenth century, when the parents of Deborah Freeman Plato and Julia Ann Pell were residing in Montville, the Mohegan reservation territory had been whittled down to the village of Uncasville in the Town of Montville, and Mohegans continued to live in the 108 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity town at large. Exemplifying how these Mohegans could not fully thwart the presence of “mulattoes and strange Indians” in their midst were Sarah and Mary Harris, two of the “young black misses” at Prudence Crandall’s school in 1833 who were Mohegan. It is clear from the judicial language of the Prudence Crandall case how easily an official definition of race affirms the collapse of Natives and Negroes together under “colored” and how historiography will assign this signification to Negro, black, or African. The condition of citizenship and identity of Natives arose in the opinion of Chief Justice David Daggett, who presided over the Connecticut State Supreme Court during the December 1833 trial against Cran- dall, schoolmistress of the Canterbury School, who proposed to convert it to the specific education of “young misses of color.” After Crandall was arrested and released, she continued to be the target of insults, not just by the people of Canterbury and its sympathizers but by the State of Connecticut, which passed a statute on 24 May 1833 commonly known as the “Black Law,” which was essentially aimed at her and forbade anyone, under penalty of fine, to bring into the state any colored persons for the purposes of educating them, as Crandall had done by hosting female pupils from Boston, Providence, and New York. The Canterbury School incident, along with this law, achieved indirect interest for late twentieth century historians in large part because Chief Justice Roger Taney cited it—Crandall v. State of Connecticut—in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. In August 1838, Connecticut repealed the statute; the full abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean may have influenced this reversal. Certainly there were growing abolitionist sentiments in Windham County,78 but the repeal also occurred during a general review and revision of the state’s statutes.79 Pros- ecutors in the July 1834 trial responded to Chief Justice Daggett’s charge in reflective language. What interests us here is the wording in exemplary passages by both the plaintiff’s counsel and the prosecutors involving Natives and citizenship. Crandall’s counselor William W. Ellsworth kept the argument in the African American framework by stating “these pupils are not Natives,” when two were80; prosecutors Andrew T. Judson and Chauncey F. Cleveland, arguing for the state, concurred with Daggett, reiterating that as a conquered people, Natives had no rights as citizens. “Are Indians citizens?” Daggett had asked. “They belong to distinct tribes. This [their being citizens] cannot be true because all Indians do not belong to a tribe. . . . Indians were literally natives of our soil; they were born here; and yet they are not citizens.”81 The language Judson deployed is more revealing:

The colored men were either natives, called Indians, or of African descent, called Negroes. . . . Connecticut has ever had within its limits numerous Indians, both tribes, and others not belonging to tribes. . . . If citizenship be a matter of favor, then surely the Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality 109

Native stands far above the African. This is the Indian’s home—it was once his soil, but it has passed into other hands. It is now the white man’s country; and the white man is an American citizen.82

Caught up in Judge Daggett’s prohibitive statute and the wording by prosecutor Judson were two of the four children who happened to be the only girls from within the state, Sarah and Mary Harris, the daughters of Sally Pren- tice Harris, a Mohegan, and her husband, William Monteflora Harris. Writ- ers on the Crandall incident mention Sarah Harris because she was the first “black” girl to approach Crandall for entry to her school. Historians identify William Harris as Negro (as they do Sally) and a distributor for William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator newspaper. He was issued Seamen’s Protection Certificates in 1800 at age eighteen, in which his complexion is noted as “Color” and in 1805, at which time he was said to have a “Light” complexion; both certificates identify his birthplace as Norwich, Connecticut, although his parents appear to have come from the French Caribbean.83 Through their son Charles, the Har- rises were the grandparents of Jeremiah Harris, who married Gertrude Field- ing (1849–1936), also Mohegan. This would mean that sentimental attraction over three generations and more defied the petitions by Occom and his later followers against non-Mohegan interlopers; the 1861 census for the Mohegan reservation identifies the blood quantum of its inhabitants; it is the census used by the Mohegans to determine its modern citizenship.84 According to traditional Mohegan matrilineal descent, and in the nineteenth century, the tribe seems to have followed that practice, with some married women keeping their family names. Sarah Harris was Mohegan. Several Mohegan documents attest to the Mohegan status of Gertrude Fielding Harris—two happen to be the 1861 census and the census of 1901, in which her adult children are named.85 Her daughter, Gertrude M. Harris (1874–1936), married a Charles Harris; the obituary for their daughter, Olive May Harris Coderre-Picozzi (b. 1911), appeared in the Norwich Bulletin on 1 August 2010.86 Sarah also would have inherited some Native ancestry from her father, who (plausibly) was on the outer fringe of Mohegan descent or held the ancestry of another tribe from southern New England or elsewhere. By the end of the nineteenth century, when sixty-eight of all enrolled Mohegans lived in Uncasville, the core town of the tribe, ninety-one resided in Norwich, five miles north.87 Learning the identity of Sarah’s parents may have encouraged the prosecutors to invoke “colored” identity to include Natives. Again: “The colored men were either natives, called Indians, or of African descent, called Negroes,” and people with both ancestries would summarily be included. The Sarah Harris example supports a thesis that simple ascription of terms such as colored and Negro during this time for the Missinnuok and generally in the Greater Northeast runs the risk of misidentifying who particular individuals 110 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity happen to be and to what family and cultural components they owed allegiance or what feelings they wrestled with to define themselves. However one appreciates Ann Plato, her staunchly objective narrative tone reveals as much about her as it conceals. And she is individualistic. Her book can be said to make a general appeal to all, regardless of race, and it is clear what Pennington means by her appealing “to us, her own people, (though not exclusively,) to give her success.”88. Or does he mean she is not thoroughly of us in racial background and allegiance? Such ambiguity typifies the enigma of Ann Plato. Her literary attitude and her phenotype must have perplexed her pastor, a fugitive from slavery, ardent abolitionist, and Christian interested in missionary work to Africa. Chapter 6

Schooling: Some Speculations; Teaching: Some Records ᇺᇻᇺ

The half-decade from 1836 through spring 1841 would have been crucial for Ann Plato and the composition of Essays. She would have been an adolescent pursuing a teacher’s education. She would have arrived in Connecticut or would already have been in Hartford in the wake of the Prudence Crandall case prohibiting blacks from out of state to be educated. Provisions for educating Connecticut-born Native or African American children, especially girls, were already very slender. For a white school authority to oversee the education and tutoring of Plato as an adolescent of color from another state would have presented an enormous personal risk of public exposure, violent community reaction, a fine, and possibly arrest. Although the black law statute was repealed in 1838, a handful of private individuals—pastors or their wives and others of abolitionist sympathies or good will—could offer fundamentals or encourage the intellects of school-aged children in clandestine ways. Plato describes all her four women as thirsting for knowledge despite disadvantages, and they represent a range of literacy and educational attainment: Louisa Seabury seems to have had the slimmest chance for learning; Julia Ann Pell could only attend school sporadically in Montville and found even fewer education opportunities after removing to Granby, Con- necticut, and with this Plato includes the five-year stretch of Pell’s life after the Crandall decision. Two others fared better: Eliza Loomis Sherman “gained a common school education,” apparently in Hartford, but nothing more due to her frail constitution, and Elizabeth Low “spent a great deal of her time in perusing the Holy Scriptures, and other religious books.”1

111 112 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Three important events had occurred by the end of 1838: (1) Connecticut had repealed its black law of 1833; (2) slavery in England’s Caribbean colonies had officially ended, after a four-year probationary period, and Plato responded to this event with a poem; and (3) the first edition of Lydia Sigourney’s The Girl’s Reading Book had appeared. During this time, Plato’s education acceler- ated and her learning intensified as her training to become a teacher underwent a transition toward professionalism and she wrote poems about that experience. Now we have a substantial envelope of her personal progress that, once she has published Essays, gives readers the impression she is in Connecticut on her own. So, who taught her? What was her learning environment? What circumstances characterized her voluminous reading and inspired or compelled her to adapt Sigourney’s books to her needs? In this period, known for its “cult of true womanhood,” the pinnacle of female aspiration beyond the domestic sphere meant becoming a teacher or sentimentalist writer or both. Some achieving women remain mysteries for the lack of information about their education. Sarah Jane Foster (1839–1868), for example, a freedmen’s education advocate born in Maine and a noted writer of short fiction and letters, was described by a Congrega- tionalist minister as “ ‘well educated [and] a vigorous thinker.” The editor of a selection of her writings, Wayne E. Reilly, described her as “an avid disciple of self-improvement” and a voracious reader who also attended lectures by prominent intellectuals and public figures of the day. Yet, her “level of education is unknown,” the presumption being that she “most likely attended school for a number of years.”2 As mild a parallel as this makes with Plato’s means of education, they share enigmatic status by a mutual absence of their schooling details. Returning to the “Little Harriet” allegory in The Colored American, is it still too convenient to suppose that its author Ann is in fact Ann Plato? Harriet is rescued by Mrs. Jewell, who takes her home, where daughter Susan instructs her in “the most useful branches of an English education . . . and in the doctrines and duties of religion.”3 As noted in chapter 1, this story was reprinted from a journal called The Weekly Messenger, an abbreviated title for the Journal of Education and Weekly Messenger, and cited in the following week’s edition of The Colored American on the same page with Pennington’s call for decent teacher wages. The announcement for it states:

This is a new paper, published in this city [New York], the first number of which has just been issued from the press, to be conducted by an association of Colored Teachers. It is a weekly journal. . . . The Journal and Messenger is to be an independent paper—wedded to no party or sect—pledged to no principles but those of truth and righteousness. Virtue will be recognized and applauded whenever found, and vice discouraged and condemned in whatever seat it may present itself.4 Schooling: Some Speculations; Teaching: Some Records 113

The authorship implies that “Ann” was interested in the professional- ization of her training and desired to be part of a group of colored teachers. Societal and legal restrictions would not dampen Plato’s aspirations. The Jewell household offered unbounded good fortune, and Susan Jewell is the catalyst for Harriet’s rectified path. “Useful branches of an English education” would approximate a classical curriculum. All Plato needed to fulfill her promise was to read voraciously and enlarge upon it in her writing. As an allegory, “Little Harriet” would reflect Plato’s real world, but the obverse of that world lay in exploring the tangible outlets for an education. Although Yale College did not admit women, its very presence in New Haven would have loomed in the imagination of anyone desiring the higher registers of learning. The plethora of educated men in Plato’s essays may have indicated an unrequitable dream of hers to be among the students of that austere community.5 Her sentiments in the essay “Education” attest to a vigorous regard for learning. The New Haven city directory for 1840 lists eleven “Young Ladies Seminaries.”6 These would have denied her enrollment, however. Rev. Amos G. Beman may have taught her, for he taught at the school operated by Colored Congregational in Hartford from 1833 to 1838, years coincident with the black law, before leaving to pursue the ministry. The Temple Street Congregational Church in New Haven was his parish by 1840. He may have taught her in Hartford; his Narragansett heritage may have endeared the responsibility to him. Someone in New Haven may have provided an impressive education to her similar to any education she might have received in Hartford or in Suffolk County, Long Island, guiding her through various levels of learning, practice, and accountability. Had Plato been more politic in predisposition and less ethereal about puritan values, she might have infused her thoughts on female education with direct mention of the barriers girls of color faced in trying to become educated. She was, in fact, writing within the historical threshold for education opportunities for colored girls—she was in the vanguard of that milieu, and judging by contemporary accounts, she was well educated. On a general level, Plato’s childhood and youth correspond with a movement in southern New England to establish schools for girls, and Mary Lyons’s successful opening of the Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837 likely prompted one black male teacher at an antislavery convention that same year to decry that “ ‘not a single high school or female seminary in the land is open to our daughters.’ ”7 Nor was there a counterpart for Indian girls. Moor’s Charity School, opened by Eleazer Wheelock in Lebanon, Connecticut, in 1754 and associated with Samson Occom, as the predecessor of Dartmouth College, was, by all accounts, a failing mission for the Indian girls it wanted to prepare for housekeeping responsibilities, not formal education, as it did for Indian males.8 Subsequently, schooling for Indian children in southern New England was at 114 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity best accomplished through the variable opportunities offered by reservation and tribal missionary efforts. Missionaries, churches, and similar entities emphasized schooling for both Native and African American males. Research to determine her education in the 1830s involves speculating about how she as an adolescent girl of color in Connecticut came to be educated at the very beginning of the nascent statewide practice of documenting educational institutions. Very few schools in the Greater Northeast provided education for colored youth at the high school level, and few teachers emerged from these schools. Dorothy Sterling’s data show that by 1827, Hartford’s population of five hundred colored people had no schools. Similarly, in Portland, Boston, New Haven, and Providence, whose colored populations were at minimum nine hundred persons, only two schools at best served each of these cities’ colored families; Philadelphia and New York City, with fifteen thousand each, had three and two schools, respectively.9 Given the dramatic Crandall case, Plato must have persevered in her education wherever and however she could, for her pedagogy was very strenuous, and most of all, compared with sample letters Sterling collected, written by young women of color who wished to teach or were already teaching, Plato’s grasp of English syntax, grammar, and rhetoric is extraordinary. Her essays and poems reflect copious reading in nonfiction and poetry.10 She learned enough about interpolating lines and phrases from reading widely read and famous poets to devise her own poetics. An allegorical Susan Jewell must have laid a foundation for this, especially for her rhetorical style. And she wrote four poems about the education process: “Advice to Young Ladies,” in which she counsels them to “try to get your learning young, / And write it back to me”; “Lines,” which deals with her teacher examination studies; “On the Dismission [sic] of a School Term,” in which she advises children to not let time away from school erode what they have learned; and “The Infant Class,” with its subtitle, “Written in School.” Her elocutionary and rhetorical skills are nearly equal to those of William Apess, born in 1798 and educated rather haphazardly; Betsey Chamberlain; Maria Stewart; and David Walker. If she was educated on eastern Long Island, Clinton Academy in East Hampton, which opened in 1785 as the first chartered academy in New York, may have accommodated her. Young women would have been educated in “spiritual reading and in the finer points of being a lady. A college education was not available to women at that time, so Clinton Academy would have been the highest academic level available to a girl in the 1780s.” Its students came from Long Island, New York City, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and by 1815, from colonies in the West Indies. Its racial demographics are unavailable.11 Connecticut, if that is where she was educated, had “no central state authority” with which to enforce educational and teaching standards, and prior to 1840, only proposals for them had been issued by criteria advocates such as Thomas H. Gallaudet and Henry Barnard. Fewer than half of children four to sixteen Schooling: Some Speculations; Teaching: Some Records 115

years old attended school; uninterested parents compelled offspring to work on farms and in factories; and teachers worked seasonally, with “no enforce- able requirements.”12 Prior to the establishment of codified standards for them, clergymen examined and certified teachers.13 In Plato’s case, Amos Beman or, most likely, Pennington would have certified her. Veteran teachers, influenced by the idea that women were better than men in a child care environment, encouraged young women of good academic standing to become teachers, and by the mid-1830s in, for example, Massachusetts, women outnumbered men as common and private school instructors, but they were paid far less.14 In the wake of the 1818 Connecticut state constitution separating the affairs of church and state, including matters of education, teachers and admin- istrators disagreed about how to reconcile those issues. Some felt religious or spiritual influence by teachers to be unacceptable. However, as reported by the Connecticut Common School Journal in its 1 September 1838 issue on the topic of “infant schools,” “the singing of hymns and moral songs is a frequent occupation”15; in a separate article in the same issue, where the questions for the examination of teachers were presented, we find:

Is the wish to please God, and to learn of Him, and to be like Him, the best? Why? Do you think a school may be successfully governed and taught, by one who depends chiefly on this motive, duty to God? Mention, if you can, some of the ways in which children may be taught to feel that God requires them to obey their teachers, to treat their companions kindly, and to be studious and conscientious.16

Paul H. Mattingly clarifies a point about teacher preparation early in the nineteenth century: the itinerant nature of a teaching life had to decline in order for the moral usefulness of teaching to become institutionalized. Teacher education by the 1820s began to include consecration, the spiritual preparation for the divine mission of teaching. Teachers were expected to possess, in other words, a spiritual devotion through which their instruction flowed.17 As Plato’s writing exhibits, and as her inscription to the poem “Lines” affirms, hers was a personality strong enough to teach effectively, and she did not have to be prodded to join the profession. The seventh and final stanza of “The Infant Class” directly addresses her “youngest class in school”: “May God your steps approve,/ . . . /May we in Christ e’er move.”18 Children one to four or five years old constituted an “infant class.” The infant schools served the same function as today’s nursery and preschools. The practice originated in Scotland in 1815 and had become firmly established in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York by 1830. Opinions about their value and effectiveness differ. Education historians such 116 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity as Eleanor Wolf Thompson embodied the spectrum of critical vacillation about infant schools, believing that children were better suited at home with their mothers but at the same time admitting that in serving the needs of working mothers of the 1830s and 1840s, these infant schools “contributed very greatly to the development of primary schools.”19 New York governor De Witt Clinton extolled the establishment of the Infant School Society of New-York in 1827 as a benevolent organization coordinating support for these schools, which were intended to help working-class families, but one historian suggests that infant schools in the United States disappeared by the middle 1830s.20 One can assume that the sex ratio discrepancy among teachers was the result of teaching being considered a babysitting profession, even though girls well into the 1830s had fewer choices of schools to attend. Whatever regard was attributed to infant schools, Plato was on the cutting edge of their practice. Moral instruction for pupils, especially girls, characterized the tenets of education as symbiotic to intellectual growth. Key female pedagogues writing in the early nineteenth century conceivably had some impact upon Plato through her instructors. In 1819, Emma Willard addressed the New York State Legis- lature on her Plan for Improving Female Education, which included objectives such as religion, moral duties, and literary instruction that would have appealed to Plato; however, nowhere in Essays does she pointedly extol the virtues of the domestic sphere or, for that matter, Willard’s promotion of the “ornamental branches” of “drawing and painting, elegant penmanship, music, and the grace of motion.”21 Ann Plato practiced admirable handwriting, but Essays conveys no sense of her interest in these other forms of expression. Her proclivities embrace the higher forms of knowledge in the sciences, just as Catherine Beecher called for in Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education (1829) when she was director of the Hartford Female Seminary: subjects that would prepare female students to obtain the core education of the day (usually reading, recitation, grammar, rhetoric, history, and arithmetic) along with knowledge of the arts. Her desire to cultivate the intellect of her pupils lies beneath the veneer of piety that overshadows anything else she states. Beecher’s An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers (1835) avers that there is an urgent need for a cadre of well- grounded and disciplined teachers; this would be beneficial to society.22 Had Plato been able to attend Mary Lyon’s new Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, in South Hadley, Massachusetts, simply put, she would have thrived. School records of enrollment and evaluation for this period in the history of Connecticut education are both incomplete and rare. To be trained for the profession of teacher during midadolescence was at that time ordinary. Barnard and one of his former students, David Nelson Camp, believed in preparing youth of about fourteen years of age for teaching, especially if they would continue their studies in college23; and Calvin E. Stowe in 1837 proposed the age of sixteen and a good record in common school as prerequisites for seminary Schooling: Some Speculations; Teaching: Some Records 117

entrance.24 At the time, Yale provided training for teachers in Connecticut, but the state dawdled for a decade before the New Britain Normal School (for the training of teachers) opened in 1849. According to Martha MacLear’s A History of Education of Girls in New York and New England, covering 1800 to 1870, there were twenty-five academies in Connecticut by 1830, most being coeducational.25 The term seminary came to identify a place of higher learning for girls, as signified by the Hartford Female Seminary, chartered in 1827, and in Massachusetts, the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. A female academy opened in New London in 1799, and when new owners directed its new building in 1834, the enrollment averaged eighty pupils.26 No records appear to be extant. The Hartford Female Seminary has no records for Ann Plato.27 The Hartford Grammar School—Barnard’s alma mater, from which he finished studies in 1827 at age 16—did not admit girls.28 Noah B. Clark, who had taught in Connecticut and Fishkill, New York, returned to Hartford in 1838 to open his Noah B. Clark Seminary, adding in 1839 a “ ‘female department,’ ” so that his became the first coeducational school in that city. On the other hand, girls could attend town schools in central Connecticut, such as Middletown, Upper Middletown, the Academical School in Windsor, the Wethersfield Academy, and in Cheshire, Miss Cornwall’s Seminary for Young Ladies.29 Despite these schools being forerunners of public institutions, pupils and their families were expected to pay costs, which, no matter how modest, would have strained the coffers of most families of color if not discouraging these families outright. Some person or persons must have loved Plato to ensure that she received an education, shepherd her preparation to tend an infant class, and prepare her to take the teacher examination. Engaging a private tutor may have been just as costly as attending a school, yet she achieved her objective. Ann Plato was one of the earliest women of color in Connecticut to attain this education level and profession, possibly the first, if we could learn what kind of schooling her successor, Betsy Fish, had. Still, the question deepens and persists: “Who is Ann Plato?” Whatever one thinks of the quality and character of her writing, it is clear that she was trained at the young age customary for the time in a regimen of reading, recitation, grammar, rhetoric, history, and arithmetic, and as we will see, practical philosophy. Sigourney’s memoir, Letters of Life (1866), provides insights into what Plato must have been exposed to as a schoolgirl. We can appreciate the rhetorical similarity between these two writers in providing their readers with few temporal guides that parallel their activities. Sigourney, after telling us of her birth date in 1791, leaves dates in the abstract; but most important is her early

attention to style, and the import of classical words. . . . They principally arose from the character of the authors with whom I became 118 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

familiar. There were literally no children’s books attainable by me; and as reading became, almost in babyhood, a necessity of existence, I was thrown upon a rather severe selection of standard authors.30

Proceeding to identify books she favored by Alexander Pope’s contemporaries Edward Young, Joseph Addison, and Oliver Goldsmith, Sigourney writes with critical reflection about her own naïve reception of other authors and admits to enjoying two imaginatively stimulating works on death and a third, Six Sermons on Death, by Bishop Sherlock, a collection that contained her “models for theological writing.” She learned by rote, but exercised critical acumen, and proceeded to teach according to the famous name-event-date system. Plato exhibits vaguely similar aptitudes; at least, we can see what she admired about those she learned, for she is not inclined to display a turn of mind that justifies pedagogical theorizing. She names her exemplary figures for their personalities and the attributes they developed that made them men of achievement, resembling Sigourney in her “Written Thought” section, where she identifies men who upheld Christian principles as they stood for truth. The joys of poetry enthralled both to differing ends. Sigourney remembers a happy childhood, “fed on the dews of love, yet guarded from the evils of indulgence by habits of industry, order, and obedience, which my parents wisely inculcated,”31 habits echoed and advocated throughout Essays but without mention of personal or family stimulation. Sigourney’s parents paid three dollars per school quarter for her education, a sum that Plato’s parents might have found dear without the intervention of benefactors. Sigourney and a school cohort, with ideas for starting a school, attended the Hartford Seminary for Women for the prestige it would lend to their services, and there they learned what essentially amounted to a “distaff” training in “drawing, painting in water-colors, embroidery, . . . filigree, and other things too tedious to mention,” returning to Norwich to begin a modest school that burgeoned from just a handful of pupils “of different ages and grades of improvement, some, indeed, older than ourselves” (192–93; emphasis added). She and her associate commenced upon this venture in 1811 (a date she neglects to identify), teaching subjects standard for the day: rhetoric, ancient and modern geography, history, arithmetic, grammar, and penmanship. Youths of both sexes certainly taught in the early decades of the nineteenth century, but Sigourney does not indicate that she has a clear sense of fulfilling some criteria for teachers as Plato does in her poem “Lines,” in which she recounts her experiences of teacher preparation examination; Sigourney simply mentions a quarter-ending “elaborate examination in all studies,” to which guests were invited.32 There is no question that Plato read John Lee Comstock’s A System of Natural Philosophy, commonly referred to as “Comstock” and “Comstock’s Phi- losophy,” because she was one of several Hartford teachers recorded as having it Schooling: Some Speculations; Teaching: Some Records 119

in her classroom in an 1845 school report (see below). First published in 1830, subsequent editions were published in Hartford, including one by L. Skinner in 1839. To quote a succinct definition of natural philosophy, it is “the science of matter and energy and their interactions”—the fundamentals of physics.33 Filled with numerous illustrations of mechanical and natural objects and how they work, Comstock is an encyclopedic manual of instructions for teachers about how things work, and Plato was well acquainted with its descriptions and instructions. She became acquainted with it before writing her own book, because besides mentioning the word science seven times in the essay “Educa- tion,” she promotes the sciences, especially the mechanical sciences, as a path young people can take to help build the country. Heavily illustrated and hefty at just under three hundred pages, three of Comstock’s ten chapters include “The Properties of Bodies,” “Optics” and “Electricity.” Invoking her reading of Comstock would, to an older audience, have provided Essays with a formidable literary edge. Its mention by Plato’s school authorities acknowledges that any teachers using it possessed greater pedagogical knowledge than they would use in the classroom. There are a group of pedagogues whose widely read and respected writings on teaching, reading, and writing may have attracted Plato. The writings of Jacob Abbott (1803–1874), a Boston Congregationalist minister, author, teacher, and pedagogue, encourage speculation about their influence on the development of Plato’s ethics as a teacher and that he eventually may have known something of her modest local reputation. Abbott was not yet thirty years old when he published his first inspirational book in1832, The Young Christian: Or a Familiar Illustration of the Principles of Christian Duty. He followed this with The Teacher: Or Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and Government of the Young (1833), The Duties of Parents, in Regard to the Schools Where Their Children Are Instructed (1834), and The Mount Vernon Reader (1835), and he contributed to a book by Scottish physician John Abercrombie, Inquiries Concerning the Intel- lectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth, published in Hartford in 1833, all while teaching at Boston’s Mt. Vernon Female School. It is plausible that Plato perused or scanned one if not all of these early Abbott books, voluntarily or by assignment, as she trained to be a teacher. The Young Christian was reprinted in 1833, 1836, and in the middle of the century. In it, Abbott transforms life experiences into Christian allegories. In his second chapter, “The Friend,” he speaks of “Howard the Philanthropist.” This is Plato’s John Howard, mentioned in her essay “Benevolence,” and Abbott may be her source of information about him.34 If she read Abbott’s account, she adroitly synthesized in that essay Howard’s life objectives and values into one brief but carefully worded and descriptive clause.35 A similarity in the fate of one of Abbott’s young female charges to that of one of Plato’s four young women will be discussed in another chapter, but her writings generally echo 120 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Abbott’s ideas that a person’s “habits of industry and integrity” come from God36; several other of his principles that Plato does not copy allow the idea that Abbott and other pedagogues did not entirely impress her. She expresses similarities with Abbott’s arguments in condensed form, following the broad outlines of his discourse. The section “Personal Improvement” in chapter 11 of The Young Christian identifies ways in which teachers can instill moral improvement in children. Abbott also wants to distinguish between character and conduct. For Plato, character affirms discipline, and obedience serves as the conduit of character. To Abbott, learning is more important for acquiring knowledge than for simple knowing. He chastises those who read nothing but the Bible. “The whole economy of nature is such as to allure man to the investigation of it, and the whole structure of his mind is so framed as to qualify him exactly for the work.” If anyone expects to teach well, no elaboration on this principle is required, for it supports a “systematic and thorough” reading of subjects. Voluminous writer as he would prove to be, Abbott defended writing as an “intellectual improvement” and advised young scholars to keep personal journals.37 Plato’s kindred sentiment occurs again in stanza three of her opening poem, “Advice to Young Ladies,” about learning young and writing it back. If she read Abercrombie’s book, Plato may have become impatient with his metaphysical principles. Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth is, by Abercrombie’s admission, not a book for children,38 and although it is unfair to presuppose that she lacked the intellectual capacity as an adolescent to engage its science-based discussion, his style and range encompass an esoteric metaphysics not manifest as an influence on her own essays. But again, there are topical influences that she could have derived from this book or a similar text, the most important of these being Abercrombie’s discussion of one needing a “well regulated mind,”39 a talent she admired and that imbues her models in Essays. Abbott’s influence in the book seems minor on the discursive level, his additions regarding teaching in educational institutions barely discernible throughout the text, but his name is on the title page, and Plato may have encountered it because it was printed in Hartford. Abbott’s other book published in 1833, The Teacher, details methods of instruction and patiently describes how teachers should respond to difficult classroom occasions. Abbott emphasizes principles of religious instruction and asserts that piety is good for the pupil. The chapter “Religious Influence,” which concerns church and state issues, gives a pragmatically engaging argument that teachers may exert influence on the community they serve, but in the classroom, they must do what they are employed to do. An Episcopalian teacher in a private school run by that denomination may deploy sectarian activities in it but not in a school run by another sect.40 Analogies and examples proliferate in this as in other Abbott texts, and one of the more important for the consideration of Plato becoming a teacher and writer is a story Abbott relates about one of his teachers Schooling: Some Speculations; Teaching: Some Records 121

telling a pupil of meeting a young woman bedridden with consumption who was prepared to die because she was a Christian.41 Plato rarely ventures beyond the boundary of Congregationalism. Except in one essay, “Education,” where she alludes to Roman Catholic superstition, she takes no judgmental stand on Christian denominations. Concerned with improving her own values and living a pious life, she admired those who did well for the betterment of humanity. Also a successful and prolific writer of children’s books, most notably the Rollo series, Abbott may have met or learned of Ann Plato before he wrote his series of four Juno stories, books in which Juno oversees Sabbath activities for a white boy named Georgie. Abbott seems to characterize Juno as a projection of Plato. These Juno books appeared three decades and more after Essays. Unlike the Rollo series, they have not attracted much critical attention among American children’s literature enthusiasts. Juno and Georgie, the first book in the series, features “a nice and tidy-looking colored girl, who had charge of Georgie in his plays”; she was “quite a pretty girl, and not very dark,” and she is the Sunday school teacher for eight-year-old Georgie and his playmates, white and colored.42 Abbott’s illustrator depicted Juno with flowing, dense black hair slightly longer than shoulder length and with a dark complexion, defying author and text. Abbott’s choice of Juno for his female character’s name suggests a hypothetical knowledge of someone specific. Juno, the name of Jupiter’s wife in Roman mythology, playfully resonates with the Greek Plato. “Sappho” could not have sufficed by virtue of its harder sonority, even if Abbott had realized that Plato had published poetry. Juno strikes a pleasing aural note as a companion to Georgie, and its classical status renders as superficial the ancient cultural differential. Concerning other aspects of The Juno Stories, Juno articulates standard English speech and displays the ability for spontaneous narrative, for the benefit of her pupils. In Juno and Georgie, perhaps because Abbott describes Juno as not understanding certain things “in theory,” a Miss Mary Osborne enters her domain as a head teacher.43 Abbott avoided having Juno speak stereotyped African American or Native dialect, with this being among the iconoclastic attributes of his representation of such a nineteenth-century literary character. One boy character, Tommy, initially feared Juno “because she was a colored girl.”44 Juno contrasts sharply with both the illiterate mammy and tragic mulatto images attributed to African American women, as well as with the stoic monosyllabic or natural philosopher-intoning Indian that is an enduring portrayal of Natives, even by Catharine Sedgwick in her character Magawisca in Hope Leslie. Juno and her charges are middle class. And if Jacob Abbott knew her prototype, he probably did not want to call specific attention to the mixed heritage she probably possessed. Other possible teaching pedagogues recommended to Plato for her preparation in the classroom include John Rippingham, who wrote Rules for English Composition, and Particularly for Themes, published in Poughkeepsie in 1816; 122 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Rippingham intended this book “for the use of schools, and in aid of self instruction.”45 Another is Richard Green Parker, whose Progressive Exercises in Compo- sition, published in 1832 in Boston, was the first American exercise and activity book in the field and included directions for writing themes on topics such as “Clemency,” “Compassion,” and “Conscience,” all abstract concepts similar to those Plato discusses in her essays and that may have instructed her on how to develop them.46 The title of one of her poems, mentioned above, “Advice to Young Ladies,” resembled other didactic literary teachings. An influential pro- genitor of this usage was the British pedagogue Thomas Broadhurst, who wrote the book Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the Mind, published in 1808. She may have encountered a reference to Broadhurst in the first number of The Ladies Companion and Literary Expositor (1834). A review of the book in the Edinburgh Review by the Reverend Sydney Smith in 1809 not only extolled it but stood on its own as an enduring statement supporting female education.47 In her poem, she implicitly echoes Broadhurst and Smith. The poem’s intrinsic value lies in the resemblance of sentiment in the title, although her example is not unique. But the poem succinctly reveals her teaching strategy, to “compose to please my friend”—to spend days in writing to please her young women contemporaries—and for young people to take advantage of their time to learn and, by writing back to her, engage in a communal dialogue. She recommends no topic in her poem’s first three quatrains, just the importance of the act of writing for the benefit of gaining knowledge; quatrains four to six promote religion as essential for a young lady’s life. In a tone nearly philippic as he chastises the “noodledom” of those who would keep young women ignorant, Smith also is secular in his review, never underscoring his support of Broadhurst with the need for girls’ lives to have a religious foundation. Indeed, the questions remain: who is this young woman, and what authors did she read that shaped her thinking and her writing? In her essays, she mentions several intellectual and scientific luminaries, yet the one serious question is, in what capacity did she know about them? The poets she favored are inscrutable unless one recognizes some linguistic facet associated with them or can identify lines or themes she adapted from them. Her exposure to poets and prose writers may have come about through participation in a reading circle, a popular activity for young women in New England and through which she may have learned about those she emulated. Wheatley was one she would have learned of, and so were Sigourney, Longfellow, and British poets Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, William Wordsworth, and Charlotte Turner Smith. Reading these seven belies a precocity born of educational privilege. By her own initiative or mentored encouragement, Plato’s poetics developed from sources modern and contemporary: Wheatley, then Wordsworth and Smith, represent her “older” published generation of resources and inspiration. Her service as a teacher links her education and poetics. Schooling: Some Speculations; Teaching: Some Records 123

Ann Plato as a Teacher

In its pilot issue, the Connecticut Common School Journal of August 1838 printed the May assembly meeting’s “Second Report of the Joint Select Committee on Common Schools,” which included wages: the monthly average for male teachers was $14.50 “exclusive of Board,” and for their female counterparts, $5.75; private schools paid better but maintained the discrepancy, $30 and $10, respectively.48 In his account book entries for Plato’s church, attorney Seth Terry includes no specific payments to any teachers, but he did enter, for the “South African School District,” cash payments to Timothy Oliver in 1843, 1844, and 1845, and to William Daniels, treasurer, in November 1845 and March 1846. Plato began teaching at the South African School when it first opened on Elm Street in 1842, and all or part of these payments to the church’s treasurers made from 1843 through 1846 must have been her wages.49 Pennington argued for paying teachers: “Give him a competent salary,” he urged schools officials, “and you free him from embarrassment and enable him to nerve his mind.” Pennington believed that teachers should be paid no less than $300 annually and paid promptly.50 Couched in rhetorical masculinity, Pennington’s article was advocating for Augustus Washington; Plato had not yet begun teaching at Elm Street. We have two definite reports about Ann Plato as a teacher. David O. White, museum director for the Connecticut Historical Commission during the 1970s, wrote about Hartford’s black schools and briefly discussed her life after

Dispensed to: Date dispensed Amount To Timothy Oliver Oct 14, 1843 21.70 To Timothy Oliver Dec 14, 1843 13.95 To Timothy Oliver Mar 18, 1844 65.10 To Timothy Oliver Oct 11, 1844 37.80 To Timothy Oliver Mar 14, 1845 60.00 To Wm Daniels Nov 4 1845 26.80 To Wm Daniels, March 4 1846 – Mar 13 80.40 To Wm Daniels Nov 2, 1846 12.80 To Wm Daniels Nov 5, 1846 28.80 To Wm Daniels Apr 10, 1847 64.00

Figure 6.1. Amounts dispensed to Talcott Street Congregational Church Treasurers for the South African School during Ann Plato’s tenure as its teacher. Seth Terry, Book of Estates Agencies Trusts, 1825–1857. The Connecticut Historical Society. 124 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Essays in her role as a teacher. I will summarize its valuable contents pertaining to her: namely, that she remained associated with Pennington’s church from 1841 to 1847 and taught at the South African School, held on the premises of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church located in Hartford’s second district at 37 Elm Street. This school, often referred to as the Elm Street School, was one of the city’s two schools for colored children, and she is specifically listed as its teacher from 1843 to 1847 (Augustus Washington taught at the Talcott Street School). Prior to Rev. Thomas Robbins of Hartford’s School Society making his inspection and observation tours of all the city’s schools and rendering the most acknowledged report on Ann Plato as a teacher, the Connecticut Courant published a Common School Report in its 8 March 1845 biweekly Supplement to the Courant that includes a description of the Second Colored School. By category for all schools, we find each school’s location, physical dimensions, and character; furniture; teacher; pupils; books and classroom manner; and length of school term. Submitted by Robert R. Raymond, one of the two public school subcommittee members charged in April 1844 with inspecting all its schools, we find for the Elm Street School: “The school has been for about a year, under the care of Miss Ann Plato; has been teaching, in all, 3 years; Salary $120.”51 Subsequent to each school’s report are paragraphs of “Notes” describing their conditions and offering remedies for improvement. For the two colored schools, Raymond commented: “the attention of the community is thus called to the inadequate provision made for educating this class of our citizens.” No criticism was offered of Plato’s teaching, but the report noted irregular attendance and went on to quote Pennington’s concerns about two districts. Plato taught forty-seven pupils of ages four to sixteen in the “North room” of the church basement, which was “24 by 20 ft. in dimension and is lighted and ventilated by 3 windows”; its “accommodations . . . are miserable” and she had to use the “merest shingle” of a blackboard. It was worse than the Talcott Street school, and neither had the advantages of the white schools. The following details were reported for Plato’s school:

Reading, 4 classes, all the pupils; books, Testament, National Precep- tor, Child’s Guide, Webster’s Spelling Book. Arithmetic, 5 classes, 14 pupils; books, Daboll, Smith, White, Davies; Geography, 3 classes, 12 pupils, books, Smith and Olney.—Grammar, 3 classes, 8 pupils, Smith’s. Spelling, 4 classes, all the pupils, Webster’s. Writing, 21 pupils. Philosophy, 1 pupil, Comstock’s. Singing, by rote, every Wednesday afternoon.52

To the chagrin of biographers, of all the teachers in the public system’s fourteen schools, Plato was one of five whose ages were not identified; however, in the report’s summary, Raymond’s colleague William A. Alcott mentions two Schooling: Some Speculations; Teaching: Some Records 125

key indicators relevant to her. Under section “II. Teachers,” he gives twenty- three as the average age of the eight districts’ teachers; in the “III. Methods of Instruction” category, where he comments that “Grammar, Geography, and History,” followed by arithmetic, are not taught well throughout the schools, “Philosophy (thanks to a certain authoress, herself a teacher) is taught a little better.”53 This “Philosophy” was from Comstock, or Comstock’s Philosophy, the standard text mentioned earlier. Raymond and Alcott appear to have completed their inspections by the end of 1844, and if Miss Ann Plato is the Miss Plato who is forty-six in Iowa’s 1870 census, she would have been, in 1844, twenty or twenty-one, within the median ages for the average of 23, and she would have been teaching since the end of 1841 at the earliest, probably as an assistant at the Talcott Street (North African) School. The instructional acumen in philosophy by “an authoress” merely neglects to say how extraordinary the reporters must have found her to be compared with other teachers. This “authoress” would have had to have been Plato; none of the other thirteen teachers appears to have published a book.54

Figure 6.2. Ann Plato: Invitation to Dr. Robins (sic), to attend the examination of the South District School. N.D. [early May 1846]. Thomas Robbins Collection, 1792–1852. Thomas Robbins School Papers box. Folder: Connecticut: Ann Plato and Augustus Washington material. Unnumbered folder, 7. Photocopied by the author from the Col- lection. The Connecticut Historical Society. 126 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Robbins commented five times on Plato’s classes; four of the comments were made after his requisite visits in 1845 on March 22, July 3, October 16, and December 18. Writing of this last visit, he acknowledged the shortage of books and the absentees but described Plato and her pupils favorably: “The teacher takes pains, & is pretty well qualified. She has taught some time . . . well qualified, with some want of patience. Religious exercises . . . The Read- ing & spelling is fair. Writing, good . . . The school much changed. A hope of progress.”55 This is a positive composite review, referring to her high level of qualification for teaching and her hard work to get her pupils to learn. Plato’s ability to improve the classroom atmosphere was duly noted by Robbins. I doubt that he is being exceptionally patronizing in his reports. Robbins’s remarks combined with the note by the inspectors about her authorship reveal that hers was a high-quality form of instruction in the city’s schools. Two undated correspondences by Plato to Robbins survive, both inviting him to witness her scholars’ exhibitions. They are from 1846, and one reads:

Here transcribed:

There will be a public Exhibition of the second colored School in Elm, St. church on Wednesday evening. Doors open at half past six, o’clock. Exercises commencing at seven. In connection with this, there will be an Examination in the vestry of said church, on said day; commencing at half past ten in the morning. Dr. Robins is respectfully invited to attend.

By order of the committee

A. Plato. Teacher

This invitation would have been written after Wednesday, 6 May, for the exhibition took place the following Wednesday, 13 May, and attracted a favorable review, which was printed in the 21 May 1846 issue (a Tuesday) of The Charter Oak, the Hartford-based antislavery weekly newspaper, yet it never mentions Ann Plato as teacher for the “South District Colored School, held in Zion’s Church, on Elm st. [sic].” The editors of the Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin, in which this article was reprinted in 1974, did not include David O. White’s endnote citing the reporter or reporters’ article, leaving it simply titled “Exhibition.”56 Plato addressed the second similar invitation to “Dr. Robins” regarding an “Examination . . . , tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock,” to be followed by an exhibition that evening. She may have wanted to alert Robbins to the emended time for the morning examination. Schooling: Some Speculations; Teaching: Some Records 127

Figure 6.3. Ann Plato: Invitation to Dr. Robins (sic), to attend the public Exhibition and Examination of the Second Colored School in Elm St. Church. N.D. [12 May 1846]. Thomas Robbins Collection, 1792–1852. Thomas Robbins School Papers box. Folder: Connecticut: Ann Plato and Augustus Washington material. Unnumbered folder, 7. Photocopied by the author from the Collection. The Connecticut Historical Society.

On the following day, Robbins wrote in his diary: “Visited Miss Plato’s colored school. Doing well.”57 Geer’s Hartford City Directory lists Ann Plato as a teacher but does not give a residence for her in its 1845, 1846, and 1847 editions, which were printed annually on 1 May for the forthcoming year. This identifies her as residing at the school.58 Isaac N. Bolles’s New Directory and Guide Book for the City of Hartford never lists Ann Plato (or Alfred Plato) but does list Rev. Pennington from 1842 to 1847, its last year before being published by J. Gaylord Wells. The paper trail on Ann Plato stops at 1847. The manner in which Thomas Robbins describes finding the school closed when he visits during spring does not bear any awareness of irrevocable closure or the need for Ann Plato to be replaced as teacher. It is still “Miss Plato’s class.” Robbins’s description suggests momentary inactivity, not dormancy or a suspension of teaching. After Robbins’s inspection visit that spring and after the publication in May of Geer’s annual directory, Ann Plato is unaccounted for as Ann Plato, and any more knowledge of her public occupation as Ann Plato, “teacher” and author of prose and poetry, also ends. 128 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Ann Plato was an extraordinary educator. Essays, not just for its categorized content but in particular for what she writes that extols education, and her school reports give us a judicious evaluation of her talents. Her schooling details may be opaque; the results produced by them are not. She held her pupils, Mis- sinnuok and black, to high standards, and they thrived under her instruction. Chapter 7

Essays

ᇺᇻᇺ

Publication and Reception of the Book

One has to agree with Williams in her introduction to the Schomburg edition of Essays when she says, “consideration of her work raises more questions than there are available answers.”1 Plato’s book of pieties directing the behavior of devout young Christians was printed by an unnamed Hartford publisher— “Printed for the Author” is stated on the title page—probably at her personal expense. As we find with all three sections of Essays—prose, biographies, and poetry—individual pieces are paged so that they segue directly one after the other, irrespective of opening lines or paragraphs; the contents grouped so closely together would save on cost. A reckoning of this spatial issue indicates that the difference in number of pages would have been negligible had each title begun on its own page. Pennington, Plato’s pastor, who wrote the book’s “To the Reader” preface, dated “June 1st, 1841,” himself saw publication that February of A Text Book of the Origins and History of the Colored People, printed by L. Skinner of Hartford; Skinner may plausibly be assumed to have printed Essays as well, and Pennington may have been Plato’s benefactor due to her youth and gender.2 Christopher L. Webber gives details of Pennington’s rescue of his own manuscript in the wake of the flooding of the Connecticut River in early January 1841.3 In a lengthy footnote that Pennington may have added to his manuscript between its rescue and publication, he quotes himself, apparently from his journal, about a church-seating incident that occurred “on Friday evening last, Jan. 8th,”4 providing a time line for his dates of composition and book preparation. Webber eventually asserts, by way of David O. White, that “among the papers rescued from the flood was the work of another author, . . . of his congregation, . . . a teacher in the other school. . . . Ann Plato.” White never

129 130 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity mentions a flood and only states that Essays was published “with Pennington’s help.” Nowhere else do we find an association between Plato’s manuscript and any danger it faced except in Webber, and although Pennington interceded for her book, he left no specific record of doing so.5 He would have liked the potential readership of her book, for consistent with the era’s desire for instructional reading material, of which there is plenty in Essays, he directs his Text Book to “families, students and lecturers in history.”6 Essays is a slight volume; the dimensions of its cover are approximately 5 15/16 inches from top to bottom and 4 1/8 inches wide. It and Pennington’s book are virtually identical in physical size and font, except that the font for A Text Book’s introduction is slightly smaller; Plato’s book contains 122 page enumerations to Pennington’s 96, and his book has wider margins. Essays, however, suffers from two page numbering flaws and title discrepancies, either from poor editing or from a sloppy page layout by the printer. It has no pages 31 and 32, although the text is continuous. The “Contents” page and some listings contain discrepancies. The subject of one biography has two variant surname spellings: in the table of contents we find Louisa Seabury, but heading the actual biography is Louisa Sebury. The table of contents also identifies the first poem, “Advice to Young Ladies,” as beginning on page 66, an obvious error; the actual page 66 is the middle of her essay “Residence in the Coun- try.” The page for the poem of note is unnumbered, because it commences the “Poetry” section. Placing Pennington’s “To the Reader” as first in the “Prose” section instead of as a separate section implies that Plato is its author. Readers will then discover, once they have read Pennington’s introduction, that Plato’s section of essays is not just “Prose” as found at the start, but a section called “Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose.” Perhaps readers will appreciate that the second poem listed in the table of contents was given the truncated form of “On examination for a Teacher,” characterized by the lower-case “e,” when on its page the title is “Lines,” (comma in the original) with the lengthy epigrammatic subtitle, “Written upon being examined in school studies for the preparation of a Teacher.” The poem “To my Infant Class” as found in the table of contents is simply “The Infant Class” on its page, and “Daughter’s Inquiry of her Father’s Absence” is, in the section, simply “Daughter’s Inquiry.” By not capitalizing initial letters of some nouns in titles, either Plato or whoever oversaw the editing and printing process adhered to a Renaissance-era style. “L. Skinner” would be Lewis Skinner, who, with partner William Hud- son, ran a printing business in Hartford, Hudson & Skinner, which had been active since the 1820s. Under the imprint of L. Skinner, Gardner’s Hartford City Directory for 1839 and 1841 lists him as Lewis Skinner, printer, suggesting the partnership was no longer active.7 L. Skinner printed one of Lydia Sigourney’s books of verse in 1839. Books published by F. J. Huntington, for example, car- Essays 131

ried the company’s seal at the bottom of the page and identified the printer. The number of copies of Essays is unknown, but 103 libraries today hold print copies of the original book, including seven in Canada and one in New Zealand.8 No notices announcing Essays and what it cost appeared in contemporary newspapers, journals for women, or periodicals supporting the abolitionist cause, but the price of twenty-five to thirty-five cents per single book persisted in the nineteenth century. Noticeably missing is any mention in The Colored American, the New York City–based newspaper that had published one of Pla- to’s poems, “Lines, Written Upon Visiting the Grave of a Venerated Friend,” in its 5 September 1840 issue, and that occasionally announced the publication of new books.9 There is no reason to absolve Pennington from not putting forth an announcement except for his interest in the Mendi Amistad case, and as a former teacher at the Talcott Street school, Amos G. Beman would also have been in a position to give her book encouraging attention. But if Essays was published late in 1841, any announcement of it risked not ever appearing in The Colored American, for due to the inability of subscribers to help sustain the newspaper, publication ceased at the end of December. By 1841, Natives and African Americans as peoples had gained a nascent authorship. Today’s college literature students may know of early African American writers; fewer may be aware of Native authors. A growing English literacy benefitting Natives and blacks produced Essays. The motivations for this writing did not include imaginative romances. Essays typifies the utilitarian function of authorship to instruct and improve the lives of its audience that, given the makeup of Plato’s teaching community, would be Native as well as black—and it could be universal. And we should not have difficulties with Plato for sociopolitical restraint if we view her as a religious writer casting herself in the “true womanhood” of her times or even for taking herself too seriously and avoiding political concerns to pursue heaven’s rewards. Ultimately, Essays did not go unreviewed. Seven years after its publication, the editor of the The Knickerbocker. or New-York Monthly Magazine gave it a snarky and condescending appraisal in “The Editor’s Table” section, although he did find some things about it he liked. He opens with “We have laughed ‘somedele’ over [this] little volume . . . sent us by a friend in Hartford (Conn.),” noting that it was printed in 1841.10 He goes on to say that Pennington’s “preface . . . is only less original and sparkling than the contents of the volume itself” and proceeds to quote passages from it. Focusing on the poetry, he proclaims (with parentheses), “this (with the exception of two stolen and unacknowledged stanzas from Manrique,) is evidently her own, which is much more than can be said of her prose; for that is a compound of her own interpolations into fragments of various moral essays and ‘advices’ of Mrs. Sigourney. Miss Plato was a thinker.” He praises her poetry as reaching higher than colored poets Pancko and Abram Gaul, samples of whose work were known to the maga- 132 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity zine’s readers.11 He begins his poetical analysis with “Advice to Young Ladies,” as it has the “ ‘place of honor’ ” in the collection, and renders all its six stanzas. He finds it “Kindling” and original, venturing that Longfellow’s “ ‘Evangeline’ would have suggested to her mind that Mr. Pennington would doubtless call the ‘colored hexameter.’ ” What does he mean by this by this pomposity, given that Evangeline was published in 1847? And what is a “colored hexameter”? The editor’s “Messrs. Post and Lemon,” poets, “could hardly excel the following,” he says, quoting the third and last stanza of “The Dismissal of a School Term,” which, he reminds the reader, is “a negro school term.” He attributes Plato’s verb tense and grammatical carelessness, to which she “pays no regard,” to “ ‘the glow of composition,’ ” a “ ‘mixed’ style” rendered in stanzas two, three, seven, and eight of “The True Friend,” which he refrains from describing further. Meanwhile, “Miss Plato is great on the ‘colored elegy’ ” such as “To the Memory of Gusteen [sic].” Completing the poem examples with lines 21–36 of “The Natives of America,” he says, in a tone of surprise, “The black ‘Platoess’ is speaking through the mouth of a ‘red man.’ ”12 The closing paragraph hopes that “no friend of our ‘dark brethren’ ” will thus accuse the magazine of “underrating ‘colored genius,’ ” appealing in liberal magazine editor language to Gaul, Pancko, and Miss Plato, as they have been unfairly represented. The magazine learned of Pancko’s gratitude, yet, in the editor’s closing salvo, he says, “It will be a cloudy period in this country’s history when the sable poet shall not be permitted to diffuse a ray. . . . ‘Honor,’ say we, ‘honor to “colored gen’us!”’ ”13 Intending no bias toward the other two, Pancko for his patriotic war poem and Gaul for his light verse, putting Plato with their one example each is clearly patronizing, no matter how innocently the editor presents his case. Once we get past his smirking and his standard insulting language, we can see that the Knickerbocker Magazine gave Ann Plato’s poems serious attention, supporting both book and author. We must be careful, however; first of all, the editor could be extolling the book because it is “good enough” for a “colored” poet, and second, he is not as widely read or knowledgeable about poetry as his pompous comments suggest; although he recognized Plato’s prose debt to Sigourney, he missed those poets Plato otherwise interpolated into her poems. Chapter 8

Essays and Lydia Sigourney ᇺᇻᇺ

The Poetics of Borrowing

Hartford gave Ann Plato the unparalleled advantage of proximity to one of the most prolific and widely acclaimed authors of the 1830s: Lydia Sigourney. Whether or not the two women ever met is unknown; there seems to be no extant correspondence between them nor can any reference to Plato by the older writer be found. Simply put, we know that the professional Sigourney had an admirer in the girlish writing aspirant because two of her books served Plato with ideas and unquestionable resonance: Letters to Young Ladies, in its fourth edition in 1837; and The Girl’s Reading Book, in Prose and Poetry, for Schools, first published in 1838. The former provided Plato with a deepened philosophical foundation for her budding career as a teacher and offered a broad parameter for the spirit of the prose in Essays. The Girl’s Reading Book served as a direct formalistic template; that it was the principal model for Essays’ organizational structure there can be no doubt. Its subtitle, the arrangement of its contents, and the substance of much of those contents bore obvious rhetorical and ethical appeal. Letters to Young Ladies was conceivably used by Plato because its contents offer a synthesis of good female citizenship on which to draw; The Girl’s Reading Book is the scientific laboratory for prose replication, experimentation, and growth. Plato’s extended title, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry, resembles that of Sigourney’s first book, Moral Pieces, in Prose and Verse (1815). For all her borrowing and interpolating of lines by other poets, Sigourney is the writer from whom Plato jumps into the authorship experience. To her credit, Plato avoids slavish imitation of Sigourney’s ideas and thoroughgoing exactness of rhetorical execution, yet she borrows from Sigourney in an act

133 134 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity of unwitting intertextual mentorship, following a practice of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prose and verse poetics. The influence of Mary Wollstone- craft on nineteenth-century women thinkers and authors in England and the United States can be seen in the aforementioned Sigourney books, in particular Wollstonecraft’s writings on the education of young women (a fuller discussion would be too layered for this study).1 Perhaps, indeed, Plato relied too heavily on The Girl’s Reading Book and other Sigourney works, which were not easy to avoid because of their ubiquity. To overly indulge in this intertextual practice puts any writer at risk of presenting a faux identity, and Plato replicates several prose passages, phrases, and sentences verbatim from that book. The two authors differ most starkly in that Plato names only male achievers throughout her discourses, unlike Sigourney, who identifies female achievers, and by name. For a young author who is said to be writing for girls, Plato’s oversight, if that is how her omission of women of achievement can be assessed, is most strange, especially in light of her women poet role models, but it may reflect the fact that she had been taught by someone who promoted male thinking as the status quo in intellectual advancement. Repetitions and similarities in titles for books and their individual contents characterize the Romantic period’s literary discourse and reading communities. Writing about these communities on different sides of the Atlantic, Anne Mellor, Kathleen Clay Bassard, and Stephen Behrend, adhering to differing critical foci, tacitly agree about such communities, where literary exchange prevailed between experienced and aspiring writers and poets. Behrend offers a useful insight: “works [emanating] from [Romantic-era England] were often characterized by a complex and sophisticated intertextuality that was apparent to contemporary readers,”2 with, to quote Mellor, women active “ ‘in the same discursive public sphere and in the same formation of public opinion as [were] their male peers.’ ”3 Considering the books by various authors that she read, Plato conceivably watched editions of each book come to life after their initial publications. The twelve editions in four years of The Girl’s Reading Book attest to its author’s enormous popularity as a writer about the domestic realm and the appeal her topics held for young female readers. By strength of reputation, Sigourney could find outlets with the fledgling Harper & Brothers in New York and with J. Orville Taylor, a Philadelphia publisher, and publishers in Manhattan would eagerly issue subsequent editions of The Girl’s Reading Book, such as the twelfth edition of 1841, which was published by Clement & Packard.4 With Essays, Plato, youthful and religiously impressionable, offered a contrast through her earnest literary countenance and the fatalistic orientation of her vision. Sigourney provided her opening of Letters to Young Ladies with a challenge that Plato could admire without taking up its pungency. “Address to Essays and Lydia Sigourney 135

the Guardians of Female Education,” definitely imbued with Wollstonecraft, implored those overseers to loosen the limitations they continued to impose on young women becoming educated, as many more were becoming teachers, and women’s education deserved an “increase of benefits.” Being (or having the potential to be) mothers, they were the primary shapers of “the structure and development of mind.” Theirs was a natural place in education.5 This essay address embodied sentiments about the mission of teaching that the younger writer would find natural to embrace for the future. The following comment, the basis for Sigourney’s “Easy Studies” in The Girl’s Reading Book, may plausibly be said to have lent moral weight to Plato’s adaptation of that essay for her own “Two School Girls.”

In our own republic, man, invested by his Maker with the right to reign, has conceded to her, who was for ages in vassalage, equality of intercourse, participation in knowledge, dominion over his dearest and fondest hopes. . . . Yet, from the very felicity of her lot, dangers are generated. She is tempted to be satisfied with superficial attainments, or to indulge in that indolence which corrodes intellect, and merges the high sense of responsibility by its alluring and fatal slumbers.6

That “sloth and luxury should have no place in her vocabulary” would have appealed to Plato’s sensibility and personal standards.7 In following Sigourney’s Girl’s Reading Book as a template for Essays, Plato did admit of some differences. She has sixteen essays to Sigourney’s thirty; she placed her four biographies in a separate section, dovetailed to the main section of prose, whereas Sigourney added four biographies to twenty-six topical essays. The Girl’s Reading Book contains thirty poems; Essays, twenty. The similarities do not stop with the arrangement. Each author’s essays are similar in length, with some of Sigourney’s being slightly longer, as are her biographies. Her female subjects, all authors born in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, are beyond the need of being eulogized, but both authors call attention to their subjects’ respective achievements and sacrifices. For Plato, admiration attends her four as they die young, giving them a martyrdom brought on by the scourge of ill health. Of minor but coincidental interest, two biography subjects share an uncanny surname resonance: Sigourney’s Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, born in 1674 in England, and Plato’s Elizabeth Low, born in Cooperstown, New York in 1818. Sixteen essays and no poems, meanwhile, constitute Letters to Young Ladies. I offer here selected examples of Sigourney-to-Plato works, there being so many. Plato uses essay titles “Education” and “Obedience,” as does Sigourney in 136 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

The Girl’s Reading Book, as well as “Religion” and “Benevolence,” as in Sigour- ney’s Letters to Young Ladies; and she deployed thematically similar titles elsewhere. With The Girl’s Reading Book being her greater attraction, Plato draws her “Lessons from Nature” essay from Sigourney’s “Lessons in the Fields”; the opening of “Two School Girls” is similar to that of “Easy Studies”; and in one cross-genre variation, she casts Sigourney’s essay “The True Friend” as a poem. “Education” opens Sigourney’s book and is Plato’s second essay after “Religion.” From Sigourney’s fifth essay, Plato adroitly takes her image of the weeping willow, although she does not acknowledge having taken the quote from Sigourney’s “The Boy and His Garden”: “Tree, why art thou always sad and drooping?”; at the end, “Then said an author” is her effacing allusion to the senior writer. Sigourney’s essay “The Summer Sun,” extolling the wonders of her subject, finds Ann Plato opening her essay “Employment of Time” by, again, alluding to “a celebrated author [says] many persons lose two to three hours every day for the want of employing odd minutes.” By that she means Sigourney’s Benjamin Franklin, but when she identifies him by name in her third paragraph, the fiscal dimension of time is her image. For her “Lessons from Nature,” Plato draws rhetorically on Sigourney’s “The Poor” and “Early Recollections.” In a final example, Plato adds a three-paragraph preamble to “Residence in the Country” before executing passages from Sigourney’s “The Happy Family.” She writes: “I once passed several weeks in the family of a farmer,” not “months,” as Sigourney writes, and: “It was one of the most pleasant, and useful visits I ever had made,” wherein she substitutes “useful” for Sigourney’s “profitable.” Compare the exemplary alignments:

The Girl’s Reading Book Essays Sigourney Plato

I once passed several months in I once passed several weeks in the family of a farmer. It was to me the family of a farmer. It was one one of the most pleasant, and profit- of the most useful visits I ever had able visits I ever had made. For I saw made. I ever saw, that industry, con- continually around me, that industry, tentment, and economy which consti- economy, and contentment, which tutes every happy household. . . . make every rational household hap- The whole family rose before py. . . . The whole family rose before the sun. . . . the sun. [Sigourney’s farmer makes The mother superintended all no breakfast prayer like Plato’s.] . . . that concerned them. Masses of yarn Masses of yarn, assorted to its vari- were assorted to prepare stockings for ous texture and destination. . . . The the father and brothers. mother superintended all that concerned them. Essays and Lydia Sigourney 137

Distinguishing the younger writer from her senior model is the former’s restraint and lack of humor. Sigourney believed that “cheerfulness is expected of the young. It is the natural temperament of life’s brightest season.”8 If Ann Plato responded to this Letters to Young Ladies chapter, “Cheerfulness,” containing those two sentences, her feelings were not manifested in any of those of her essays connected with education, religion, or various other achievements; these essays do not advise her readers to heed the unacknowledged Sigourney’s advice to “form a habit of being cheerful under adverse circumstances.”9 Plato contained her bliss and serenity—in short, her ability to muse whimsically about the ordinary. In “Description of a Desert,” her tone is admonishingly serious, perhaps understandably so, as she draws her reader’s attention to a Saharan disaster; Sigourney asks young women to be grateful for the water they take for granted; water that would be greatly appreciated by caravan traveler and camel.10 Both authors mention Sir William Jones, with Sigourney identifying his multilingual proclivities in “Value of Time”11; Plato, in turn, calls attention in “Education” to his having listened to his mother’s advice to dedicate himself to reading. From here on, I will concentrate on the issue hectoring the reader: doesn’t Plato’s use of Sigourney constitute plagiarism? It seems no close reading of these texts need be indulged. What is the nature of plagiarism? What forms does it take? And to what extent do intertextuality and heteroglossia mediate accusations and defenses of this kind of literary craft, which today is highly reprehensible? Cut-and-dried cases of plagiarism notwithstanding, legal dispositions occasionally seem capriciously applied, if not with outright bias. I want to distinguish how Plato’s borrowing as compositional craft in the nineteenth century could be rationalized in terms of how writers of that century rendered their borrowing and what ensued as interpretations of their practice. Bassard’s Spiritual Interrogations positions Plato in a writing community with Phillis Wheatley as the role model and enabler. If nothing more, Plato had a plethora of Sigourney works upon which to draw, and for an aspiring teacher, the immediacy of The Girl’s Reading Book provided an appropriate source of emulation. Intertextuality not being simple imitation, legal issues loom over the appropriations of text passages. Implicitly agreeing with Chad Edgar (2001) and Laura Mandell (2002), Behrend, considering the practice in English Romanticism, views the intertextuality-as-plagiarism issue from the standpoint of the politics of book reviewing, wherein critics were more preoccupied with the practice than writers themselves; writers expected disclaimers by “offend- ing” authors.12 A literary community of writers must have perceived that it could dictate its own parameters and protect its own. Edgar interprets this kind of plagiarism as “benevolent”13; Mandell, on the other hand, believes that the “productive consumption” women poets engaged in was less to demonstrate their professionalism than to display their educational acumen.14 In a display of 138 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity discretion, Plato used quotation marks for her passages from The Girl’s Reading Book but without identifying Sigourney. Conceivably, the discretion would have absolved her from negative reaction by Sigourney or her publishers; at the same time, learning about the youth of the author of Essays and her presumed relative poverty as a young woman of color would have caused Sigourney to forego a legal entanglement. In no extant Sigourney correspondence between 1841 and 1850 is there mention or allusion to Essays or its author.15 Plato’s motivations for copying particular passages verbatim from Sigour- ney are opaque, and today’s literary historians may view them as more disturbing than the concerns Behrend, Mandell, and others have described. The appropriations of text within literary (or, as James E. Porter and Behrend call them, “discourse”) communities seem to be the truest form of imitator flattery.16 Examples proliferate. In Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories, Tillie Olsen provides one passage in her “Biographical Interpretation” that, she says, Rebecca Harding Davis freely copied from Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, adding in an endnote that such quotations “appear throughout Rebecca’s writings.”17 Many writers indulged in this dialogical practice, a saying-with or saying-back that has become a successful paraphrasing technique in today’s classroom small-group sessions.18 Romantic-era poets of both genders read and responded to each other; even Byron, Behrend adds parenthetically, “engaged both Hemans and [Letitia Elizabeth] Landon.”19 To pose a glib and rhetorical question, from a liberal vantage today, would one of British Romanti- cism’s major male poets borrowing from two female poets affirm the practice as acceptable? Plato would have realized the ethics of engaging Sigourney as well as Wheatley, Wordsworth, Hemans, Opie, Longfellow, and Charlotte Turner Smith. If she was naïve about intertextual engagement, she learned quickly enough to use quotation marks. And she was smart enough to proceed in her own directions after rendering most of these borrowed passages. She sacrificed considerable originality by borrowing from other writers and risked her literary integrity. Naïve adolescence can be offered as her reason for engaging her role models directly or with minor adjustments. Plato’s thematic trajectory in fact allows readers to follow life from school years to old age. Sigourney refrains from adhering to this. Copying and paraphrasing as she does, Plato never abandons her religious foundation, expressing Christian tenets throughout her book. Sigourney registers a more secular contrast, one superficially pedestrian in substance. Their functional similarities notwithstanding, these publications stand as complementary conduct books stressing female intellectual improvement and married to the kind of religion and education openly expressed by Plato. Despite Plato placing in quotation marks the passages she used from Sigourney, strict readings of Essays and interpretations of what Plato did will Essays and Lydia Sigourney 139

raise the specter of plagiarism, and this can instigate a theory that she has a ten- dency to expropriate lines and phrases from Sigourney’s prose and from other writers’ poems. Readers who apply twenty-first century standards of plagiarism and ideas about how to deal with it misapprehend Plato’s intertextual uses of her models. That her process resembles the rife student plagiarisms of the twenty-first century is ironic, considering her stated preparation for teaching, yet scholarly and legal inquiry into the nineteenth-century practice of borrowing supports it as not plagiaristic. In describing what he finds to be historical swings in temperament concerning plagiarism among nineteenth-century Brit- ish authors, Robert Macfarlane personally views the practice as “both an ethical infringement, and an aesthetic one,” although he recognizes it as inextricable from the creation of a poem.20 We thus cannot objectively read Plato’s derivations from Sigourney for the essays in her book. Laws in the United States protecting copyright early in the nineteenth century may appear lax by our standards. About English writers and publishers, much ink has described and mitigated literary borrowings by Coleridge and Shelley. Although literary historians of the Romantic era have, under post- structuralist influence, examined discourse community relationships in England, little has been written about contemporaneous practices in the United States, one notable exception (for African American women) being Bassard’s research. Examining dispositions from two nineteenth-century plagiarism court cases should help put Ann Plato’s borrowings in perspective and allay any challenge to her reputation that might arise. The first, from 1845, is Emerson v. Davies, et al. (8 F. Cas. 615), a Massachusetts case in which mathematician Frederick Emerson claimed that Charles Davies plagiarized his (Emerson’s) book The North American Arithmetic: Part First, first published in 1829. U.S. Supreme Court Judge Joseph Story, in one of his last decisions, ruled against the defendant, who did not deny reading the book before writing his own First Les- sons in Arithmetic (1840).21 This case never attracted as much attention as did the accusations against and debates about Ellen G. White for plagiarism that have spanned the twentieth century, but it was among the one thousand legal cases an attorney consulted in the course of studying the accusations against White. A Seventh-day Adventist, Ellen G. White (1827–1915) was born in Maine and raised a Methodist. To many in and outside that denomination who have read her books, she is still considered a prophetess, just as she was when she was alive. Two of her books, published after 1850, are central to accusations that, it should be noted, did not go to court during her lifetime or later: her The Great Controversy, first published in 1858, was excoriated in 1889 by Dudley Marvin Canright, a Seventh-day Adventist minister, which initiated a debate that lasted more than a century; another lightning-rod publication, The Desire of Ages, appeared in 1898. In 1981, the Ellen G. White estate, burdened by the reputation of her alleged plagiarism, hired a law firm, Diller, Ramik & Wight, 140 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Ltd., of Washington, DC, with senior partner Vincent L. Ramik the principal investigator, to put accusations to rest. Ramik’s findings exonerated White.22 A distinction about White’s usage of other printed books holds interest for our interpretion of Plato’s use of Sigourney: it has to do with whether the usage, or “plagiarism,” has a religious and spiritual public benefit or a literary, creative one. In a conference presentation in 2005, Seventh-day Adventist theologian, scholar, and reputable Ellen G. White expert Jerry Moon of Andrews Univer- sity, a Seventh-day Adventist institution in Michigan, reminded his audience that what essentially constitutes plagiarism for religious purposes was common in the nineteenth century. “Religious writers of [the early nineteenth century] were . . . less scrupulous about crediting quotations, because their goal was not for personal profit, but to advance the kingdom of God, and they felt that excess documentation would distract the reader from the spiritual purpose of the publication.” Furthermore, as Moon claimed that White herself opined, God and Jesus are the owners of all things; man down through the ages has only repeated or paraphrased doctrine established by the Almighty.23 Canright had vigorously opposed such a rationale and accused White of fraud. If we accept Moon’s interpretation about the religious intent of borrowing, such intent would certainly distinguish the topical essays in Plato’s book. It should, and probably does, rationalize her interpolations in poetry as we proceed from Bassard’s Bakhtinian intertextual discussion of Plato’s use of Wheatley, first identified by Kenny G. Williams, to include Julia Kristeva’s heteroglossia. Meanwhile, Ramik’s investigation and the thousand cases he vetted unearthed no charge by Sigourney of plagiarism by Plato. Let us consider three reasons for this, beginning with Sigourney realizing how pointless it would be to take to court a nonetheless intelligent and clever adolescent of a colored Congrega- tional parish or, second, Sigourney realizing or learning that the print run for Essays was too small for serious concern, or, third, Sigourney possibly being flattered by Plato’s appropriating her Girl’s Reading Book in order to disseminate ideas of propriety among girls of color. As Essays was published in Hartford, where Sigourney sustained her own literary reputation, Sigourney may well have eventually encountered a copy of Essays; she was interested in abolitionist causes, female education, and the plight of the “vanishing Indian.” The authorial relationship between the two women is younger-to-experienced and remains opaque. Sigourney’s liberal relationship in the 1830s with a black serving woman, Ann Prince, which as described might smack of condescension, might lead one to conclude that she may have been bemused by Essays. By proposing Ann Plato as a religious writer, not just an author of commonplace bromides about piety, we can mitigate the question of how she used Sigourney and perhaps why she did so. The bigger, lingering issue involves the morality of plagiarism and how Plato may have understood it when writing the prose for Essays. The moral standards implicit and explicit in her book would Essays and Lydia Sigourney 141 rule against her indulging in any form of literary deception or deliberate plagiarism, leading us to accept that plagiarizing in nineteenth-century America had an inconsistent life among litigants and an ambiguous role in print culture, however we regard Moon’s interpretation for religious texts. We have to theorize about Plato’s appropriations of the essays in The Girl’s Reading Book. Plato was an adolescent when this Sigourney book was published. The Girl’s Reading Book would have been one of her personal and pedagogical readings, probably required of her as part of her teacher training. When she borrowed from Sigourney, she would have considered that any “successful improvement” of borrowed material, what critic Tilar J. Mazzeo identifies as “ ‘poetical’ plagiarism” among the British Romantics (in contrast to “ ‘culpable’ plagiarism”), aided a writer in avoiding the charge of illegitimate usage. In regard to improvement, Mazzeo says, “it was sufficient to alter the context of the borrowed work, which could include extending the idea, adding new examples or ‘illustrations,’ or seamlessly integrating the borrowed text into the voice or style of one’s own production.”24 Without question, Plato deployed her Sigourney passages for the religious teachings that imbued her book’s examples. Plato accomplished this poetical improvement by taking out the third and sixth lines from the “stolen and unacknowledged” Manrique stanzas in “Cop- las de Manrique,” a fifteenth-century elegy translated by Longfellow, resulting in their better narrative flow. Borrowing text is a form of text analysis and compositional revision for contextual reapplication. The borrower must find explicit value in another’s work in whole or in part—a gesture of flattery, if you will. Plato rendered her chosen passages to suit her personal literary authorial preferences, and in doing so, she had to have analyzed passages in order to replicate, modify, or interpolate them into her own composition. That the Knickerbocker Magazine editor used language that made it clear he could identify expropriation of Sigourney but proceeded to praise Plato affirms that plagiarism as we understand it today was, at least among poets, acceptable and not a cause for litigation. Expropriated usage, despite the inclusion of a title or theme or both similar to her source, would improve Plato’s original by recontextualizing some or all of its original components of composition. In this case, absurd as it may sound, Essays “improves” The Girl’s Reading Book’s secular lessons by giving Sigourney’s discourse Plato’s spiritual dimension.

Chapter 9

The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics ᇺᇻᇺ

In the sixteen essays that open her book, Ann Plato projects the fullest account- ing of her general knowledge as it informs and relies upon her Christian devotion. Their rhetorical landscape in fact affirms Essays as a conduct book for the middle of the nineteenth century and thus can be seen to have been drawn from a template of early nineteenth-century didactic writing. Kathryn Suther- land’s essay about this literary subgenre in Britain, “Writings on Education and Conduct: Arguments for Female Improvement,” acknowledges Nancy Arm- strong’s influential study, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987), in association with Sutherland’s consideration of conduct books as key reading material for women coming into middle-class refinement. As Sutherland puts it, this eighteenth-century model invoked a “ ‘grammar’ of female subjectivity . . . in order to establish the desired domestic relations and practices of an apparently non-political private sphere. . . . The conduct book is about the creation of coherent identity, and the middle-class female as its representative.”1 Some of Sutherland’s points about social status are useful when contextually applied with Plato in mind. Otherwise, adding to the influence on Plato of Sigourney’s popular The Girl’s Reading Book (1838), we find a New York State educator recommending that Sigourney write “a work of didactic instruction—narrative and poetry—adapted to the use of the young of my own sex during their progress in scholastic education.”2 In the short pieces in Essays that are the subject of this chapter, Plato’s derivations exhibit the mimetic acumen consistent among her contemporaries and the ability, perhaps prompted by a tutor, that Plato had to depart into her own rhetorical and narrative forays.

143 144 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Eschewing, in her book, political consciousness and social status for religion’s moral code of conduct, Plato demonstrates as much social consciousness as the religious life offers anyone. Her readers, then and today, may question the idea that the persons she refers to as her models of conduct are truly paragons of perseverance; none are commoners—in fact, many emerged from ordinary lives in the European middle class. The New England and Long Island of Plato’s time had a middle class dominated by merchants, artisans, maritime business men, pastors, and school teachers, along with persons of color struggling to take advantage of education, churches, and other amenities their communities might provide. A small critical mass of families of color did subscribe to codes of conduct that would enhance their image among their fellows and for their benefit in the dominant society. Plato, too, was preparing unwittingly to join this middle class as a teacher. Her writings do not patronize white reader attention; if she writes with a general audience in mind, she does so without aggrandizement. As widely read as she was of poets who interested her and of the numerous people she learned about through schooling or self-initiative or both, she followed precepts for developing Essays as her own book of conduct whose principles should be passed on to her readers. This chapter’s first half interprets the content of her essays according to her combined moralisms and mimetic intellectual acumen derived from The Girl’s Reading Book; in the second portion, I concentrate on her rhetorical proclivities to demonstrate that deploying comparisons between pairs is her typical discursive strategy. It is evident that she arranged the sixteen essays according to a life path along the principal thread of what she sees as important and complementary human values: religion and education. Discerning readers should not take for granted that her coupled investment is a contradiction, for “New Divin- ity” values imbue her Calvinism and the ethical results derived from education; realizing some value in the secular as it would guide her toward a profession of service demanded that she pay attention to figures from the classical Greek and Roman eras as exemplars of perseverance and achievement. We can assume that Plato wrote some of her essays during the autumn of 1840, and thus was likely to have encountered a short, anonymously written essay, “Hints to Young Ladies,” in the 21 November issue of The Colored American newspaper, which had published one of her poems several weeks before. This didactic statement, addressed to young women between the ages of sixteen and twenty, admonishes them to avoid the habit of wasting their time during this period of their lives, which is “the prime season for improvement.” Plato would have appreciated the author’s general advice about personal industry, but the aims of such personal improvement in the prospective service of motherhood and being a man’s female companion and eventual spouse are manifest in her essay “Two School Girls.” The generality of its content points to personal improvement through time well spent, and Plato could not deny the wisdom in a series of remarks: The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 145

It is not for want of capacity that so many women are such trifling and insipid companions, so ill qualified for the friendship and conversation with a sensible man, or for the task of instructing or governing a family; it is oftener the neglect of exercising the talents they really have and from omitting to cultivate a taste for intellectual improvement.3

Did Ann Plato write this essay? Probably not; consider that its tone couches its subject in a style more aggressive than Plato’s customary form of address. Besides the arching similarity to her own benevolent advice, stanza three, already noted, of her poem “Advice to Young Ladies” agrees from the point of view of a teacher. But religion is, for Ann Plato, the pragmatic foundation of friendship, and her poem’s remaining three stanzas affirm that attitude, not a young woman’s preparation for the generalities of the domestic sphere. Her young women’s indus- triousness moves education into the realm of piety, not social conversation. Some of her families tend to have an absent or lost parent; the essays “Two School Girls” and “A Residence in the Country” being two exceptions (see the poems “A Mother to Her Fatherless Son” and “Daughter’s Inquiry,” with its departing father, and the biography of Eliza Loomis Sherman). Besides the melodrama modern readers would perceive in single-parent circumstances of righteous families, piety remains the benchmark for any life that jettisons earthly domesticity. God’s benevolence dominates the character and content of these essays, and tempers the image of Ann Plato as a strict and gloomily theocentric Edwards Calvinist misbegotten in the 1800s. Leo P. Hirrel explains that traditional Calvinism was strictly theocentric, with man absolutely dependent upon God and His infinite glory. Jonathan Edwards famously proclaimed man’s condition with the caustic dictum “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” and as his theological disciple Samuel Hopkins emerged, Calvinism took on a sense of New Divinity in which the principle of benevolence, for one, came to be extolled through intellectual and personal spiritual rewards. Hopkins’s reinterpretation of Edwards evolved further in the 1820s, when Congregationalist ministries found in the Reverend Charles Finney’s thought a utilitarian application of benevolence.4 Plato may have heard of or read Charles Grandison Finney’s Lectures to Professing Christians. Finney promoted a benevolence aimed at increasing others’ happiness.5 Most of Finney’s “Lecture 19: Instructions to Converts” is under the subheading “Instructions to Young Converts,” in which Finney reminds youth: “They should not be left to think that anything is their own, their time, property, influence, faculties, bodies or souls.” This expressed his transformed meaning of “disinterested benevolence,” and northern African American ministers, according to Monroe Fordham, espoused this value in their sermons, pairing it with charity as a dual theme.6 Nor should we forget possible sources for Plato’s literary didacticism. Mary Sherwood’s The Infant’s Progress, from the Valley of Destruction to 146 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Everlasting Glory (1821), a Bunyanesque children’s allegory published during the Evangelical Movement in Great Britain, was likely one of these. In her preface, Sherwood advises children to search for meaning after the fashion of a playful yet serious game. As concealed in nature, “there is a hidden meaning in every part of my allegory” that she hopes will prove profitable, as God will “seal instruction upon our hearts, and fill you with that heavenly wisdom.”7 The trajectory of Plato’s essay section follows this guidance, and she does not deviate far from Sherwood emphasizing education for moral and religious benefit,8 yet she is writing nearly two decades after The Infant’s Progress initially appeared and at a time when events of the day, despite her ignoring them in her book, demand more secular interest in order for her very own tenets to help those she would teach. The naïve character of Plato’s rhetoric is evident, for she is sometimes uninformed about history and its personages, reflecting shallow teaching by mentors whose intellectual proclivities either were narrow or who deliberately schooled their prodigy according to what they felt she could absorb. Sigour- ney refrained from offering so many role models in The Girl’s Reading Book, but a possible model for Plato may have been Emerson’s “American Scholar” address in the summer of 1837. His analogies, too, could have demonstrated how to make references useful, planting in listeners and readers an appreciation for intellectual curiosity. Also, Sigourney’s essay arrangement did not follow the kind of life trajectory that characterizes Plato’s fundamental construction. Through close scrutiny, we can find that Plato’s essays extrapolate the intentions and achievements of her named personalities, demonstrating some basic critical engagement. Curiosity, if not suspicion, will always hover over Ann Plato concerning how she learned about the many figures she names and to what extent she knew about them. A precocious adolescent schoolgirl undergoing teacher preparation might be victimized by not having enough time to learn substance over details. Ann Plato assimilated poetry more deeply, her sensibility honed for the kind of rhapsodies inspired by hymnody and prosody. “Religion,” the opening essay in Essays and one of its longest, describes the virtues of a religious Christian life, with Plato presenting her ideas as a mani- festo to promote Christian devotion. Christian devotion and service to others, preoccupying her consciousness, lends the essay less of Sigourney’s comparatively secular tone. The Girl’s Reading Book lacks an essay chapter thematically kindred or so named. Rhetorically, it conveys the revivalist spirit of the Second Great Awakening, which had moved away from Calvinist orthodoxy, whose God was “unknowable, unpredictable, and completely sovereign,” to “produce a god of love and benevolence.”9 Requisite to the strength of one’s faith, however, is a strong intellect, and in that sentiment, Plato characterizes her rhetorical manner. Readers may thus perceive how she correlates piety and the desire for knowledge. Ann Plato encourages the study of science, yet she does not concep- The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 147

tualize scientists such as those in Hawthorne’s tales as men capable of irrational experiments. Essays explicitly demonstrates the role of religion in clarifying and training the mind. “Religion” duly serves as a précis for the rest of the book, even with The Girl’s Reading Book as her intermittent rhetorical guide but thoroughly spiritual formulaic model. For one to possess and abide by a Christian foundation is to be served by “the daughter of Heaven—parent of our virtues, and the source of all true felicity.” Personified as heaven’s daughter, Religion is advocate, healer, and comforter. This essay contains Plato’s most sustained ecclesiastical rhetoric mannerisms; it single-mindedly mitigates her distinction between spiritual disaster and religion personified as a female who “promotes love and good will among men.” Religion is ideally feminized; the personification should be lost neither on the readers of Plato’s time nor on today’s critical reader. The Chris- tian’s love for God results in a nobly independent mind; the intellectual person cannot realize the Almighty in a vacuum but must act with fearless conscience in every endeavor. The soul (as found in the fourth paragraph) is also personified as feminine. The “bosom of religion” invokes the bosom of Christ or of God, a place of refuge and solace. It also inadvertently reflects two discursive characteristics in religious commentary by fusing feminized religion with the feminized bosom of Christ, reflecting religion’s persona as a woman. In spite of this, Plato reverts to making masculine her impersonal nouns oriented around the “ ‘upright man.’ . . . Happy in his own integrity, conscious of the esteem of good men.”10 We can derive significance from these metaphorical distinctions. Religion and the soul reflect the feminine power, but the male reflects actual- ized religious devotion. Characterizing paragraph four are “they” and “thou” pronouns and “ ‘you’ calm,” as Plato prepares the reader to “burst this earthly poison of the body [and] spring to endless life.” God’s blessings are constant; he “demands our supreme reverence, and . . . obedience to his will.”11 Love, the foundation of virtues, instills confidence in faith, which sustains a good man through all forms of adversity. Love of God means pleasing him by obeying the gospel and bearing suffering with piety. Yet the context remains the benevolent God nurturing his followers. In accordance with Christian piety and sacrifice, Ann Plato reiterates the promise of an afterlife free of earthly troubles. Her quoted examples can be traced to the Bible. The voice of good conscience saying “ ‘Fear not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God’ ” is from Isaiah 41:10. She quotes further: “ ‘The upright man is satisfied from himself’ ” (Proverbs 14:14); “ ‘love among men is the fulfillment of the law’ ” (Romans 13:10); and “ ‘It is impossible to love God without desiring to please him, and as far as we are able, to resemble him’ ” is based upon Hebrews 11:6. Closing this essay is the oft quoted “ ‘O Death! Where is thy sting?’ ” passage from I Corinthians 15:55 and the “ ‘Thanks be to God’ ” from two verses later; then, from Revelations 148 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

5:13, following this partially quoted passage, Plato’s context is all the creatures “heard I saying,” which she proceeds to quote with a minor adjustment: “— blessing and honor, glory and power, be unto him that sits upon the throne.” By paragraph nine she reaches a sermonizing and all but didactic tone, and as the essay nears its end, in which she avers that extended life in the present is not to be desired, the sentiment of embracing Christian death, maudlin to the twenty-first–century reader, reflects a young mind made eccentric by narrow pieties interpreting benevolence as fundamentalism. Sigourney’s Letters to Young Ladies does contain a “Religion” essay expressing philosophical and benevolent underpinnings for the essential belief in and practice of religion. Plato prefers emulating it while promoting a firm moral sensibility. Her “Religion” is important for the tone and principles it sets for Essays. Her paragraphs seven and eight affirm that humans can act in the love of and obedience to God. Christian faith is “the anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast; the foundation of the Christian’s hope”; it is the Christian’s rock against adversity. Seemingly contrary dependencies will emerge in subsequent essays in which she negotiates piety while referring to ancient imperialists such as Alexander the Great, Columbus, and Napoleon, and then Franklin, the quintessential American of the Enlightenment whose rational mind she admired. “Religion” also proposes earthly sacrifice, encouraging human beings to improve their souls toward a perfect state, for despite our lives of suffering and sorrow, “it must be pleasing to God himself to see his creation forever beautifying in his eyes, and drawing nearer to him by degrees of resemblance.”12 Once her readers have read this essay sequentially with Pennington’s introduction, they are sure to maintain some reaction to such a “young lady” so deeply given to her mode of faith. Her concentration on achieving a perfect state of being in life and, especially, beyond it piques interest on three levels: How does the Christian live while awaiting salvation? Is Plato making a comparison, however unwittingly, with Hindu precepts of attaining nirvana? What does the worshiper face in health and outlook? Ann Plato’s God is not Jonathan Edwards’s angry Ruler holding his created beings in hand. In Puritan fashion, her admonitions, based upon Christian faith, preclude free will as an option. Second, striving for a state of Christian perfection in earthly terms to prepare for heaven’s reward glibly parallels the path followed by Hinduism and other Asian spiritual practices and exhibits comparative similarities in these religions. Puritans by no means believed in reincarnation, yet the striking similarity between Plato’s idea of improving the soul and what Emerson and New England’s Transcendentalists espoused is an idea worth pausing to consider. It is plausible that she encountered Transcen- dentalist idealism in a published tract, poem, or one of their speeches, learning enough for her to sift through ideas she may also have found sacrilegious; she did not have to look further than the Colored American, which ran an occasional The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 149

series of anonymous reports about India during 1840, to tell her that Hinduism was idolatrous.13 Finally, where in subsequent essays she identifies exemplary figures to convey her themes, the Christian Bible is all she needs for “Religion” in any obvious way. God’s word she trusts exclusively; He is her only theologian. Still, no one’s scriptural education is attained in a vacuum, and here is where her origins and the circumstances of her learning the creeds of Puritanism remain inscrutable. “Education” is Plato’s second essay and Sigourney’s Reading Book’s opener, and Plato by and large presents her own ideas with minimal paraphrasing. Not until her fifteenth paragraph does Plato repeat the sentence “A good education is another name for happiness” directly from Sigourney’s paragraph fourteen; she foregrounds this quote by echoing Sigourney’s previous paragraph, which states that education is an unfinished endeavor. In this essay, Plato identifies learning as a source of natural human progress, especially for children. Yet, she represents the zeal for education as a developer of early American character in inflationary terms. Schools and teaching were strongest in the Puritan colonies, but Plato acknowledges neither that girls were undereducated in comparison with men nor that social constructions determined educational opportunities along lines of gender and race. Referring in her third paragraph to “uninstructed persons,” she states that they are “but little above the late [wandering] inhabitants of this country.” Her sentiment strongly counters the father’s narrative in “The Natives of America,” where the father speaks of being fated to unrelieved roaming since Europeans came. The attitudes in “Education” and in the poem differ starkly. The poetic father is himself one of the “late inhabitants” she objectifies and criticizes in the essay; they were happy people, careless of “civilization,” and wandered the “then unknown world” that, as implied in the poem, was never threatening to them. As the poem romanticizes the Indian past as recalled by an Indian, the essay passage expresses common stereotypes of the untutored, wandering primitive. Judging by the language of the poem, indigenous Ameri- cans developed “the science of living well” without books and their preserved knowledge; instead, by softly intoned speaking that kept knowledge and traditions alive. The condition of civilization results from being educated, and as Plato states in the opening and then the third paragraphs of “Education”:

History tells us that the first settlers of our country soon made themselves conspicuous by establishing a character for the improvement, and diffusing of knowledge among them. . . . It is, therefore, an unspeakable blessing to be born . . . where wisdom and knowledge flourish; though it must be confessed there are even in these parts several poor, uninstructed persons who are but little above the late inhabitants of this country, who knew no modes of the civilized life, but wandered to and fro, over the parts of the then unknown world.14 150 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

By invoking the condition of wandering, a key theme in four of her poems, as analogous to being uncivilized, she is being covert, indicting her heathen cultural origins without informing the reader that she too stems from those “late inhabitants.” The remark also betrays that whoever schooled her about Indians ignored the fact that Quinnipiac Indians, such as Asa Freeman and his wife, resided seasonably in Cheshire (between Hartford and Water- bury) or Enfield (close to the Massachusetts border) during the time she was writing.15 Plato prioritizes books over “oral instruction[, which] can benefit but one age and one set of hearers.”16 But doesn’t the oral tradition motivate her to preserve her father’s lament in “The Natives of America”? Clearly, Plato exemplifies how successfully the Christian mission in the Americas compromised indigenous resistance to God’s will through its appeal to spiritual grace and the myth of civilizing influences for the good of character. Assimilating to the New England status quo will end wandering, and the sentiments expressed in the aforementioned essays, and those by the titles “Employment of Time” and “Diligence and Negligence,” an allegory, affirm this. Plato never betrays the political perspective that civilized Christians undermined indigenous life ways. The narrator in “Natives of America” accuses European men of introducing the bonds of “cruel oppression.” The contradictions between the respective passages in the essay and in the poem are less remarkable when the politically discerning reader acknowledges how each narrative reflects the work of colonizing conquerors. In Plato’s view, education and Christianity are fundamentally linked. In one of the generalizations that was acceptable during her time, she states that the people of the Ganges practiced “deluded votaries of idolatry.” Like many Christian zealots, she invoked Alexander’s praise of Aristotle’s tutoring efforts, a pre-Christian event.17 At the same time, she is not hostile to science, praising Newton and the light of science as cohorts with religion to improve the conditions of knowledge. Education is indispensable as an agent of happiness. What are Ann Plato’s sources, for this essay and those to follow? Her dispassionate representations of North American Indians, “Esquimaux,” indigenous Greenlanders, Africans, and East Indians have to have been drawn from books, newspapers, and secondhand knowledge that she got from teachers and learned men.18 Early New England Transcendental notions about the Orient and its spirituality are likely to have been kept from her. Where did she acquire her information, and who instilled such biases in her? Did she read any works by those whose names she mentions, or did she read about them? Her inquiring mind reflects a determination to absorb as much as was available to her. The range of her reading is extraordinary for any precocious schoolchild and even for an adolescent training to teach in infant schools. The British-born Susanna Rowson’s An Abridgment of Universal Geography (1805) may have been on Plato’s reading list, for its author, who was enjoying success for Charlotte Temple and The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 151

other sentimental romances and plays, drew upon other geographers in order to write a book for the classroom.19 Perhaps not so curiously, the world peoples that Plato briefly mentions in “Education” are written about along with their regions in some detail by Rowson, and Plato echoes her attitudes toward non- Christians. Less judgmental than Rowson’s, however, is her treatment of Ameri- cus Vespucius, but we can detect a trace of Rowson’s rhetorical influence. Where Rowson refers to Columbus’s discovery not resulting in his name being used as the name for the new lands, Plato portrays Vespucius as a “Florentine gentleman” and “fortunate imposter” for having essentially received that honor; she is far more circumspect and reticent about this, describing Columbus as “having undergone the siege of the first discovery,” although the land “was given” Ves- pucius’s name.20 She displays more fully in later essays a sophisticated method of critical judgment for distinguishing achievement from Christian devotion. Sentiments in “Education” reveal Ann Plato as not free of prejudice. The “consecrated” Ganges flows through a “deluded” India; Mexico is a land of confused ideas.21 Such opinions were widely acceptable in her time, and she adds to the latter, and on the following page, anti-Catholic sentiments, first implying that Mexico is a confused country with ideas narrow in conception, then taking the position that “wherever ignorance holds unlimited sway” (essentially, in lands colonized by Europeans), “the light of science and the splendor of the gospel of truth is obscure and nearly obliterated by the gloom of monk- ish superstition, merged in the sable hues of idolatry and popish cruelty; no ray of glory shines on those degraded minds; ‘darkness covers the earth, and gross darkness the people.’ ”22 Although Catholicism did not secure a place in Congregationalist-dominated Connecticut until Irish immigration burgeoned in the 1850s, despite its small number of practitioners, as historian Jarvis M. Morse observed in 1933, “it produced an effect on other religious organizations out of all proportion to its membership. All the well-established sects became terrified at the prospect of the spread of popery.”23 Of course, Plato is a child of her era, as evidenced by the Congregational rebuke she echoes back into this anxiety. In the chapter “The Catholic Church and the Whore of Babylon” in his Children of Wrath study of antebellum Calvinism, Leo P. Hirrel describes how, prior to the Civil War, Congregationalists and Presbyterians held intense anti-Catholic attitudes. Viewing Catholics as employing false doctrine, New Divinity Calvinist militants “dismissed Catholicism” in terms Hirrel unwittingly echoes from Plato, as “superstition and idolatry,” conceiving of “their [reform efforts] as an expression of disinterested benevolence.”24 Less kind is Plato’s regard for Catholics, especially when compared with Sigourney, who, in Letters to Young Ladies, extols the eminent services nuns play in nursing sick and dying strangers.25 By the 1830s, esteem for the principles of benevolence that Congregation- alists and Presbyterians had carried over from the previous century had become 152 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity the subject of cultural and theological debates engaged in by clergy and educators. In summer 1834, a year before Noyes Academy opened in Canaan, New Hampshire, with a mandate to educate “all pupils without distinction of color,” a town diarist ebulliently noted: “The master spirit of the age is benevolence. The earth, the atmosphere, everything seems pregnant with the spirit of [it]. What must be done, can be done. What ought to be done, must be done.”26 As befell Prudence Crandall’s school in Connecticut in 1833, however, Noyes Acad- emy closed in 1835 after a month of operation, when intolerance and fear of racial amalgamation produced divisive controversy, mob behavior, and a town edict, a testimony to racial polarity as the preferred norm. Ever supportive of benevolence as a bromide, diverting her gaze from those who would disrupt it, Ann Plato extols the good deeds of exemplary models. The essay “Benevolence,” opening with the idea that youth is “the proper season for cultivating the benevolent and humane affections,” well illustrates her New Divinity Congregationalist values. One’s “sense of justice” serves as one’s personal foundation. Follow the golden rule; individuals and nations should exercise benevolence, for it supports the rational mind and should not be permitted to feed pride or vanity. Truly benevolent men, Plato tells her readers, are consistent. John Howard (1726–1790) is her first luminary example, but her brief but glowing description does not specify his humanitarian aid to inmates of prisons and asylums or his efforts to alleviate the terrible conditions in those environments. Like John Eliot, her second illustrious figure, Howard sacrificed personal pleasures for others’ betterment. She must have respected Eliot for his efforts to convert Indians in Massachusetts and Connecticut by translating the Gospels into the Natick language. Yet her singling him out for his devotion “to the poor Indians” need not be considered an innocuous reference. Starting with the structural properties of this example, we can find a rhetorical strategy at work here, for she gives “the immortal” Howard, named first, the rhetorical primacy in her deductive alignment. With exemplary historical people at her disposal, she sets a high bar for personal sacrifice. Had she deemed Richard Allen’s establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadel- phia as a reactionary response, perhaps the only African American who might have fulfilled her criteria would have been Jupiter Hammon, known as the “Long Island slave poet” of the eighteenth century, who consoled many, not just those sharing his plight.27 Plato’s identification of Eliot for his work illustrates the admiration she had for selfless magnanimity. The rhetorical weight in the pairing of this benevolent icon with those he helped actually implies a colonialist sympathy toward Indians, and that she chose him seems not accidental but typical for a New England puritan of her day. To interpret her choice as a subconscious expression would be to say that hers was a reflexive act exhibiting faith in the civilizing benefit she felt John Eliot brought to Indians like her father, although her love The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 153

for him and his lessons are mixed with shame that she has Indian heritage. If we recall the early lines of “The Natives of America,” we cannot miss that the narrator speaks of the relationship within pre-Columbian tribal life as one of benevolence and that the benevolence practiced by Indians toward Europeans was betrayed. With the help of Monroe Fordham’s distinctions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precepts of benevolence, we can appreciate how Charles Finney’s utilitarian benevolence of the 1830s challenged the altruistic and “disinterested” benevolence of a century before, as espoused by Samuel Hopkins, and, in the process, transformed the meaning of “disinterested” in such a way that it now appealed to northern African American ministers, who sermonized on charity and benevolence in their calls to aid blacks driven from their homes and facing poverty.28 Christian duty in society is the concern in most of “Benevolence,” and Plato expresses her faith in women’s benevolent societies. Because she is writing succinct essays, she leaves a seemingly important issue to one sentence: “I have known Ladies forming themselves into a society, for the purpose of assisting the poor; and have done much good in the undertaking.”29 In Letters to Young Ladies, Sigourney elaborates on fifteen schoolgirls, “smitten with the love of doing good,” who formed “a society for that purpose,” and how interesting it is that Plato did not addend to her brief comment anything about the Cherokees to whom Sigourney’s schoolgirls donated books, as Sigourney is obviously her source.30 Disturbing similarly on a critical level are those quotes she attributes to no one. One has to do with the “fundamental principle” for living being “integrity, or the observation of justice [as] essential to private and public happiness.” Her readers might appreciate knowing that Noah Webster originated this comment.31 The language of “Benevolence” in general and the usage of specific individual terms in association with its general idea are common in legal and government-related discourse such as that in The Federalist Papers. Plato’s habit of neglecting to identify those she quotes shuts out curious readers tantalized by the quotation marks. No book that espouses principles of moral uplift and directs young readers toward piety would be complete without at least one allegory, and “Diligence and Negligence” is a complete but brief allegory in the Bunyan mode. A baby boy named Diligence, who is initially asleep in his cradle, is subjected throughout his life to the enticements of Negligence. Strictly on the level of rhetorical construction, however, this tale bears the flaw, or idiosyncrasy, of Diligence in youth becoming a separate entity, also named Diligence and exercising free will. Negligence is the agent of this distinction; in the third paragraph, as a response to the boy Diligence’s rejoinder “ ‘And of what canst thou tell me’ ”? Negligence says “ ‘Diligence is an unknown path’ ” marked by difficulties, advice which the boy rejects. The boy Diligence is visited by both allegorical elements. Plato offers no clarification of how the second Diligence comes to be or why she 154 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity effects this character representation, leaving a resourceful reader to interpret the situation as when “the boy becomes a youth,” he assumes responsibility for his own accountability. From this point in the allegory, Ann Plato never identifies the youth- then-man as the personified figure. Diligence keeps a promise to be the man’s friend throughout his life. In old age, the man thanks Diligence for his steadfast protection, for being the one who secures his demise to “the glorious form . . . whose name was Religion.” In the third to last paragraph, Plato seems to stand on end her mission of moral teaching for girls and young women by identifying Negligence as female: “Negligence looked mournful, and ceased to ask to be forgiven of her error. She stopped in her career,” going forth no more.32 Constructed upon and continuing the fashion of moral instruction books for pupils, this chapter is like a miniature allegory for “The Infant’s Progress” in which Inbred Sin comes to live with three orphans; Plato seems to unify the sisters Playful and Peace, allowing their brother Humble Mind to be led astray. Maintaining her thematic unity and cumulative life projection in this collection, the oppositional axis involving the boys in Diligence-Negligence continues as a variant in the next essay, “Two School Girls,” with its contrast between one girl, who broadens her knowledge from what she learns from her natural surroundings, and another girl, whose interest in learning is shallow and meant for show. Plato relates this distinction in ironical fashion: both girls attend school, but Plato defends the one who decides to spend time in the Natural History Room. The natural history interest of the more studious girl is the divergent structural element that allows “Two School Girls” to avoid an outright parallel to Sigourney’s “Easy Studies” essay in The Girl’s Reading Book. Although she possesses no distinguished talents, this girl made precise observations with scholarly thoroughness. Plato portrays her as a model for someone who, when not in school, would visit places that could deepen and strength- en her knowledge. The casual reader might presume her to be a dreamer or slacker, given the puritanical mien displayed by the author thus far, yet the unwise girl aims her practice of superficial diligence toward the wrong thing. Plato defends the truly diligent and wise girl by pointing out that she gains “more useful knowledge” than the one who will go directly to school without comprehending intellectual challenges, preferring perfunctory study and having little patience and attentiveness.33 By describing how personal discipline favors the girl who attends school less, is Ann Plato betraying the dictates of conventional teacher responsibility? The lesson of this allegorical essay is that discipline develops character and fortitude for life’s experiences. In maturity, and as a young matron with a family, the superficially educated girl may find that if she is wealthy and has servants, life is disordered, whereas the life of her friend with less schooling but more discipline may be prudently economical and industrious. Using schoolgirls as the narrative’s central figures, Plato protects The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 155

her personal advocacy of sophisticated education for young women, her only expression in prose of this issue. Two observations in the closing paragraph hold deeper interest, in part because the paragraph is set as a quote, suggesting another source also not cited and unknown. Consuming the bulk of the paragraph is Plato’s acknowledgment that women have been tyrannized by heathens into “vassalage,” with Muslims pronouncing that women have no souls. Attitudes have been changing, and women should take advantage of their opportunities. Concluding with what seems to be a peculiar sentiment, considering her pious sensibility, such opportunities should allow women to know “ ‘glory and immortality beyond the grave.’ ”34 This phrase, ending the essay’s final paragraph, can be traced to “Testimony to the Missionary Character of the late Mrs. Smith,” part of “Extracts from the Joint Letter of the Missionaries at Beyroot, Dated Dec. 31, 1836,” as published in the Missionary Herald, a magazine of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.35 Again, Mrs. Smith’s ardent efforts to win Christian converts among the Muslims go unmentioned, lending Plato a contrary posture toward what should be held as a feminist value for dedication to work, for she clearly affirms her context; the extract praising Mrs. Smith describes how she dedicated herself “to educate the females of this country, and elevate them to the dignity of her sex—to make them intelligent and virtuous.” The phrase perhaps originally appeared in a review of a sermon published in England in The Gentleman’s Magazine in October 1804, a publication probably not of interest to Ann Plato yet which, however coincidentally, mentions those who stray from God and otherwise are unsure of how to worship him.36 This is certainly self-reflexive, this musing on immortality that may come from writing, and in a small way, perhaps Ann Plato achieved that. Yet, she apparently reversed this attitude, trading it for obscurity by not having continued to publish, so far as is known. Clearly, a mixed message is evident: women are to efface their identities for their wonderful accomplishments in the service of others and as Christians. Plato’s conscious attention to the life path and life experience paradigm is represented by individual essays whose topics are constructions of personality and its foundational components. Becoming a useful member of society depends, of course, upon personal discipline, diligence, adherence to a Chris- tian moral code, and benevolent service, all of which suit a useful person well. In “Decision of Character,” useful people “come to decided opinions” for the social good, their usefulness supporting the domestic and community spheres. Diligence itself is a product of decision, and, with Plato having accepted the rhetoric of the discovery of America, Columbus would not have achieved his honor “had he not come to the determination that he would seek for a distant country.” In this and in the following two paragraphs, she extols the “traits of character which proved the greatness of his mind” and proved that he was fit 156 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity for his role as a leader who could withstand the apprehensions of his crew. In this essay, Plato commences a short list of other achievers, a précis to the longer list she later offers in “Eminence from Obscurity.” The list in “Decision of Character” includes Demosthenes overcoming a speech impediment, her source being John Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, and the Roman general Pompey having the “force of mind” that compels useful ambition, which in his case meant sailing to Rome in stormy seas.37 She invokes Franklin here, for his lightning experiments, as well as in the “Eminence” essay (the only figure she mentions twice in the essays collectively); the “comprehensive mind” of steamboat inventor Robert Fulton; and Robert the Bruce’s patient observation of a spider ascending a beam thirteen times. The essay follows the exemplary course of her writing in general; the figures she mentions are synechdotal. To Fulton’s widespread fame, she adds that his thinking produced something that reached far into human life, community, and travel. Plato is consistent in admiring men who make good decisions, and she translates this and other traits of character for her young female audience. Determination rules what we can do for ourselves. In order to be diligent, one must determine that one will be diligent. Diligence, achievement, and ambition to succeed are all elements the individual must take on to become a useful person. The procession of essay topics finds strength by giving Plato opportunity to engage her discussions with a range belying her youth. In “The Seasons,” we can identify some of the literature that inspired it, and we find Nature personified as in no other representation. Plato even chooses the word Creator to identify the wondrous source of “the perfect regularity, order, and harmony of nature,”38 a sobriquet not just for literary enhancement—in her first essay, “Religion,” she refers to “God”—but perhaps as her father might have used it. The Creator is the giver of the seasons, bestowing upon each the rewards that mankind must appreciate. Plato commences with spring, which is the standard method for such an encompassing discussion of the changes in a year; spring is also the beginning of the new year as observed by Algonquians. Using indirect address, what Plato says to spring is in quotes; her narrator’s statement is not given as a command but as a description of spring’s capabilities as the successor of winter and bringer of the rapid growth of vegetation. Summer and autumn are given standard descriptions, and in summer parents prepare for winter; in autumn, farmers harvest, having worked hard with their crops. She portrays autumn as “a good period of the year to contemplate the shortness of life” and notes how we will all eventually turn to dust.39 Families benefit from winter in ways less obvious than from the other seasons, but “the child sees more of its father.” The personal mother absent from Plato’s book (there is neither allusion nor direct reference) is, ironically, implied as present throughout the year in this comment. The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 157

Superficially, this essay contains no features concerning its topic that are out of the ordinary; its language and perceptions are neither weighty nor memorable. Its vocabulary, although marked with terms from neoclassical and early romantic-era discourse and poetry, deserves another level of consideration. Because Plato specifically mentions English poet Robert Bloomfield’s The Farm- er’s Boy in another essay, “Eminence From Obscurity,”40 a close reading finds Bloomfield’s sentiments resonating in “The Seasons,” although she manifests nothing discernible from it, and his boy Giles never has the advantage Plato wants her students to have for meditation. Instead, words and word associations such as “dreary winter,” stated as she addresses spring, may have been adapted from any number of sources: “drear Winter” in line eleven of Charlotte Turner Smith’s sonnet 51, “Supposed to Have Been Written in the Hebrides,”41 and directly from Daniel Staniford’s (1766–1820) Art of Reading.42 In Smith’s sonnet 74, “The Winter Night,” we find “cold and drear” ending line seven. At least Plato, if she read Smith’s two-volume Elegaic Sonnets (1797) and utilized her as an influence, was clever enough to alter her context by dominating her spring paragraph with images of the close of winter. That both Plato in this essay’s spring paragraph and Smith in another poem, “April,” deploy stream “banks” and call attention to the “verdure” of the season may not be mere coincidence, even if Smith’s “verdure” happens to be forested (line 38) and Plato writes “spacious meadows soon receive their usual verdure.” Here again, Ann Plato is content to extract necessary vocabulary; yet, in place of the graveside contrast distinguishing Smith’s poem, she contextualizes the changing seasons as God’s graciousness “consonant to the feelings of man.”43 However, we cannot overlook the superimposition of usage here, for in these word choices, which were in casual use at the time, there is a link between Smith and Plato through Staniford, who uses the spring setting for stream banks and “verdure” without mentioning the month of April.44 Once again, we see widespread borrowing early in the nineteenth century, even if the specific language and images appear innocuous to us today. “Obedience,” Plato’s eighth essay, thematically resembles Sigourney’s tenth. Perusing the essay “Obedience,” we can see how Plato layers its advice onto what she has already presented as components of character and, as the topics proceed, how the trait for obedience is essential for Christian living. Obedience to parents, preached by scripture and also practiced by heathens, is of paramount importance. The father in “The Natives of America” demands her obedient attention, and if Plato had spent any time in a “heathen” Indian community, she would be justified in her inclusion. Lydia Sigourney, in her own essay “Obedience,” refrains from using the term “heathens,”45 which Plato could not bring herself to do. Her reference, otherwise subtle in its self-referral, indicates at least a superficial appreciation for indigenous and preliterate traditions. 158 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

The rest of the paragraph describes how the young among heathens solicit opinions from their parents and then “their hoary men” as “other superiors.” Plato stresses attentive and respectful listening by the young, who must display reverence to those elders, supporting her admonition with an unacknowledged ancillary passage (the order of which she transposes) to the Ten Commandments: “rise up before the face of [the] old man, and to honor the hoary head” (from Leviticus 19:32). The simplicity of her description belies the strict adherence to respect shown by tribal youth to their parents and elders.46 How much of this did she know intimately, and does not her initial child narrator do so in “The Natives of America,” which her father closes by telling her to remember his story? Punishment and its justification are absent from her advice; she disliked the harsh punitive options taken by Roman parents. It is God who punishes those who fail or refuse to honor their fathers according to the commandment, including those who disobey during parental absence. Hoary-headed elders are no exception, and on their behalf, Athenian knowing and Spartan practice of rightness serve as the analogue of “Diligence and Negligence” and the “Two School Girls.” More than halfway through “Obedience,” in her sixth paragraph, Ann Plato engages the reader on a tangible level concerning respect for one’s elders. Disrespecting elders is discard- ing scripture. Then, in one sentence, she takes a leap of faith: “if in nations the laws are disregarded, what safety is there for the people?” Mired as her nineteenth century was in the legalities of Indian removal, slavery, and rights for women, the bromide of that sentence would be lost on no one sympathetic to these causes. Extending the issue of obedience to being a pupil, Plato points out that pupils who remember that school is a privilege will adhere to its rules. Disobeying one’s teachers’ instructions is not beneficial for students. By the same token, one cannot teach obedience without having been obedient.47 Life’s fundamental outlines teach young people, and their obedience, diligence, and education are supported by her values in the essay “Employment of Time,” not one of the better structured of the sixteen. “A certain regularity is absolutely necessary, to make a proper use of time” is a sentiment related to Nature’s consistent regularity. Plato refrains from identifying the celebrated author who spoke of people who lose hours a day as having nothing to do in “odd minutes,” but in her second paragraph, she advises the reader, just as does Franklin in his Autobiography, to devote the first hour of waking “to the service of God.”48 Sigourney had already extolled Franklin’s personal habit in her book’s essay “The Summer Sun,” and although Plato formally quotes that passage, she does not acknowledge Sigourney by name; instead, she says “a celebrated author.” Franklin for the second time heads a parade of pragmatic thinkers when Plato finds distinction in his “Time is money” axiom and heightens for her readers their curiosity about what we would expect to be philosophically in conflict with her religion: the Italian philosopher (the philosopher whom The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 159

Sigourney does not identify culturally in her “Value of Time” essay in Letters to Young Ladies), of whom she acknowledges that “time was his estate,” might, with Franklin, suggest an influence leading to her alignment with utilitarian Calvinism if not Unitarian ideas. Both Franklin’s and the Italian philosopher’s ideas are examples of her borrowing, this time from an “Address” given by a young unnamed minister in 1839 that Amos G. Beman introduced in the 26 September 1840 issue of the Colored American.49 In her fifth paragraph, however, she will rejoin Franklin by averring that “Time is more valuable than money,” especially for young scholars, who should not be interrupted from studying. “Robbers of their time, are more guilty, than robbers of money.” Young people may believe Franklin’s axiom, but “there would be more happiness, and less discontent” if, for her peers and charges, “time was more improved.”50 Plato’s examples bounce freely, seeming to oscillate between, on the one hand, how one can spend time “deepening the mind” with books that reflect one’s character, and on the other hand, in her fifth paragraph, praising Homer, whose poems inspired conquerors such as Alexander the Great, who left impressions upon Caesar and was admired by Napoleon, who wished to be a second Alexander. These were not mediocre men, she implies, for mediocrity reflects weakness. And what may shock us is that she mentions them at all; perhaps she is name-dropping, but she does find greatness of mind in them. Again, her sentiments provoke some skeptical reaction about her awareness of those she finds exemplary, and a careful reading of her remarks poses the question: is she writing in support of her quest to be a teacher, and if so, how much has she copied from someone else? The seeds of knowledge, she says, should be planted while a person is young, else knowledge will not provide shade in old age. To Phillip, Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773), she turned for “comfortable and necessary shelter . . . in old age” (quote unacknowledged). Instructing others, then, becomes beneficial to the mind when one teaches self-control and sets a good example: “We love those whom we make wiser and better, and their gratitude is sweet reward.” Invoking the sacrifices Greeks made when they had not long been liberated from their Turkish oppressors, she instructs her young readers that during this low period, both the wealthy and their servants gave in charity to save their country. In closing, she bids the reader to ask God for assistance in employing time. Yet again, she never alludes to Sigourney as her source, for Sigourney’s “Letter to the Females of Greece” is one of her Reading Book’s essays.51 Plato’s commendation of the three conquerors for their resourceful prepa- rations differs little from what school children had been taught. The conquests of Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon were couched in romantic and glorious terms. She never raises the issue of the brutality of leaders leading armies in quest of overtaking another people’s lands and resources, nor does she inter- rogate or challenge the rationales and alleged visions that spurred them on. 160 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Impressionable in her youth, Plato was influenced by the anonymous writer of “Address” in the 26 September 1840 Colored American, who may have instituted a change in her focus on what he called the elevated intellects of Hannibal, L’Overature, Alexander, and Napoleon, all of whose cruelties the anonymous author acknowledges, but he argues “did they show the existence of a mind: of intellectual powers?”52 Her association of the three conquerors for her benevolent instructional purpose stems from this source rather than one on their respective deaths that includes Hannibal, the North African invader who crossed the Alps and invad- ed Rome. In the January 1832 issue of a Philadelphia-based magazine, Atkinson’s Casket, or Gems of Literature, Wit and Sentiment, all four are the subject of an article, also likely reprinted from another source, “The End of ‘Great Men,’ ” whose unnamed author admits that having seen miniature portraits of Alexan- der, Hannibal, Caesar, and Napoleon several times, he or she was reconsidering “their several histories,” defined as they were by death and suffering on a grand scale. Ironical plots and circumstances in poems, stories, and prose miscellany fill the pages of Atkinson’s, and this particular entry summarily focuses on the irony of the conquerors’ demises after they had wantonly and cruelly shed so much blood in pursuit of their goals. Alexander’s “temples [were] bound with chaplets dipped in the blood of countless nations”; Hannibal “stripped three bushels of gold rings from the fingers of . . . slaughtered knights who opposed him”; Cae- sar “[dyed] his garments in the blood of a million of his foes”; and Bonaparte “filled the earth with terror of his name,” getting “kings and princes” to obey.53 A provocative three-way connection involves Plato and this entry. Atkin- son’s, a sort of miscellany, contains numerous entries identified as direct author contributions, usually by initials, but this is not one of them, leaving the identity of the writer of the remark, the title of the publication in which it originally appeared, and the date unknown. Given her personal disposition, that Plato does not scrutinize these conquerors suggests that her teacher selected three of the conquerors for her, and that she obeyed in accepting them, as would be in character for her youth. Hannibal is omitted, possibly because he was a pagan who assaulted a pillar of western civilization, despite its being Rome, the seat of what she called religious superstition. The example of Napoleon, who had lived within the memory of her instructor, became, like the other acceptable two, a matter of military valor. Surely Plato must have read “The End of ‘Great Men,’ ” because it was reprinted on page 4 of the Colored American’s 21 November 1840 issue. Evidently she chose to ignore its criticism, or she had written her text and did not want to change it. But the Colored American writer, in his “Address,” exercised sophomoric hairsplitting to rationalize his admiration. Beman realized this as folly in an otherwise stimulating oration, for in a July 1841 issue of the newspaper, he delivers a rejoinder in a challenge without names to the young pastor, likely including Plato, that considering the record of The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 161

those conquerors, “is their ‘record on high?’ ” as they “rioted in the spoils and sported with the miseries of their fellow men.”54 He may have felt self-conscious about the impact the pastor’s radical logic had had on Plato’s young mind and had probably read her chapter in the recently printed Essays. In a post-Essays indirect association with her is a reprint of this article in the 2 August 1845 issue of a newspaper (also published in Philadelphia), The Presbyterian, under the title “Four Great Murderers.” Beman, the Narragansett Indian and Afri- can American who left teaching at the Colored Congregational Church’s Elm Street School to pursue the ministry, saved a newspaper clipping of “Four Great Murderers,” in his scrapbook identified as from The Presbyterian; the immediate source for Beman’s clipping may have been the New Haven Daily Palladium, and the negative valences the four conquerors presented must have attracted him even though his ideas were normally contrary to the magazine’s pietous and abolitionist sentiments.55 Objectivity about these exploits caused Ann Plato to name Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon; perhaps her objectivity stopped when she considered Hannibal. Conquerors who built the Greco-Roman world and ideals could be excused their negative points. Hannibal was Europe’s ultimate barbarian invader, the nightmare from the empire of Greece’s Alexander, striking propitiously when Rome was on the threshold of greatness. No self-respecting Puritan of the seventeenth or nineteenth centuries could create for Hannibal a place in a conquerors’ pantheon if the conquests by the other three were to be viewed in positive light.56 Even Napoleon’s army and his invasion of Russia could be rationalized, because France, dubiously aligned with Protestant Great Britain, had wrangled with “black legend” Catholic Spain over colonies in the Americas and had suffered defeat by Africans in Haiti, who had thrown off the yoke of slavery in a revolution not warmly received by the United States. Adhering to this kind of logic, Plato’s mentors would have indicted the Pequots, Metacom, and Montezuma for their patriotic resistance to Christian domination. Assimi- lating Christian rationalizations that polarized civilized and pagan, youthful Ann Plato displayed her naïveté in showing that she was impressed that to be nonwhite could provide for her only heaven’s reward. In light of her pronouncement that the conquest of the “late inhabitants . . . who wander” is part of the Divine plan, their salvation is offered only by books and the love of Christ. The point of view of the writer of “Address” reveals a sophisticated knowledge of history and consideration for the victims that conquest leaves in its wake. Condemning Plato for her exemplars because Homer inspired Alex- ander, who in turn inspired his admirers, would avoid having to intellectually and morally confront whomever served as her teacher and mentor. Of the misunderstood history and personalities we find in this section of Essays, this kind of exaltation for intellectual training is the most egregious. The writer of “Address” and Beman himself obviously recognized how extolling the “four 162 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity murderers” ran inexcusably contrary to Christian values. Whether or not the deeds of these conquerors resonated with Beman’s knowledge of his own heritage we may never learn. In the longest of her essays, “Eminence from Obscurity,” Plato promotes as exemplary models a host of men who rose from humble and obscure circumstances to social, scientific, and literary renown—she includes no women among them. An Anglophile pedagogue must have impressed upon her the assumption that the United States has not as many men who overcame such obstacles as in “the Mother Country.” Sons of the wealthy may, in their leisure, employ themselves in pursuits that include knowledge, and they have “plenty of time for it”; the poor have to be industrious, and being so “protects them from the many vices and promotes health, and self-approbation.”57 She proceeds to attribute her previously explained values, such as sensing the value of time and perseverance, as foundations of success and achievement. Achievers are most numerously listed in this essay, and Franklin, her sole American model, heads the list. Except for him, most are figures of the Enlightenment who do not initially come to mind as thinkers of that persuasion. As an example of the profusion of individuals she cites throughout the book, this essay includes Richard Bently, the English classicist; the poet Robert Bloomfield (she mentions his poem “The Farmer’s Boy”); Inigo Jones, the English Renaissance architect who brought the Italianate Palladian style to London; Sir Edmund Saunders, a chief justice during the reign of Charles II; the archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelman; Pietro Metastasio, a composer of operas; English painter John Opie; Dr. Prideaux, bishop of Worcester; composer Franz Josef Haydn; Dr. Isaac Milnor; Henry Kirk White, professor of Arabic at Oxford; astronomer James Ferguson; “the celebrated” Benjamin Johnson (Ben Jonson), who early in life worked as a bricklayer and mason; Thomas Sympson, the mathematician; Castalio, who translated the Bible into Latin; Avaigio, the six- teenth-century Italian poet; Aurelian, an early Christian-era Roman emperor; and Dioclesian (her spelling), who followed Aurelian as emperor a decade later. Bently, Winckelman, Opie, and Haydn she identified only with surnames, Cas- tilio and Avaigio by single monikers. Opie (1761–1807) must have had some interest for her because he was the husband of the poet Amelia Opie, whose poems she read and that influenced her. To Ferguson (1710–1776) she devotes, after an initial paragraph mentioning him, two small paragraphs about his achievements, although she does not mention his autobiography, Select Mechani- cal Exercises, published in 1773, nor does she mention Sympson’s A Treatise on the Nature and Laws of Chance (1740). Her point in listing these luminous figures is to demonstrate how a humble birth is no impediment to curiosity and intellectual desire. The questions shall always linger: what did Ann Plato know of these people, and did she indeed read their works? The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 163

In Ann Plato’s world, had not women risen from obscurity? She herself was in the process of doing so, although she would not have wanted such attention. However, she could have named female writers in North America, such as Anne Bradstreet (whom she might have considered a woman of no mean background) and Wheatley, whose being taken from Africa as a slave at age nine she would have read about in Wheatley’s poems. Isn’t it curious that she mentions Bloomfield and one of his poems but not Wheatley? Is she hiding something from a particular readership? In the eleventh essay, “Lessons from Nature,” she advances the theme of how the individual can look to the natural world and its inherent order in order to learn how to live right. Yet this essay does not seem to follow its titular focus, as it breaks off to accommodate a discourse by a wounded young soldier. She opens it with virtually the same choice of words as Sigourney’s “Les- sons in the Fields” in The Girl’s Reading Book, but the themes diverge, as each sage reproaches Sigourney’s and Plato’s narrators for failing to read nature’s signs. First, consider Sigourney’s opening paragraphs:

When I was a child, I knew an old gray haired man. Years had brought him wisdom, and he was kind as well as wise. So, I loved him, and rejoiced when I saw him coming towards me, leaning upon his staff. Once, as he talked with me, he said, “I know a way to be happy. I learned it in the fields.” Then I entreated him to teach it also to me. But he answered, “Go forth into the fields, among living things, and learn it there for thyself.”58

Now, note Ann Plato’s replication and adjustment:

When I was a child, I had great esteem and affection for an aged sire. Years had brought him wisdom, and he was kind as well as wise. So I loved him, and rejoiced much when I saw him coming towards me. Once, as he talked with me, he said, “have you learned the lessons from nature?” I replied, that his meaning I understood not. Then said he, “Await here on the morrow, and I will hither come.”59

She recalls childhood esteem and love for a wise and venerated elder who once asked her “have you learned the lessons from nature?” When she admits that she does not understand him, he bids her return the following day. Both authors’ narrators are “ashamed” at their ignorance, and Plato imitated Sigour- ney’s “Early Recollections” essay. The elder too is pious and has given his fate to the Almighty. The next day he bids the narrator sit and listen attentively to 164 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity him. Plato’s approach to learning from elders follows a pattern in her book, for the girl opening “The Natives of America,” asking her father for a story, speaks from naïve wonder and is told to listen attentively. In both instances, the elders remind her of natural delights of an essentially idyllic or pastoral quality. In this essay, the elder reminds her of the natural delights the world has for the human eye: the “broad and open field,” “brooks flowing on among sweet flowers,” grass growing, birds. The final passage of the fifth paragraph holds interest in that, dovetailed to the working of the industrious spider and bee, the sire states: “to them that admire the works of nature, the fields lift up their heads and cry unto them, ‘industry is happiness, and idleness is an offence both to nature and to her God.’ ” The fields, thus personified, desire to be sown and cultivated; their crying out to those admiring nature is motivated by the Puritan ethic of useful labor. In this preindustrial age, useful work with one’s hands serves to counter the sin of idleness. This is probably not a northeastern Native traditionalist speaking, for he would live by a much different rhythm, and European-style farming would be an unlikely vocation; it is more likely to have been an Indian partially assimilated into European American methods but still holding on to his traditional regard for the natural world and agriculture. In the succeeding two paragraphs, the sage wants to know what her knowledge consists of, to which she responds that she lacks any except for vio- lets and lilies. She wants to be taught about nature; something in her “wished to turn from the wild scenery around her and look into the moral and intellectual views of mankind.”60 We can interpret this comment accordingly. First, urban living has confused her about the necessity for learning from nature; second, she is confused about how to reconcile the moral with the intellectual, a desire incidentally besetting several characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s contemporaneous short stories. In response, her aged friend persists, asking her to witness dawn and then revisit him. He continues, in appreciation of her naïveté, that she must learn carefully in order to gain knowledge from what she encounters. At their third meeting, she admits to have learned nothing after having seen her surroundings. Her playmates, untutored, “unfed,” and coarse of speech, mocked her advice about indulging in “the pleasant path of knowledge.” Being obstreperous preempted their ability to reason. The next several paragraphs convey a musing, almost a soliloquy, in response to her playmates’ taunting question, “what seek you among us?” Her description is the literal recall of a dream, first of a widow with children mourning beside an open grave, yet she says, “I dreampt [sic] not of her sorrow.” In the dream, she reminds the silent mother not to forget her children and urges that friends not forget their early love. A small voice renders an ecclesiastical admonition, that mankind will suffer if there is “disregard to my laws, and for this reason, there is lamentation.” The passage bears an inscrutable rhetoric in the flow of meaning suggested by its syntax. The narrator sighs and remains silent after this whispered admoni- The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 165 tion to acknowledge her own neglect.61 Having created a brief ecclesiastical melodrama of sorts, Plato declines to engage any further what she presumes to be theologically obvious. The narrator’s dream is a traveling in life, and next in the dream, she encounters by a roadside a weeping young soldier, who reluctantly tells her of the battle’s victims beneath the moonlight, the dead and those desperately desiring death, the maimed, the mortally wounded horses mangling fallen soldiers. Last he recalls those mourning at home, but she stops him and moves on. She next comes to “a school house of white,” and true to its color, it symbolizes a place of truth and knowledge. “Sometimes they [the children] wept, and again they rejoiced, when none knew why,” and she recalls, in a variant phrasing from Mark 10:16, that Christ embraced children “and blessed them” in a lay- ing on of hands.62 Through the aged sire’s questions and his compelling her to seek knowledge on her own, the seemingly tangential details Plato provides in this essay instruct her that as much as knowledge may be joyous in its rewards, the rewards are not always lovely or of intellectual substance. The narrator encounters children repulsed by her questions, she experiences a dream in which she successively encounters two people affected by death in different ways, and she cannot bring herself to take on more of their knowledge. The white schoolhouse at the end of the dream, which can be interpreted as a site of life’s final lessons, is not without occasional weeping by the children in it, but the cause of or need for weeping is unexplained, and the dream remains, like many dreams, without closure.63 All this is the nature the wise elder knows and praises her for seeing, and he wants her to treasure and retain what she has learned. His closing remarks begin with the reminder of the brotherhood of “God’s family,” we who occupy many nations and stations in life with an immortality the Almighty has given to us. With this sentiment, Plato has shifted to the thirteenth essay in Sigour- ney’s book, “The Poor,” making interesting changes in the taxonomy of complexions presented by the older writer. Sigourney has her elder say: “Some have black or olive complexions, some are red like the roving tribes of our forests, and others are white.”64 Plato, reversing these descriptions, has her elder identify humanity as “some have white complexions, some are red, like our wandering natives”; others are “sable” or “olive.” This man, more of whose identity neither author gives us, has constructed an initially biracial American predominance, the option of which, in each author’s hands, may signify for Sigourney an intellectual predisposition but for Plato something familial. Sigourney championed human rights for blacks (and by extension, the mulattoes, who could be viewed as “olive”). Her sequence of terms may not be merely manipulative, for to identify white and red races first rather than white and black may be a preoccupation, conscious or otherwise, of hers. Then too, the selected pairs may simply 166 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity have been chosen because they resonate for poetical effect; the passage shifts the weight of modern prescriptions about white-black discourse over slavery and abolition to the vanishing Indian theme, justified because, contemporaneously considered, Indian removal and the Indian wanderer and disappearance themes were perhaps more immediate to New Englanders than was slavery. One might expect a young African American woman who was writing to either prioritize her “sable” race over Indians, giving blacks equal footing with whites on America’s developing scene, or to at least make the three races equal, perhaps assigning the olive-skinned to a secondary status presumably uncommon to North America. Plato avoids this altogether. If her wise elder is drawn from an actual person or is a composite of similar individuals, during his active years he may have encountered few Africans, or he himself may have possessed both European and indigenous ancestry. “Olive” is a complexion commonly accorded people of the Mediterranean, but loosely applied, in the American argot, it could mean one whose racial mixture evokes that descriptive tonal assignment. Americans tend not to assign the vernacular identity of olive to red-white, black-white, or triracial mixtures unless something about an individual’s skin tone supports an assumption that the person is “foreign.” Plato’s sage’s use of “olive” remains yet another discursive intangible. God’s children, the elder in “The Poor” tells Sigourney (represented with slight variation by Plato), live throughout the world and its climatic range, and imbibe what is there for them: wine (Sigourney’s “liquor from some grape”), palm wine, and water. “God provides for all” as a “Merciful Parent” is another passage Plato quotes fully from Sigourney without naming her. Closing his lesson, the elder tells the narrator that service to those less fortunate is rooted in love.65 It is in the next essay, about a desert, that water and survival play a major role. We can read “Description of a Desert” as Plato’s useful analogy to the obverse character of nature for which we may find ourselves unprepared; it presents a didactic counterweight through which she attempts to illustrate the fault of pride, and it warns the reader about indulging in fantasies of the exotic. The essay opens with a slightly rephrased quote from Psalm 107:4–5 (which number she never specifies): “They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way. . . . Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them.”66 The context of this verse is the consequences of sin, as when God saved the Israelites from captivity. Following this, she states, “It is difficult to form a correct idea of a desert, without having seen one,”67 and it is doubtful that she ever did see one, especially a portion of the vast Sahara of which she writes. Her knowledge of deserts, the idea of a desert, and a mental picture of the actual terrain of the Sahara she most certainly drew from the same source whose three paragraphs close this essay. This would be the most enigmatic of her sixteen expositions were it not for the element of sacrifice so tenuous in the stark conditions that dust storms The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 167 and lack of water present to desert travelers. Assessing this essay as unbalanced and discursively unresolved means one has taken a position on its tone and outline. Plato does not present a stronger analogue between how one behaves in a desert and how her readers might behave. Yet, the psalm verse describing one’s wandering in the wilderness “in a solitary way,” with thirst affecting one’s soul, is probably all the reminder she felt necessary to give, with historical exactness, of the Sahara tragedy of 1805 in which two thousand humans and 1,800 camels perished. It is central to her allegory. Nowhere else in her essays is she as specific about an obscure detail as for this reference. Its source, more than its accuracy, provokes our attraction to her reading matter, for explorers and readers with the spirit of adventure into lands deemed mysterious would have known about this tragic incident. The Moroccan-based British trader and writer James Grey Jackson seems to have been the first to write about it in English, in his An Account of the Empire of Morocco, which first appeared in 1809, with subsequent editions in 1814 and 1820; his book also provides a sketch of the stark terrain. Authors after Jackson, including Plato, have replicated his description in virtually the same language; she may have had access to the first American edition printed in 1810 in Philadelphia by Fry and Kammerer.68 Water being precious, no one, whether master or servant, helped the other, and Plato’s subsequent quote from her unacknowledged source contains the entire weight of individual admonition: “very few are the instances where a man will voluntarily lose his life to save that of another.”69 The three quoted paragraphs underscore what Ann Plato must have determined to be an essentially criminal selfishness. But deserts are clearly defined spaces, and physical and spiritual travelers can avoid encountering and traversing them lest they find themselves in a circumstance with little promise of recovery or safety. As a pious Christian, Plato chose the Sahara, a location far from western Christianity and surrounded by Muslims, to create an analogy of straying into the wilderness away from one’s faith. That much is transparent. The opaque part of the equation lies in the refusal by the Native speaker in “The Natives of America” to venture toward “civilization,” preferring to push deeper into the wilderness of America. Only in the poem “Daughter’s Inquiry,” in which she implores her father to quit a life of roaming the seas, does she raise this issue of faith as home, in contrast or opposition to the idea that wandering or roaming threaten the acceptance and stability of a Christian life. That her desert description follows her essay about the lessons nature teaches places her in an Enlightenment tradition whose deserts, like swamps and the wilderness at large, are metaphorically disreputable spaces for Christians. Still, we can look again at a possible motivation that deepens her admonition about wandering astray, and that is her warning about weakness of intellect. The contemporary style of writing for children coincided with the desert 168 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity tragedy and was steeped in a critique of Romantic-era orientalism. Because the far-away desert held no wonders for the devout Christian, death was sure to come to anyone heading toward the eastern world’s strangeness of manner and religion. Samuel F. Pickering, Jr., relates the mixed reaction, learned late in the eighteenth century, to eastern or “oriental” stories in English society and education; although these stories contained values for moral instruction, they also served as an edifice for the exotic, which tempted the imagination. “Most eighteenth-century critics of children’s literature,” he observes, “were ill at ease with the imagination, and they attacked fairy tales for awakening the imagination without providing useful, moral lessons for understanding it.”70 This is but a vestige of the strict piety that objected to the reading of romances because they were books of pleasure. We can see that none of Plato’s narratives are based upon romances and none of them allude to fairy tales, and her allegories are parabolic. How much she read or learned about “eastern” or “exotic” stories is unknown, but from training or predisposition or both, she would have considered the remoteness and strangeness of their settings worthy of her disdain in the same way she would have disdained any sort of narrative not extolling Christian piety and sacrifice. Hence, of the examples of benevolent thought and action she could have drawn from the eastern world, she chose the doomed Saharan caravan to underscore the importance of Christian civilization. This essay connects to the next about country life in a perfect segue. No open quotation mark, only a closing one, distinguishes the opening paragraph of the next essay, “Residence in the Country,” in which she advocates country living as the best locale favorable to cultivating habits of virtue and “powerful sentiments of devotion,” preferably through the occupations associated with that environment. Except for her own three-paragraph preamble, this essay has been freely extracted from “The Happy Family” in The Girl’s Reading Book. Plato is securely in a pastoral mood here, and the country is where she couches ideals for happiness as the great pursuit of man. Seamlessly she combines industry (the productivity of farm life) with faith (religious devotion), drawing the reader to a bucolic earthly divinity of ethereal character. Nowhere else in Essays does she write of urban life in contrast with equal descriptive focus, revealing perhaps a predisposition to a rural environment. The lives of her exemplary farm family are peaceful and characterized by rewarding labor. The farmer feels most “sensible [of] his immediate dependence upon God” and instinctively looks to the bounty of heaven. Between himself and God he has no intermediary, receiving the succession of seasons and temperate weather as beneficial constructs for his work and care of the land. During the several weeks (as compared to Sigourney’s “months”) of her stay with a farm family, she witnessed “industry, contentment, and economy which constitutes every happy household”; the farm family conducts daily devotions, and its members take pride in helping one another for mutual ends; by contrast, Sigour- The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 169

ney’s farmer makes no daybreak prayer. Surplus staples were sent to market, and the mother taught her daughter the virtue of thrift in order to lessen the father’s expenses. Mothers also instructed daughters in utilitarian values, not in appearances or social refinements. Plato’s mother and daughter “superintend the household affairs”; in Sigourney’s essay, only the mother does so. A steadfast devotion to peace of mind and the care of possessions was impressed upon all. Life in a country farm setting serves Plato as a paradigm for the way to build good character, and in considering how farm life affects the American character, she relates that in her reading she finds “that some of the most illustrious men that ever filled our country, were the sons of farmers.” We, like them, should be industrious and willing to labor. Country life allows us to “stand” amid “the great theatre [sic] of God’s power and we feel an unusual proximity to our Creator,” whose workings, whether tranquil or stormy, are his. The farmer’s life is suited to “purity and moral sentiment.” He is the food producer and is unlikely to find enchantment in “fictitious pleasures, the unnatural wants, the fashionable follies and tyrannical vices, of more busy and splendid life.” Those leading the country life are not so preoccupied with other lifestyles, as their own lifestyle allows time for “contemplation, reading, and intellectual pleasures.”71 Most important in her reasoning is that country life embodies the ideals of keeping the Sabbath and moral and religious values; busy men cannot comprehend moral nature.72 Self-control helps all men live harmoniously and without shame about their own vice and folly; a man should be humbled, she says in closing, “by the mortifying view of his own perverseness,” and quoting from Proverbs 19:3 (as usual, without acknowledgment), which starts, “The foolish- ness of man perverteth his way,” she concludes with a slight interpolation: “Let not his ‘heart fret against the land.’ ”73. This essay also contains quotes whose authors are unidentified. Her third paragraph, beginning with “No man, one would think; [sic] would feel so sensible [of] his immediate dependence upon God, as the farmer,” she could have retrieved from either of two contemporary sources, “The Husbandman,” with anonymous authorship, printed both in The Farmer’s Cabinet and a month later in The Friend: A Literary and Religious Journal—she changed only “husbandman” to “farmer.”74 Plato breaks up this narrative by relating her observations of the family’s work, picking it up again at the “In the country” passage found also in the two sources. There is yet one more, her concluding paragraph: “Did man control his passions, and form his conduct according to the dictates of wisdom,” numbered thirteen and last in a series of short paragraphs of moralisms by Hugh Blair, the Scottish pedagogue.75 As in other essays, she relies upon such quotes to buttress her observations. The dreary mood she created with the dying soldier and the mournful mother and children in “Lessons from Nature” consume the fourteenth essay, “Life Is Short”: she passes a throng of villagers gathered in sympathy for two orphans and follows them to the graveside. Despite admonishing the children 170 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity about their feelings of loneliness, telling them God will be their earthly father, the pair soon die. The boy cries to see his “Uncle,” which, as rendered, may signify Christ, and his sister, who finds a faithful interpreter in Ann Plato, longs for an abode with the righteous. The life-to-death path is encapsulated in the closing; Plato’s sentiments about the inevitability and ubiquity of “DEATH” overwhelm the comments. The “Death of the Christian” offers solace because only the true believer “can triumph against the agonies of dissolving nature” and can die “with a genuine dignity.” In this essay, Plato refers to men who died with vanity: Augustus Caesar, who wished his subjects to applaud him, and (Major) Andre, whose “heroic stupidity” lay in wanting to be seen dying bravely and who was hanged in 1781 for being a Royalist spy. A “cultivated mind, and an unsanctified heart” typified Byron, Rousseau, and Voltaire. To die with thoughts of personal bravery is vanity, and dying with wealth of intellect but without sanctification is foolish. An Indian warrior, dying in torment, as commonly described by travelers and romanticized by poets and fictionists, she describes as exulting in his “hardy insensibility, provoking his tormenters.” Rather inscrutably, she then describes him as “meanly [retreating] from evils which Christian heroism would qualify to overcome by his exertions, or to endure with patience.” Only in Addison does she find an exception for amiability, virtue, and piety: he died as a model Christian, with great dignity. Her message and theme in this essay is that all will someday come before their Maker.76 “Reflections upon the Close of Life” completes these formal essays. Its subheading says it was “Written on Visiting the Grave Yard at New Haven, Ct.,” referring to the famous cemetery in that city chartered in 1797 as the New Burying Ground in New Haven, in modern times known as Grove Street Cemetery; it is the resting place for an array of Connecticut and Yale University dignitaries.77 She acknowledges the many graves “before me, and all around me” as “thickly deposited,” their noble headstones serving as a warning to the living: death is inevitable; where once we were so busy and happy, we still die, and death is—and she deploys the essay’s epigram to say—“awful and tender.” The information on the graveyard’s old headstones in the early twenty-first century is not very readable, and so the essay’s concrete details are today only mildly traceable. For instance, the nearby grave for “some sainted priest”; one for a family plot, or parents and children; another for an infant, to whom she speaks while sitting upon its grave, saying that she too might die before the day has ended; and one more for “an aged sire” who has “seen peace and war succeeding in their turn” could all be anywhere in the cemetery plot if the headstones were readable. On the east side of the cemetery, along its Maple Avenue walkway, are plots for the Thompson, Bence, Howell, Hunt, and Townsend families, with Trowbridge and another set of Hunt plots on the parallel Cypress Avenue side. No “Words” distinguish any of these headstones. All the noted The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 171

family members, including adolescents and adult children, could be eligible candidates for the unknown families to whom Ann Plato calls attention. She mentions a willow tree among the cemetery’s many trees, but the few in the cemetery in 2009 are not that old.78 And neither is this essay immune from Plato’s borrowing from Sigour- ney’s book: this time, the willow tree is taken from the fifth of Sigourney’s essays, “The Boy and His Garden.” Sigourney’s boy, after planting a shoot, returns to watch it grow, and in this allegory, the shoot grows into a small tree faster than he grows, and its branches “drooped downwards to the earth,” which, despite birds singing on them, he takes as a forlorn indicator. Plato adroitly sets up this unacknowledged quote by first identifying the species of the tree among “countless” others in the graveyard, then copies Sigourney’s apostrophe verbatim:

Tree, why art thou always sad and drooping?—Am I not kind unto thee? Do not the showers visit thee, and sink deep to refresh thy root? Hast thou a sorrow at thy heart?

“Then said an author—‘but it answered not’ ”; this is her only allusion to her source. Plato has juxtaposed her narrator musing in the graveyard with the boy whose forlorn tree was Sigourney’s symbol for those who weep constantly. The allusion is not given didactic expression, but by skillful association in the succeeding paragraph with the narrator stooping “over the grave of an ancient sire,”79 Plato does exhibit some degree of independent structure. Sigourney’s essay “Perseverance,” which closes Letters to Young Ladies, attributes to Christ the cornerstone of “intellectual, moral, and religious obliga- tion,”80 in the process encapsulating the fundamental wisdom Plato promotes for her readers. Derivative of Sigourney though she is throughout her discourses in Essays, and at whatever potential risk her borrowings bear, Plato was yet a prodigy for the social application of religious ideas for her narrow and gender- unspecified readership.

Other Rhetorical Strategies

Ann Plato’s girlhood and youth coincide with the protracted decline in Jeffer- sonian republicanism that overlapped the rise of Jacksonian democracy. Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen, in developing an epistemology affecting civic rhetoricians and rhetoric, assert that neoclassical rhetorical practice was at that time “under considerable pressure to change.”81 Female civic rhetoricians drew upon issues of women’s education, social place, and legal protection as their cultural resources and deployed neoclassical strategies in their discourses.82 These characteristics can be found in the writings and public statements of 172 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

educators Catherine Beecher and Mary Lyon, as well as in those of Maria Stew- art, the black human rights activist. But Plato refrained from what Eldred and Mortensen call “civic liberatory rhetoric,”83 virtually avoiding politicizing her topics in favor of asserting a literary personality motivated by a strict Chris- tian education and its pieties. Biography is the only one of women’s modes of “reminiscence and celebration” in which she indulged. We invoke yet again her poem “To the First of August” as evidence of her pedestrian rhetoric when it seems unavoidable to celebrate with enthusiasm the occasion of the date for the end of slavery in the British Caribbean. Perhaps constricted by her own piety, and despite the political anomaly of “The Natives of America,” Plato as rhetorician is neither mildly dramatic nor blandly disengaged within a Christian sense of duty. Her writing exhibits no deep (and certainly no objective) investment in the state of motherhood, no racialized discourse except for that poem and occasional passing remarks in her essays that run contrary to the poem’s sentiments, and no morality fictions. Who is she but a young woman who accepted tenets predisposing her to the “cult of true womanhood”? Her instructional discourse lacks civic rhetoric as social consciousness; it is a rhetoric buoyed by neoclassical republicanism, grounded in solid religious principles. Her references in the essays are not belletristic in nature but enumerative, meaning that her prose avoids altogether the combined traits of sophisticated rhetoric and critical discourse. The burning issues of the 1830s addressed by many other female writers and poets—slavery and abolitionism and Indian disappearance and removal—she leaves unattended. Evidently, she believed whoever instructed her formative education and training to become a teacher, who must have taught her that combining religion and social-political issues should not be her domain. Education linked to religion was the norm of the day; combining the concerns of church and state, however, abolitionist black pastors and a militant William Apess saw none of the philosophical conflicts that might have plagued her. The predominating nineteenth-century theme of death is, of course, the conclusion of the earthly presence for which the young author has prepared her readers. For two of the three sections, “Prose” and “Poetry,” she employs thematically a chronological arrangement starting at childhood, but death inter- venes early for many of those she describes. The four biographies exhibit the fruits of the devotional life; all four women died young. Plato’s own life, at least the little we know about it, represents a paradox that inverts life’s linear progression to a level of irony: we learn something of her early-middle years and remain ignorant of her entry and exit; her devotion to Christian morality and to public service never waivers during this relatively brief time, with only one of her poems offering any clue to direct a pre-Christian inheritance indigenous to this soil. The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 173

All else is speculation. She neglects to mention any Christian sects or denominations except in two instances: that which Louisa Seabury joined, the Church of Christ, and Roman Catholicism—but only for its superstitious character. Apess’s exhortatory Methodism would not likely have appealed to her. Mohegan Congregationalist minister Samson Occom of the previous century, if recalled by her friends or relatives, might have attracted her attention instead, although he was unaccommodating to part-black Indians. But her essays say nothing about styles of preaching or worship, although she does cast the practice of faith and the life of sacrifice according to generalist latter-day Puri- tan standards. Plato strikes readers as a pious follower of Christianity’s tenets rather than its preachers; a life lived in the holy spirit holds more meaningful significance and reward than life in the church per se, for the faithful live a transitory and temporary existence. Ann Plato shares obsessions about piety and death with her religious and some of her literary peers, and the delicacy of her sensibility could make worldly endeavors such as marriage all but inconceivable. In her entire book, her personal narrative voices in “The Natives of America” do not rescue it from being problematical. By itself, her use in this poem of “the Creator,” as she uses it in the essays “The Seasons” and “Resi- dence in the Country,” would only be of facile value to support the idea of her having Indian ancestry. The sixteen short essays, grouped as “Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose,” reveal little about Ann Plato except that she was a devout Christian. One plausible explanation for there being no mention of any of her family members in Pennington’s congregation when he writes the introduction for Essays may be the strength of her opposition to indigenous cultural traditions. Christianized Indians such as Occom and Apess distinguished between salvation and survival and neglected neither for their peoples. Plato adhered to the same cultural intolerance and narrow view of American culture history as the ministry from which she learned. We know too little of her life to propose other paradigms of resistance in her writings, which state no objections to the conquest of Indians or the enslavement of Indians and Africans. She accepted the conquest and the forced African diaspora and applied all her energies to the advocacy of the pious life and faith in the Christian mission. If we racialize Ann Plato’s writings, her raceless narrator speaks as a white woman whose values and point of view reflect and embrace assimilation, thus challenging Foster’s and Bassard’s insistence that she was writing exclusively for young black women. An individual in 1840 insisting on being a nonracial “human being,” a person whose humanity transcends and even obliterates racial category, risks betrayal of family and heritage and would find social restriction and reflexive protest frustrating her at every turn. Feminist deconstructionist readings of Ann Plato would present some problems if assumptions about her writing, her influences, and her audience 174 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity went too far. Justifying a meteoric literary life such as hers and her reputation as exemplary of a “[young] mad woman [of color] in the attic”84 would ignore her youthful inexperience for this activity in which she indulged and for which she reveals no discernible sense of feeling any omission from the female literary mainstream. Plato may have written simply because she was bright enough to realize she had something to say for a wider audience. She was an adolescent female devoted to her religious faith, savvy enough to find other women poets to read and draw upon for analogous inspiration, and for Pennington, perhaps enigmatic enough for him to describe her as “interesting.” Given the absence of black consciousness in Essays, it is doubtful that her intended audience was exclusively African American: “To the First of August” possesses no direct racial investiture. The book’s contents also bear no outright American Indian consciousness, however, other than the irrefutable “Natives of America.” A teacher or similar benefactor may have encouraged her to write, and such a person (or persons) or Ann Plato herself may have edited literary impulses we may never know about. To deracialize her writing would affirm the prevailing context observed by Eldred and Mortensen, who, citing Williams’s introduction to the Schomburg edition of Essays,85 imply that Plato would have been trained to write “school compositions for publication. . . . in fact, what she wrote,” they proceed to state, “shows her to be the perfect student of domestic economy.” Referring to “Two School Girls,” they interpret Plato as casting her model student as one who demonstrates “constant economy, . . . order, industry,” and other ennobling traits her family taught her.86 Yet, this critique overlooks female essayists and poets, such as her models Sigourney and the Briton Amelia Opie, who did address race issues. And neither does her compulsion, evinced by the contents of her book, reveal any consciousness of a culturally or politically aggrandized feminine agenda. Instead, a pious youth’s sensitivity to women’s (and girls’) education, domestic duties, and family concerns and experience distinguishes Plato’s writing. She clearly had not achieved in her personality any kind of consciousness that would have rendered a sophistication of literary mission. Her youth can be appreciated in a context of what must surely have been cultural isolation, as Essays would attest, in her public and personal spheres. Silvia Xavier, comparing Plato’s tone to Charlotte Forten’s in her journals, describes Plato as “more ameliorative,” engaging the emotion of love “to operate on her white Christian audience’s religious and moral sentiments.”87 Because we lack vital information about her, Ann Plato’s writings tempt the critical reader to approach them according to older strategies such as For- malism and the New Criticism. Understandably, Bassard resists this by deploying a Bahktinian-based poststructuralism, which is appropriate for interpreting some of the poems. But isn’t it ironic how critics in this long postmodern era may confront her poems best by relying on an anachronistic critical assess- The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 175 ment tool that turns out to be perfect for her output in the absence of life details? Besides Sigourney for The Girl’s Reading Book, the foremost contemporary essayist invoking our initial comparisons to Plato’s sixteen essays is Emerson, whose publications by early 1841 she may have encountered: Nature (1836); “The American Scholar” (1837); the “[Harvard] Divinity School Address” (1838); and “Self-Reliance” (1840). A plausible (if facile) association may lie in her choosing (or having had chosen for her) her book’s title after the publication in March 1841 of Emerson’s Essays in its first series. And although she would have admired his erudition, his liberalism, which served as part of the foundation of New England Transcendentalism, would have been met with her Congregationalist status quo disdain. The two authors do not offer deep or impressionable comparison except in their periodic inclination to identify great thinkers and achievers whom they have read and, in Plato’s case, about whom she has read. Plato names her exemplary figures in far greater profusion than does Sigourney. In several instances, her succinct descriptive phrases do resemble Emerson’s, not in content but on the level of how her analogies inform the reader about great persons and what they accomplished. We do not get from her the kind of extrapolations that make a philosophical impact or the circular discourse and deployment of profound analogy as rhetorical strategies acknowledged as Emerson’s prose traits. With the length of her prose pieces either restricted by foreseen printing costs or short because of personal preference, she does not exert great range in her thematic overtures. Her themes serve young female readers, not Emerson’s Brahmin adults and divinity scholars. Although she is not writing down to her readers, she mentions luminaries, in an array of intellectual and social activities, about whom she feels they deserve to know. Emerson is not one of them. Given their contemporary intellectual and educational opportunities, what might we be compelled to distinguish between an Emerson in his early prime as a thinker and an Ann Plato as a teenage prodigy? Gender and education do not make a superficial paradigm, nor is it meaningless to consider the effect of gender upon the nature and depth of what is expected of a scholar, particularly of a young woman of color eager to become educated and just as eager to teach. An Ann Plato could not elude vestiges of the cult of true womanhood in the process of composing her essays. Although the true woman would have been trained to become an organizer and protector of hearth and schoolroom, stern and puritanical hands would have constricted her full intellectual growth. Several American women writers of this era refused to be confined: Sedgwick, Child, Jarena Lee, Betsy Chamberlain, Maria Stewart, and Sigourney during Plato’s childhood and youth are outstanding examples, but she invokes none of them. The strategy Plato adheres to and develops for her essays, compelled into being by the combination of piety and responsibility to 176 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

American social and religious ideals she wants to convey to her pupils, follows a life-path trajectory driven by didacticism. Emerson is never so admonishing about such fundamentals of living; his ideas spiral into metaphysical terrain that teachers of girls would not have been inclined to encourage. Xavier, briefly discussing four of Plato’s essays with a passing reference to a fifth, deploys the Scottish Enlightenment rhetorician and preacher George Campbell’s principle of sympathy from The Philosophy of Rhetoric, a tome published in 1776 whose influence among teachers in the United States carried well into the following century. She bases her reliance on Campbell on Eldred and Mortensen’s position that Campbell proves to be an effective strategy for studying Charlotte Forten rather than on whether or not Forten ever was exposed to Campbell.88 By extension, we can include Plato in this paradigm and expand the possibilities to include nineteenth-century pedagogues such as the American Jacob Abbott and another Scot, John Abercrombie. Xavier’s essay concentrates more on the study of Campbell as a discursive approach to Forten, who not only experienced racial prejudice but was, thanks to her membership in an active family, of an abolitionist disposition in her journal writings, which make her politically a much more interesting writer than Plato. Yet one can find a reason for Xavier’s sparse critique of Plato, for Campbell probably offered Plato little in the manner of a discursive style acceptable to her temperament and predisposition. The Philosophy of Rhetoric is a hermeneutic treatise that follows a scientific method of reiterated statements of problems to be solved, listing several hypotheses and providing examples to illustrate analytical inquiry. Campbell’s style does not depend upon analogy, although some are present in his book. Plato would, plausibly, have found Abbott and Abercrombie better suited to her nature. One can imagine her shunning Campbell but taking an interest in Hugh Blair, one of his contemporaries, and Richard Whately, an Ameri- can rhetorician. In Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America, Nan Johnson keenly distinguishes Campbell from Blair, although she finds similarities in their objectives. Where Campbell is a philosopher, logician, taxonomist, and psychologist whose rhetorical style may have disenchanted Ann Plato, she might have found Blair’s style attractive, because, according to Johnson, Blair’s “belletristic ideology established an equally influential claim for the role of rhetoric in the cultivation of liberal and moral culture, a claim that would find wide acceptance in the nineteenth-century tradition in North America.”89 In another view of Xavier’s somewhat gratuitous attempt to discuss Ann Plato through a rhetorician like Campbell, Campbell nevertheless can serve to encourage investigation of Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) and Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric (1828). Along with the qualities of her rhetoric, Ann Plato paid some attention to ideas advocating the education of women. Thomas Broadhurst was likely The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics 177

one of her influences here; his Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the Mind (1808) and the review of this book by Sydney Smith were widely read. In either text available to her, Plato would have found the opinion that education improves character, the characters of men and “the stock of national talents” and “public morals.”90 If her book is addressed to girls and young women, as several critics maintain, no examples of women populate her expositions. How odd she is for ignoring female creativity in letters and leadership in religious and educational endeavors! Piety consumes “Education” to the extent that she omits Catherine Beecher and Mary Lyon for their achievements in women’s education. Mention of Prudence Crandall’s disappointing experience would have absolved, perhaps, Plato’s bland acknowledgment of England’s abolition decision. These female educators embody so much of what Plato professes in their virtue of personal integrity, affirming religion as the foundation for a young person’s general learning. Clearly, piety interfered with Plato’s attention to gender. Plato’s predisposition to piety befits a return to Sigourney’s The Girl’s Reading Book to close this chapter. The rhetorical contrast between the two authors lies most pronounced in Sigourney being given to closing her essays with religious allusions, unlike Plato, who imbues God into virtually all thought. Sigourney aims her “Preface” at upholding the value of reading: “To read well is a high accomplishment. It is not only graceful in a female, but its results rank among the virtues. It enables her to impart both instruction and pleasure.”91 Although no religious formulation distinguishes this stated aim in any obvious manner, and religion is not mentioned in this preface, its author was well versed in Christian standards. Plato’s “Religion” essay serves as her prefacing statement, and Essays, no matter to what degree the twenty-first–century reader interprets its nineteenth-century readership, reflects its author’s youth in deeply felt church affiliation and devotion to piety expressed perhaps more clearly in her poems.

Chapter 10

Four Women as a Cultural Circle ᇺᇻᇺ

There is nothing remarkable about Ann Plato selecting her four young women as subjects of biographical eulogies, because they exhibited the kinds of Christian devotion and sacrifice to which she personally aspired. I want to go deeper into this relationship. The four, Louisa Sebury or Seabury, Eliza Loomis Sherman, Elizabeth Low, and Julia Ann Pell, share Plato’s enigmatic status in being virtually absent from the public record; they maintain an ironic presence in Essays because Plato is the principal or only source of their vital information, although she says nothing of her own origins. They represent a collective of alter egos for her, well-chosen personalities, each of whose lives, as she describes them in three to four pages, parallel the birth-to-death cycle of her entire “Prose” portion. They lived carefully; were imbued with Christian teachings; and, being extraordinarily delicate in health, died between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six. Collectively, their leaving home as adolescents runs counter to Barbara Welter’s otherwise useful generalizations about “true womanhood” in the early nineteenth century: they do not seem to have been hos- tage to a man’s home.1 They and Plato enjoyed an independence not generally experienced by their peers. Native families trusted their offspring regardless of gender and refrained from constricting those who wished to venture out away from the family; parents who felt that their children “knew their own minds” after a regimen of adult instruction and proper childhood behavior would not discourage girls and young women from leaving home. Eliza Loomis Sher- man might have wished to relocate for health reasons; the ill health that she and Louisa Seabury suffered made them exceptions to the impulse to remain at home. Tuberculosis plays a role that should not be viewed casually. It was

179 180 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity responsible for one in four deaths in the 1830s in New England, “where it was particularly endemic.”2 Plato writes with intimate familiarity about their moments of demise. This culture of dying makes appreciable her piety and the deathward attitude found in her book. Furthermore, Natives historically have been susceptible to fatality from diseases brought by Europeans, such as consumption, diphtheria, and pneumonia. What should we believe when these young women are absent from the public record by specific name? They are real people; their names are not pseudonyms, nor are the women themselves fictitious. None of their families, which Plato claims lived in Hartford, appear in the Hartford City Directory of 1828 or 1838. Plato conjoins with them in spirit by possessing a pre-martyr religious sensibility. If they were her acquaintances, she may herself have been born within the ten-year span of their dates of birth. Two do emerge from the dense fog of history when obscure documents reveal them. The four young women appear to be of Native ancestry, which would also have attracted Plato to their fates. I will explain relevant specific details of their lives, but on a general level, that they, along with Ann, Henry, and Deborah Plato, all appear to be part of the fluctuating Missinnuok world of Long Island Sound makes a compelling set of circumstances that is not accidental. If we consider the movements of Plato and these women, as well as those of her elders from Montville, Paugusett, and Montaukett counties and those who came over from Cooperstown, these particulars combine as cultural contacts and do not strike the tone of racial coincidence, for they may have been a part of the Missinnuok cultural and ethnic world of Long Island Sound. Families and individuals that move about within the landscape of eastern meta-Algonquia survive with “blood memory” and “land memory,” a concept raised by Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday, on which scholar Chadwick Allen has elaborated. Many in this population negotiate survival within a regional place without articulating what holds them to it. The result is that they live in Missinnock but adjust to being away from its spiritual epicenter. Teasing out a theory of mixed-identity lifestyles may simply demonstrate that individuals of mixed background ultimately choose one ethnicity or have it chosen for them. For persons with Native and African American lineage, this may present a problem, unless one of those cultures demands predominance. During Plato’s time especially, admixture would not fully compromise emotional ties to Native identity and memory. The intangible blood, culture, and land memories Momaday addresses would be just as strong in southern New England and New York as on the southern Plains. What compels Indians to gravitate to places in North America is not going to resemble what characterizes the attraction to place felt by African Americans. The spiritual reservoir and motivations will differ. To what degree was the Low family in Cooperstown, New York, like or distinct from their presumably fellow free African Ameri- Four Women as a Cultural Circle 181 cans? Did young Elizabeth leave for Hartford because she felt isolated in that small New York town? And why Hartford and not Albany or some other Hudson Valley city or town? Did her family encourage her to return to be closer to a place of cultural and family origins, or did Hartford offer something better for living and more opportunities for a young woman of color born in the northern foothills of the Catskills? Montville, as the place of birth for both Julia Ann Pell and Deborah Freeman Plato, is problematic when one considers the other reason: Native ethnic exclusion. Families like those of Abba Mason, who migrated to the East Haddam vicinity, were compelled by nothing more than the need to move to territory that belonged to the Niantics before the pre- European Mohegan-Pequot influx. Anthropologist Karen I. Blu offers a suitable analogy when she discusses Lumbees in Robeson County, North Carolina:

Lumbee identity, like the particular identities of other native [sic] American peoples, depends heavily upon connection to a particular place, a home place. . . . I never had the sense from either blacks or Whites [there] of the same kind of connection between place and people-as-a-whole.3

This sense of Natives belonging to a local homeland becomes compli- cated for individuals who were not wanted in the Native communities they might have chosen to adopt as their own; nineteenth-century mixed-ancestry Natives could not have migrated with religious enclaves and were unwelcome and marginalized in their adopted places. In his History of Fairfield County, Connecticut, of 1881, D. Hamilton Hurd presents a chart giving “Population and School Statistics” for the years 1756 through 1880, whose interpretation will illuminate the documentary racialism affecting Natives becoming invisible in public records by the nineteenth century. The chart has separate columns for Whites and Negroes for 1756, Whites and Blacks (1774), and Whites and “Indians and Negroes” (1782). In this kind of demography, Natives may be included as part of the earlier Negro and Black tallies, yet grouping Natives and blacks together in 1782 is both anomalous and transparent, reflecting on one hand that Natives were undergoing a gradual (and most likely selective) acculturation to Anglo-American society and on the other hand, that efforts to align the two peoples and collapse them for the demographic record were taking place more in earnest at that time, erasing the indigenous population from the record. And contrary to reality, as already discussed and as we will see, no people of color were recorded in Bridgeport or Trumbull in these years. Those few residing on the tiny Paugusett reservation in Trumbull were probably omitted from this series of record gatherings because they were reservation Indians. From 1790 on, following the federal census, only population totals are provided in the summary represented by Hurd.4 Bearing 182 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity this kind of documentation in mind helps us scrutinize the Native and African American color line in northeastern history. Plato writes about her four women as if she had known them as slightly older peers. Nevertheless, her narrative style lacks any personal investment on a level of intimate familiarity or contact with them. In a period when ordinary people were never described at such length in their obituaries, these four young women are honored for their unshakeable religious faith by Plato, who writes of them in a journalist’s fashion, anticipating the style of early twentieth-century newspaper obituaries. Yet presuming that Ann Plato actually knew any or all of these women might be risky. Indeed, she may have, but her prose betrays her familiarity as distant, and given the possibilities that she might not have known them or that she might have known them well, her writing about them by itself may reflect that she herself was an early adolescent living in Hartford during 1838 and 1839. In discursive style, the biographies follow a formulaic structure. The subject is introduced immediately, with Plato identifying the woman’s date of birth and town of origin; characteristics of her pious disposition follow; her desire to attain a formal education is acknowledged; a brief comment is then made about her delicate health; and Plato then testifies to the young woman’s religious devotion and the strength of her faith, concluding with an account of her profession of faith en route to her rapid demise. Plato thus provides her readers with a neat biographical package, whose order and compact nature are predictable and easy to read. The women are all youthful, have never had a male consort, and abide by principles stringently focused on Christian faith and piety, buttressed by their individual modest circumstances.5 Plato seems to be following Sigourney’s model in Female Biography (1829), about which Sigourney stated in Letters of Life that she had written biographical sketches “of the good and distinguished as examples of good conduct” and had chosen several “American women remarkable for their conduct.”6 With a predisposition toward piety and the afterlife, however, Plato would have been drawn to seek out and peruse obituaries in newspapers, and as an adolescent with the goal in mind of writing and publishing a book, an obituary having the title “The Triumphant End of Mrs. Mary Virginia Forten,” which appeared in The Colored American newspaper on 29 August 1840, may have deepened her appreciation for how the genre should be represented. That the obituary was written by “D.A.P.” momentarily captivates the modern scholar’s attention. Had not Forten left a record of vital information through her in- laws, Plato could easily be thought to be the obituary’s author. Thinking that “D.A.P.” could be Deborah [Ann] Plato, Henry Plato’s wife, or Ann Plato, and remembering that Plato would publish a poem in this newspaper exactly one week later serves for conversation over these coincidental associations. The actual author of the obituary is Daniel Alexander Payne, a Charleston, South Four Women as a Cultural Circle 183

Carolina, native and Lutheran pastor who held Mary’s Philadelphian father- in-law, James Forten (1767–1842), in high regard.7 Although the discursive formula of this obituary resembles the eulogies in Essays, D.A.P. provides no date and place of birth (or of death) for Mary Forten, nor does he add comments about the deceased wishing to pursue an education other than that “she possessed an intelligent mind and a clear judgment”; most of all, D.A.P. acknowledges that Forten was “the consort [husband] of Mr. Robert Forten” and that she was also a mother—one of her small children was Charlotte L. Forten, who also became a writer. The Fortens were a distinguished family of free blacks living in Philadelphia, where the patriarch James was born, as was his father. Robert Forten married Mary Virginia Wood in 1836.8 The last two-thirds of the obituary teem with Christian pieties, salvation- related imagery, and pious melodramatic sentimentality that simply draw readers into the shared sense of loss through a profusion of sadness and melancholia. The “dying saint” comforts her weeping sisters-in-law by attesting to her forthcoming salvation and her lack of fear because the “Precious Saviour . . . will be with me for six troubles and in the seventh he will not forsake me.” Forten is recorded as asking the popular phrase from scripture and hymn, “O death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” And the narrator repeats this; it will be a minor detail in the final paragraph of the biography of Elizabeth Low.9 The amount of maudlin church rhetoric in this obituary would test the patience of modern readers. It differs, however, from the four biographies in Essays by being more a description of dying, lacking biographical substance, and offering no sense of earthly place. Taking the approach that a specific earthly region bears superficial meaning in the heavenly kingdom would not be unlike Plato. The experience of reading Forten’s obituary should have served well her attention to matters of style, for this entry as is would have been far too languorous for her book.

Louisa Seabury

Louisa Seabury’s surname appears in two forms in Plato’s book: as Seabury in her table of contents and as Sebury in the chapter’s title and the first sentence of the biography, most likely a printer’s error.10 Plato may have known her well; she specifies that Louisa died in the Hartford of her birth on 16 December 1838 at twenty-two years of age, pneumonia overwhelming her predisposition to ill health. Louisa joined Colored Congregational on 13 May 1838 (one of eighteen people, including Henry Plato, to do so), seven months before her demise. It is unknown if the Mary Seabury who joined with Ann Plato on 4 April 1841 is related to her.11 Otherwise she leaves no record. Seaburys of color in Connecticut at that time seem to have been nonexistent; a few lived on Long Island. But two discrepant records for a Samuel 184 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Seabury do exist, and not only are they likely the same person, Louisa may have been his daughter. In one, John Mumford of Lyme posted Samuel Seabury’s absence in the Connecticut Gazette the day following his running away from Lyme on the night of 23 February 1801, age twenty, dressed in a gray coat and “trowsers” and carrying “a bundle of Cloaths.” He is described as about five feet, six inches tall, with “sandy hair,” and Mumford promised a reward of only three cents for his return.12 In the second record, which appears in the Kingsbury Negro Census of 1805, we find Samuel Seabury, “age 20, free. Formerly in New London; in Hartford 10 yr.; present master Thomas Y. Sey- mour.”13 Either there were two Samuel Seaburys, or young Seabury had indeed lived in Hartford and had an indenture misadventure during a visit to Lyme. But the name Sebra (or Setra) is a probable alternate form of Seabury: a Setra was listed in both the 1830 and 1840 censuses for Hartford as a free colored male between thirty-six and fifty-four, with seven people in his home at the earlier enumeration and four in the 1840 census. The age distinctions remain problematical in relation to Louisa Seabury’s parents. Descriptions like that of 1801 may be too imprecise for a researcher to use to affirm Samuel Seabury’s race or ethnicity. “Sandy hair” could refer to hair texture as well as hair color. Connecticut records otherwise list few Seaburys living outside Groton and New London, and all were whites descended from the long line of that family in that area. Lemuel Seabury, born in Islip, Long Island, in 1772 and registered as black and unmarried on his Seaman’s Protec- tion Certificate, which he received in Providence in 1796, is another possible relation.14 The Nassau County North Shore town of Oyster Bay recorded the birth on 5 May 1800 of a third Seabury, a slave child named James Seabury, belonging to Daniel Duryea.15 This slave child may also have been an older brother to Louisa; his parents may have either been manumitted from slavery or served out their indentures and decided to move to Hartford, where Louisa was born. The best evidence that could link him as a sibling, cousin, or father to Louisa Seabury is his being listed in the “Free Blacks in Incomplete Negro Censuses, 1805” section of Barbara J. Beeching’s paper on Hartford blacks and Natives.16 If Louisa Seabury is related to Samuel Seabury, her absence in the record may be attributed to his having been an indentured servant or perhaps a slave, although his slave status cannot be verified.17 With Plato describing her as thirsting for the knowledge she did not have the advantages to attain and that she was not “skilled in [its] depths,”18 it seems clear that Louisa Seabury probably had very little schooling of a formal or informal kind. In Plato’s description of what precipitated Seabury’s demise, there is a provocative similarity of detail to pedagogue Jacob Abbott’s description of a young woman to whom he assigns the pseudonym “Louisa” in his early book The Young Christian (1832). “The Story of Louisa” comprises a major portion of Abbott’s fourth chapter, “Consequences of Neglecting Duty”; his Louisa, a Four Women as a Cultural Circle 185

visitor to his home when her female peers gathered to discuss religion, could never bring herself to become a Christian; she lived a good life on her own terms yet struggled with her commitment to faith in a manner Plato would have been unable to fathom. Abbott eventually learns that “she had taken a violent cold, and it had settled into a fever.”19 Louisa Seabury differs from Abbott’s Louisa in having accepted Christ and being of sickly constitution; Plato describes her demise as follows: “Her last sickness was occasioned from a violent cold which she had taken. This terminated her existence.” Plato lived by the principle of “resignation to the will of one’s Maker,”20 which is the same as Abbot’s idea of “real submission,” which is needed in order for a person to become one of Christ’s disciples.21 Seabury’s death was related to consumption; Abbott’s Louisa’s death was not.

Eliza Loomis Sherman

Hartford-born Eliza Loomis Sherman, born in December 1822 “at Hartford,” who died in August 1839 of “pulmonary consumption” at sixteen, is the only one of the four women whose father Plato identifies: Henry Sherman. A Henry Sherman was enumerated in the Connecticut federal census for Hartford in 1820 and 1830. He is identified as black, twenty-six years of age, and head of a household of five in 1820; over the next decade, his household increased to twelve.22 Lydia Sherman, eighty-four years of age in 1840, may have been his mother. One of the two female children in his Hartford household in 1830 who were under age ten may have been Eliza.23 There is a temptation to speculate that this Henry Sherman may have come from one of two communities. He may have been a descendant or relative of the George Sherman who, along with other members of the Scaticook (or Schaghticoke) community, had settled in Hartford County, or he may have been originally from or near the Paugusett tribe’s Golden Hill reservation in Bridgeport and, later, Trumbull, Connecticut, where a Sherman family lived, one being a seaman, William Sherman, who returned to live there in 1853. In a third possibility, Henry Sherman’s ancestors may have lived in both places.24 Evidence for the first of these possibilities may appear in a side comment in a correspondence of 1843 in which a Bridgeport selectman, Smith Tweedy, who became the overseer for the Paugusetts, acknowledged having an “application from another branch of that Tribe from Litchfield or Hartford County for a share” of money meant to aid indigent members of the tribe.25 The narrative follows this with the observation, “The ‘other branch’ is not named,” but it is implied that this other group may be associated with a daughter of Tom and Eunice Sherman, Sarah, who supposedly married a Negro, Ben Roberts.26 Then again, among the thirteen Natives of the Moravian mission at the Schaghti- coke community who petitioned the Connecticut General Assembly regarding 186 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity land concerns in 1752, two were brothers of Petrus Sherman: Christian, or Pentawam, and Tsherry, or Solomon; the tribe of Petrus Sherman is listed with two spellings, Potatuck and Potaik. The people resided in what became New Milford and vicinity.27 Petrus Sherman was probably an extended family member of Thomas Sherman of Paugusett and may possibly have been of the founding lineage of the Sherman name among Natives in western Connecticut. The Peter Sherman identified as one of the Scaticook tribe on 7 October 1789 by Ezra Stiles in his Itinerary may be the same Petrus Sherman. Additional Shermans listed include David Sherman, who was single, and “Hannah Sher- man at N.Y.”28 Under this hypothetical perspective, if he had been residing in Hartford, Henry Sherman would have been enumerated according to the whim of the census official, because he was not residing at the Paugusett reservation or at Schaghticoke. If he had been at either of those locations, he would not have been included in the federal census, because he would have been a Native who was not taxed. William Sherman (1825–1886) served on whaling ships from 1848 to 1853, and he is identified in seventeen documents between 1848 and the year of his death by an array of designations—Copper, Black, White, Mulatto, Colored, and Indian—which attests to how Native identity in the Northeast was given facile identifications by officials and others who encountered them and according to the interpretations of many documents.29 It is possible that Eliza Loomis Sherman’s father Henry is part of the extended family of descendants associated with the first nonwhite Tom Sher- man, who, with his wife Eunice and their daughter Sarah, petitioned the Con- necticut General Court in 1763 for redress, claiming that several white families had evicted them “and pulled down their wigwam without right.”30 Documents show Eunice’s surname as both Shoran and Sherman.31 Tom and Eunice’s son, also named Tom, maintained the Paugusett reservation as head of its only resident family in 1800.32 William Sherman would have been Tom and Eunice’s grandson. Plato mentions of Eliza that “when quite young her excellent father died,” leaving her with a sister to help their mother.33 This specific detail of one sibling could nullify the possibility that the Henry of Plato’s poem “I Have No Brother” is Eliza’s relation. But the deaths of two Henry Sherman toddlers should pique our interest. Both boys died before Eliza reached ten: one died March 1, 1829, and was buried in Bethel at age one year and nine months; the second, Henry Levi Sherman, died at seventeen months in Bridgeport on September 9, 1832. The child buried in Bethel may have been the offspring of a “Widow Sherman” recorded in the census of 1830 in Fairfield County in the neighboring village of “Newton” (Newtown).34 The toddler buried at Bridgeport may have resided in Hartford with his parents and family, who took him to Bridgeport for burial. His being a Sherman child makes that location plausible: the father of this very young Henry Sherman may have wished the Four Women as a Cultural Circle 187

child to be buried on ancestral land. This thesis then affects the way we read “I Have No Brother,” for Plato may have adopted the persona of Eliza Loomis Sherman reminiscing about her lost brother, and such a thesis may counter the interpretation that the father in “The Natives of America” is Ann Plato’s own. William Sherman assisted and administered to a contemporary, Henry Sher- man, a man documented as Henry O. Pease,35 but if and just how this person might be related to Ann Plato’s young woman remains undetermined. Eliza Loomis Sherman attained a “common school education” at a succession of schools; poor health eventually interrupted her schooling.36 If Eliza Loomis Sherman’s parents were nonwhite, they could have been modestly well off, for Plato describes her at fifteen as “capable of superintending her mother’s largest tables; if she saw anything go on wrong among the servants” she would speak first to her mother. Then, what does Plato mean by writing wistfully that had the consumptive young woman “wished for shelter beneath a Georgian clime, that privilege would not have been granted her, on account of the laws”37? By specifying Georgia in this way, Plato enlarges the confusion circumscribing three possible restrictions that would have motivated her remark: is she driven by a particular motive? Is Georgia a general yet symbolic place for tuberculosis recoveries that would have denied access to Sherman? Georgia did not prohibit consumptives from New England to enter its boundaries for its balmy weather.38 On the level of race, the laws would have affected Natives and blacks differently and with varying permutations. Danger of capture for enslavement put free African Americans and unwary Natives at risk anywhere in the South at that time. Georgia discriminated against black immigrants, but of incoming slaves, Article IV, Section 11 of its Constitution of 1798 clearly proclaims that the legislature “shall have no power to prevent emigrants from either of the United States to this State from bringing with them such persons as may be deemed slaves by the laws of any one of the United States.”39 Furthermore, as Plato avers that the “winter of 1839” was the period of her declining health, Eliza Loomis Sherman would have risked deportation from the state if she were Native, as Georgia had recently and vigorously enforced the Indian Removal Act. Plato would have been writing from awareness gained from newspapers and journals or from discussions and debates she may have heard by local pastors, teachers, and lay persons over the issue of Cherokee removal, as the military roundup and corralling of Cherokee families had occurred during the summer of 1838. Plato also may have gained insight about this circumstance through a version of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s letter of April 1838 to President Martin Van Buren, in which Emerson opposed the legal dimension supporting Georgia’s decision.40 What are we otherwise to make of that portion of her comment, “because of the laws”? It possesses a deliberately circumspective quality that throws the rhetorical weight of onus on Georgia as prepared to refuse admission to a young woman solely on the basis of health. Plato therefore 188 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity must have deemed the subjects of Indian removal and chattel slavery too sensi- tive for her presumed target audience of young colored girls. In what seems like deliberate veiling of the two principal human rights issues of the day, she prefers an obvious political reticence easily spotted by Vernon Loggins. Plato’s choosing, or perhaps being coached, to be vague rather than making a direct reference to race-related conditions in the South runs contrary to the grain of contemporary New Light Congregationalist thought and dispositions on these issues, resulting in this failure of assertion, which contrasts dramatically with her “The Natives of America” poem. To conclude regarding Eliza Loomis Sherman, Connecticut vital records, such as they were when she died, do not list her. John Ellsworth compiled a “register of deaths” for Hartford between 1810 and 1846 that lists none of Plato’s women. However, two people bearing the surname Loomis are listed: one, a year-old child named William R. Loomis, is recorded for April and August, 1839. The Loomis family name has a long history in Hartford, but just how Eliza Sherman came by her middle name can only be speculated: her father’s line may have been servants to a Loomis family, or a Loomis woman may have married a Sherman who was Native.

Elizabeth Low

Plato’s third Hartford victim of consumption, in her twentieth year in 1838, was Elizabeth Low, born in Cooperstown, New York, and appearing “to possess a truly noble mind”: “perusing the Holy Scriptures, and other religious books” occupied much of her time.41 Her demise, on 15 September 1838, is documented neither in official state nor in local records; her place of rest is also unrecorded. However, two notices attract our attention. One mentions the death of a “Miss Law” on 10 February 1839.42 The other is a portion of a paragraph in Plato’s description of her demise, especially with regard to a shroud, which evidently comes from the “Address” fully reprinted in the Colored American’s 3 October 1840 issue. Amos G. Beman briefly introduced this entry in its first part the week before as having been “delivered in the city of Hartford, on the first of August, 1839, by a young ministering brother and associate” who, referring to Elizabeth Low, asks:

Did not the gospel display its power in the life and triumphant death of Elizabeth Low? What caused the beauteous smile of resignation to shed a calm serenity over her placid features? What caused a benignant lustre [sic] to enkindle in her dim eye when surveying her robes, which, at her own request, had been prepared to deck her for the tomb?43 Four Women as a Cultural Circle 189

This young minister was possibly Payne. The italicized portion Plato followed almost to the letter, only changing the grammar from the interrogative to the declarative voice. Here we find her liberal use of printed text, especially her expropriation of the “triumphant” designation for Low’s death rather than a word with more common contextual usage. And although she does not follow our citation expectations, as she also did not when quoting or paraphrasing Sigourney, this becomes a small detail in her appropriating the narrative of Low’s life of faith:

A benignant lustre enkindled in her dim eyes, while surveying the robes, which, at her own request, had been prepared to deck her for the tomb!44

Evidence that is more than circumstantial suggests that Low may have been a daughter of Robert Low, whose household is enumerated in the federal censuses for both 1820 (where the name is spelled Lowe) and 1830 for Otsego County, New York, in which the village of Cooperstown is situated; the same household also is enumerated in the Otsego County census of 1825. In 1830, free colored persons constituted this household, among them Robert and, presumably, his wife, who was, as was he, at least fifty-five years old. There were also one female between ten and twenty-three, another between twenty-four and thirty-five, and two males between the ages of ten and twenty-three. In 1830, Elizabeth Low would have been in her twelfth year. The Lows left Cooper- stown for Hartford in the 1830s; either Elizabeth preceded them, or they moved as a family. The Federal Census for Connecticut in 1840 listed Robert Low as a free colored head of household in Hartford. A decade later, neither he nor his wife were listed in either the New York or Connecticut census; if Robert’s wife’s name was Jane Low, she was indeed from the state of New York and was listed in the Hartford Town records as black and having died of old age in October 1847 at age 71.45 The Lows may have left Cooperstown because it was slow to develop a settled religious community, for, as Alan Taylor points out in his useful history of the town, its founder, William Cooper, was a Quaker and religious skeptic who was hostile to Calvinist denominations and more interested in other civic developments. Devout Cooperstown Christians at the turn of the nineteenth century, while bickering over denominational preferences for ministers, held worship services in homes, barns, and even fields.46 The Lows’s desire for a stable religious life two decades later might conceivably have compelled them to venture, or return, to Connecticut. Robert and Jane Low’s eldest son Alexander, born in the state of New York, thirty-three years old and a stonecutter by trade, was listed with his wife Almira, age twenty-two, and a year-old daughter, Laura. Eli, their son, was recorded as having been 190 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity born in February 1851 in Hartford, “Coloured.”47 Determining whether the Lows were black, descendants of an Iroquois community traditionally residing north of Cooperstown, Mohicans, Munsee Delawares, or an intermixed family possessing African American and any combination of those backgrounds, or that the husband and father was descended from New England Algonquian migrants, is difficult to ascertain.48 In the “Address,” Beman’s admired young minister speaks of Elizabeth Low right after noting that Christ’s gospel “has found some of its brightest ornaments and ablest defenders among the African race.” Beman appears to have accepted the the comment as literal. By 1820, when Robert Low was initially enumerated in the federal census, Natives were an underground presence in Otsego County, the result of intrepid anti-Indian attitudes stemming from the massacre of pro-rebellion settlers in Cherry Valley, twelve miles northeast of Cooperstown. Briefly, this massacre by Indians and British in November 1778 occurred between the raid by rebel militiamen and Continental soldiers that destroyed the Indian town of Ono- quaga located south of present-day Cooperstown and, later, General Sullivan’s infamous destruction of Seneca Country in 1779. William Cooper, the father of the novelist, began establishing his town in 1786. Local memories of the Cherry Valley massacre expose a raw nerve even in the twenty-first century, and Natives would have remained, furtively, in this region only for a while. But, says Taylor, in the early years of the republic, “small groups of Iroquois and Mohicans returned to Otsego in the warm months to hunt and fish, to sell venison” and other items, implying that neither Native families nor individuals had forever disappeared.49 White residents would have tolerated as harmless these itinerant visitors. Cooperstown was never a large settlement; the 1825 state census for the entire town of Otsego identifies fifty-four colored persons (Robert Low is among these), some of them residing in white households.50 African Americans celebrated holidays such as the First of August abolition of British slavery,51 the same subject that was the occasion for Plato’s eponymously titled poem. The post-Revolution Otsego County generation that taught its children to “dread and detest Indians”52 would likely not have considered the Low family Natives even if they had identified themselves as or were indeed Natives, or otherwise were perceived to be nothing more than the mulattoes or the free colored persons the census had described. Further speculation as to Elizabeth Low and her family leaving Cooper- stown for Hartford may have to do with Robert being somehow related to Wil- liam Low, the husband of Sally Low—spelled “Law” in both the Connecticut General Assembly transcription and the 1826 Mohegan overseer’s list.53 This couple lived in Norwich, Connecticut, when Sally, in her petition of 5 May 1823 in Montville, affirmed being Mohegan as she was attempting to dispose of her mother’s house and parcel of land in Mohegan; because she had been “educated entirely in respectable families of white people, she has no attachment Four Women as a Cultural Circle 191

to the mode of life which the natives pursue” and is happy otherwise.54 (This reminds us of Ann’s “Little Harriet” narrative of 1841, in which Harriet finds peace in the Jewell household.) The sale was completed in 1825. The relationship of her husband to Robert Low’s household or others is left to speculation. One of those others, a Sarah Low, also of Norwich, unsuccessfully petitioned for tax relief in 1836.55 Later, a William Lowe, who died at Stonington in 1905, presents a potential conundrum. George D. Stanton, the physician officiating at this Lowe’s demise, recorded no vital details such as race, color, age, or place of birth. Worse, the information on him in the New London County Records and in Ancestry.com do not agree.56 This William Lowe had a daughter, Caroline (Carrie) Lowe, who is identified as black and as having been born in Macon, Georgia, either in 1837, 1838, or 1841.57 Caroline married Silas H. Hazard, likely Narragansett, in Stonington around 1870, and only Carrie Louise and another daughter of their five children lived past infancy; their first child died on 12 June 186958; daughter Mary lived just over a month in her natal Stonington and is identified on the marriage certificate.59 In another record, Caroline, listed as Carrie, is listed as mulatto, age 28, wife of Silas Hazzard (sic), which would confirm a birth year of 1843. Key to the research on the William Low whose wife is Sally and the William Lowe whose daughter is Caroline is who they are to each other, if they are related at all. In the 1900 federal census for Connecticut, Caroline (Lowe) Hazard’s father, whose name is not provided, is listed as having been born in Georgia. If this is true, and he was born also in Macon, he would have been born a slave or born free (as an obvious historical alternative). And was he black or Native (of Creek, Yuchi, or Cherokee background) or mixed? In terms of servants, those New Englanders who migrated westward, specifically those settling in Otsego County, could have brought black or mixed-Native servants or slaves with them.60

Julia Ann Pell

The oldest of these ill-fated young women, Julia Ann Pell, was born, according to Ann Plato, in 1813 in Montville, Connecticut, and died at the age of twenty- five or twenty-six in 1839.61 She should not be confused with another woman similarly named, the Methodist preacher Julia Pell.62 Until 1786, Montville was the north parish of the town of New London; later, Uncasville was part of the parish of Montville. Both Montville and Uncasville are the traditional homelands of the Mohegans, although not only Mohegans resided there in the early nineteenth century. In their census of 1782, no individual or family named Pell, or for that matter Freeman, is listed.63 The Lewis Pell family listed in the Montville federal censuses of 1820 and 1830 are identified as “Free Colored People”; but in 1830, the listings for Lewis Pell and “Lewis Pell Junior” are 192 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity almost identical and identify by age one female between ten and twenty-four in the household, who could be, Brown and Rose speculate, Julia Ann Pell. Contributing to the complexity of these Pell listings is that Lewis Pell Junior appears to be older than Lewis Pell, but Lewis Pell’s son (born in 1811 and who ran away from his apprenticeship at age sixteen in 1827) is also named Lewis.64 A “Japhit” or “Ja s s het” (Jahosephat?) Pell, male, is also listed in the Montville census for 1820. According to Brown and Rose, “Between 1818 and 1820, Japhet Pell was paying twelve dollars a year for the use of a house and a half acre of land in Montville; his wages were eleven dollars a month, for which he worked every other week.”65 Japhet Pell worked differing numbers of days prior to that; however, Nathaniel Comstock, a Montville farmer, recorded on 22 April 1816 that Japhet Pell, Negro, “beg[a]n to work one half of the time for two months and half” and worked again on April 27.66 Much of his wages apparently paid for foodstuffs, and at times he settled his account with Comstock.67 Comstock documents these transactions between 1816 and 1820.68 A Nancy Pell, identified as Ethiopian but probably not actually from East Africa, was admitted to the East Lyme Baptist Church in 1788 and later enumerated in the 1820 Connecticut census for Bozrah, a town west of Montville; an Andrew Pell rendered services in Lyme in the 1790s.69 The Lucinda Pell enumerated in the 1850 federal census for Montville is listed in the Norwich census the same year with Nancy M. and Fanny Pell, perhaps her daughters (at respective ages of 26 and 36), and is listed as mulatto; at age 70, she could have been the widow of one of the Lewis Pells or of Japhit Pell. The 1800 census for Groton lists a Peleg George as Mashantucket Pequot. This man may be a relation to William Apess’s Aunt Sally George.70 The name Pually, according to both Mohegan Nation tribal historian Melissa Jane Tantequidgeon Zobel and Paul Grant-Costa, formerly of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum Library and Research Center, could be the predecessor of the name that one family of Natives may have transformed to Pell.71 Pually Mossuck or Massuck (variously spelled in court documents) is the name of a Tunxis woman whom Samson Occum brought from Farmington in the 1780s. Mossuck or Massuck appears on the Mohegan tribal roster of 1786, and she is described in the 1861 Mohegan genealogy as half Farmington and half Mohegan, the Farmington descent indicating Tunxis. She was one of the “heirs at law” and a daughter of Olive Occum, one of Samson Occum’s daughters, as identified in a petition she filed in November 1845 when she resided in Oneida County, New York, and in a New London County Court Petition of February 1846 seeking due interest and estate, which she filed with her own daughter and others. Pually Mossuck’s father was Solomon Adams of Brotherton. She would have been a very young child, not a woman, in 1783.72 Still another possible association for this name is a Pells family in the Mashpee Wampanoag community on Cape Cod.73 Some nineteenth-century residents bearing the surname Pell are white, Four Women as a Cultural Circle 193

but a heightened interest accompanies this name due to its being among a complex of New England Algonquian names such as Peleg, Pually, and Pells. A non-Mohegan Indian, such as a Pequot or an Eastern or Western Niantic, would not have been eligible to live on Mohegan lands except by invitation, by being formally taken in by the host tribe, or by being a lineal descendent, as seems to have been the case with Pually Mossuck. Julia Ann Pell was not a slave, as some writers on Ann Plato surmise, but she became an apprentice at a young age.74 The family to whom she was apprenticed for a decade, beginning at age eight (1821), and where they lived, Plato never identifies. Pell later moved to East Granby, north of Hartford, within seven miles of the Massachusetts border, around 1831 or 1832. If Lewis Pell was her father, his demise in March or April 1832 may have prompted Julia Ann’s relocation at age eighteen.75 Plato does not specify what year or that Pell may not have reached eighteen until later in calendar year 1832. She merely states that Pell lived “some years in the family of the Pastor of that village” and was highly respected for her character and honesty.76 This unidentified minister would have been the Reverend Daniel Hemenway, who formally assumed the pastorate of East Granby Congregational Church on 3 April 1832. He succeeded Rev. Ste- phen Crosby, who departed for another church in New York, being dismissed on 31 January 1832. Pell’s age of eighteen would corroborate with her joining the Hemenway household later that year.77 Like Colored Congregational, led by Pennington in Hartford, East Granby Congregational (sometimes referred to as Turkey Hills Congregational) contributed to the schooling effort, with men teaching in their homes and in the church meetinghouse. Hemenway “had both day and boarding students at his home at 36 South Main Street.” Quite possibly, Susan Pinney, who operated a “dame school” in the town for children, may have tried to teach her scholastic fundamentals.78 Plato does not relate Julia Ann Pell’s decision to remove to East Granby to a desire to be schooled, nor does she specify her being schooled under the pastor’s tutelage.79 Four years later, in 1836, Pell relocated to Hartford. Her education Plato describes as sporadic, yet she was devoted to learning, religious instruction, and practicing care and the order of her person and domain. Pell having lived “in the country” during childhood Plato asserts to have been disadvantageous for formal education; she seems to have honed her abilities through the Sabbath school. She is the lone of the four Christian noviates Ann Plato identifies as having a specific church or denomination, the Church of Christ, described as “pleasant and agreeable to her,” which she joined in 1838.80 Hartford had more than one Church of Christ congregation during Julia Ann Pell’s last years. No membership lists survive, but other surviving records for them are a mixture of budget information, notes for sermons, and reiterated railings against backsliders. These four women formally enter history thanks to Ann Plato’s high regard for their piety. She gives personality to their lives in the graveyard 194 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

trajectory that afforded her an ironic literary nourishment, and she controls their identities as she does her own. Identities reflecting cultural backgrounds may have been taken for granted during her time (as they often are even today). Natives living among whites would be singled out, but not necessarily if they were living among blacks, because all members of that community simply defied presumption if they wished to return to the individualistic path of indigenous identity sovereignty. Plato may have learned something from their lives that suited her values, or the stories of their lives may have fulfilled her own self- impressions. As youths aware of their vulnerable health, perhaps they cared less about being Native than about being prepared to give themselves to their Maker. The attitude parallels the emphasis of “humanity” over race and gender, protecting one in a cloak of safety that gives one salvation. The bigger picture they inhabited in life and death contains their social history as forlorn people knowing they will succumb to a near epidemic and seeming to welcome the change, looking forward to where it will take them. Chapter 11

The Poetics of a Young Writer ᇺᇻᇺ

If Ann Plato’s poetry exhibits a craft youthful in its pious sentiments and derivative of works by other poets, it nevertheless demonstrates a shrewd craft. Her capacity to dialogically engage experienced role models and display attributes is deemed extraordinary for a young writer of color. At whatever age she wrote these poems, she displays a studious sense of intertextual poetics. She interpolates many lines, words, and phrases of her role models, following a standard practice during the Romantic era in British literature of borrowing and reworking lines and phrases from others—and not always between poets whose friendships constituted a coterie. In this chapter, I argue that we should respect Plato’s poetic compositional impulses and examine interpolated passage samples to demonstrate how she was an ordinary young thinker of poetic craft for her day. The prosody of hymnody also characterizes her poems, and I will demonstrate again that she was an ordinary, early nineteenth-century American poet deploying common meter as a fundamentally Christian-imbued technique and strategy. In the current millennial environment, where critics wrangle over priori- ties of Expansionism versus those of Postmodernism, Plato’s nineteenth-century verse finds no new historicist advocate; Bassard’s inquiry, despite its proposals of scholarship in a nineteenth-century black female literary community, exemplifies how epistemologies in Plato’s contemporaries’ feminist poetics are likely to misapprehend Plato’s female landscape under what may prove to be an erroneous racial application. Some flexible approach to her poetics would seem reliably centered in Formalist criticism, at least until we learn more about her—if we ever do—as a person, about the community that produced her, the

195 196 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity education that disciplined her intellect, and why she submerged her identity under religious and spiritual pieties. Studies of her poetics remain preempted by Modernist critical values. Narrative verse of the past two centuries that follows a prosodic conservatism does not fare well critically under Modernist free-verse agendas celebrating the proto-Modernism of Dickinson and Whit- man. Adapting Dana Gioia to the Modernism–nineteenth century nexus agreed on by Kevin Walzer means that Modernist critics eclipse a Lydia Sigourney by, for instance, lauding the narrative freedoms taken by Dickinson and Whitman.1 In such a critical environment and climate, not even Ann Plato’s compositional skills attracted serious appreciation during the New Negro era’s emphasis on pride of race. Wheatley’s popularity is not so anomalous, for African Americans never devalued her credibility as a poet. She remains a treasured cultural icon. Unlike Plato, she wrote poems about lofty national subjects, men such as George Wash- ington and the minister George M. Whitfield, and in allegorizing America as “Columbia,” the sublime distinguishes her patriotism. Wheatley did not ignore the benefices of Christian piety and charity, but Plato exhibits a deeper personal grounding and preoccupation with Christian virtue. Modernist verse has little room for pieties; Robinson Jeffers’s theological allegories broaden Emerson’s embrace of the natural world’s “Over-Soul” into a literary naturalism. Modern- ists jettison faith for social realism and psychological angst, leaving virtually no critical space for the likes of an Ann Plato. Compounding this to some extent is the relative lack of text analysis given to Plato’s poetry by those few who have written brief essays about her. Bassard, contextualizing her in a Wheatleyesque community, can be included among them, for, as Rafia Zafar says in a review of Spiritual Interrogations, “the chapter on Ann Plato would have gained from a more extended textual critique.”2 Poetics easily loses out to social relevance and biographical essentialism; the structuralist poetics that probe the relationship of form to statement and elucidate the mechanics and impulses that characterize the process of composition find fewer adherents among critics lulled by feminist and racial themes. Still, to literary feminism we are indebted to a nascent yet vigorous Plato scholarship by Williams, Ann Allen Shockley, and Bassard. What Annette Kolodny perceptively describes as the critical devaluation of women writers from the 1920s into the Vietnam War era is in fact the hubris of the staunchly male bastion of Modernism. And until the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, white American Modernists and literary historians altogether resisted allowing more than one—at best two—authors of color, historical or modern, to enjoy academic and public attention, to become cultural “stars” in their genres: in poetry, this would mean Langston Hughes, then Margaret Walker, then Gwendolyn Brooks; even Wheatley’s reputation was criticized by Negro literature apologists. Plato’s girlish Puritan “effusions,” in the words of Saunders The Poetics of a Young Writer 197

Redding, fell victim to what essentially were antiwoman poet and conservative narrative attitudes that had no use for piety. A precocious writer but no experimenter, Plato created poems that help today’s readers appreciate how poetic and moral conventions influenced the techniques and standards of craft she held and shared with her generation of poets. She thus may not interest readers seeking from her a radical feminism that could dictate her prosody, but some of her poems, like her prose, are distinguished by intertextual and dialogical properties affirming her self-assumed kinship with some of the widely read formalist, pastoral-rural, and graveside poets of her youth. A remark by Emily Stipes Watts in 1977 that Frances Harper was “the first black woman poet to publish [in the nineteenth century] since Wheatley” rings false. Literary scholars in African American studies had declared otherwise before this remark appeared in The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945, certainly those who perceived Plato strictly in terms of African American poetry.3 Plato may indeed be the first post-Wheatley woman poet of color to publish a book, and her poems attest to some familiarity with the poetics of her day. We should expect any generation of adolescent poets to be inspired by established living poets or by poets canonized for the classroom and for light or serious reading, and we should expect adolescent poets to emulate those poets and their strategies. Plato accomplishes this by both appropriating text, which she will adapt to suit her experience, and by adapting moments rendered by other poets into her own narrative and lyrical voice. The extent and manner of Plato being dialogical with other poets becomes a compelling issue. She adroitly executed the dialogical character of some of her poems from eclectic sources. Her poetics inform us about the craft of borrowing and interpolating that was practiced by poets, especially skilled novices like herself, during the Romantic era. Plato’s poems reveal her to be among a community of readers and writers constructed around feminine sensibility but not drawing exclusively on female poets. Her compositional strategies affirm that she is as complex a poet as she is an individual. Bassard’s positioning of Wheatley’s communal artistic impact on Plato and two other African American women understandably does not take Plato’s dialogical proclivities very far. The historian of African American literature would see in Plato an allegiance to Wheatley by virtue of a presumed communal lineage. The Rever- end James C. Pennington mentions her as following Wheatley’s example,4 and Williams and Bassard respectively elaborate on Wheatley’s impact on her. Yet Wheatley is the only poet they have identified for whose work Plato exhibits a dialogical relationship. There are at least six others, none being African American, and Plato exerts in her own poems a talent for adapting their poetic 198 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity situations and their scenes and moods to her own expressive needs. Her adaptations from Catherine Turner Smith, Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, Longfellow, and Sigourney synthesize moods they developed in lengthier forms or echo sentimental and syntactical pronouncements. Bassard, by way of Bakhtin, pursues a dialogical thesis over mere poetic influence in order to theorize about “black woman’s subjectivity, authorship and writing community that will allow an historical dialogue to emerge between these texts.”5 My point is that Plato was not parochial in selecting her poet models. Her openness and exposure to works by four British poets and two Americans, two being male, bear witness to three theoretical objectives. First (and this is reiterative), Ann Plato responded directly to at least seven poets whose published works she encountered either through the educational setting or by personal reading, and she interacts with them in ways that are very engaging. Second, the breadth and catholic nature of her selections would be a function of fortuity despite her presumed limited reading resources as a woman of color. Third, the poems by these poets for which she wrote interpolative parallel poems reveal a classical, although undocumented, education and are manifest in what she derived from those poets who made her enthusiastic about creative activity. Embedded in Plato’s response to her favorite poems is an impulse toward writing poetry that defies two assumptions: much of the critical judgment of our times about gender, race, and poetics, and an insularity that means we find exclusively African American sources in her poems. Alexander Pope attracted Wheatley’s attention by virtue of his popularity in her social and cultural environment. Plato’s attraction to and poetic use of her favorite poets challenges the assessed exclusivity by critics of the African American perspective and offers a subtext explaining a tenuous relationship that, as an adolescent writer, she appears to have to African American life. Nevertheless, even in a black women’s reading circle she would have had to read Anglo-American and British poets and writers available to her. Wheatley’s poems, published in the 1770s, continued to be appreciated during Plato’s time. Caroline May’s American Female Poets anthology of 1848 contains three. Both Williams and Bassard interpret a six-line passage from Wheatley’s poem “On Recollection,” which Plato slightly paraphrases for her own poem “Lines,” as best expressing Plato’s experiential circumstances. But Plato also appropriates the passage for the strength and value of its parallel personal significance. Plato as reader, student, and supplicant (and not necessarily in that order) adjusts their differences in age according to when each accepted Christ as personal savior; in “Recollection” and its later version, “On Recollection,” Wheatley couches her age in the following metaphor: “Now eighteen years their destin’d course have run, / In fast succession round the central sun.”6 Plato uses these two lines, changing only the age, to “fifteen,” and uses Wheatley’s subsequent line—“How did the follies of that period pass,” (add- The Poetics of a Young Writer 199 ing an end-stop comma)—before pursuing her own interpolation to complete the couplet: “I ask myself—are they inscribed in brass!” where Wheatley used “Unnotic’d, but behold them writ in brass!” Both Plato and Wheatley found a metier in elegiac poems. Wheatley’s elegies would have offered Plato useful models despite the differing aesthetic temperaments of their times. One particular example reveals how a line from Plato’s “Memory of Gusteen” echoes the format of Wheatley’s “On the Death of J. C., an Infant.” Where Wheatley offers in line 32 “There see your infant, like a seraph glow,” and in general as evident here and in other elegies she takes an admonitory tone when talking about the futility of grief, Plato’s line 5, “Thy infant is a seraph now,” sounds much more consoling. “On the Death of J.C.” is longer and more expansive than “Gusteen,” but Plato concludes her poem by adhering to the spirit of Wheatley’s mood of spiritual triumph. And although she deploys “divine” in her penultimate line, just as Wheatley does, she invokes spiritual resurrection for the dead child where Wheatley, here and elsewhere, directly reminds her specific audience that reunion in death is promised. It so happened that in the decade after the publication of Essays there appeared women’s reading societies named in honor of Lydia Sigourney and Felicia Hemans, as much tributes to the interest in the moral value of their poetry among young women as in the poets themselves being reputable literary role models. And perhaps by coincidence, Hannah Sleeper, principal of the New Hampton, New Hampshire, Female Seminary, mentioned both together in a circular which was part of the Literary and Missionary Associa- tion of the Philadelphia Collegiate Institution for Young Ladies Annual Report for 1839.7 Lydia Howard Huntley taught school in Hartford until she married Charles Sigourney in 1819, becoming Lydia Sigourney (1791–1865). She was easily her generation’s most widely read poet of either gender, her poems circu- lating among individuals and in venues such as poetry annuals and in domestic periodicals catering to women. The British reception of her book of poems The Coronel (1848) prompted a reviewer in London to affirm that her having “long been designated as the American Hemans [is] appropriately applied.”8 She enjoyed a reputation as one of America’s most widely read poets and was sought after by magazines for exclusive rights to her poetry and for editorial affiliation. She also traveled to major northeastern cities, meeting with friends, other writers, and editors. By 1841, thirty-four volumes of her verse, prose, or combinations of both had been published. Her impact on Plato has been explained, and she was, after all, “the Sweet Singer of Hartford,” a sobriquet Gordon S. Haight used to subtitle his 1930 biography of her. Plato had plenty of her publications at her disposal, including Pocahontas, and Other Poems, Sigourney’s second book of verse on an Indian theme, which was printed first in London, and then in New York.9 200 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Specific poetical strategies do associate these two, namely their emphasis on families (not just for elegiac reasons) and the presence in their poems of a father as referent or character. Emily Stipes Watts observes the absence of men as fathers in American women’s poetry after 1800, the most notable exception being Sigourney,10 but Plato should be added to this exception—Plato mentions mothers sporadically but never her own. “The Sick Child,” with its twelve quatrains in abcb iambic tetrameter, exhibits one of Plato’s best sustained deployments of common meter. She uses this same rhyme scheme in some of her other common meter poems: “Advice to Young Ladies,” for instance, and “I Have No Brother.” “Death of a Young Lady at the Retreat for the Insane” is a Sigourney example. Cheryl Walker identifies these themes as among those favored by Dickinson and other Ameri- can Romantic-era women poets, all of whom shared a series of life trends such as childhood precocity, a seminary education, having been privately tutored, the deaths of young family members and friends, and, for all Walker’s poets except Dickinson, pursuing the teaching profession, suffering illnesses such as tuberculosis, and demonstrative religious devotion.11 Some features of Plato’s style and technique and of the scant details of her beliefs and activities replicate the life trends of Sigourney and her own younger peers, and according to “Advice to Young Ladies,” Plato embraced Christianity at age thirteen, an age change from that in her poem “Lines.” Discussing more affinities between the prose of Sigourney and the poetry of Plato is appropriate here. Sigourney’s Sketches, published initially in 1834 and again in 1840, features a domestic portrait in prose, “The Father,” written from a male perspective and underscoring a purposeful delineation of “a single and simple principle of our nature,—the most deep-rooted and holy,—the love of a father for a daughter.” Sigourney’s narrator differentiates a father’s love according to the gender of the offspring, the love for a daughter being more “disinterested” than that for a son. A father’s love for his daughter draws “nutri- ment from . . . the power which she possesses to awaken his sympathies.”12 If Ann Plato perused this sketch, she would have found compatible its obverse significance in reinforcing the image of a tender relationship in her poems of a daughter’s love and need for a father figure. Sigourney’s narrator loses his beloved daughter in the fashion typical to the era’s popular domestic romances, in a vague yet quick and melodramatic decay of youthful beauty, the daughter succumbing to an ambiguous decline that perpetuates the function of a Romantic-era woman dying in the prime of her youth. The lives of the four young women Ann Plato wrote about correspond with similar self-effacement and age, differing in Plato’s emphasis on their piety and their relative social isolation while they were away from their home communities. We can examine the influence of Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) on some of the poems Plato wrote, noting that while they too correspond to Bassard’s The Poetics of a Young Writer 201

critical deployment of Bakhtinian dialogics involving Wheatley, they also reflect Hemans’s religious passions. The poems and books by this prolific poet attracted considerable attention from American women. A complete 444-page collection of her poems was published in Philadelphia in 1836, and a copy of it must have reached Plato, because we find in some of her poems echoes of Hemans’s narrative structures and mood.13 In addition, she may have learned of Hemans’s demise at age 41, thus viewing her as a sister in piety with herself and the four women in her “Biographies” section. She parallels Hemans’s poetic settings; she does not graft a passage from her as she did from Wheatley, offering a personal interpolation, but her lines and settings seem to respond contrapuntally to the selected passages she borrows from Hemans. Between Hemans’s “The Aged Indian” and Plato’s “Natives of America” no ostensible similarity exists, but each contains stock phrases and images about Indian valor and the Indian past. Still, with interest, we find Hemans writing “Fearless of heart, and firm of hand” and Plato stating, “Mothers spoke,—no fear this breast alarms.”14 Here I want to make a centerpiece of an exemplary series in Plato’s poetic strategy. Plato subtly uses three Hemans poems, without imitating them, for her own “Forget Me Not,” and I find Sigourney’s voice contributing to a three-way transatlantic conversation. In England, these poems were published in different collections: the three-stanza “Leave Me Not Yet” appeared in National Lyrics, and Songs for Music as the fifth part of a sequence, “Songs for Summer Hours”; “A Poet’s Dying Hymn,” in fourteen stanzas, is found in Hemans’s Scenes and Hymns of Life; and “A Parting Song,” one of her last, was published posthumously. Each follows a stanza form similar to what Plato would employ: a group of lines with a stanza-ending refrain flush to the right margin. The primary number of lines in each stanza in “Leave Me Not Yet” is four, in “A Poet’s Dying Hymn” and “A Parting Song,” six; “Forget Me Not” contains five lines per stanza. Yet, Sigourney’s volume Poems (1827) offers a closer model in “Remember Me,” from which Plato both interpolated lines and used lines and phrases outright. The titles “Leave Me Not Yet,” “Remember Me,” and “Forget Me Not” resonate as obvious poetic kin and use popular titular rhetoric for narrative vehi- cles of that era. Sigourney’s third stanza in “Remember Me” reads as follows:

When the first star, with cresset bright, Gleams lonely o’er the arch of night, When through the fleecy clouds that dance The moon sends forth her timid glance, Then gazing on that pure expanse, Remember me.

Hemans’s lines three to five of stanza one in “Leave Me Not Yet” read “The quivering image of the first pale star / On the dim lake yet scarce begins to 202 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity burn: / Leave me not yet!” Plato responds by opening her stanza three in “Forget Me Not” with: “When the first star with brilliance bright, / Gleams lonely o’er the arch of night; / . . . / . . . / . . . / Forget me not.” She uses both Hemans and Sigourney but emphasizes her appreciation of the latter. On the subject range of Hemans’s “A Poet’s Dying Hymn,” with its refrain “I bless thee, O my God!,” Ann Plato modeled her own religious and personal sentiments to create a remarkable parallel statement. Both poets invoke the idea of a dear friend being fatally overwhelmed while in the mood of celebrating nature. Hemans uses “To pierce the mist o’er life’s deep meanings spread” in stanza four of this poem, and Plato parallels this line in her stanza two of “Forget Me Not” with “When mists are gathering on the hill, / Nor sound is heard save the mountain rill.” Another collective example reads, from Sigourney’s “Remember Me”:

When mournful sighs the hollow wind And pensive thought enraps thy mind, If e’er thy heart in sorrow’s tone (fourth stanza, ll 1–2)

To further illustrate this aspect of Plato’s poetics, I will use this Sigourney poem with the Hemans and Plato poems, “A Poet’s Dying Song” and “Forget Me Not,” respectively. From Hemans:

“the swift winds bid” the “soul’s utterances” . . . “be conveyed” (“Poet’s Dying Hymn,” stanza five)

In Ann Plato:

When solemn sighs the hollow wind, And deepen’d thought enraps the mind. (“Forget Me Not,” stanza four, ll 1–2)

Finally, from these poems, Sigourney expertly offers to open stanza five of “Remember Me” with “stealing to thy secret bower,” an avian allusion to ascending to a private space for reading scripture. Hemans’s stanza thirteen contextualizes devotion as lofty flight:

Yes! the young vernal voices in the skies Woo me not back, but, wandering past mine ear, Seem heralds of th’ eternal melodies

Plato responds, in the fifth stanza of “Forget Me Not,” “When bird does wait thy absence long, / Nor unto its morning song.” “Bowing o’er that sacred page” in Sigourney becomes “While thou art searching stoic page” in Plato. The Poetics of a Young Writer 203

We find sharper echoes of Hemans’s “A Parting Song” in Sigourney’s “Remember Me” and Plato’s “Forget Me Not.” Although “A Parting Song” contains but four stanzas, the first three, like Sigourney’s first five and Plato’s first five and her seventh, open adverbially with “When,” Hemans differing in using the interrogative mood. Hemans’s poetic sophistication creates a common meter couplet for the two opening lines of stanzas one to three. Her seventh line refrain is “Then let it be!,” changed to an unemphatic “So let it be” for the closing stanza. The appeal of lines by these two poets alone on Plato’s sound and sense shows: “When the air with a deepening hush is fraught” (Hemans l 5) and “When solemn sighs the hollow wind, / And deepen’d thought enraps the mind” (Plato ll 19–20), owing much to Sigourney as indicated; “When the last red light, the farewell of day” (Hemans l 3); “When gentle twilight, pure and calm” (Sigourney l 6); and “When the last rays of twilight fall” (Plato l 7); and when Hemans writes “When ye gather its [a midsummer rose’s] bloom” (l 12), the bloom sound appeals to Plato for her “bloom / . . . gloom” rhyming couplet that opens stanza seven. In “Remember Me,” Sigourney does not indulge in gloom, expressing instead a comfortable adjustment to mortality without dismissing a naturalistic Christian reward. The opening stanza of “Forget Me Not” contains the piety that prepares one for the impending state of repose. Stanza two increases the pensive mood. Where Sigourney’s narrator acknowledges a gradual, almost pas- torally tinged demise, Plato introduces “gloom” and “bloom” in stanzas three and seven and “mournful” in four and five; she repeats the opening line in Sigour- ney’s stanza seven, “And when in deep oblivion’s shade,” for line three in her seventh stanza. Clearly, Plato’s responses, using both Sigourney and Hemans as models, are idiosyncratically forlorn in solemn devotion, appearing to celebrate life’s inevitable journey to repose as a principal objective. In an 1840 issue of The Ladies Companion, Plato may have read B. B. Thatcher’s “Original: The Life and Poetry of Mrs. Hemans,” which described her works as “[rejoicing] with a more than religious resignation” in the face of some of her experiences and identified “pure religious enthusiasm,” a personal discipline contributing to her becoming “an accomplished writer,” and “the spirit of vivid reality,” based upon experiences that influenced her style.15 Hemans, observed Thatcher, “did not devote [her poems] to passion, or to popularity, to fancy, but to religion, virtue, truth. . . . She thought, in a word, of all that suffered and all that strive. She wrote for them all.”16 Plato’s poems reflect Hemans’s criteria as interpreted by Thatcher, and whenever she encountered Hemans’s poems, a generality from this assessment is not difficult to deny. Plato, of course, may be responding to an inordinate youthful preoccupation with death and salvation, if young people of her day were not much unlike some of their twenty-first–century descendants: concerned about political and religious hypocrisy, war, and so on. In a period when death was a major theme in poetry, Plato exhibits an immersion 204 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity in Christian pieties of devotion, sacrifice, and finding peace and reward in the afterlife. As an adolescent writing these poems, she underwent a most thorough and single-minded assimilation of the tenets of a conservative Christian theology. Here we can identify yet another poet, also from England, the writer of well-crafted, extended nonfiction allegories such as Illustrations of Lying, in All Its Branches and romances such as Adeline Mowbray that appealed to readers’ ethical and moral standards: Amelia (Alderson) Opie (1769–1853). She may not have had as strong an impact on Plato as others. One of the seven poems entitled “Song” (“Go youth, beloved”) in her Poems (London, 1802) repeats the phrase “Forget me not, forget me not!” in each last line of its two eight-line stanzas.17 The repetition gives the phrase a different rhetorical quality from other refrains, and the stanza length itself differentiates the cadence. The stanzas’ final phrase represents a continuum of motifs of Opie, altered through Hemans and returning in Plato. Opie’s poems circulated in the United States in the early nineteenth century, and it is conceivable and tempting to imagine that Plato may have encountered them, as she must have encountered Hemans. In the second edition of Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie (1854), Cecelia Lucy Brightwell acknowledges the favorable early reception of this particular “Song” by a journal reviewer, a correspondent from India, and a theologian.18 Plato would have enjoyed the phrase in “Song” but not the poem’s sugges- tion of earthly unrequited love. Opie’s “youth beloved,” perhaps the “Henry” addressed or alluded to in other Opie poems, wants to leave the narrator for new adventures. In the individual poems by all four poets, we find the general theme of parting, with individual stanzas essentially following the same manner of presentation: a narrator acknowledges life’s preoccupations, then bids the addressed person or persons not to forget her. The imperative mood—“Forget me not,” “Remember Me”—dominates each poem’s culminating syntax. From Opie to Plato by way of Sigourney and Hemans, the focus shifts from the secular to the theme of pious demise. No one would disagree with Donald H. Reiman about Opie’s limited technique: “some of her poems are destroyed by inappropriate metrics and rhyme schemes or awkward diction.”19 By contrast, Plato displays an admirable and stronger consistency in those qualities.20 The last of the particular poets for which one Plato poem exhibits some affinity is William Wordsworth, for his “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Plato adapts the Wordsworthian sentiment for her own “Lonely I’ve Wandered,” and she is remarkably subtle in doing so: in six quatrains, compared with Word- sworth’s four sestets, totaling equal numbers of lines; Wordsworth deploying iambic tetrameter to Plato’s predominance of iambic trimeter with occasional anapests. I believe she conceptualized her poem as a companion piece. Where Wordsworth specifies details of the landscape and flowers, Plato’s narrator mus- es along a walk, thinking “of God’s creation” (l 7); she converts Wordsworth’s multitudinous flower field from being analogous to stars along the Milky Way (ll 7–8) to actual stars: having “wander’d / Brisk at the evening tide / . . . / I The Poetics of a Young Writer 205

look up to the heavens, / Behold each solemn star” (ll 1–2, 17–18). Image conversion is Plato’s approach here: her “verdant lawn seems dazzling” might well have come from “vales and hills, / . . . / Fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (ll 2, 6), and she identifies as “How precious are these moments” (l 15) Word- sworth’s “A poet could not be but gay, / In such a jocund company” (ll 15–16). She departs from Wordsworth, however, in the sentiment of her conclusion, her closing stanza expressing piety in contrast to Wordsworth’s secularism and having found God in nature. Plato’s reworking of Wordsworth bears no ecological consciousness unless one wishes to interpret her aloneness strictly according to piety. Her imagery oscillates between the joys and pleasantries of nature as she wanders “from home / To admire the works of nature; / And thus I like to roam” (ll 10–11). In her closing quatrain, her thought returns to “God who made all worlds” and will upon “the last solemn day” invite the righteous to join “the heavenly lay.” She seems to rejoin Wordsworth’s poem not because it provides a model for hers but to imbue his poem with the spirit and sentiment of Christian values. “Alone I’ve Wandered” fulfills Ann Messenger’s third aesthetic element for the Christian pastoral, wherein the poet is “inspired by the creation to worship the Creator,” a criterion having a particularly womanly appeal.21 A somewhat kindred poem to this one, worthy of discussion, appears in Essays under the title “Reflections, Written on Visiting the Grave of a Venerated Friend,” the only one of her poems found so far that appeared elsewhere prior to the book; the original title used “Lines” instead of “Reflections.” This was the Plato poem published in The Colored American. But for cosmetic changes, the versions are practically alike; many but not all past-tense verb endings in “Reflections” tend to adopt the apostrophe in place of the “e” prior to the final “d.”22 Either Plato or an editorial advisor suggested changing two line-ending verbs in the second stanza from present to past tense; changed the one star to plural stars (l 14); “O!” became “Oh!,” a minor change (l 21); and for relative significance, the next to the last line of the poem shows the change “For out of dust we were composed” to “For out of dust, God did compose.” A word in line 16 should have been left as it appeared in the newspaper: “In sweetness o’er” contributes to a perfect iambic phrase that the extra syllable created by “sweetness over” ruins. Scholars may ponder who was responsible for these editorial alterations. Where, meanwhile, did this “venerated friend” reside? Plato avoids those details. This person was an aged woman, yet Plato never describes what she did other than living “as all God’s saints should do, / resigned to death and suffering too” to be beheld with such esteem. Did she teach Sabbath school or aid the poor? Did she live in Hartford, or perhaps New Haven, where Plato may have spent her childhood? As this poem is an elegy, the focus of its first three stanzas is the suffering virtues of the departed. In stanza four, the persona appears to be accompanied by a companion she addresses as “my sister” (ll 13 and 33), whom she 206 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity admonishes, directing her to walk carefully at the grave site and to refrain from plucking the leaves hanging above it. This “sister” insists that the grave should be told about (l 29). The rose (l 17) is life’s indicator and speaks to the persona, bidding her to spread its aroma over the grave when its flowers should bloom. Line 25 opens with the phrase “Alone I’ve wandered” in a poem with fairly straightforward four-beat iambic rhythm, different from the uneven iambic trimeter of the eponymous poem. This time her wandering is “through the gloom” to pay her respects, anticipating this and the following stanzas’ promise of dedication to the resting place of “God’s saint.” Plato couches this special dedication in reminders of heavenly devotion; the poem allegorizes the inevitability of life’s “duties, penitence, and prayer” (l 36). Can an outlook steeped in piety and moralistic sentiments serve poetic impulses toward the rural and the pastoral? Only in “Residence of My Father” does Plato exhibit an aesthetic philosophy that reflects the realities of rural living; her poems as a whole stand in a problematic relationship to the pastoral tradition, for their moralistic voice overrides the bucolic. Jonathan Law- son discusses the rural-pastoral distinction in his critical biography of Robert Bloomfield, a poet Plato acknowledged in her essay “Eminence from Obscu- rity.” Bloomfield’s “The Farmer’s Boy” may have exerted residual and indirect influence upon Plato’s poetics, but in her essay “The Seasons,” she shares a contextual vocabulary with another British woman poet, Charlotte Turner Smith (1748–1806). In Plato’s idealization of nature, we find the disciplined and ordered presentation that Thomas Rosenmeyer, as both paraphrased and quoted by Lawson, identifies as the tension between real agriculturalism and “ ‘pre-agriculturalist utopia,’ ”23 but advocating a personal discipline, devotion, and order in one’s life determines and organizes the imagery of Plato’s piety. Nature’s ultimate presence and role in Ann Plato’s poetry are that of sepulcher for what the spirit leaves earthbound. Her pastoral consciousness, if that reliably describes one aspect of her poetics, celebrates heaven’s ecclesiastical utopia. Law- son accurately maintains that the experiential knowledge gained through labor determined the rural tradition of the Enlightenment and neoclassicist period. What essence of the rural and of nature we find in Plato reflects divine order and the temporality of the human presence in it. Drawing upon neoclassical and early British romantics, Plato adapts their portraits of innocence and their bucolic atmospheres to the task of a personal, yet exemplary and didactic, piety and spiritual devotion. She may invoke Alexander Pope in her essays without, perhaps, having made a concentrated reading of his discourses and poems, but she probably would have found Pope and, certainly, William Hazlitt’s critical writings too frivolous for her devotional objectives. Exposure to these poets belies a reading precocity born of some degree of educational privilege. Whether through her own initiative or the encouragement of a mentor or mentors, or both factors combined, Plato’s identifiable The Poetics of a Young Writer 207 poetics developed from sources recent and contemporary to her: they represent the “elder” published generation she used for resources and inspiration. She thus is not unlike young poets of any era moved by an older living generation or a generation not anciently deceased. Wanting specific details about her, we are left to trust that a mentor directly or indirectly spurred her interest in her models for particular qualities in subject and mood that she then skillfully adopted from one stanza form to another, transforming prosodies to suit her work. Plato’s poetics offer a glimpse of how an individual, pedestrian young poet—a woman not a part of her era’s mainstream of American women poets or poets in general, and a poet of color—formulates her compositions en route from an identity of “student” poet. Saunders Redding described Plato as a devout Christian who “wrote verse to encourage women to the Scriptures,” her poems being the “pious, moralistic effusions of a Puritan girl.” She emulated Columbus, Redding observed, along with Franklin and Demosthenes, and her writings “encouraged order, integrity, benevolence, humane acts, and most of all, love of God.”24 Plato’s moralisms and sentimental entreaties are consistent with those of her era, and it is not surprising that her two principal thematic categories are death and religious piety, with a few poems sharing both themes. Those about death are “Reflections, on Visiting the Grave of a Venerated Friend,” “I Have No Brother,” “Mem- ory of Mary,” “Memory of Gusteen,” “The Departed in Christ,” “A Mother to Her Fatherless Son,” and “The Grave.” Three of these seven concern the demise of young children. Her pietistic verses occasionally include education as a subtheme: “Advice to Young Ladies,” “Lines,” “On the Dismissal of a School Term,” “The Infant Class,” “The Inquiry,” “Forget Me Not,” “A Mother to Her Fatherless Son,” and “Author’s Farewell.” “The Natives of America” and “The Residence of My Father” offer the theme of place, and the first of these, like “Daughter’s Inquiry,” conveys the theme of loss. “To the First of August” is Plato’s sole poem about a topical political event. She favored the quatrain stanza form, adhering to an abcb pattern more often than couplets or the abab rhymes of “Memory of Mary.” One can admire her near perfection in achieving exact rhyme throughout these quatrains, even when the meter itself is clumsily executed. Occasionally her inexactness of rhyme could be identified as imperfect or slant rhymes. Among her few exceptions, the fourth stanza of “Memory of Gusteen” features slant rhyme in lines 17 and 19 (“loss” and “remorse”). Academic readers still may fault her for thrice using couplets ending “unknown” and “tone” in “The Natives of America” (lines 3–4, 19 and 20, and 44 and 45). In this narrative poem, Plato follows her own muse, adding a brief unanswered line-ending sound—“refuge”—in line 43 and adroitly closing the poem at line 66 with three successive endings of “more,” “score” and “more.” Her poet contemporaries wrote as she did about death and piety and also deployed common meter’s 8-6-8-6 syllabic formulation in doing so. Endemic to 208 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity some of the hymns compiled by the Reverend Isaac Watt early in the eighteenth century, common meter had attracted more women poets than men, especially in the United States, by the late 1820s, figuring in their prosody from then through mid-century. Ann Eliza Bleecker (1752–1783), anthologized in Caroline May’s American Female Poets of 1848, represents a Wheatley-generation poet; of the anthologized poems, one uses common meter (“Lines to Grief,” 31–32) and two feature 8–7 metrics with clumsy syntax.25 Editions of Watts’ compilations were widely available to New England worshipers who used them in church and home; in 1830, a revised edition previously compiled by Timothy Dwight was printed in Hartford, with the title The Psalms of David Imitated in the Lan- guage of the New Testament, and Adapted to Christian Use and Worship. This was rivaled only by Samuel Worcester’s Christian Psalmody (1815), revised in 1819 as The Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs of the Reverend Isaac Watts, commonly referred to as Watts and Select.26 What David Porter says of the effect of hymns on Emily Dickinson would generally hold true for others:

Dickinson adopted this ready-to-hand verse form in the same way she took subjects of popular poetry. . . . In the beginning, her taking up the hymn perhaps was not at all conscious but came from familiarity since childhood. The hymn was for her the way words grouped themselves, established their bonds, and took their cadence in her mind.27

Lucy Larcom (1824–1893) of Lowell, Massachusetts, devoted an entire chapter to her childhood attraction to hymns. She learned them “at meeting,” attracted to their resonating qualities, their stories, the images they set off, and even what she misunderstood about them.28 Eleven of the twenty poems in Essays scan to common meter or a close variation, the better examples being “The Departed in Christ” and “Daughter’s Inquiry of her Father’s Absence.” Others include “The Infant Class,” “Memory of Gusteen,” “To the First of August,” and “The Grave.” “The Inquiry” and “Alone I’ve Wandered” are irregular; “Memory of Mary” opens in 7-6-7-6 before progressing through 7-5-8-6 and 7-6-8-6 toward strict common meter. In her memoir A New England Girlhood, Larcom affirms the tangibility of divinity through hymns:

I believe that one great reason for a child’s love of hymns, such as mine was, is that they are either addressed to a Person, to the Divine Person,—or they bring Him before the mind in some distinct way, instead of being brought upon a subject, like a sermon. To make Him real is the only way to make our own spirits real to ourselves.29

Plato wrote just one poem, “The True Friend,” in common particular meter’s 8-8-6-8-8-6, and her contemporaries, such as Julia Ward Howe (1819– The Poetics of a Young Writer 209

1910), infrequently used the more trochaic variant of long meter, 8-7-8-7, instead of 8-8-8-8. Lucretia Davidson, who died in 1825 at age sixteen; Alice Cary of Cincinnati (1820–1871); and Emma Embury (1806–1863) of New York City used common meter infrequently. Embury and Davidson (posthumously) published books before Plato’s Essays was published, with Embury appearing in the fashionable periodicals; Howe and Cary published their own volumes later, the 1840s and 1850s becoming productive years for them and other women poets who lived in those decades. In 1830, Samuel Willard proposed a reconciliation of hymnology and poetics according to principles of tone, intonation, pauses, and mood, seeking to open hymn meters to irregular meters such as common, short, and long meters anapestic.30 In doing so, he affirmed what for Larcom and Plato would be hymnody’s profound spiritual associations, deployed for their less radical literary composition, and he anticipated some of the criteria of twentieth-century poetical theory. In particular, Willard anticipated three modernist critical and compositional tendencies: the basis of a psychological process that David Porter came to describe as the way a poet processes hymn meters, the “metrical contract” theory of John Hollander, and Annie Finch’s adaptation of Hollander into the parameters of feminist poetics she proposes in The Ghost of Meter.31 Plato’s poems offer modern readers insights into how nineteenth-century women poets in the United States negotiated the intersection of common meter hymnody and what they adapted to their own poetics and themes of domestic responsibility. Common meter compels the iambic or spondaic; it becomes tetrametric in Plato’s quatrains and pentametric or hexametric in her verse narratives, but its musical effect tends toward iambic when read and spondaic if one tries to sing a particular stanza. One popular hymn, attributed to William Croft and included in Watts’s compilation, illustrates this well: “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” based upon Psalm 90, verses 1, 2, 4 and 5:

O God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Our shelter from the stormy blast, And our eternal home.

Considering her youth, Plato can be appreciated for a remarkable facility with common meter, despite occasionally jarring reader appreciation with clumsy syntax or a curious irregularity. The second stanza of “Memory of G usteen” is one peculiar example:

Thy infant is a seraph now, Parents shed thou no tear; But then in God do thou E’er trust, and like him do appear. (ll 5–8) 210 Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Line 5 sustains the iambic foot; “Parents” compels the trochaic, which she continues to the end of the stanza, initiated by using to her advantage a rise in pitch to emphasize the second syllable; lines 7 and 8 feature an unusual prosodic enjambment that resolves uncannily; one cannot pause after the three iambic feet of line 7 if one reads the poem according to common meter but must continue the phrase-breath onto the following line to complete the stanza. Awkward, but it works! For line 7 of “The Infant Class,” she manages successfully, by chance or design, to prevent a multisyllabic word from being a tongue twister: “And consolation, might there dwell.” Although Willard honored “natural pauses near the middle” of an eight-syllable hymn line much as a lyric poet deploys the caesura, he would have rejected Plato’s choice of “consolation” had she resorted to anapestic rhythm (l 9). Her occasional clumsiness with such lines stems from her not adhering to or her failing to use effectively her prosodic downbeats. Her execution must be deft throughout because of the way strict common meter prefers to scan to iamb and trochee. Annie Finch, referring to Margaret Homans’s Women Writers and Poetic Identity (1980) and to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Guber’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) in chapter two of The Ghost of Meter, reinforces the stature of Emily Dickinson’s poems as the basis for criteria of meter that encode women’s poetics and poetical responses to social circumstances.32 This has dichotomous critical significance. On one hand, common meter offers poets immersed in or influenced by Congregational hymnody a prosodic convention in which to circumscribe mood and texture, something Willard knew quite well when he was trying to open and coordinate the rhythmic emphases in poetry and music.33 Yet, in pointing this out, Finch oversimplifies the composition process of nineteenth-century United States women poets, viewing them narrowly, as if the patriarchy of formalist poetics—“patriarchal meter”—denies them any credit for appropriating meter that male experience and values only appear to have dictated. Appropriating common meter for individual poems is exactly what Plato and some of her contemporaries accomplished. That Isaac Watts set so many psalms to this rhythm and its hymnodic relatives would have impressed these young poets less than the power common meter lent to women’s poetic voices. Dickinson was a rebel in a culture of female poetry that considered common meter a suitable rhetorical and metrical strategy. She contrasts markedly with Plato’s literary personality, which pursued a spiritual stability offered by Christianity and found poetic conventions suited to her prodigality. Dickinson is also a singular rebel against patriarchal meter, or, as Finch puts it:

Iambic pentameter codifies the force exerted on Dickinson’s poetry by patriarchal tradition (she associates the meter with the power of religion and public opinion, with formality, and with stasis.34 The Poetics of a Young Writer 211

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, Dickinson studies helped bring critical respectability to nineteenth-century women poets, and Ann Plato, who wrote and published before her, has benefitted from the critical realm they opened. It seems critically responsible to identify and examine these poets, as Walker began doing in The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (1982), followed by her critical anthology American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (1992); thus we may better appreciate their compositional strategies even when their implicit resistance codes seem “weak,” if they exist at all.35 Ann Plato was an adolescent poet who simply lacked the temperament for radical opposition. The foregoing examples of Plato’s poetic adaptations in “Forget Me Not” were meant to illustrate her range and facility for composition. In the analyses offered, I acknowledge her poetic process, affirming it as part of the energy of her youth yet finding it significant enough to buttress recognition of her as a practitioner in her medium. My intention, in other words, was to get inside her processes of attention to poetic construction, intonation, and rhythm, essential tools that poets must learn, absorb, and render in their own writing. As a young woman of color, of indigenous or African descent or both, Ann Plato warrants justifiable attention to her compositional formulations, derivative though they might be. How many women authors of her time across racial and ethnic lines have we embraced in their youth as subjects for research into their poetics? Her accomplishment lends credence to the capabilities of nineteenth-century adolescent poet prodigies. We should honor her for the complexity of her achievement.

Epilogue ᇺᇻᇺ

After the Paper Trail

Adhering to a methodology emphasizing Native American identity helps to demystify Ann Plato, although she remains an enigma. We are fortunate to have Essays and her to bemuse us. Essays could be Plato’s “flash in the pan”; any writing following it is either obscure, pseudonymous, or meant to be private. Nothing about her participation in women’s reading groups has been revealed in the diaries and journals of her peers. As readers have seen, writing about her means working with numerous contingencies, from her parents’ backgrounds and her place and date of birth through her fate. She should have a place in literary and cultural history as an author and educator from Missinnuok, because she contributes to the representation of that Algonquian culture in transition, especially for those who relocated to Hartford, a budding city situated in a space they recovered out of an indigenous past. Her enigma is defined by its having been gifted with Christian learning, which led to her extraordinary reputation, yet, paradoxically, she is inscrutable except for less than a decade of recorded activity. I was not attracted to Essays only by the likelihood of her cultural origins but because it reflects the uncommon fortune of a nineteenth-century woman of color to be able to exert her intellect and publish a book. Ann Plato should give pause to facile dismissals of her talent as one of many young women writers of her era. And she should be accorded the identity of religious writer, not one of sermons or deep theology but of religion that inspired her instruction as her schoolroom responsibility. Plato knew the particular people in her Hartford church and community who were Missinnuok; she sought to reach out to them as socially stable and first- or second-generation or more Christian converts; she shared with them an attachment to Missinnuok

213 214 Epilogue space and the confusion over social identity brought on by transformations from what she understood as heathen origins. Missing is any information about how her fellow Missinnuok perceived her, other than that they entrusted their children to her devotion, care, love, and instruction—Amos Beman’s responses are indirect, covert, and circumspect, possibly because of his assimilation into African American religious activism. Ultimately, this study is bigger than Ann Plato but places her and Hart- ford Natives in Missinnuok context. Hartford between 1830 and 1850 offers a case study on the relationship between culture and race when we deconstruct a monolithic black or colored population and analyze the parts that emerge. Anglo-European invasion and settlement, producing devastating changes for indigenous people throughout the hemisphere, instigated changes by which the surviving indigenes had to abide: spiritual, social, cultural, place or residence, psychological, economic, and more. Pressures on cultural identity confronted Missinnuok peoples in Hartford during Plato’s time, as they struggled to accommodate themselves to a new sense of community that expected them to adapt to a new sensibility. Plato was among them, and as a school teacher and an author, she achieved a place in the tiny middle class of a fragile colored community. So, what now? Do bouts with the tuberculosis that claimed her four women explain her absences from teaching? It was still rampant throughout the southern Connecticut Valley.1 Did she leave Hartford for a friendlier climate? Had she wished for a local sanatorium, no option would have been available until the following decade, with the opening of Hartford Hospital. She would have had to rely on a private and personal physician. The Hartford Asylum, still extant on the street named for it, might have refused her for not meeting their psychological criteria. It would not be surprising that she left Hartford; the questions are, when did she leave and where did she go? Did she continue teaching? Did she relocate to the vast West? Her writings convey no taste for marriage. Educational service, neither in the slave states nor on foreign soil, seems to have interested her; her sensibility in Essays suggests that she would have avoided the South’s dangers and found life there intolerably un- Christian. Did a school in Indian Territory or the Great Lakes beckon? She is not listed among the teachers at the Cherokee Female Seminary in Indian Territory (would she have remained there, amid its sometimes volatile internal disputes?). If she traveled as a missionary, would she have overcome her desul- tory attitude about Africa or the Caribbean, especially in the heavily Roman Catholic Spanish and French colonies? Passenger lists for Americans traveling abroad are sketchy for mid-century. Hartford in 1847 to Iowa in 1870 is a long stretch for unaccounted maturity, mobility, and life experiences. If she remained interested in teaching, seeking opportunities to serve Indians or colored children in the Midwest or in the prairie states and territories should not be discounted. Did she pursue additional education? What drew her to Iowa? When did she Epilogue 215

arrive; how long did she stay; why was she unemployed? Was she indigent while abiding in the Frederick B. Landers household? Why was she so furtive about her identity? Why no recorded church membership? Where did she go? Where is her final resting place? Decorah, Iowa, gives us a sort of Janus vista for Ann Plato. It reviews what we know of her and teases us about her unknown location and activities for the intermittent twenty-three years, then it looks forward into a future we know already through the annals of a history that does not contain her. Perhaps Miss Plato was reluctant to provide certain personal information. The Landers were Congregationalists, “a welcoming family [who] readily opened their home to boarders, domestics, etc,”2 but the town’s First Congregational Church, UCC, has no record of membership for her.3 Preceding Miss Plato as a resident in the Landers household, according to the 1860 Iowa census, was a another young woman from New York State, Carrie Mcnair (sic), white, and a schoolteacher by occupation.4 Miss Plato, although without occupation in the record, had also been a schoolteacher, suggesting that each may have supplemented the formal education or Sabbath-school instruction of the Landers children. Miss Plato is not listed in the 1869 state census for Decorah—in fact, the town had no colored residents and no Indians, although twenty-five colored individuals lived in the township.5 Vital details and other references may emerge slowly to help explain this author and personality who preferred obscurity. What this study demonstrates about Ann Plato fills a partial gap for scholarship and personality, yet her life defies full closure. I feel confident that the “Miss Plato” in the 1870 Iowa census in the town of Decorah, Winneshiek County, deep in the state’s northeast and abutting Minnesota, is Ann Plato, as her age corresponds to my original speculation, corroborated by the School Report of 1845 in the Connecticut Cou- rant of 1845, and because of the designation of “foreign” that her enumerator wrote. She may have been of Native and European ancestry, dedicated to the educational and spiritual well-being of colored children of Indian and African descent. Someday, history’s proverbial dusty records may disclose her footprints along the path preceding Essays; in its continuation during her twenty-three year absence before Iowa; and at its end, revealing her fate after that enumeration. Enigma she remains, yet I am honored that she has shared her life thus far.

Notes

Introduction

1. Ann Plato, Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; originally published in 1841). All references to this book will be cited as Essays. The full text of the book can be read online at http://digilib.nypl. org/dynaweb/digs/wwm97251/@Generic__BookView. 2. J. Saunders Redding, “Negro Writing in America” (class lecture, Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, fall 1967). 3. See the passages in the collaborative essay on Métis author Maria Campbell’s autobiography, Halfbreed. Kristina Fagan (Labrador Inuit) coordinates with graduate student coauthors in discussing the colonialism dimensions of racial “hybridity” as it is part of the vocabulary of postcolonial discourse: Kristina Fagan et al., “Reading the Reception of Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed,” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 29, nos. 1–2 (2009): 262–66. 4. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). 5. Holly Jackson, “Identifying Emma Dunham Kelley: Rethinking Race and Authorship.” PMLA 122, no. 3 (May 2007): 730–32. 6. Jackson, “Identifying Emma Dunham Kelley,” 740. 7. Kelley’s identity ignited a series of blog entries and a few articles during 2004–2007. The author of the blog “Mode for Caleb,” Caleb McDaniel, joined the fray, anticipating the then forthcoming article by genealogist Katherine Flynn. Caleb McDaniel, “The Latest on Emma Dunham Kelley Hawkins,” Mode for Caleb (blog), 7 June 2006, http://modeforcaleb.blogspot.com/2006/06/latest-on-emma-dunham-kelley- hawkins.html.The journal Legacy published Flynn’s “Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins”

217 218 Notes to Introduction in 2007 with a modestly extensive bibliography that included census and burial data and Jackson’s article; see Flynn (2007), 278–89. 8. Jackson, “Identifying Emma Dunham Kelley,” 729. 9. Carteaux-Bannister (née Babcock) (Narragansett) owned businesses in Rhode Island and a salon upon moving to Boston. Following her marriage to Bannister in 1857 (her third), they supported abolitionist causes and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment (which included Nipmuc and other Native enlistees). Several years after relocating to Providence, she opened the Home for Aged Colored Women (now Bannister Nur- sing Care Center). She enjoyed a lengthy union with her famous husband, born in New Brunswick, Canada, of a Barbadian father; the ethnicity of his mother, Hannah Alexander Bannister, has never been ascertained, although I suspect she may have been Métis or white. See C. C. Bannister, Biographies, Edward M. Bannister: An American Artist, accessed 12 November 2014, www.edwardmbannister.com/biographies/cbbio. html, and Edward Mitchell Bannister, Bannister Gallery, Rhode Island College, accessed 12 November 2014, www.ric.edu/BANNISTER/about_emb.php. Fortune’s Native lineage as reported is controversial. His grandfather Thomas Fortune was “a wealthy Irish gentleman [who] married a beautiful Spanish-Indian girl”; their son, Emanuel, likewise married a Spanish-Indian woman. “T. Thomas Fortune,” AME Church Review 19, no. 3 (January 1903): 670. Meanwhile, D. W. Culp’s short biography the previous year, “Timothy Thomas Fortune,” describes Fortune’s grandmother as a mulatto and his grandfather as a Seminole Indian. D. W. Culp, “Timothy Thomas Fortune,” in Twentieth-Century Negro Literature or a Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Issues Rela- ting to the American Negro, ed. D. W. Culp (Toronto: J. L. Nichols & Co., 1902, http:// archive.org/stream/twentiethcentury00culp#page/226/mode/2up), 226. “Doc” Cheatham identified his own parentage as Cherokee and Choctaw in his Jazz Oral History Pro- ject interview, conducted by Chris Albertson in 1979 (http://newarkwww.rutgers.edu/ IJS/johpaudio/DocCheatham_audio.html); for Oscar Pettiford (Choctaw/Cherokee), see George Hoefer’s memorial in “Hot Box: Oscar Pettiford,” Down Beat, 2 June 1961, 40, and an anecdote by trumpeter Clark Terry in Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (New York: Scribners, 1974), 188. 10. John Milton Earle, Report to the Governor and Council Concerning the Indians of the Commonwealth, Under the Act of April 6, 1859, Senate Report No. 96 (Boston: William White [Printer to the State], 1861), 5. 11. Barbara W. Brown and James M. Rose, Black Roots in Southeastern Connecti- cut, 1650–1900, Gale Genealogy and Local History Series 8 (Detroit: Gale, 1980); Vicki S. Welch, And They Were Related, Too: A Study of Eleven Generations of One American Family! (Philadelphia: Xlibri Corporation, 2006). 12. I will elaborate on this term and explain my usage in Chapter 4, “Plato Families and Their Circles in Missinnuok.” 13. Gaynell Stone, ed., The Shinnecock Indians: A Culture History, vol. 6, Suffolk County Archaeological Association (Lexington, MA: Ginn Custom Publishing, 1983); Gaynell Stone, ed., The History and Archaeology of the Montauk, vol. 3, 2nd ed. (Stony Brook, NY: Suffolk County Archaeological Association, 1993); John A. Strong, The Montaukett Indians of Eastern Long Island (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001); John A. Strong, The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Island: A History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); John Menta, The Quinnipiac: Cultural Conflict in Notes to Introduction 219

Southern New England, Yale University Publications in Anthropology 86 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Daniel R. Mandell, Tribe, Race, History: Native Ame- ricans in Southern New England, 1780–1880 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Amy E. Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Jean M. O’Brien, “ ‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England,” in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, ed. Colin G. Calloway (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 144–61; Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Seketau, “The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era,” in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, ed. Colin G. Calloway (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 114–43; and John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). For the republication of her “ ‘Divorced’ from the Land” essay, O’Brien wrote a “New Introduction” to precede it in Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing, ed. Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 333–35. I have confined this body of scholarship to southern New England and Long Island, although I am quite aware of works on southeastern peoples, including several about the Lumbees: Adolph L. Dial and David K. Eliades’s groundbreaking The Only Land I Know: A History of the Lumbee Indians (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1975); Karen Blu, The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Gerald M. Sider, Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity, and Indian Identity in the Southeastern United States (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 1993); Malinda Maynor Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Also noteworthy are Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), and Samuel R. Cook, Monacans and Miners, Native American and Coal Mining Communities in Appalachia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). 14. Occasionally I will use “off-reservation” to denote Natives who live outside their tribal communities; some made enclaves of their own. 15. Earle, Report to the Governor, 7. 16. Many Natives maintained their identities in the service of black or colored communities. Two people come to mind. Laura Belle McCoy, a long-time member of New Haven, Connecticut’s Temple Street Congregational Church and founder of the nation’s first black Girl Scout troop, was Mohawk, born in Carlisle, New York (“Laura McCoy, Started Black Girl Scout Troop,” New York Times, 1 June 1983, B5.); Schoha- rie County, with Carlisle and the neighboring town of Cobleskill, continues to have a Mohawk community. The church’s website, however, continues to identify McCoy as African American. Another, Madge Barnes Allen (1906–1989), was a recognized member of her mother’s Shinnecock Nation and was enrolled in her father George Barnes’s 220 Notes to Chapter 1

Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Barnes was a “going-back Cherokee,” born in Tahle- quah, Indian Territory; he graduated from Atlanta University and worked occasionally for Booker T. Washington as a contractor. Madge Allen taught art for forty-nine years in the segregated schools of Greenville, North Carolina, and later in Newark, New Jersey. She was a silversmith active at art and gem and mineral shows and on the pow wow circuit (author’s personal knowledge and experience, 1978–1989). 17. The full citation is Donna Keith Baron, J. Edward Hood, and Holly V. Izard, “They Were Here All Along: The Native American Presence in Lower Central New England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 53, no. 3 (July 1996): 561–86; see also Earle, Report; Thomas Doughton, “Unseen Neighbors: Native Americans of Central Massachusetts, a People Who Had Vanished,” in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, ed. Colin G. Calloway (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 207–30; Charles Brilvitch, A History of Connecticut’s Golden Hill Paugusett Tribe (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2007); Claude Clayton Smith, Quarter-Acre of Heartache (Blacksburg, VA: Pocahontas Press, 1984). 18. At least three other spellings of this people’s name have been used: Siukog, Secoag, and Sicoag. 19. Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 20. William Apess. A Son of the Forest, in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). This compilation contains the 1831 edition of Apess’s narrative. 21. Katherine Clay Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Com- munity in Early African American Women’s Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 71–74.

Chapter 1. Ann Plato: Hartford’s Literary Enigma

1. Catalogue of the Talcott-st. Congregational Church in Hartford, Together with Its Articles of Faith and Covenant and Rules of Order and Discipline (Hartford, CT: Courier Office, 1842) Housed in the Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. It lists Ann Plato as a member in 1841. 2. Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African Ame- rican Women, 1746–1892 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 53. 3. Claire Knowles, Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780–1860: The Legacy of Charlotte Smith (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 73–75. 4. Joseph Sabin, ed., Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America (New York: Sabin, 1885), 192. For the “colored Sappho” comment, see http://books.google.com/books?id=6TIqAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA192&lpg=PA192&dq= reviews+of+ann+plato%27s+essays,+1841&source=bl&ots; for a biography of Sappho, see Sappho, Poets, Poets.org, accessed 12 November 2014, http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/ poet/sappho. The Bureau of Education and DuBois bibliographies are in Betty Kaplan Gubert, comp., Early Black Bibliographies, 1863–1918 (New York: Garland Publishing, Notes to Chapter 1 221

1982), and Arthur A. Schomburg, A Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry (New York: Charles F. Heartman, 1916), 33. See also Dorothy B. Porter, comp., North American Negro Poets. A Bibliographical Checklist of Their Writings, 1760–1944 (Hatties- burg, MS: The Book Farm, 1945), 65. 5. James Hardy Dillard, introduction to An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes, ed. Newman Ivey White and Walter Clinton Jackson (Durham, NC: Trinity College Press, 1924), 6; Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931; Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1964), 248–49. Citations refer to the Kennikat edition. Ann Allen Shockley, “Ann Plato,” in Afro-American Women Writers 1746–1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide (Bos- ton: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988), 26–27; Quandra Prettyman, “Ann Plato,” in Africana, ed. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 1527; Newman Ivey White and Walter Clinton Jackson, eds., An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes (Durham, NC: Trinity College Press, 1924), 230. 6. Benjamin Mays, The Negro’s God, as Reflected in His Literature (Boston: Chap- man & Grimes, 1938); Jay Saunders Redding, To Make a Poet Black (Chapel Hill: Uni- versity of North Carolina Press, 1939). 7. Sterling Brown, Negro Poetry and Drama (Washington, DC: The Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937), 7. 8. Iowa Federal Census, City of Decorah, Winnisheik County, 1870, 112. See the “Epilogue.” 9. Harley Refsal, associate director of Scandinavian Studies, Luther Colle- ge, identified the distinction between the Norwegian script of O. N. Olson and the Anglo-American script of Cyrus Wellington. Because of resilient Norwegian colloquia- lisms in Iowa, Refsal suggested that Wellington’s rendering of “For” exhibits how he may have assimilated the Norwegian vernacular and unconsciously transformed “Fre” from Fremmd to “For” to signify “stranger.” In English, “foreigner” and “stranger” bear contrasting resonant meanings, whereas in Norwegian, they tend to have a closer relationship. Harley Refsal, conversation with the author, 29 October 1999. 10. Brown and Rose, Black Roots. 11. William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun, eds., The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), xix–xxviii. 12. Bernice Forrest Guillaume, ed., The Collected Works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7. 13. David O. White, “Hartford’s African Schools, 1830–1868,” Connecticut Histo- rical Society Bulletin (April 1974): 47–54. 14. Katherine Clay Bassard, “Spiritual Interrogations: Conversion, Community and Authorship in the Writings of Phillis Wheatley, Ann Plato, Jarena Lee, and Rebecca Cox Jackson” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1992); Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gen- der, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Shockley, Afro-American Women Writers; Kenny J. Williams, introduction to Essays: Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry, by Ann Plato (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxvii–liii. 222 Notes to Chapter 1

15. Prettyman, “Ann Plato,” 2160. 16. Katharine Capshaw Smith, “Ann Plato,” in American Women Prose Writers, 1820–1870, ed. Amy E. Hudock and Katharine Rodier, vol. 239, Dictionary of American Biography (Detroit: Gale Group, 2001), 242–46; Michelle Diane Wright, Broken Utte- rances: A Selected Anthology of 19th Century Black Women’s Social Thought (Baltimore, MD: Three Sistahs Press, 2007), 76–83. 17. See, for example, Steve Courtney, “Ann Plato Showed Talent Was Colorblind,” Hartford Courant 4 August 2002, G4, and “Ann Plato, a First for Black Women Authors,” African American Registry, 2013, accessed 16 June 2014, http://www.aareshistry.org/ historic_events/view/ann-plato-first-black-women-authors. 18. Judith Ranta, The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003); Jonathan Brennan, introduction to When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African–Native American Literature, ed. Jonathan Brennan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 23–24, 38–39, 63–64; Kiara Vigil and Tiya Miles, “At the Crossroads of Red/Black Literature,” in The Oxford Hand- book of Indigenous American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 32– 34. 19. This cultural term I explain further in chapter 3. 20. Holly Jackson, “Identifying Emma Dunham Kelley: Rethinking Race and Authorship,” PMLA 122, no. 3 (May 2007): 730–32, 739. 21. Jackson, “Identifying Emma Dunham Kelley,” 739. 22. Ann, “Little Harriet,” The Colored American, 19 June 1841, 64. Discussion of this obscure journal and how the narrative may suggest where and how Ann Plato was taught will follow in later chapters. 23. Amelia Opie, Illustrations of Lying, in All Its Branches (Hartford, CT: Silas Andrus, 1829, and Hartford, CT: Andrus and Judd, 1833), 80. These were reprints of the London-published original, and Plato may have read either edition. 24. Plato, Essays, 47. 25. New Haven is a plausible site. Considering the likelihood that Ann as author used fictitious names, the 1830 federal census for the city lists one household, headed by Ann Miller, with four residents, among them a female child of color of under ten years, which could be where the allegorical Harriet resided. Presumably, Ann Miller is the woman between fifty and sixty years old; her other two female residents are between fifteen and twenty and between twenty and thirty. 26. In early 1841, the Colored American began a “Children’s Department” series with a story by an anonymous author. This entry, “Only Once,” appears in its 13 Februa- ry 1841 issue (p. 3), not as an allegory but as a didactic lesson about the dangers of permit- ting children to lie “just once” when they are asked to do so. The newspaper published short articles about moral precepts, and their authorship is virtually impossible to discern. 27. See White, “Hartford’s African Schools,” 1974; Metropolitan African Metho- dist Episcopal Zion Church, The Hartford African American Heritage Trail, accessed 12 November 2014, http://hartfordheritagetrail.org/heritage-trail/churches/metropolitan-african-methodist-episcopal-zion-church/; and Tamara Verrett, “Faith Congregatio- nal Church: 185 Years: Same People: Same Purpose,” Hog River Journal Online, accessed 12 November 2014, http://www.hogriver.org/issues/v03n03/congregational_church.htm. 28. Vince Marotta, “The Stranger and Social Theory.” Thesis Eleven 62 (2000): 121–34. Notes to Chapter 2 223

29. The Stranger Unknown’s Call to Holiness of Heart. Shewing the Most Compendious Way to Arrive at the Internal Work of God in the Soul of Man, That the Servant May Be as His Lord Eighteenth Century Collections Online. (Andover, Hampshire: Gale ECCO), 3. 30. All biblical quotations are from the King James version. 31. I acknowledge Lloyd Pratt’s “Strangerhood and African American Literature around 1845” (paper presented at the Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 19 June 2012), for inspiring my application to this analysis. 32. Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen, Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States, Pitt Comp Literacy Culture (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 178; Silvia Xavier, “Engaging George Campbell’s Sympathy in the Rhetoric of Charlotte Forten and Ann Plato: African-American Women of the Antebellum North,” Rhetoric Review 24, no. 4 (2005): 438–46. 33. Lydia Sigourney, The Girl’s Reading Book, in Prose and Poetry, for Schools (New York: J. Orville Taylor, 1838).

Chapter 2. “The Natives of America” and “To the First of August”: Contrasts in Cultural Investment

1. Newman Ivey White and Walter Clinton Jackson, “Bibliographical and Cri- tical Notes,” in An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes, ed. Newman Ivey White and Walter Clinton Jackson (Durham, NC: Trinity College Press, 1924), 230. 2. Foster, Written By Herself, 20. 3. The drawing “Britannia Giving Freedom to Her Slaves” features an iconic depiction of a female Liberty and about-to-be-freed blacks (Colored American, 9 May 1840). Notices of the final emancipation and celebrations appeared in the newspaper’s 8 August issue. 4. Amelia Opie, Poems (New York: Garland Press, 1978); The Warrior’s Return / The Black Man’s Lament, (New York: Garland, 1978). In chapter 11, I discuss Plato’s drawing on Opie, with examples. 5. Cecelia Lucy Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, 2nd ed. (Norwich: Fletcher and Alexander, 1854), 23–27. 6. The Black Man’s Lament (1826), in Opie, The Warrior’s Return. 7. Philip Freneau, “The Indian Burying Ground,” Poems & Poets, Poetry Foun- dation, accessed 18 June 2014, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175365. 8. Ann Messenger, Pastoral Tradition and the Female Talent: Studies in Augustan Poetry (New York: AMS Press, 2001), 2. 9. Renato Rosaldo, Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 68–70, 81–82. 10. Plato, Essays, 110–112. Ongoing references to this poem will be according to its lines. 11. Emily Stipes Watts, The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (Aus- tin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 67; Lydia Sigourney, Pocahontas, and Other Poems (London: Robert Tyas, 1841); Lydia Sigourney, Traits of the Aborigines of America (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1822); Lydia Sigourney, Letters of Life (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1866), 327. 12. The Ladies’ Companion and Literary Expositor, 1 (September 1834): 22, 203–208, and 2 (1834): 115, 233. 224 Notes to Chapter 3

13. “The Indian with His Dead Child,” in The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans, in One Volume (Philadelphia: Grigg & Elliot, 1836), 234–35; William Cullen Bryant, The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant, vol. 1, ed. Parke Godwin (New York: Russell & Russell, 1983), 93; Charles Sprague, “The Last Indian,” The Ladies’ Pearl, May 1841, 274–75. 14. Messenger, Pastoral Tradition, 98. 15. Sigourney, Girl’s Reading Book, 177. 16. For Apess’s publications, see Apess, On Our Own Ground. 17. Sigourney, Traits of the Aborigines of America, 327. 18. Apess, On Our Own Ground, 172. 19. Apess, On Our Own Ground, 177. 20. “Petition of the Montauk Indians,” in Documentary History of the State of New York, ed. Edmond Bailey O’Callaghan, 4 vols. (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1850), 3:390–91, quoted in Strong, Montaukett Indians, 73, who refers to the first edition of 1849, in which this passage is found on page 263. The document records Charles’s first name as Silas, which Strong suggests may be an alternate designation for Cyrus; also, if Charles was illiterate, someone else probably wrote his petition for him, and he added his mark, a simple “X.” O’Callaghan provides no date for the petition. 21. Apess, On Our Own Ground, 295. 22. Apess, On Our Own Ground, 307. 23. An example of the enduring strength of this cultural responsibility is related by the Mohegan ethnobotanist Gladys Tantaquidgeon when she talks of her people’s origins: “this tradition was impressed upon the minds of their children. In the words of my great aunt, Emma Fielding Baker, ‘Don’t ever forget it.’ ” Folk Medicine of the Delaware and Related Algonkian Indians (Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1977), 65. 24. Watts, Poetry of American Women, 66. 25. Foster, Written by Herself, 20. 26. Ranta, Life and Writings, 99. 27. Plato, Essays, 42. 28. Plato, Essays, 117–19. 29. Plato, Essays, 103–104. 30. Plato, Essays, 35, 42, 70–71. 31. Williams, introduction to Essays, xlix. 32. William Apess, “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man,” in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 155–61. For transcriptions of The Cherokee Phoenix contents, see http://www.wcu.edu/library/DigitalCollections/ CherokeePhoenix/. 33. Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 291.

Chapter 3. Missinnuok at the Hartford Space

1. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1997), 3A. Notes to Chapter 3 225

2. James Hammond Trumball, Natick Dictionary, Bureau of American Ethno- logy, Smithsonian Institution, Bulletin 25 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1903), 306. 3. Steven F. Johnson, Nínnuock (The People): The Algonkian People of New England. (Marlborough, MA: Bliss Publishing Company, 1995); Kathleen Bragdon, Native Peoples of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Faren N. Siminoff, “The Ninnimissinnuwock and Their Communities of Interest,” in Crossing the Sound: The Rise of Atlantic American Communities in Seventeen- th-Century Eastern Long Island (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 15–35. 4. Bragdon, Native Peoples, 142–43. 5. Siminoff, “The Ninnimissinnuwock,” 155n6. 6. For a brief description of Montaukett agency regarding wampum, see Marion Ales Fisher, “The Pequot War and Its Aftermath,” in The History & Archaeology of the Montauk, ed. Gaynell Stone, Readings in Long Island Archaeology & Ethnohistory 3, 2nd ed. (Stony Brook, NY: Suffolk County Archaeological Association, 1993), 13. Siminoff cites Ives Goddard (157n8) and others regarding these. 7. I settled on Missinnuok after several months of considering what term would be inclusive of Long Island Sound Indians. Being a bit familiar with Williams’s 1643 Narragansett language book yet trying to avoid both Johnson’s Nínnuock and Bragdon’s and Siminoff’s Ninnimissinnuwock, I wanted to pursue using Missinnuok because Narra- gansett is the most comprehensive regional dialect in practice and in text form, more than Montaukett or Mohegan-Pequot. I am grateful to Dr. Ella Seketau, Narragansett linguist and historian, for clarifying that Missinnuok would signify people, with men prominent in spoken usage, and Missinnuosh correspondingly for women. I chose the former of these two due to the preponderance of male-centered documentation, a bow to British colonialism that I am not altogether happy about. Prior to her demise, Dr. Seketau conveyed her agreement with my interpretations through her son and my acquaintance John Brown, chief historic preservation officer for the Narragansett Nation in Rhode Island, at Mohegan Territory, Connecticut (personal communication, 23 November 2013). Also, I use the term survivance as can be found in the writings of Anishnaabe author and scholar Gerald Vizenor to mean, or to signify, an expanded sense of ongoing cultural presence manifest as contrary to Indian genocide. See, for example, Manifest Manners: Narratives of Postindian Survivance (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). 8. Reyna K. Ramirez, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 3. 9. See [Ezra] Stiles’ Notes on the Indians of Connecticut and Massachusetts, Yale Indian Papers Project, New England Indian Papers Series Database, 406, accessed 12 November 2014, http://jake.library.yale.edu:8080/neips/data/html/1761.10.00.06/1761.10.00. 06.html, and Timothy Howlett Ives, “Wangunk Ethnohistory: A Case Study of a Connec- ticut River Tribal Community” (master’s thesis, College of William and Mary, 2001), 82. 10. See J. Hammond Trumbull, “The Indians of the Connecticut Valley” in The Memorial History of Hartford County, 1633–1884, vol. 1, ed. James Hammond Trumbull (Boston: Edward L. Osgood, 1886), 14. 11. Doughton, “Unseen Neighbors”; Brilvitch, History of Connecticut’s Golden; Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 226 Notes to Chapter 4

12. In “A Question of Margins: Native American and Colonial Interaction in Late Eighteenth Century Southern New England,” archaeologist Stephen Cook describes finding English ceramics, drinking and boiling vessels, tools, and other items at three reservation sites and a site at Lake of Isles. Paper presented at the Third Mashan- tucket Pequot History Conference, Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Mashantucket, CT, September 2002. 13. Although very little is known of the Suckiaug, documented references use both Sicaog and Suckiaug, as well as a third spelling, Saukiog, for their name. I use Suckiaug in this book for two reasons: it appears in the oldest records of the Connecticut colony, and its suffix is consistent with place names in Connecticut ending in “—aug” rather than the “—aog” more likely to be encountered in Massachusetts tribal and place name spellings (e.g., Quaboag and Wampanoag). Trumbull’s lexicon, in which he uses the Sicoag spelling, translates the name as signifying “dark ground.” See Mathias Spiess and Percy W. Bidwell, History of Manchester Connecticut (Manchester, CT: Centennial Committee of Town of Manchester, 1924), 25. 14. Similar locations to the north are Wonnotuck (present-day Springfield), Norwottuck (Northampton), and Pocumtuck (Deerfield and Greenfield). But these geophysical riverine formations are not acute, like the famous oxbow at Northampton painted by Thomas Cole. 15. See Connecticut Circa 1625: Its Indian Trails Villages and Sachemdoms, from data collected by Mathias Spiess, ed. Elinor H. Bulkeley Ingersoll (The Connecticut Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Inc., 1934). 16. N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 45, 114.

Chapter 4. Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle

1. Jacob E. Mallmann, Historical Papers of Shelter Island and Its Presbyterian Church (New York: Rev. Jacob Mallmann, 1899). Shelter Island was one location for an early postcontact stockade on eastern Long Island; see John A. Strong, The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island From Earliest Times to 1700 (Interlaken, NY: Empire State Books, 1997), 36, 83. 2. Barbara Jean Beeching, “African Americans and Native Americans in Hartford 1636–1800: Antecedents of Hartford’s Nineteenth Century Black Commu- nity,” Hartford Studies Collection: Papers by Students and Faculty 7, Trinity College Digital Repository, 1993, accessed 20 June 2014, http://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=hartford_papers. 3. Brown and Rose, Black Roots. 4. An Index to the East-Hampton Town Records, 1675, vol. 1, 383, East Hampton Library, Long Island, New York. 5. Index 1:431; Index, 1681, vol. 2, 101. 6. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, Long Island, Suffolk Co., NY: With Other Ancient Documents of Historic Value, vol. 2 (Sag Harbor: John H. Hunt, 1887), 101. East Hampton Library, Long Island, New York. Spelling and case irregularities in the original. 7. Gaynell Stone, ed., The Shinnecock Indians: A Culture History, Readings in Long Island Archaeology and Ethnohistory, vol. 6 (Lexington, MA: Suffolk County Notes to Chapter 4 227

Archaeological Association, Ginn Custom Publishing, 1983), 102. The Montaukett and the Shinnecock are closely related. 8. See William S. Simmons and Cheryl L. Simmons, eds., Old Light on Separate Ways: The Narragansett Diary of Joseph Fish, 1765–1776 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), 8, 22. 9. Census enumerations in the early nineteenth century for Plato families living in upstate New York indicate origins in Germany. See also Josef Karlmann Brechen- macher, comp., Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Deutschen Familiennamen, Vol. 1, A–J, (Limburg an den Lahn: C. A. Starke-Verlag, 1957), 153; and August Friedrich Pott, Die Personenamen insbesondere die Familiennamen (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1859), 631. 10. Three excellent examples of the latter practice are the names Custalow, held by a family line of chiefs among the Mattapani in Virginia and apparently derived from Cus- taloga; Coombs, the name of a family line among Aquinnah Wampanoags on Martha’s Vineyard, derived from Hiacoombs; and Seketau, a Narragansett name akin to Secatur. 11. This may be the same individual who, on another whaling contract, rendered the letter upside down, whereas others represented themselves by their marks. A similar circumstance surrounds the acquisition by one Montaukett family of the name Pharoah, allegedly by an observer who compared an individual Indian’s countenance to a depicted likeness of an Egyptian Pharoah. See Gaynell Stone Levine and Nancy Bonvillain, eds., Languages and Lore of the Long Island Indians, Readings in Long Island Archaeology and Ethnohistory 4 (Lexington, MA: Ginn Publishing, 1980). 12. The sound for n is also used in place of these two consonant sounds in Algo- nquian, but it does not affect this discussion. 13. See Forbes 1993. 14. Williams, Key into the Language, 105. 15. “Montauk Vocabulary, recorded from George Pharoah by John Lyon Gardi- ner, March 25, 1798,” in Levine and Bonvillain, Languages and Lore, 15–16. 16. Roger Higgins, my emeritus colleague in the University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Linguistics, suggested syncope to describe this morphological process. 17. Alexander Starbuck, History of the American Whaling Fishery, vol. 1 (New York: Argosy-Antiquarian, Ltd., 1964), 5; James Truslow Adams, History of the Town of Southampton (Port Washington, NY: Ira J. Friedman, 1962), 228; Williams, Key into the Language, 113. 18. Starbuck, History of the American Whaling, 10. 19. Starbuck, History of the American Whaling, 11. 20. Adams, History of the Town, 231n* (Adams’s asterisk). 21. Sag Harbor was a hailing port for whalers such as the Fair Helen and the Abigail from 1817 to 1819, and Indian crew members such as Ananias Cuffee were aboard them. See Log 201, Manuscript Collection, G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport; also Adams, History of the Town. 22. Stonington Vital Records, Stonington, New London County, Connecticut, 1688–1852, 3, p. 247; Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 553. The Barbour Collection identifies Deacon Miner’s servant Plato as born 2 July 1735 (or 1736). 23. See Grania Bolton Marcus, A Forgotten People: Discovering the Black Experience in Suffolk County (Setauket, NY: Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, 1988), 10; and Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 22. 228 Notes to Chapter 4

24. John Lyon Gardiner, “Book of Colours, or Mulatto Book,” Ledger, East Hampton Long Island Collection, East Hampton Town Library. 25. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, Long Island, Suffolk Co., N.Y., vol. 5 (Sag Harbor: John H. Hunt, 1905). In neither case is the sex of the child identified. 26. An Index to the East-Hampton Town Records, vol. 4, 385; Records of the Town of East-Hampton, vol. 5, 293. 27. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 229, 311. 28. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 229. 29. H.D.S., “Shipbuilding Once Flourished on L.I.,” Traveler Watchman, Southold Free Library, Southold, New York. A compilation of local newspaper clippings donated over years to the library includes this and others, with the date of publication and often the source name and the page numbers missing or unidentified. Text of the article suggests it may have been published around 1924. 30. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 312. 31. The Index lists this person as Martin Plats because in script, the “o” appears to be an “s.” 32. Records of the Town of East-Hampton, 100. 33. Rufus B. Langhaus, comp., Manumission Book of the Towns of Huntington and Babylon, Long Island, New York, with Some Earlier Manumissions and Index 1800–1824 (Huntington, NY: Town of Huntington, 1980). 34. Strong, The Montaukett Indians, 90. 35. “Greenport, L.I. Aug. 20, 1853,” Scrapbooks of Amos G. Beman, vol. 2, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, accessed 23 June 2014, http://brbl-zoom. library.yale.edu/viewer/1064836. 36. The Long Island town’s name consists of two words, hyphenated in most early documents; the one-word form is used by a town in west-central Massachusetts, to the south of Northampton. 37. Various entries in the Town of Salem General Land Index Grantee 1819–1963 record her as Sabia, Salevia, Sabria, and Sebria, but Brown and Rose use “Sabra” (Black Roots, 311). “Sabra” Ransom may have purchased another home from one of her in-laws. 38. Connecticut Superior Court Divorce Files, Record Group 3, LDS no. 1638196, Box no. 31, New London County, 1719 to 1875. Town Hall, Salem, CT. The author acknowledges Rev. Timothy Dubeau of the Salem Congregational Church for sharing knowledge of the Ransom family in conversation and Patricia Crisanti, Clerk of the Town of Salem, Connecticut, for a photocopy of the divorce petition, 2004. 39. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 311. 40. Vital Records of Nantucket, Massachusetts: to the Year 1850, Marriages–Hach to Hight, Massachusetts, Dunham-Wilcox-Trott-Kirk, accessed 23 June 2014, http://dun- hamwilcox.net/ma/nantucketf60.htm. 41. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, xv. 42. Philip Occuish, a Niantic /Nehantic, became a Baptist minister in the eighteenth century; many of his descendants and his people at Black Point followed him into the Baptist faith. Baptists maintained a strong presence in the Lyme area. See Frances Manwaring Caulkins, History of New London, Connecticut: From the First Survey of the Coast in 1612, to 1852 (New London, CT: Frances Waring Caulkins, 1852), 617. Also, the Niantics and Nehantics are essentially the same people split into eastern and western Notes to Chapter 4 229 groups by the Mohegan-Pequot invasion. Both spellings prevail, but those under Nini- gret who sheltered the Narragansetts after the Great Swamp Massacre of 1675 continue to use “Niantic” and many who live westward tend to use the “Nehantic” spelling. 43. The Village of Greenport assumed its name upon becoming incorporated in 1838; prior to that, its name was Greenhill, which was preceded by two successive names. History & Landmarks, The North Fork Chamber of Commerce, accessed 23 June 2014, http://northforkchamberofcommerce.org/history-a-landmarks. 44. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 297, 626. 45. Shockley, Afro-American Women Writers, 26. 46. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 229; Church Records of the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, Conn. 1693–1963, 318. These records may be accessed at The First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, in Old Lyme, CT. 47. See Welch, They Were Related, Too, 40, 43; see also Mrs. Jane T. (Hills) Smith, Last of the Nehantics (East Lyme, CT: East Lyme Historical Society, 1947), 9, regarding Rev. George Griswold’s association with the Niantic /Nehantic reservation at Black Point; part of this book, with its author identified as Mrs. Charles H. Smith, was excerpted as “Last of the Niantics” in The Connecticut Magazine 8, no. 3 (15 March 1904): 455–56. Also, Prince Crosley’s Story, B & G’s Family Scrapbook, accessed 29 May 2008, http://home.stny.rr.com/bgscrpbk/stories.htm. No longer extant. 48. J. David Little, Revolutionary Lyme: A Portrait 1765–1783, A Supplement to the Annual Report of the Town of Old Lyme, 1975 (Old Lyme, CT: Board of Finance, 1976), 21. Little uses the name Joshuatown without explanation; I surmise that Joshuatown was a place named after Joshua, the chief sachem in the reservation’s early years, and that it became a vernacular reference to Black Point due to the prominent figures Joshua Nonesuch in the mid-eighteenth century and Joshua Wakeet in the early nineteenth century. Smith, Last of the Nehantics, 5–6; see also John W. De Forest, The History of the Indians of Connecticut (Hartford, CT: Wm. James Hamersley, 1851), 382–86. 49. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 229. Livingston Lewis is probably the great-grandfather of Bernard Aloysius Livingstone Lewis, whose male line is from Connecticut and whose son, Barney T. Lewis, was an important figure in lower Hudson Valley Indian cultural affairs from the 1970s until his death in 2006. 50. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 311; see also Church Records 1693–1963, 265. 51. East Haddam Vital Records 1743–1857, 6, vol. 3, Barbour Collection, Connec- ticut State Library, Hartford. 52. Reel 70: Indians, ser. 2, 21a, Connecticut Archives, Connecticut State Library, Hartford. 53. John W. De Forest, in his History of the Indians of Connecticut (Hartford: Wm. Jas. Hamersley, 1852), 443, cites the Massachusetts Historical Collections, 23, 134, for these details. Present-day Pequots bear the surnames Meason and Mason. 54. Jason Mancini, et al., comps., database of Connecticut Indian names and families (Mashantucket, CT: Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center), incomplete manuscript as of 14 August 2008. 55. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 241–46. 56. Barbour Collection 9:297. 57. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 242, 311; see also Connecticut Federal Census, 1870, Washington, Litchfield County, Roll M593, p. 524B; Connecticut Vital Records: 230 Notes to Chapter 4

Connecticut State Library Index; Barbour Collection: Stonington; Arnold copy, 1658– 1854, Woolworth Library, Palmer House, Stonington, CT, 42. Also, Clarence V. H. Maxwell, “ ‘The Horrid Villainy’: Sarah Bassett and the Poisoning Conspiracies in Ber- muda, 1727–30.” Slavery & Abolition 21, no. 3 (2000): 60. 58. On the Lighthouse community, begun by Narragansett Indian James Chaugham and his white wife in the middle of the eighteenth century, see Kenneth L. Feder, A Village of Outcasts: Historical Archaeology and Documentary Research at the Lighthouse Site (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1992). In Connecticut’s Indigenous People: What Archaeology, History, and Oral Traditions Teach Us about Their Communities and Cultures (New Haven, CT: Yale Uuniversity Press, 2013), 348–49, Lucianne Lavin briefly mentions the Danbury Quarter and identifies it on a map. However, see Ryan W. Hewey and Warren R. Perry, “Negrotown: An Archaeology of African Agency from Colonial Connecticut,” Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut 71 (2009): 61–80. 59. Lyme Land Records, 30, 15, New London County Court, Mar 1825; also in Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 331. 60. The name Congdon appears alternately as Condol. William Congdon may be the ancestor of George Washington Congdon, a blacksmith in Stonington described as “a descendant of the Mohegan tribe of Indians.” George H. Stone, Cracker Barrel Chronicle: A Connecticut Yankee Storekeeper Views Village Life in North Stonington (North Stonington, CT: North Stonington Historical Society, 1985), 40. 61. New London County, County Court Files, RG 003, Mar 1823, box 342, folder 1, CSL, and RG 003, Mar 1825, box 348, folder 3, CSL; in Welch, And They Were Related, Too, 82–83. 62. Robert Grigg, Colebrook town historian, telephone conversation, 19 July 2004. Grigg assumes that Abraham Plato never lived in Colebrook but happened to be enumerated for the federal census almost literally while passing through the town. 63. Connecticut Gazette, 27 January 1817, 3. Solomon, as posted by Thomas Bel- lows of Groton, was “blind in one of his eyes . . . good disposition sedate in his appearance” (sic). Connecticut Gazette, 10 September 1817, 3. 64. Church Records 1693–1963, 322; Records, Old Lyme First Congregational Church, vol. 1, 52; vol. 4, 134. Welch, in her study of the Condol/Congdon family, identifies Abraham Plato as a Native descendant from Long Island (And They Were Related, Too, 82). 65. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 311; Land Records, Town of Lyme, CT, 1821– 1825, vol. 30, p. 15. 66. The cemetery inscription for Henry Plato, Hartford 114, Cem. 3, Sec. C in the Connecticut State Library lists the vital statistics and correctly assesses his age at death as 57. The following newspaper notices list him as 58: Hartford Evening Press, 2 August 1859, 106; Christian Secretary, 5 August 1859, 548; Connecticut Press, 6 August 1859, 116; Connecticut-Hartford Weekly Post, 6 August 1859, 45; and the Hartford Courant, 2 August 1859, 1635, in which he is misidentified as Harry Plato. 67. I arrived at this insight independently, but I wish to acknowledge Howard Tredwell-Smith of the Unkechaug Nation of eastern Long Island for its affirmation in “Rebuilding the Other Half: Reclaiming the Unkechaug Nation’s Linguistic Heritage,” Language and Literacy panel, Fourth Annual Meeting of the Native American and Indi- genous Studies Association, Mohegan Sun, 5 June 2012. See also “Map of the Southern Notes to Chapter 4 231

New England Culture Areas,” plate 20 in 43rd Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1928). 68. John Ellsworth, Hartford First School Society Deaths. 1810–1846, manuscript, MS stack, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford. This seems to be the only record of Nancy Plato, and it is probably the source for the reference in Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 311. 69. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 311–12. 70. Hartford City Directory, for 1828 (Hartford, CT: Ariel Ensign, 1828), 45; see Bassard, “Spiritual Interrogations,” 72. 71. Hartford City Directory, 29. 72. See Perry Close, History of Hartford Streets (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1969), 13, 110. 73. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 311. 74. Gardner, Gardner’s Hartford City Directory (1838), 22; Gardner’s Hartford City Directory (1839), 22. 75. This surname, defying earlier documentation, was supplied by a Mrs. Plato of 499 Garden Street. She may be the wife of Frank Plato and may have confused the maiden name of Deborah Freeman’s mother, also Deborah Freeman (hence: Deborah Edwards Freeman). 76. See John Wood Sweet, “Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery,” in Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom, ed. James Brewer Stewart (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 99–100. 77. Elihu Geer, Geer’s Hartford City Directory (Hartford, CT: Hartford Steam Print Company, 1843, 1846–1850). Alfred Plato is not listed in the 1844 and 1845 directories. See also “The Colored People Who Lived in Hartford,” Hartford Courant III, Oct. 24, 1915, 1. 78. See the Catalogue of the Talcott-st. Congregational Church, 11, 12. A major find: besides identifying when Henry Plato joined and his being chosen a deacon, it lists Ann Plato as becoming a member in 1841. 79. “The Coloured Christians of America,” in Black Abolitionist Papers 1830–1865: A Guide to the Microfilm Edition, ed. George E. Carter and C. Peter Riply, Reel 2, Fr. 674 (New York: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1981). Available in digitized format through the W. E. B. DuBois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst, http:// bap.chadwyck.com.silk.library.umass.edu/pdf/tmp_55793.pdf. Accessed October 9, 2014. 80. Seth Terry’s Book of Estates Agencies Trusts. Account Books, 1825–1857, 42, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford. This account book is a ledger about 15 × 12 × 1¾ inches thick. 81. Farah Jasmine Griffin, ed., Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends (New York: Knopf, 1999), 14; refer also to Beeching, “The Primus Papers.”82. Catalog of the Hartford Public High School 1925 (Hartford, CT: Hartford Press, 1925), 74, 262; also, Benajah may have been recorded as Bellagia due to the N and L dialect distinction carried over from eastern Algonquian, similar to his father Henry’s place of birth being identified once as Rhode Island instead of Long Island. 83. A.G.B., “New York, October 25, 1862. A Visit to Hartford,” The Weekly Anglo-African. Scrapbooks of Amos G. Beman, vol. 2, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, accessed 26 June 2014, http://brbl-zoom.library.yale.edu/viewer/1064783. 232 Notes to Chapter 4

84. Beeching, “Primus Papers,” 108. 85. Name: Benajah, Babynamesworld, accessed 26 June 2014, http://babynamesworld.parentsconnect.com/meaning_of_Benajah.html. 86. Albert E. Sims, comp. and ed., Who’s Who in the Bible (New York: Philo- sophical Library, 1960), 24. Sims does not include the references to Benaiah in I Kings 1:10, 32, 38, and 44 and in II Samuel 23:20, 22, and 30. 87. Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, Christology of the Old Testament and a Commen- tary on the Messianic Predictions, vol. 3, trans. Ruel Keith (Washington, DC, 1836–1839). 88. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 311. Regarding Gertrude Plato’s death, see Cemetery Inscriptions and Published Death Notices, Hartford 114, Cem. 3, 165, Connec- ticut State Library. 89. Griffin,Beloved Sisters, 14. 90. Griffin,Beloved Sisters, 155–182. 91. Letters, MS Box 2, 44102, Folder 21, Primus Family Papers, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford. 92. Beeching, “Primus Papers,” 8. 93. The Ancestry.com online genealogical site features transcriptions of an individual’s census enumeration supplied by contributors; the original transcriber for Gertrude Plato’s 1910 entry interpreted the scripted “Id” as “white.” By 2013, this record had been changed, and Gertrude Plato was identified in the race category as Indian, followed by “Native American” in parentheses, then “White” in brackets. 94. Rev. Epher Whitaker, Whitaker’s Southold; Being a Substantial Reproduction of the History of Southold, L.I. Its First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1931), 56. 95. See Gaynell Stone’s map in “The First Inhabitants of Riverhead Town,” in Journey Through Time., ed. Barbara Austen, Riverhead Bicentennial 1792–1992 (Riverhead, NY: Riverhead Bicentennial Commission, 1992), 3. 96. William S. Pelletreau, ed. Records of the Town of Southampton (Sag Harbor, NY), 1874, vol. 1, 159, cited in Marian Fisher Ales, “Conditions and Customs of the Early Montauks,” in Readings in Long Island Archaeology and Ethnohistory, Vol. 3, The History and Archaeology of the Montauks, ed. Gaynell Stone, 2nd ed. (Stony Brook, NY: Suffolk County Archaeological Association), 9, 11n38. 97. Attested to by attorney Marguerite Smith, Shinnecock citizen, Riverhead, NY, January 2006, in conversation with the author. Absorbed groups included the Mia- mogue, a small group situated near the Peconic Bay shore. By 1840, an entrepreneur named James Tuthill had helped persuade them to sell their land (once called Lower Aquebogue by settlers) and cross the bay to Shinnecock, resulting in the place names of Jamesport and South Jamesport (from undated typescripts, First Parish Church, United Church of Christ, at Jamesport and Northville, New York: A History of the Church at Jamesport, 2, and A History of the Jamesport Congregational Church, 4). 98. Edmond Bailey O’Callaghan, ed., Documentary History of the State of New York, 4 vols. (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1850), 3:392–94. 99. Strong, Algonquian Peoples, 229. 100. On RootsWeb, a researcher occasionally encounters a source posted only temporarily, and passing by it momentarily, a researcher may be unable to retrieve the site. This occurred in 2011, when a Long Island librarian found a reference for 1820 that Notes to Chapter 5 233 later “disappeared”; it could be found neither in the federal census for 1820, nor was it known to the Southold town historian. The 1820 federal census records for eastern Long Island towns of East Hampton, Southampton, Riverhead, Southold, and Brookha- ven are interspersed with one another, but Plato families in East Hampton are clearly represented. Whatever the source and possible legitimacy of this reference, it suggests a remnant group of Corchaugs or Yennecocks (or relocated Indians from Montaukett, Shinnecock, or Manhansetts from Shelter Island) fighting abject dissolution and resisting Christianity—the father-persona in Ann Plato’s poem gives the impression of not being interested in conversion.

Chapter 5. Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality

1. James C. Pennington, “To the Reader,” in Essays: Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry, by Ann Plato, Schomburg Library of Nine- teenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 198), 1. 2. Apess, On Our Own Ground, 287, 305. 3. Jean M. O’Brien, “ ‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Native Women in Eighteenth-Century New England,” in After King Philip’s War: Pre- sence and Persistence in Native New England, ed. Colin G. Calloway. (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 154–57. See also Ann Marie Plane’s Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 130, in which she points out that as colonists during the eighteenth century began “to lump Natives together with Africans[,] simultaneously, economic and demographic pressures would force natives to move across the countryside, away from their traditional enclaves, in search of work, bringing them into new relationships with other poor and marginalized individuals.” 4. Strong, Montaukett Indians, 60. 5. Southeastern Natives brought into Rhode Island and Massachusetts were probably prisoners from the rebellions waged by the Tuscarora and the Yemasi. As Almon Wheeler Lauber summarizes, “Indians from the Carolinas were sent to ports in New England where the demand for them was greater.” Indian Slavery in Colonial Times within the Present Limits of the United States (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 117. The traffic in Native slaves from Latin America into British colonies continued into the nineteenth century. 6. This information was first provided to the author by Mohegan Tribal Histo- rian Melissa Zobel Tantaquidgeon (nee Fawcett), telephone conversation, 1996. 7. Quoted in Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest, 117. 8. Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest, 29. 9. Caulkins, History of New London, 604. 10. Caulkins, History of New London, 605; italicized names by Caulkins; clause italicized by the author. 11. A brief unsigned article, “Two Hundred Years Later,” quotes the following from a note by William T. Williams early in the 1830s: “There is a remnant of the Pequots still existing. They live in the town of Groton, and amount to about forty souls” living “poorly” on about forty acres “reserved to them in Groton” (Historical Footnotes, Bulletin of the Stonington Historical Society 25, no. 4 (November 1988): 9. 234 Notes to Chapter 5

12. Reel 70: Indians, ser. 2, vol. 1, 81b, Connecticut Archives. 13. Reel 70: Indians, ser. 2, vol. 1, 81c, Connecticut Archives. 14. Reel 70: Indians, ser. 2, vol. 1, 86a, Connecticut Archives. 15. Strong, Montaukett Indians, 76–77. 16. Eleazer Wheelock to Rev. George Whitefield, letter, 25 November 1761, Wheelock Papers; cited in W. DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 92. 17. Reel 70: Indians, ser. 2, vol. 1, 86a, Connecticut Archives. 18. Sweet, “Venture Smith,” 99. 19. See Forbes, Africans and Native Americans; also, Steven Pony Hill has created a useful web page, with historical documentation as late as 1871, “A Rose by Any Other Name Is a Cactus”—Defining Mixed-Blood Natives in Colonial Virginia and the Carolinas, accessed 27 June 2014, http://www.sciway3.net/clark/freemoors/ARose.htm. 20. See Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners:PostIndian Warriors of Survivance (Hano- ver, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 72. 21. Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 128. 22. Daniel M. Tredwell, Personal Reminiscences of Men and Things on Long Island, Part One (Brooklyn, NY: Charles Andrew Ditmas, 1912), 67. 23. Tredwell, Personal Reminiscences, 65. 24. Tredwell, Personal Reminiscences, 76. 25. See Ron Welburn, “A Most Secret Identity: Native American Assimilation and Identity resistance in African America,” in Confounding the Color Line: The Indian- Black Experience in North America, ed. James F. Brooks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 292–320. 26. Charles Brilvitch, A History of Connecticut’s Golden Hill Paugusett Tribe (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2007), 27–33, 36, 43, 45, 71–72, 86, from C. S. Bachelor and R. Edward Steck, “Indian Archaeology in and around Bridgeport, Connecticut,” Bulletin of the Archaeology Society of Connecticut 12 (May 1941): 19–26. 27. Brilvitch, History of Connecticut’s, 92. 28. Tamara Verrett, “Faith Congregational Church, 185 Years: Same People, Same Purpose,” Hog River Journal 3, no. 3 (2004), accessed 30 June 2014, http://connecticutex- plored.org/issues/v03n03/congregational_church.htm. 29. Verrett, “Faith Congregational Church.” 30. See David O. White, 1974; also, “Metropolitan African Methodist Episco- pal Zion Church,” accessed 12 November 2014, http://hartfordheritagetrail.org/heritage-trail/churches/metropolitan-african-methodist-episcopal-zion-church/, and Verrett, “Faith Congregational Church.” These churches share complex histories linked to the movements of their buildings and their denominational affiliations: African Religious Society, Colored ME, Congregational, AME, and AME Zion, each of which emerged successively from the one historically before it. 31. “Historical Sketch,” Our 150th Anniversary 1826–1976: Faith Congregational Church (United Church of Christ) (Hartford, CT: Faith Congregational Church, 1976). 32. The historical sketch (p. 4) in Our 150th Anniversary 1826–1976 names Primus Babcock and a William Mason. This information was originally printed in “A Brief Historical Sketch: Talcott Street Congregational Church,” in The Dedication of Faith Notes to Chapter 5 235

Congregational Church, 1826–1954 (Hartford, CT, 13 June 1954) booklet, 7. See also “Where We Come From,” Faith Congregational Church, accessed 12 November 2014, http://faithcongchurch.org/blog/?page_id=37. 33. This would be Jehiel C. Beman of Middeltown, CT. White, in error, identifies Beman the son with the middle initial “L.” White, “Hartford’s African Schools.” 34. Welch, And They Were Related, 173–75, 177. 35. Welch, And They Were Related, 24–25, 178. 36. Welch, And They Were Related, 173. 37. Catalogue of the Talcott-st. Congregational Church, 6–7, 8–10, 16. Miniature in size, its twenty pages begin with the green cover; the copy at the Wadsworth Atheneum is dulled with age, and pages 17 to 20 are blank. Its dimensions are approximately 2 7/8 by 4 1/16, and the binding is long-stitched. A list of codes identifies the status of the church’s members. 38. Catalogue of the Talcott-st. Congregational Church, 11–14. 39. Catalogue of the Talcott-st. Congregational Church, 13–15. 40. See Simmons and Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways. 41. Apes would surely be a Pequot surname. The Randall and Mason surnames are held by persons of color in Stonington and North Stonington during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, signifying that they too are Pequot. Cisco and Condall connote Narragansett origins. On the Cisco surname being Narragansett: in the 1850s, Samuel Cisco married into the Nipmuc Printer/Arnold line, and the surname became associated with the Hassanamisco Reservation and Cisco Homestead in Grafton, Massa- chusetts (Rae Gould [Nipmuc Nation], personal communication, 6 June 2013). Babcock is another name among the Narragansetts and Pequots (see Tables 2 and 3 in Jack Cam- pisi, “The Emergence of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe, 1637–1975,” in The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Native Nation, ed. Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 128–29. As indigenous New Englanders know, due to mobility and marriages into related Algonquian communities, there is nothing exactly stable about where these names may be found tribally. For example, besides Narragansett and Nipmuc, Cisco is held by Delaware (Lenape) people in the Ramapos and in Canada by Moravian Delaware. Hazzard (or Hazard) is heavily associated with the Narragansetts but is also held by a Nipmuc descendant. And as records show and the oral traditions of today’s Connecticut Natives affirm, Congdon and Condoll are essentially interchangeable. 42. Catalogue of the Talcott-st. Congregational Church, 16. Holdridge Primus (1818– 1884), his famous daughter Rebecca, and his son Nelson are the most prominent Primus line associated with the Talcott Street church, and they are of mixed ancestry, Holdridge’s wife Mehitible Jacobs Primus having Missinnuok origins. Most people named Primus or Prim in Black Roots are “Negro” but two are mulatto (319–320 and 555–556). Holdridge Primus came to Hartford from coastal Guilford (traditional Hammonessett territory). Lydia Sigourney, writing about Norwich, describes a highly respected aged African, “Father Primus,” a widower whose surviving daughter Flora “bore no resemblance to her father”; Flora preferred to live among Mohegans and was considered a witch. See Lydia Sigourney, Sketches of Forty Years Since (Hartford, CT: Oliver D. Cooke and Sons, 1824), 81–83, 90–94. 236 Notes to Chapter 5

43. Elihu Geer, Geer’s Hartford City Directory, for 1845; With a Complete Stage, Rail Road, Steamboat, Packet, and Freight Boat Register, &C., &C. (Hartford, CT: Elihu Geer, 1845). 44. Gardner, Gardner’s Hartford City Directory (1838), 9; Geer, Geer’s Hartford City Directory (1843), 96, (1845), 105. 45. 1850 United States Federal Census and 1870 United States Federal Census. 46. “Report on the Committee on African Colonization,” The Genius of Univer- sal Emancipation, A Monthly Periodical Work, Containing Original Essays, Documents and Facts, Relative to the Subject of African Slavery, July 1833, 137–38. Spywood’s Native heritage would not have to nullify his taking a stand on African American rights. 47. Staff, review of Spywood, George A. The Experience of George A. Spywood, Between the Covers Rare Books Inc., accessed 2 July 2014, http://www.betweenthecovers. com/btc/item/285417. 48. Samuel G. Drake, The Book of the Indians; or, Biography and History of the Indians of North America, From Its First Discovery to the Year 1841, 8th ed. (Boston: Antiquarian Bookstore, 1841), 3:73–76. 49. Also of interest, a longer George Street runs parallel to Spywood Avenue. 50. See George R. Price and James Brewer Stewart, eds., “Introduction: Hosea Easton and the Agony of Race,” in To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice: The Life and Wri- tings of Hosea Easton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 3–10. Price is a direct descendant of James Easton’s brother, Somerset Easton. 51. William J. Brown, The Life of William J. Brown of Providence (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 5–7. 52. Joanne Pope Melish, introduction to The Life of William J. Brown of Providence, R.I. with Personal Recollections of Incidents in Rhode Island (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2006), xxxviii. 53. Stephen G. Ray, Jr., “Not All Black and White: African American Christian History and the Politics of Historical Identity” (paper, Afro-American Religious History Group, American Academy of Religion, Nashville, November 19, 2000, 11–12, accessed 2 July 2014, http://livedtheology.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/s_ray.pdf). 54. Parts of the dialogue are quoted in T. G. (Theophilus Gould) Steward’s The Colored Regulars in the United States Army, 13, 1904. Accessed 2 July 2014. http://www. bookrags.com/ebooks/16750/. 55. Rita Roberts, Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought 1776–1863 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 106, 124. 56. Roberts, Evangelicalism, 32. 57. Plato, Essays, 93. 58. See Jane des Grange, comp., Long Island’s Religious History (Stony Brook: Suffolk Museum, 1963), 36. 59. The inhabitants of Hassanemisco, a Nipmuc praying village that became a reservation, escaped this kind of devastation. However, inhabitants of the praying village situated at Lancaster in the Pennsylvania colony were slaughtered during two raids by the Paxton Boys in 1764; see Jeremy Engels, “ ‘Equipped for Murder’: The Paxton Boys and ‘The Spirit of Killing All Indians’ in Pennsylvania, 1763–1764,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 3 (2005): 355–82, Academia.edu, accessed 2 July 2014, http://www. Notes to Chapter 5 237 academia.edu/1428360/_Equipped_for_Murder_The_Paxton_Boys_and_the_Spirit_of_ Killing_all_Indians_in_Pennsylvania_1763–1764. 60. Patricia Mann, Ramapough Lenape Nation historian, in-person and telephone conversations, 2005–2011. 61. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quar- terly 18 (Summer 1996): 152. 62. Sweet, Bodies Politic, 127–28. 63. Sweet, Bodies Politic, 130. 64. Pennington, “To the Reader,” xviii. 65. Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Poli- tical Writer: Essays and Speeches (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 66. See “Proceeding of the Colored National Convention Held in Rochester, July 6–8, 1853,” in Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864, ed. Howard H. Bell (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 34, cited in Monroe Fordham, Major Themes in Northern Black Religious Thought, 1800–1860 (Hicksville, NY: Expo- sition Press, 1975), 24. 67. Fordham, Major Themes, 73, 121. 68. Apess, On Our Own Ground. 69. Plato, Essays, 27–29, 47. 70. In Philadelphia, for example, small handbills announcing the services of “Indian doctors” and “Indian readers” were ubiquitous in colored neighborhoods into the 2000s, affixed to lamp posts and superimposed on advertising found on public trans- portation. These persons were part of an Indian spiritualist underground in African American communities, and virtually all proclaimed some degree of Native ancestry. 71. Roberts, Evangelicalism, 165; Henry Highland Garnet, The Past and Present Condition and the Destiny of the Colored Race (Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing, 1969), 25. 72. Martin B. Pasternak, Rise Now and Fly To Arms: The Life of Henry Highland Garnet (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), 19–21. 73. “Mammoth Cave in Kentucky,” The Colored American 31 July 1841, 88. 74. Price and Stewart, “Introduction,” 51. 75. Price and Stewart, “Introduction,” 7–8. 76. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 133; to be fair, this observation is couched in her discussion of the Cherokee Freedmen issue. 77. Byrd, Transit of Empire, 136n54. 78. See Susan Strane, A Whole-Souled Woman: Prudence Crandall and the Education of Black Women (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 169. Strane implies that the county’s Anti-Slavery Society had become strong, which may have precipitated the reversal. 79. Benjamin Sevitch, “Connecticut’s Canterbury Tale: Prudence Crandall and Her School,” Connecticut Review 10, no. 1 (Summer 1987): 94. 80. Report of the Arguments of Counsel, in the Case of Prudence Crandall, Plff. in Error, v. State of Connecticut, before the Superior Court of Errors (Boston: Garrison & Knapp, 1834), 11. 81. Edmund Fuller, Prudence Crandall: An Incident of Racism in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 83. 238 Notes to Chapter 6

82. Report of the Arguments of Counsel, 17–18. 83. Carl R. Woodward, “A Profile in Dedication: Sarah Harris and the Fayerweather Family,” New England Galaxy 15, no. 1 (Summer 1973): 5. Sarah Har- ris married George Fayerweather III, whom Woodward describes as “Afro-Native”; George’s grandfather was a slave born at one of the “Narragansett plantations” near Kingston, Rhode Island, which does not absolutely mean his Native heritage was Nar- ragansett. A newspaper clipping at the Woolworth Library in Stonington that provides neither the name of the paper, the date, nor the page number also uses “Afro-Native” to describe George. “Folks in South County still talk about King Tom, the Niantic Native who graduated from Oxford.” File: Indian Material–Mixed Tribes #1 (Mohegan, Pequot, etc.), Woolworth Library, Palmer House, Stonington, CT. If nothing more, the Harris-Fielding-Fayerweather relationship exemplifies the kind of bi- and triracialism developing in Connecticut Native country. 84. Summary under the Criteria and Evidence for Final Determination for Federal Acknowledgment of the Mohegan Tribe of Natives of the State of Connecticut (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of Federal Acknowledgment, 7 March 1994), 38, 45. Cited hereafter as Mohegan Tribe Determination. 85. Mohegan Tribe Determination, 187. 86. Olive May Harris Coderre-Picozzi, Obituaries, Norwich Bulletin, 1 August 2010, accessed 13 November 2014, http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/norwichbulletin/ obituary.aspx?n=olive-may-harris-coderre-picozzi&pid=144434423. 87. Mohegan Tribe Determination, 181, Appendix C. 88. Pennington, “To the Reader,” xix.

Chapter 6. Schooling: Some Speculations; Teaching: Some Records

1. Plato, Essays, 80–81, 84, 87. 2. Wayne E. Reilly, ed., Sarah Jane Foster. Teacher of the Freedmen: A Diary and Letters (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 8, 23. 3. Ann, “Little Harriet.” 4. A similar announcement appeared in The Liberator’s 1 October 1841 issue, stating that the Messenger was “ ‘devoted to education, religion, morality, and general intelligence.’ ” The rest of the brief notice states, “It is published on a small sheet every Saturday. . . . We have seen only the last (15th) number” (159), which suggests that the journal began in the middle of June, with “Little Harriet” in its inaugural issue. Mariam Touba, reference librarian at the New York Historical Society, confirmed more references to it in the Colored American up to September 1841, and that black abolitionist David Ruggles referenced it in a letter reprinted in the National Anti-Slavery Standard (“Mr. Rug- gles’s Acknowledgment,” 22 September 1842, 63). Prince Loveridge, a teacher and “Agent for the Schools for Colored Children” in New York in 1841, reported on the Journal of Education and Weekly Messenger in the Colored American. African American abolitionist William Cooper Nell is quoted as one of its supporters; see Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac, eds., William Cooper Nell: Nineteenth-Century African American Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist, 1832–1874 (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 2002), 104. Fifteen numbers of a journal is a modest success for a group of colored teachers at that time, but issues apparently did not survive. Neither the Library of Congress nor the Notes to Chapter 6 239

Garrison archive at Brandeis has extant copies. The author appreciates the assistance of senior research librarian James Kelly of the University of Massachusetts Amherst W. E. B. DuBois Library for inquiring at specialized databases operated by the Schomburg Library of the New York Public library, New York Historical Society, for Touba’s reply; Villanova University; and the American Antiquarian Society; all of whose databases cross-reference one another and link to others. The only database references for a Weekly Messenger journal pertain to a later nineteenth-century periodical published by the German Reform Church. 5. A tempting muse imagines Ann Plato as a clandestine auditor of lectures from outside open windows during trips to New Haven. 6. Patten’s New Haven Directory for the Year 1840: To Which Are Appended Some Useful and Interesting Notices: Also the Annual Advertiser (New Haven: James M. Patten, William Storer, June 1840), 93, 110. 7. Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1984), 182. 8. Margaret Connell Szasz, “ ‘Poor Richard’ Meets the Native American: Schoo- ling for Young Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut,” Pacific Historical Review 49, no. 2 (May 1980): 215–35. 9. Sterling, We Are Your Sisters, 180. 10. Sterling, We Are Your Sisters, 182–83. 11. History: Clinton Academy, EastHampton.com, accessed 7 July 2014, www. easthampton.com/history/clinton.html. 12. Herbert E. Fowler, A Century of Teacher Education in Connecticut (New Bri- tain: The Teachers College of Connecticut at New Britain, 1949), 11–19. 13. Jarvis M. Morse, A Neglected Period in Connecticut’s History, 1818–1850 (New Haven, CT: University Press, 1933), 151–52. 14. Jurgen Herbst, And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and Professionalism in Ame- rican Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 23–27. 15. “Infant Schools,” Connecticut Common School Journal, 1 September 1838, 14. 16. “Questions, For the Examination of a Teacher by a School Committee. Such questions have been used with success, and are worthy of general consideration,” Connec- ticut Common School Journal, 1 September 1838, 12. 17. Paul H. Mattingly, The Classless Profession: American Schoolmen in the Nine- teenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 42–43. 18. Plato, Essays, 103. 19. Eleanor Wolf Thompson, Education for Ladies 1830–1860: Ideas on Education in Magazines for Women (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1947), 106–109; see also Robert Samuel Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College, from Its Foundation through the Civil War (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College, 1943), 1:344. 20. Memoir of De Witt Clinton, Appendix, note G, “His Services in the Esta- blishment of Infant Schools,” accessed 6 July 2008, http://www.history.rochester.edu/ canal/bib/hosack/APP0G.html. On the supposed decline of infant schools, see Robert M. Hardaway, America Goes to School (Westport, CT: Greenwood, Praeger, 1995), 88. 21. Willard, in Willystine Goodsell, ed., Pioneers of Women’s Education in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), 59–65. 22. In Goodsell, Pioneers of Women’s Education, 145–87. Coincidentally, Beecher was born at East Hampton, Long Island. 240 Notes to Chapter 6

23. Mattingly, The Classless Profession, 78–79. 24. Fowler, Century of Teacher Education, 15. 25. Martha MacLear, A History of Education of Girls in New York and New England (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1926). 26. Caulkins, History of New London, 623. 27. Maria Rivero, telephone communication, November 1996. 28. Orwin Bradford Griffin, The Evolution of the Connecticut State School System (New York: AMS Press, 1972), 57ff. 29. Griffin, Evolution, 40, 42. 30. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 39. 31. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 40, 42, 174–75, 219. 32. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 189–90, 192–93, 213–20; Plato, Essays, 94. 33. The succinct definition can be found in the Free Online Dictionary: http:// www.thefreedictionary.com/natural+philosophy. The book’s full title and subtitle are: A System of Natural Philosophy: In Which Are Explained the Principles of Mechanics, Hydrosta- tics, Hydraulics, Pneumatics, Acoustics, Optics, Astronomy, Electricity, Magnetism, Steam-En- gine, Electro-Magnetism, Electrotype, Photography, and Daguerrotype, to Which Are Added Questions for the Examination of Pupils Designed for the Use of Schools and Academies. 34. Jacob Abbott, The Young Christian: Or a Familiar Illustration of the Principles of Christian Duty (New York: John B. Haven, 1833), 31, 131–32. 35. Plato, Essays, 35. 36. Abbott, The Young Christian, 84. 37. Abbott, The Young Christian, 275–76, 289–90, 295–96, 300. 38. John Abercrombie, Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Inves- tigation of Truth; with Additions and Explanation to Adopt the Work to the Use of Schools and Academies, by Jacob Abbott (Hartford, CT: Huntington, 1833), 15. 39. Abercrombie, Inquiries, 258ff. 40. Jacob Abbott, The Teacher: Or Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and Government of the Young (Boston: Peirce and Parker, 1833), 160–62. 41. Abbott, The Teacher, 173. 42. Jacob Abbott, Juno and Georgie (New York: Dodd & Mead, 1870), 11–12. 43. Abbott, Juno and Georgie, 51, 91, 181ff. 44. Abbott, Juno and Georgie, 152. 45. Rippingham, Rules for English Composition, and Particularly for Themess: Designed for the Use of Schools, and in Aid of Self Instruction (Poughkeepsie, NY: Para- clete Potter, 1816), quoted in Lucille M. Schultz, The Young Composers: Composition’s Beginnings in Nineteenth-Century Schools (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 25. 46. Richard Green Parker, Progressive Exercises in Composition (Boston: Lincoln and Edmands, 1832), cited in Schultz, Young Composers. 25. 47. Sydney Smith, The Works of The Rev. Sydney Smith, Including His Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859), 175–86. 48. “Second Report of the Joint Select Committee on Common Schools,” Connec- ticut Common School Journal 1, no. 1 (August 1838): 3. Notes to Chapter 7 241

49. Terry, Book of Estates Agencies Trusts; see also David O. White. “Hartford’s African Schools, 1830–1868.” Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 39, no. 2 (1974): 49. 50. James C. Pennington, “Common School Review—No. XL.” The Colored Ame- rican, 26 June 1841, 66 (the page number on the page reading “62” is a printer’s error). 51. “II. Second Colored School,” in “Original. For the Supplement: Common School Report,” Supplement to the Courant: Connecticut Courant, 8 March 1845, 35. 52. “II. Second Colored School,” 35; italics in the original. The author thanks Robert Dale Parker (Illinois) for providing this newspaper document. The Narragansett and black memoirist William J. Brown recalled being taught Daboll, Arithmetic as a youth in 1820s Providence, and there is no reason not to suspect it provided Plato with early mathematics instruction. It helped Brown learn how to “cipher”; see Brown, Life of William J. Brown, 73. The full citation for Daboll is Nathan Daboll, Daboll’s School- master’s Assistant, Improved and Enlarged. Being a Plain Practical System of Arithmetic, Adapted to the United States (Albany, NY: E. & E. Hosford, 1817). After the first edition of 1800 appeared in New London, subsequent editions were printed there in 1821, 1823, and 1829, in addition to editions printed in Albany, Utica, and New York. Rooms in Hartford’s colored schools were described as “quite too small” in “Schools for Colored Children, Hartford,” Barnard’s American Journal of Education 19 (1869): 334. 53. “II. Second Colored School,” 38. 54. Even using the surnames as indicated in the report, none of these female teachers shows up in the library catalog of the Connecticut State Library. The closest match for Mary P. Cheney is Mary A. Bushnell Cheney, author of her father’s Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell (1880). Horace Bushnell did not marry until the 1830s. 55. Thomas Robbins, Thomas Robbins School Papers box, Thomas Robbins Col- lection, 1792–1852, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford; and White, “Hartford’s African Schools, 1830–1868,” Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin, 53. 56. “Exhibition,” The Charter Oak, 21 May 1846, 2, in David O. White, “Hart- ford’s African Schools, 1830–1868,” ms. with endnotes, folder 378, box 303, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford. 57. Thomas Robbins, Diary of Thomas Robbins, 2 vols., ed. Increase N. Tarbox (Boston: Beacon Press, 1887), 2:823. This was not one of Robbins’s inspection reports, and consulting a perpetual calendar for 1846 to verify the Charter Oak issue’s date solves the discrepancy implying that the invitations were written in 1845. 58. Geer, Geer’s Hartford City Directory, 1845: 109; 1846: 155; 1847: 165.

Chapter 7. Essays: Publication and Reception of the Book

1. Williams, introduction to Essays, xxxix. 2. James C. Pennington, A Text Book of the Origins and History of the Colored People (Hartford, CT: L. Skinner, 1841). 3. Christopher L. Webber, American to the Backbone: The Life of James W. C. Pennington, the Fugitive Slave Who Became One of the First Black Abolitionists (New York: Pegasus Books, 2011), 150. 4. Pennington, Text Book, 82. 242 Notes to Chapter 8

5. Webber, American to the Backbone, 162, 453n41; David O. White, “The Fugi- tive Blacksmith of Hartford,” Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 49, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 11. 6. Pennington, Text Book, 3. 7. Gardner’s city directories were replaced in 1842 by Geer’s. Hartford History Center files, Hartford Public Library. 8. The author thanks Melinda McIntosh, Reference Services librarian at the W.E.B. DuBois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst, for these details (e-mail, 8 January 2014). The 103 copies are those listed in the WorldCat database, so libraries not in this service may also have extant copies. Meanwhile, neither the American Anti- quarian Society nor the Connecticut State Library files for L. Skinner’s printing business show any association with Essays. 9. Ann Plato, “Lines, Written Upon Visiting the Grave of a Venerated Friend,” The Colored American 5 September 1840, 4. 10. “Platonic Prose and Poetry, by a Colored ‘Platoess,’ ” The Knickerbocker. or New-York Monthly Magazine 31 (February 1848): 166–68. “Somedele” is a variant spelling for “somedeel,” a term possibly archaic in the 1840s meaning “somewhat,” or “somewhat, in fairly large amount.” Webster’s New International Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1942), 2397. 11. “Platonic Prose and Poetry,” 166. I wish to acknowledge Robert Dale Par- ker for calling my attention to this review after the Sigourney chapter (chapter 8) was written. The stanzas the editor refers to are from the fifteenth-century Spanish soldier and poet Jorge Manrique’s enduring poem “Coplas por la muerte de su padre” (stanzas on the death of his father). He did not identify that Ann Plato found Longfellow’s translation of Manrique’s poem “Coplas de Manrique” in Longfellow’s very first collection of poems, Voices in the Night (1839), and used lines from it for her closing poem, “Author’s Farewell.” “The Editor’s Table,” The Knickerbocker’s monthly miscellany section, had quoted poets Pancko and Gaul in the January and February 1847 issues, respectively. It had printed five quatrains of a poem about the Mexican–United States War by Joseph C. Pancko, a Utica “ ‘colored gentleman’ ” (his name was spelled “Pankco” in that issue). “We know of no distinguished American poet who has penned such verse” (95; a printer’s error rendered the year on that page 1846). Gaul “is a colored shoe-black,” “a ‘gemman’ ” who resides “in the ‘Literary Emporium,’ ” and his six-stanza “New-Year’s Address of Abram Gaul,” with slight dialect features, is quoted (February, 190). More comments about this review will follow. 12. “Platonic Prose and Poetry,” 167. 13. “Platonic Prose and Poetry,” 168.

Chapter 8. Essays and Lydia Sigourney: The Poetics of Borrowing

1. Sigourney drew upon the philosophy expressed throughout Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786) and the Vindication of the Rights of Women (1791). Several handy editions of these are available, one being Barbara H. Solomon and Paula S. Berggren, A Mary Wollstonecraft Reader (New York: Signet Books, 1983). 2. Stephen Behrend, British Women Writers and the Romantic Writing Community (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 8. Notes to Chapter 8 243

3. Behrend, British Women Writers, 9, quoted in Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana Univer- sity Press, 2000), 2–3. 4. This is the edition to which I will refer in this and other chapters; the 1837 edition of Letters to Young Ladies will likewise be the one referred to. 5. Lydia Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Bro- thers, 1837). 6. Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies, 14. 7. Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies, 14. 8. Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies, 165. 9. Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies, 170. 10. Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies, 167. 11. Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies, 19–20. 12. Behrend, British Women Writers, 9. 13. Chad Edgar, “Felicia Hemans and the Shifting Field of Romanticism,” In Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2001), 130. 14. Laura Mandell, “Hemans and the Gift-Book Aesthetic,” Cardiff Corvey: Rea- ding the Romantic Text 6 (June 2001), http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/journals/corvey/ articles/cc06_n01.html. 15. Lydia Huntley Sigourney Papers (1788–1911), SIGOL/1865–, I. 10 et al., Correspondence files; SIGOL/1865–, I. 26, Legal Papers [18–], Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford. 16. James E. Porter, “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community,” Rhetoric Review 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1986), 34–47. 17. Tillie Olsen, ed., “Biographical Interpretation,” in Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1985), 101, 166n16. 18. Nick Carbone, “Saying Back What You Hear: Responding to Reading,” Strategies for Teaching with Online Tools, Bedford Workshops on Teaching Writing Online, accessed 11 July 2014, http://bedfordstmartins.com/technotes/workshops/sayback. htm. 19. Behrend, British Women Writers, 8. 20. Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Cen- tury Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 44. Macfarlane, whose book’s primary focus is the Victorian era, builds a position distinguishing between creation and invention, with some literary icons praised by other authors as original being the foremost borrowers. 21. Emerson v. Davies et al., Fred Rickey, 13 April 2000, accessed 13 November 2014, http://fredrickey.info/dms/DeptHeads/Davies-plagiarism.html; Frederick Emer- son, The North American Arithmetic: Part First, Containing Elementary Lessons (Boston: Lincoln and Edmands, 1829); Charles Davies, First Lessons in Arithmetic (Philadelphia: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1844). 22. The Ramik Report: Memorandum of Law: Literary Property Rights 1790– 1915, 14 August 1981, accessed 11 July 2014, http://www.whiteestate.org/issues/ramik. html; Was “Ellen G. White a Plagiarist? Examining the Evidence,” Ellen-White.com, updated 8 July 2006, accessed 11 July 2014, http://www.Ellen-White.com/Plagiarism.html. 244 Notes to Chapter 9

23. Jerry Moon, “Who Owns the Truth? Another Look at the Plagiarism Debate”(paper presented at the Ellen G. White and Current Issues Symposium, Seven- th-day Adventist Theological Seminary, Andrews University, 4 April 2005), 6, 9–11. 24. Tilar J. Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (Phi- ladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 2–3; see also 21–23.

Chapter 9. The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics

1. Kathryn Sutherland, “Writings on Education and Conduct: Arguments for Female Improvement,” in Woman and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26; Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 2. This was J. Orville Taylor. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 343. 3. “Hints to Young Ladies,” The Colored American, 21 November 1840, 4. 4. Leo P. Hirrel, Children of Wrath: New School Calvinism and Antebellum Reform (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998), 9–18. 5. Charles Grandison Finney, Lecture to Professing Christians: Delivered in the City of New York in the Years 1836 and 1837 (New York: J. S. Tyler, 1837). 6. Fordham, in Major Themes, cites Finney’s Lectures to Professing Christians and paraphrases him from “Instructions to Young Converts” (“that all of their possessions, including their time, property, minds, bodies, and influence belonged to God”), 58. This Finney presentation is embedded in Lecture 19, “Instructions to Converts,” collected in Lectures on Revivals of Religion (New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1835), 371. 7. Mrs. [Mary] Sherwood, The Infant’s Progress, from the Valley of Destruction to Everlasting Glory (Wellington, Salop [London]: Houlston and Son, 1821), iv. 8. See Pickering, Moral Instruction, 19. 9. Fordham, Major Themes, 13. 10. Plato, Essays, 21–23. 11. Plato, Essays, 22–23. 12. Plato, Essays, 23–25. 13. Sample reports would be “A Native Hindu School” (21 March 1840, 4); “Hindu Picture of Krishna on an Elephant Composed of His Female Attendants” (28 March 1840, 4); and five others through the autumn months. These reports informed the newspaper’s readers as encyclopedic synopses and bemoaned the lack of Christian values thought to uplift the populace. Other reports informed readers of the more enlightened Holy Land region at large and its biblically imbued history. Nearly all reports were accompanied by engravings depicting a scene. 14. Plato, Essays, 27. 15. Menta, Quinnipiac. 16. Plato, Essays, 27. 17. Plato, Essays, 28–29. 18. Plato, Essays, 28–29. 19. Susanna Rowson, An Abridgment of Universal Geography (Boston: John West, 1805), iii. 20. Rowson, Abridgment, 296; Plato, Essays, 42. Notes to Chapter 9 245

21. Plato, Essays, 28–29. “Festival of the Swinging of Krishna,” an article in the Colored American issue that came out two weeks after the issue that contained one of her poems, may have buttressed this remark, its author using the phrase “representations of deluded and degraded human nature” (19 September 1840, 4). 22. Plato, Essays, 29. 23. Morse, A Neglected Period, 134–35. 24. Hirrel, Children of Wrath, 93. 25. Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies, 206. 26. William Allen Wallace, The History of Canaan, New Hampshire, ed. James Burns Wallace (Concord, NH: Rumford Press, 1910), 255, 258. 27. See Jupiter Hammond, America’s First Negro Poet: The Complete Works of Jupiter Hammond of Long Island, ed. Stanley Austin Ransom, Jr. (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1970). 28. Fordham, Major Themes, 57–64. 29. Plato, Essays, 29. 30. Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies, 194–95. 31. Plato, Essays, 36. The comment is direct from Webster’s Manual of Useful Studies, for the Instruction of Young Persons of Both Sexes, in Families and Schools (New Haven, CT: S. Babcock, 1839), 74. 32. Plato, Essays, 38–39. 33. Plato, Essays, 39–40. 34. Plato, Essays, 41. 35. “Extracts from the Joint Letter of the Missionaries at Beyroot, Dated Dec. 31, 1836,” Missionary Herald 33, no. 11 (1837): 443. 36. Review of A Compendious View of the Christian Doctrine. . . , by David James, The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle 74, pt. 2 (October 1804): 444–45. 37. Plato, Essays, 42–43. 38. Plato is using the “perfect regularity” passage from Daniel Staniford’s The Art of Reading, Containing a Number of Useful Rules (Boston: West & Richardson, 1817), 50. 39. Plato, Essays, 45. 40. Plato, Essays, 53. 41. This is how the poem is titled in Charlotte Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 47. 42. Staniford, Art of Reading, 50. 43. Plato, Essays, 45. Smith’s second volume contains sonnet 74 and “April,” and the longer poems that bookend the latter, “Verses, on the Death of [Henrietta O’Neill]” and “Ode to Death” surely would have captured Ann Plato’s attention. Smith, Poems, 117–22; bracketed material added by Curran. 44. Staniford, Art of Reading, 50. 45. Sigourney, Girl’s Reading Book, 46. 46. Plato, Essays, 46. 47. Plato, Essays, 48. 48. Plato, Essays, 49. 49. “Address,” The Colored American, 26 September 1840, 1, and 3 October 1840, 1, Scrapbook of Amos G. Beman 2, 27, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, accessed 13 July 2014, http://brbl-zoom.library.yale.edu/viewer/1064808. 246 Notes to Chapter 9

50. Plato, Essays, 50. 51. Plato, Essays, 50–52. Sigourney in turn probably relied upon John Lee Comstock’s History of the Greek Revolution (Hartford: Samuel Griswold Goodrich, 1829); see also James Hammond Trumbull, The Memorial History of Hartford County 1633–1854. Vol. 1. The County (Boston: Edward L. Osgood, 1886), 172. 52. Amos G. Beman, “Thoughts—No. XIII,” The Colored American, 10 July 1841, 74, Scrapbook of Amos G. Beman 2, 1838–1857, 32, accessed 13 July 2014, http://brbl- zoom.library.yale.edu/viewer/1064813. 53. “The End of Great Men,” Atkinson’s Casket, or Gems of Literature, Wit and Sentiment, January 1832, 24, accessed 13 November 2014, http://books.google.com/ books?id=SpfPAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=atkinson%27s+casket,+Janua- ry+1832&source#v=onepage&q=atkinson’s%20casket%2C%20January%201832&f=false. 54. Amos G. Beman, “Thoughts—No. XIII.” The reference details were not saved. 55. “Four Great Murderers,” The Presbyterian, 2 August 1845, 124, Amos G. Beman Scrapbooks 4, 1838–1857, 4, Beinecke Library, Yale University. The title of the newspaper that printed the clipped article, as well as the date and page number, were not saved. Beman’s scrapbook also contains clippings of other articles from The Spring- field Republican that he found interesting. As stated in note 54, the details were not saved. 56. It is tempting to speculate whether Plato recognized the surname Hannibal (sometimes Hannible), which was held by some early nineteenth-century Montaukett families. 57. Plato, Essays, 52. 58. Sigourney, Girl’s Reading Book, 36. 59. Plato, Essays, 56. 60. Plato, Essays, 57. 61. Plato, Essays, 58. 62. The historical record contains several women named Hannah Cogswell; one, whose vital information is obscure but who apparently was a contemporary of Mother Ann Lee (1736–1784), the founder of Shakerism, seems to be the one who wrote a book for children containing the passage used by Ann Plato; she was also among the “living witnesses” quoted in “Testimonies of Mother Ann Lee and the Elders,” originally published in 1816. The excerpt is from “Shaker Testimonies of Mother Ann Lee and the Elders, Authentic Excerpt from: Chapter XXX, pages 217–219, Parenting,” Shaker Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations, and Doctrines of Mother Ann Lee and the Elders with Her, last updated 6 August 2013, accessed 13 July 2014, http://www.iinet. com/~passtheword/SHAKER-MANUSCRIPTS/Testimonies/tstmnyx4.htm 63. Plato, Essays, 59. 64. Sigourney, Girl’s Reading Book, 63. 65. Plato, Essays, 60. 66. Plato renders this as: “ ‘They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way. Thirsty, their souls fainted in them.’—PSALMS.” Essays, 61. 67. Plato, Essays, 61. 68. James Grey Jackson, An Account of the Empire of Marocco, and the District of Suse (Philadelphia: Fry and Kammerer, 1810), 200; Brian Gardner, in The Quest for Notes to Chapter 9 247

Timbuctoo (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 17, asserts that Jackson was the initial reporter of this event. Other travel narratives that may have provided Plato with this specific detail are G. F. Lyon, A Narrative of Travels in Northern Africa, in the Years 1818, 19, and 20; Accompanied by Geographical Notices of Soudan, and of the Course of the Niger (London: John Murray, 1821); Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton, The Narrative of Travels and Discourses in Northern and Central Africa (Boston: Walter Oudney, 1826), from which Plato may have gleaned details of the landscape despite the fact that its focus is to the east of where the tragedy occurred; and Robert Huish, The Travels of Richard and John Lander into the Interior of Africa (London: John Saunders, 1836). James Wellard also mentions the tragedy’s exact figures and cites these texts in The Great Sahara (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965). 69. Plato, Essays, 62. 70. Pickering, Moral Instruction, 21. 71. Plato, Essays, 63–65. 72. Plato, Essays, 66. 73. Plato, Essays, 67. 74. “The Husbandman,” in The Farmer’s Cabinet 1, no. 1 (1 July 1836): 14, and The Friend: A Literary and Religious Journal, 7 August 1836. 75. These were printed in Lindley Murray, The English Reader: or, Pieces in Prose and Poetry Selected from the Best Writers (Utica, NY: Hastings and Tracy, 1827). 76. Plato, Essays, 70–72. 77. The brochure History of Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut (New Haven, CT: The Standing Committee of the New Haven City Burial Ground and Friends of the Grove Street Cemetery, Inc., April 2005) is available at the entrance to the cemetery. I am grateful for the maps and descriptions shown me by James Campbell, librarian of the New Haven Museum & Colonial History Society, on 9 October 2008. The brochure provides information replicated almost verbatim on the website http:// www.grovestreetcemetery.org/history_of_grove_street_cemetery.htm. 78. Plato, Essays, 71–74; also, visits by the author to Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut, on 20 April 2009 and 19 April 2010. 79. Plato, Essays, 74. 80. Sigourney, Girl’s Reading Book, 259. 81. Eldred and Mortensen, Imagining Rhetoric, 4. This and Xavier’s “Engaging George Campbell’s Sympathy” are the only critical essays besides Bassard that, although focused on Ann Plato’s race, also consider her writings in the context of rhetoric. 82. Eldred and Mortensen, Imagining Rhetoric, 6–7. 83. Eldred and Mortensen, Imagining Rhetoric, 8. 84. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Wri- ter and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). 85. Williams, introduction to Essays, xl. 86. Eldred and Mortensen, Imagining Rhetoric, 178; Plato, Essays, 41. 87. Xavier, “Engaging George Campbell’s Sympathy,” 447. 88. Xavier, “Engaging George Campbell’s Sympathy,” 452n7. 89. Nan Johnson, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (Carbondale: Sou- thern Illinois University Press, 1991), 35–36. 248 Notes to Chapter 10

90. Sydney Smith, review of Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the Mind, by Thomas Broadhurst, in Smith, Works, 182–85. 91. Sigourney, Girl’s Reading Book, 5.

Chapter 10. Four Women as a Cultural Circle

1. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quar- terly 18 (Summer 1996): 151. 2. Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experiences of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 4, 131. 3. Karen I. Blu, “ ‘Where Do You Stay At?’ ” in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith Basso (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 1996), 207. 4. D. Hamilton Hurd, History of Fairfield County, Connecticut, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis & Company, 1881). 5. Let me interject here that these four eulogies offer a literary parallel to a reinterment ceremony. As Patricia E. Rubertone points out, citing the research of James Bradley, a Massachusetts archaeologist, “ossuaries dated to about a thousand years ago have provided evidence which suggests the Native Americans in coastal southern New England conducted periodic re-interment ceremonies”; their relations “brought remains [for] a communal burial” and “prepared the dead for their final rites, lamented their passing, extolled their virtues, and cast their mortal remains into the ossuary pit.” “Grave Remembrances: Enduring Traditions among the Narragansett,” Connecticut History 35, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 33, 44 n59. See also James Bradley, “The Grove Field Ossuary, Bourne, Massachusetts (19-BN 612), Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society 50 (1989): 19–23. That Ann Plato might have found this practice repulsive does not nullify the poetics of her gathering the memories of these women for essentially the same, if perhaps unwitting, objective. 6. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 330. 7. Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 321. 8. Winch, Gentleman of Color, 278–80. 9. Plato, Essays, 89. 10. This discussion will use the more standard spelling of Seabury, which is the spelling that appears in Essays’ table of contents. 11. Catalogue of the Talcott-st Congregational Church, 12, 14. 12. Mary Sterling Bakke, A Sampler of Lifestyles: Womanhood & Youth in Colonial Lyme (Lyme, CT: Connecticut Bicentennial Commission, 1976), 61–62. 13. 1803–1805 Hartford Negro Census (Kingsbury Collection), Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, CT. Also identified as NC 1805 (NC= Negro Census). 14. Seaman’s Protection Registry, 11 January 1796, Providence, RI District, Cus- tom’s House Papers, Book 1, 30; Maureen A. Taylor, ed., Register of Seamen’s Protection Certificates from the Providence, Rhode Island Customs District, 1796–1870 (Baltimore, MD: Clearfield Company, 1995). 15. Birth Records (Town of Oyster Bay), Abstracts, Cox, John Jr., Oyster Bay Town Records 1795–1878, vol. 8 (New York: 1940), The Long Island Native & Black History Update Notes to Chapter 10 249

1, no. 4 (August 13–19, 2006), 6, Long Island Genealogy, accessed 13 November 2014, http:// longislandgenealogy.com/LINandBNewsletter/Vol_1.pdf.16. Beeching, African Americans. 17. These Long Island Seabury men being indentured to or slaves of households not named Seabury tempts one to read the name as a plausible Algonquian language derivative: Seabamuck, referenced by ethnologist Wallace Tooker as a “lesser neck of land” at Mastic on Long Island’s south shore, bordered on the west by Great South Bay. Is it coincidental that this location in the town of Brookhaven is the territory of the Unkechaugs, whose reservation dates from 1700? One may speculate that although no Seabury appears in extant Unkechaug records, a transliteration could have been effected by a Native individual to signify a local memory. See Wallace Tooker, Indian Place Names on Long Island (Port Washington, NY: Ira Friedman, 1962), 229. 18. Plato, Essays, 77. 19. Abbott, Young Christian, 70. 20. Plato, Essays, 78. 21. Abbott, Young Christian, 83, Abbott’s italics. 22. Connecticut Federal Census, 1820, vol. 1, p. 601, no. 127; Connecticut Federal Census, 1830, vol. 1, pp. 58–59, no. 227, Connecticut State Library. 23. Connecticut Federal Census, 1830, Hartford, 30. 24. The Paugusett Reservation, one of history’s most relocated Indian locales, was the second reservation established in Connecticut (1659), after Quinnipiac (1638), and the third Indian reservation established in North America, the first being the Gin- gaskin Reservation in Northampton County, Virginia (1640–1641). Paugusett continues as the oldest extant Indian reservation in the United States. It has been located at four successive sites in Bridgeport and vicinity; it was situated at one location in Trumbull at the end of the eighteenth century and was relocated in 1874, again in Trumbull, by William Sherman; only a quarter acre of this reservation space remains. The Golden Hill Paugusetts began securing additional acreage in 1979 in the town of Colchester, approximately fifty-five miles to the east. See Smith, Quarter-Acre of Heartache. Aurelius Piper (Chief Big Eagle, 1916–2008), the narrator of the book, erroneously asserts that the Paugusett Reservation was the first to be established. 25. Ada A. Deer, Summary under the Criteria and Evidence for Proposed Finding against Federal Acknowledgment of the Golden Hill Paugusett Tribe (Washington, DC: Bureau of Indian Affairs, Board of Acknowledgment and Recognition, 23 May 1995), 21–22. Ada Deer was at that time Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs. See also Charles Brilvitch, History of Connecticut’s, 88: “It is known that other tribal members resided at New Milford/Bridgewater, Woodbury and Litchfield [between 1830 and the 1850s].” 26. Deer, Summary, 22. Eunice Shoran/Sherman is Eunice Mauwee, the Schagh- ticoke matriarch. 27. United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Branch of Acknowledgment and Research, In re Federal Acknowledgment Petition of the Schagh- ticoke Tribal Nation Petitioner Group (16 April 2002), 55–58, Official Website of the State of Connecticut, accessed 16 July 2014, http://www.ct.gov/ag/lib/ag/press_releases/2002/ indian/schagfinal4-15.pdf. 28. See Ezra Stiles, Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D., 1755–1794: With a Selection from His Correspondence, ed. Frank Bowdit- ch Dexter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1916) 5:157–60, in “Schaghticoke 250 Notes to Chapter 10

Indians,” by Fortunata M. Holmes (unpublished manuscript, fall 1965), Tribes Misc. Connecticut, Scaticook to Suckiog, Indian and Colonial Research Center. Holmes compiled this list while a graduate student at Willimantic Teachers College (now Eastern Connecticut State University). 29. See Blair A. Rudes, “The Complexities of Racial and Tribal Identity,” Exhibit 1: Approximate Percentage of Paugusett Marital Unions by Spousal Race; Exhibit 2: Racial Identity of William Sherman, both handouts, 21 October 1999. Adapted from Roger Joslyn, “Report of Roger Joslyn, CG, FASG to the Interior Board of Indian Appeals,” submitted to the Interior Board of Indian Appeals in re: Final Determination against Recognition of the Golden Tribe of the Paugusett Nation (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1997), Table 1. Unpublished document. Despite his being the heir to and caretaker of the Paugusett reservation, as was acknowledged in documents and by Aurelius Piper, William Sherman’s racial and color designations were used by the Board of Acknowledgment and Recognition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to justify rejecting the Golden Hill Paugusetts’ application for federal recognition. It is believed that Rudes submitted his material in good faith that it would describe the inconsistencies in how authorities identified Paugusett Indians. 30. Samuel Orcutt, A History of the Old Town of Stratford and the City of Bridgeport, Connecticut (New Haven, CT: Fairfield County Historical Society, 1886), 41. 31. Orcutt, History of the Old Town, 41; Hurd, History of Fairfield County, 67. 32. Smith, Quarter-Acre of Heartache, 27. 33. Plato, Essays, 84. 34. The Connecticut Census Index for 1830 indicates that this listing is on page 286 or on microfilm reel 6, but there seems to be no Widow Sherman in the actual listing. 35. Brilvitch, History of Connecticut’s, 65, 89. Supposedly, Pease was the actual surname of William Sherman’s father. 36. Plato, Essays, 84. 37. Plato, Essays, 85. 38. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 33–35; René Dubos and Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer- sity Press, 1987), 25ff. 39. 1798 Georgia Constitution, Article IV, Section 11, GeorgiaInfo, accessed 16 July 2014, http://georgiainfo.galileo.usg.edu/topics/government/related_article/constitutions/ georgia-constitution-of-1798. 40. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “To Martin Van Buren, Concord, April 20, 1838,” in The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 7: 1807–1844, ed. Eleanor M. Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 303–306. Tilton implies that this letter has not been reprinted in Emerson studies in its entirety. We can presume that Emerson’s local Yeoman’s Gazette (Concord) printed the entire letter in its May 19, 1838, issue and that a copy of the issue or a verbal account by someone may have reached Plato. See the list in “Emerson: Bibliography,” The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21), Vol. 15: Colonial and Revolutionary Literature, Early National Literature, Part I, Bartleby.com, accessed 16 July 2014, http://www.bartleby.com/225/1800. html. Another possible influence that would have encouraged her to allude to the Indian Removal Act is the support that the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, a Congregationalist program established in Massachusetts in 1810, provided for Notes to Chapter 10 251

Rev. Samuel Worcester, an anti-Removal advocate who appeared in two of the famous John “Marshall Trilogy” court cases favoring the Cherokees. 41. Plato, Essays, 87. 42. See John Ellsworth, Hartford: First School Society Deaths, 1810–1846, B, 32, Manuscript Stack, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford. This item is catalogued under both “Ellsworth” and “blacks.” If the deceased is Elizabeth Low, the discrepancy in date may simply be because the recorded date is actually the date of entry; a few other names in the lists were entered months later. 43. Beman, “Address.” Beman referring to the young minister as “brother and associate” may not signify that he is black or colored; he may well be a white clergyman supportive of black or colored people’s religious lives. 44. Plato, Essays, 89. 45. Town Records, CSL Reel #1544, Hartford, CT, Vital Records: Birth, Marriage, Death 1795–1856, 4, Connecticut State Library. 46. Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early Republic (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995), 214. 47. Town Records, CSL Reel #1544, 59. 48. In The Story of Cooperstown (1917), Ralph Birdsall suggests “a cosmopolitan Indian community at the foot of Otsego Lake” comprising Mohawks, Oneidas, “and probably Delawares, or Mohicans,” as well as, possibly, former Indian prisoners of the Iroquois whom they adopted (13). Project Gutenberg, accessed 17 July 2014, http://www. gutenberg.org/files/18621/18621-h/18621-h.htm. 49. Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, 40, 60–62, 73–74. During 1984 and 1985, when I occasionally volunteered at the Schoharie Iroquois Museum, which was then located in the town of Schoharie, staff affirmed (in circumspective voice, I should add) that the region’s long-time residents still spoke of how the Iroquois had devastated their colonial settlements. Some years prior to that, the same bitterness was conveyed to me in conversation with a fellow vendor at a powwow. A sensationalist historical novel set in that time and place, The Destroyers, by E. R. Eastman (Ithaca, NY: American Agricul- turist, 1946), features the settler-scout Joel Decker, “who scalped so many of [his Indian enemies] that he had to keep the tally on a rawhide string around his neck” (from the blurb on the dust jacket). 50. Hugh MacDougall, comp., African Americans in the Census, Otsego County, New York (1825, Town of Otsego). E-mail from Hugh MacDougall, official historian, Village of Cooperstown, New York, 11 December 2003. 51. William B. Gravely, “The Dialectic of Double-Consciousness in Black Ame- rican Freedom Celebrations, 1808–1863,” Journal of Negro History 67 (Winter 1982): 304–305. 52. Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, 39. 53. 1826 Mohegan list of overseer Nathaniel Bradford, conveyed by e-mail from Kathleen Brown-Perez, Brotherton Indians tribal historian and attorney, forwarded to the author from Caroline Andler, Brotherton tribal historian, 30 January 2009. 54. Connecticut General Assembly Papers, RG 002: Petition for sale of land, Item 3, Box 1, Folder 2, 5 May 1823, Montville, Connecticut State Library, Hartford. 55. Connecticut State Archives Record, Rejected Bills: Tax relief, Box 2, Folder 11, 1836, Connecticut State Library, Hartford. 252 Notes to Chapter 10

56. New London Vital Records, Stonington, Deaths, microfilm no. 1309876, 1880–1907, Item 3, 27. 57. Discrepant data from the Brotherton files identify Carline (Carrie) in this fashion, including the “Descendants of William Lowe” document compiled by Caroline Andler. 58. New London Vital Records, Stonington, Births, microfilm no. 1309874, 1869– 1874, Item 1, 27. 59. Caroline Andler, comp., Descendants of William Lowe, 2, New London County Vital Records, Stonington, Marriages, microfilm no. 1309876, 1880–1907, Item 3, 10. 60. Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, 92. 61. Plato misidentifies her age at death to be “in the 27th year.” Plato, Essays, 83. 62. This Julia Pell is mentioned by Lydia Marie Child in a letter of 9 December 1841. A Philadelphian whose father had escaped slavery, Pell became a Methodist preacher in that city and later in a church on Elizabeth Street in New York City. Lydia Marie Child, Letters from New-York (New York: Charles S. Francis and Co., 1843), 61–63. 63. See Henry A. Baker, comp., History of Montville, Connecticut (Hartford, CT: The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company, 1896), 58–62. 64. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 297. 65. James M. Brown and Barbara W. Rose, Tapestry: A Living History of the Black Family in Southeastern Connecticut (New London, CT: New London County Historical Society, 1979), 25; Japhit, or Japhet, also identifies a seventeenth-century Indian in East Hampton who volunteered for whaling. 66. Nathaniel Comstock, Account Book 1801–1824, Montville Farmer, Connecticut Historical Society, manuscript no. 73157, 42, 43. 67. Comstock, Account Book, March 20 and 22, 1817, 48, 49. Comstock’s entry for April 24, 1817, affirms that Pell worked for “Eleven Dollars per month,” 53. See also Rose and Brown, Tapestry, 25. 68. Comstock, Account Book, 1817, 42, 43, 49, 51, 53, 63, 67. 69. Rose and Brown, Tapestry, 296. 70. See “The Experience of Sally George,” in The Experiences of Five Christian Indians, in Apess, On Our Own Ground, 148–51. 71. Tantequidgeon Zobel (née Fawcett), telephone conversation, 1995; Paul Grant-Costa, letter, 8 July 1996. 72. Tribes Mohegan 3 Genealogy, Indian and Colonial Research Center, Old Mystic, CT, I NB# 71. 73. See Earl Mills, Sr. and Alicja Mann. Son of Mashpee: Reflections of Chief Flying Eagle, a Wampanoag (North Falmouth, MA: Word Studio, 1996), ix, 16. 74. Even Ann Plato describes her as serving as an apprentice to a family, presumably in Montville, before she went to East Granby. 75. Brown and Rose, Tapestry, 297. 76. Plato, Essays, 80. 77. Albert Carlos Bates, Records of the Congregational Church in Turkey Hills Now the Town of East Granby, Connecticut 1776–1858 (Hartford, CT: Albert Carlos Bates, 1907), 79. Notes to Chapter 11 253

78. Mary Jane Springman and Betty Finnell Guinan, East Granby: The Evolution of a Connecticut Town (Canaan, NH: Phoenix Publishing, 1983), 133–34. 79. The author acknowledges Carol Laun, genealogist, Salmon Brook Historical Society, Granby, Connecticut, for accommodating his visit on 10 June 2004. 80. Plato, Essays, 81–82.

Chaper 11. The Poetics of a Young Writer

1. Walzer concurs with Gioia on this paradigmatic contrast between the two nineteenth-century poetry icons (and Longfellow) and Postmodern composition. He names Sigourney merely as an example; Gioia does not mention her at all. See his The Ghost of Tradition: Expansive Poetry and Postmodernism (Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 1998), 25; see also Dana Gioia, “Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism,” The Columbia History of American Poetry, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 79–81. 2. Rafia Zafar, review of Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing, by KatherineClay Bassard, African American Review 34 (Winter 2000): 710, The Free Library by Farlex, accessed 18 July 2014, http:// www.thefreelibrary.com/Spiritual+Interrogations%3A+Culture,+Gender,+and+Com- munity+in+Early...-a070434338. 3. Watts, Poetry of American Women, 123. 4. Pennington, “To the Reader,” xviii. 5. Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations, 73; Bassard’s emphasis. 6. Phillis Wheatley, The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, ed. Julian D. Mason, Jr. (Cha- pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 74–75, 28–29. 7. Mary Kelley, “ ‘A More Glorious Revolution’: Women’s Antebellum Reading Circles and the Pursuit of Public Influence,” New England Quarterly 76, no. 2 (June 2003): 174–75. 8. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 357. 9. Gordon S. Haight, Mrs. Sigourney: Sweet Singer of Hartford (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1930). 10. Watts, Poetry of American Women, 87. 11. Cheryl Walker, ed., American Women Poets of the 19th Century: An Anthology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), xxix–xxxi. 12. Sigourney, Sketches (Amherst, MA: J. S. & C. Adams, 1840), 10–11; Sigour- ney’s italics. 13. Hemans, Poetical Works. Passages quoted from Hemans’s poems are from this collection. 14. Hemans, Poetical Works, 26; Plato, Essays, 38. 15. B. B. Thatcher, “Original: The Life and Poetry of Mrs. Hemans,” The Ladies Companion 12 (November 1839): 23. “Original” was a standard heading in this magazine, indicating that the work had been contributed directly to the magazine and was not a reprint. 16. Thatcher, “Original,” 24. 17. Amelia Opie, Poems (New York: Garland Press, 1978), 159–60. 254 Notes to Chapter 11

18. Brightwell, Memorials, 86–88, 90. 19. Donald Reiman, introduction to Poems, by Amelia Opie (New York: Garland, 1978), viii–ix. 20. I am grateful to my former University of Massachusetts Amherst colleague Christine Cooper for calling my attention to Hemans’s “A Parting Song” for its similarity to “Forget Me Not” and for informing me of Opie’s “Song,” anthologized in Paula Feldman, ed., British Women Poets of the Romantic Era (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 536. See Reiman’s introduction to Opie’s Poems, 159–60 and Bri- ghtwell, Memorials, arranged from Opie’s “Letters, Diaries, and Other Manuscripts.” See also Duncan Wu’s biography of Opie in Romantic Woman Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 345–50. Amelia Opie, The Works of Mrs. Amelia Opie: Complete in Three Volumes (New York: AMS Press, 1974) was originally published in Philadelphia, first in 1841, then in 1843. Volume 1 includesAdeline Mowbray; volume 3 Illustrations of Lying, in All Its Branches. The latter was published in New Hampshire in 1829 and in Hartford in 1833. 21. Messenger, Pastoral Tradition, 124. 22. For example, “traced” in the last line of the third quatrain in “Lines” becomes “trac’d” in “Reflections.” 23. Jonathan Lawson, Robert Bloomfield(Boston: Twayne, 1980), 143–44. 24. Saunders Redding, lecture: Negro Writing in America, Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, November 1967. 25. May, American Female Poets. 26. See Henry W. Foote, Three Centuries of American Hymnody (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), and David T. Porter, The Art of Emily Dickinson’s Early Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 58–59. 27. David Porter, Dickinson: The Modern Idiom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1981), 98. 28. Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), 58–59. 29. Larcom, New England Girlhood, 65–66. 30. Samuel Willard, Sacred Poetry and Music Reconciled (Boston: Leonard C. Bowles, 1830), 11–18. These meters are archaic today, but Willard lists them using initials (e.g., C.M.A. for common meter anapestic, on his unnumbered page 360, and uses those abbreviations for each of over three hundred hymns he delineates. Common meter anapestic would be an eleven-syllable line followed by an eight-syllable line. 31. Porter, Dickinson, 98; John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Annie Finch, The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 10–12. 32. Finch, Ghost of Meter, 13–30. 33. Willard, Sacred Poetry, 8. 34. Finch, Ghost of Meter, 13. 35. Cheryl Walker, The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Walker, American Women Poets. Notes to Epilogue 255

Epilogue: After the Paper Trail

1. See Alan Swedlund, Shadows in the Valley: A Cultural History of Illness, Death, and Loss in New England, 1840–1916 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). 2. Duane Fenstermann, e-mail correspondence from Decorah, Iowa, to the author, 18 July 2013. During my visit to Decorah in late October 1999, both Fenster- mann, then a reference librarian at Luther College, and Stan Jeffers, of the Decorah Genealogical Association, confirmed that the name is “Landers,” not “Sanders” as handwriting suggests in the enumeration. See also Phyllis Leseth, “Landers, Adams, and Boldensteiner Families,” in Decorah Genealogy Association, Winneshiek County, Iowa, Biographies 1996: A Genealogical Report (Decorah, IA: Anundsen Publishing, 1996), L-1. 3. Pastor Laura Arnold, e-mail correspondance, 17–19 June 2013; Duane Fens- termann, Luther College librarian, personal conversations, 26 October 1999, and e-mail correspondance, 2013; see his compilation, Duane Fensterman, Congregational United Church of Christ, Decorah, Iowa: A History of 150 Years: A Faith Pilgrimage, 1854–2004 (Decorah, IA: 3W Fenstermann Group, 2006). 4. 1860 Census, Decorah, Winneshiek County, Iowa, Roll M653_345, 795, http:// search.ancestry.com/content/viewerpf.aspx?h=5829687&db=1. These records may also be accessed at the Schomburg Library, New York. 5. Census Board, The Census of Iowa as Returned in the Year 1869: Showing, in Detail, the Population, Agricultural Statistics, Domestic and General Manufactures, and Other Items of Interest (Des Moines, IA: F. M. Mills, 1869), Winneshiek County, 60, 64, accessed 20 July 2014, www.iowadatacenter.org/Publications/iowa1869.pdf.

Select Bibliography

References to Ann Plato, Anthologies, and Related Sources

African American Registry. “Ann Plato, a First for Black Women Authors.” 2013. Accessed 13 August 2007. http://www.aaresgistry.com/african_american_history/2906/ ann-plato-first-black-women-authors. Ann. “Little Harriet.” The Colored American, 19 June 1841. Bassard, Katherine Clay. “The Daughters’ Arrival: The Earliest Black Women’s Writ- ing Community.” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 508–18. Accessed 21 July 2014. http:// muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v019/19.2bassard.html. ———. “Spiritual Interrogations: Conversion, Community and Authorship in the Writ- ings of Phillis Wheatley, Ann Plato, Jarena Lee, and Rebecca Cox Jackson.” PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1992. ———. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African Ameri- can Women’s Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Derived from her doctoral dissertation, Bassard’s chapter on Ann Plato is the first serious scholarly inquiry about her. Beeching, Barbara Jean. “The Primus Papers: An Introduction to Hartford’s Nineteenth- Century Black Community.” Master’s thesis, Trinity College [Hartford], 1995. Connecticut Historical Society MS No. 93175. Bolles, Isaac N. New Directory and Guide Book for the City of Hartford. Hartford, CT: I. N. Bolles, published annually 1842–1847. Identifies Ann Plato as residing at the same address as the Elm Street School for 1844–1847. Brennan, Jonathan. Introduction to When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native Amer- ican Literature. Edited by Jonathan Brennan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Makes a passing reference to Plato’s probable Native ancestry.

257 258 Select Bibliography

Brown, Barbara W., and James M. Rose. Black Roots in Southeastern Connecticut, 1650– 1900. Gale Genealogy and Local History Series 8. Detroit: Gale, 1980. A valuable compendium, which mentions Ann Plato as well as Henry Plato’s household, as well as Abraham and Jason Plato in Olde Lyme. Brown, Sterling. Negro Poetry and Drama. Washington, DC: The Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937. Brown is unimpressed with Plato’s reticence and describes her as a Methodist. Catalog of the Hartford Public High School 1925. Hartford, CT: Hartford Press, 1925. Catalogue of the Talcott-st Congregational Church in Hartford; Together with Its Articles of Faith and Covenant and Rules of Order and Discipline. Hartford, CT: Courier Office, 1842. Housed in the Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Lists Ann Plato among those who became members, in her case in April 1841. Courtney, Steve. “Ann Plato Showed Talent Was Colorblind.” Hartford Courant, 4 August 2002, G4. Dillard, James Hardy. Introduction to An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes., 1–26. Edited by Newman Ivey White and Walter Clinton Jackson. Durham, NC: Trinity College Press, 1924. Dillard, in whose honor Dillard University in New Orleans was named for his efforts to support the education of black teachers, was, like White and Jackson, a white academic interested in African American literature. In the introduction’s section “Post-Revolutionary Developments,” Dil- lard contrasts Plato with Wheatley (6). Eldred, Janet Carey, and Peter Mortensen. Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States. Pitt Comp Literacy Culture. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. Mentions Ann Plato’s rhetorical strategies as found in her “school compositions” (178). Eleazer, Robert B., comp. Singers in the Dawn: A Brief Anthology of American Negro Poetry. Atlanta, GA: Conference on Education and Race Relations, 1934. Eleazer includes Plato in the context of “minor poets who at least deserve mention,” giving her one clause: “Ann Plato, of Hartford, Connecticut, published a book of twenty poems in 1841; [about all poets listed] . . . lack of space forbids quotations.” “Exhibition.” The Charter Oak, 21 May 1846, 2. This newspaper article, alluded to by David O. White (1974), never mentions Ann Plato as a teacher but describes favorably a school exhibition by pupils of the “South District Colored School, held in Zion’s Church, on Elm st.” Several extant copies at the American Antiquarian Society and the Connecticut State Library, as well as a microfilm copy, have this news item carefully clipped out of the page. Foster, Frances Smith, ed. Love and Marriage in Early African America. Hanover, NH: Northeastern University Press/University Press of New England, 2009. Contains three poems by Ann Plato: “Forget Me Not,” “Two School Girls,” and “Daugh- ter’s Inquiry.” ———. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Fraser, C. Gerald. “A Scholar Traces ‘Lost’ Literature of Black Women in America.” New York Times, 21 April 1988, C23. Select Bibliography 259

Gray, Janet, ed. She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the 19th Century. London: J. M. Dent, 1997. Suggests a birth year “(b.? 1820)” and represents Ann Plato with two poems, “Advice to Young Ladies” and “A True Friend.” The brief biographical note includes the following: “a poem about her father indicates that he descended from Native Americans” (75). Gürel, Perin. “The Other 80s Revival: On African-American Women’s Literary Tradi- tion.” CJAS [Columbia Journal of American Studies] Monthly (1 January 2006). Accessed 22 July 2014. www.columbia.edu/cu/cjas/otherrevival.html. Refers briefly several times to Ann Plato as part of the resurgence of nineteenth-century African American women writers about whom very little is known. Gürel is an American Studies graduate student at Yale whose focus includes studies of Turkish fiction. Hansen, Karen V. “ ‘No Kisses Like Youres’: An Erotic Friendship between Two Afri- can-American Women during the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Gender & History 7, no. 2 (August 1995): 153–82. Hansen used a trove of epistolary exchanges for her discussion of the friendship between Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown of Hartford in the late 1850s. She has one passing mention to Ann Plato as a Hart- ford resident (165) and cites Kenny J. Williams’s introduction to the reprint of Essays (177n13). She never considers Primus’s Native ancestry. Hill, Patricia Liggins, Bernard W. Bell, Trudier Harris, and William J. Harris, eds. Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Makes two passing references to Ann Plato: one, erroneously stating that she “taught at a Zion Methodist school in Hartford, Connecticut in 1845”; the other pertaining to her essay “Education,” in which she “expresses the collective yearning of her people, namely, that the fight for liberty and education must be won for ‘the perfect day’ to come.” “Historical Sketch.” Our 150th Anniversary 1826–1976. Hartford, CT: Faith Congrega- tional Church, 1976. Iowa Federal Census, City of Decorah, Winnisheik County, 1870, 112. Enumerates “Miss Plato” residing in the home of F(rederick) B. Landers with no occupation, age 46, New York as her birthplace, and the idiosyncratic handwriting by an Anglo American entering the abbreviation “For” or “Fre” superimposed over the “k” in New York. The handwritten script confuses name spellings: Landers seems to read “S. B. Sanders” and Miss Plato is “Mis Plate.” The Knickerbocker. or New-York Monthly Magazine. “Platonic Prose and Poetry, by a Col- ored ‘Platoess.’ ” Editor’s Table. 31 (February 1848): 166–68. Accessed 9 July 2014. http://books.google.com/books?id=UJM0AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA166&dq=%22an n+plato...%20plato&f=false#v=onepage&q=%22ann%20plato...%20plato&f=false. This snarky and patronizing review of Essays is the sole analysis of the book unearthed during the antebellum period. It finds most of Ann Plato’s poetry laudably original and provides examples. The writer briefly acknowledges Plato’s debt to Sigourney’s prose. Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Sorrow Songs and Flying Away: Religious Influence on Black Poetry.” Crosscurrents (Summer 2007): 281–89. “As illustrated by Hammon’s poem, African American poetry has been indebted to Christian belief. One sees this trend in the works of such voices as George Moses Horton, Daniel A. Payne, Ann 260 Select Bibliography

Plato,” and five others from the nineteenth century. This is the sole reference to Ann Plato in the article. Levine, Robert S. “Slavery, Race, and American Literary Genealogies.” Early American Literature 36, no. 1 (2001): 89–115. In this review essay, which includes Spiritual Interrogations among seven books, Levine qualifies his praise of Bassard’s writing about Ann Plato by observing that she “may have overemphasized the importance of African survivals to her authors. . . . Time will tell if Bassard’s boldly conceived rethinking of African literary genealogies will lead to an upsurge of interest in Plato [et al.]” (112). Loewenberg, James, and Ruth Bogin, eds. Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings. University Park: The Pennsyl- vania State University Press, 1976. Utilizing Essays, David O. White (1974), and Robbins’ report, the editors describe Plato sympathetically as “a shy, introspective woman” with a “melancholy outlook [who] was the prototype of multitudes of women, black and white, whose work was satisfying and whose compensation was the knowledge that they had done their best” (175). Loggins, Vernon. The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900. Port Wash- ington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1964. First published 1931 by Columbia University Press. Loggins’ brief critique was the first serious discussion of Ann Plato and the first to acknowledge the possibility of her Native ancestry. His tone is impatient when he talks about her reticence. Pennington, James C. “To the Reader.” In Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry, by Ann Plato. Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Cen- tury Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Originally published in Hartford, CT, in 1841. Plato, Ann. Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry. Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Originally published in Hartford, CT, in 1841. ———. First invitation to Thomas Robbins. May 1846. Connecticut Historical Society. ———. “Lines, Written on Visiting the Grave of a Venerated Friend.” The Colored American. September 5, 1840, 4. ———. Subsequent invitation to Thomas Robbins. 12 May 1846. Connecticut Histori- cal Society. Prettyman, Quandra. “Ann Plato.” In Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and Afri- can American Experience. Edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, 2160. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Includes the possibility of Plato’s Native ancestry. Ranta, Judith A. The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Mentions Plato in a passing reference to her contradictions about Natives. Raymond, Robert R. “Second Colored School.” In “Common School Report.” Supple- ment to the Courant: Connecticut Courant, 8 March 1845. Raymond and another were appointed in 1844 as a subcommittee to visit and assess all schools under the aegis of the Hartford Public School Society. Categorized in the pro forma reports for each school are descriptions of the school structure, its furniture, teacher or teachers, books and classes, and length of the school term, followed Select Bibliography 261

by a “Notes” subsection commenting on “General Subject,” “Accommodations,” and “Evils—Remedy.” Raymond’s report identifies Ann Plato as the Elm Street School’s teacher for “about a year,” that she had three years’ experience, and that her salary was $120. Reference supplied by Robert Dale Parker. Redding, Jay Saunders. Negro Writing in America. Class lecture. Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, fall 1967. Robbins, Thomas. Thomas Robbins School Papers box. Thomas Robbins Collection. 1792–1852. Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford. ———. Diary of Thomas Robbins. 2 vols. Edited by Increase N. Tarbox. Boston: Beacon Press, 1887. Sherman, Joan R. Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: Uni- versity of Illinois Press, 1989. Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers, 1746–1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. One of the earliest published acknowledgments after Loggins about the possibility of Ann Plato having Indian heritage. Smith, Katharine Capshaw. “Ann Plato.” In American Women Prose Writers, 1820–1870. Vol. 239 of Dictionary of American Biography. Edited by Amy E. Hudock and Katharine Rodier, 242–46. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. In the longest critical biography on Ann Plato other than Bassard’s and Williams’s, Smith proposes 1824 as her possible birth year, assumes that her parents were Henry and Deborah Plato, and interprets several poems according to that alignment. She treats several essays with succinct analysis; mentions particular poems, among them “To the First of August”; and refers to David O. White’s 1974 article, reproducing Plato’s notes to Henry Robbins (she may have used the originals in the Connecticut Historical Society). Never mentioned is “The Natives of America.” Warren, Nagueyalti. “Ann Plato.” In Notable Black Women. Edited by Jessie Carney Smith, 853–84. Detroit: Gale, 1992. Webber, Christopher L. American to the Backbone: The Life of James J. C. Pennington, the Fugitive Slave Who Became One of the First Black Abolitionists. New York: Pegasus Books, 2011. Notes that melting snow and heavy rain of early January 1841 produced a flood threatening Pennington’s personal library (148–49), which included rescuing “the work of another author . . . who was a teacher in the . . . South African School. . . . Ann Plato . . . an aspiring writer, twenty-one years old, whose father, Alfred Plato, was a leading member of the Talcott Street Church” (162). Webber footnotes his information as from David O. White’s “Fugitive Blacksmith of Hartford” article in the winter 1984 issue of the Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin (49, no. 1), but the information about Ann Plato is inaccurate: Webber repeats White’s assumption that Plato may have been born in 1820, but Alfred Plato himself was born in 1818; Webber leaves the mistaken impression that Ann Plato was teaching at the Elm Street School when her book was published, but that school did not open until 1843. He then proceeds to describe Plato’s writing more generously: “there can be no question that Ann Plato had some ability as a writer and [Essays] gives evidence of an unusual thoughtfulness and skill with language. She writes too much of death and the grave for modern taste, but any woman of twenty-one” who wrote sketches of “three [sic] friends who have died” was more likely to do so at that time. “Even so, Plato is less sentimental than a 262 Select Bibliography

good many of her contemporaries. What she does not write about, and modern writers criticize her for it, is race. But perhaps it is evidence of her secure sense of herself that she is able to write instead about matters that transcend racial difference” (163). He mentions her again in passing with other distinguished members of the church (177). Henry Plato is mentioned as a cosigner of the 1843 letter thanking London church authorities for hosting Pennington (206). Webber never mentions Indians, but in citing the similarities of friends Pennington and Henry Highland Garnet, he says (with no verification): “Both . . . traced their ancestry to a grandfather who had been a tribal chief” (138). Welburn, Ron. “A Most Secret Identity: Native American Assimilation and Identity Resistance in African America.” In Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America. Edited by James F. Brooks, 306. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. The author, in one short section of this essay, states that Ann Plato may have been of Montaukett or Narragansett descent. ———. “To the Editor.” Opinion. Chips. 2 December 1999. Luther College.Accessed 7 May 2006. http://chips.luther.edu/modules/news/print.php?storyid=1449. A letter sent to and published in the student newspaper at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, thanking various college faculty and librarians for their assistance when Welburn visited in October 1999 to explore pertinent documentation. White, David O. “The Fugitive Blacksmith of Hartford: James J. C. Pennington.” Con- necticut Historical Society Bulletin 49, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 5–29. This focuses on Rev. Pennington and his milieu, twice mentioning Ann Plato: as a member of Fifth Congregational Church who “taught at the local school for blacks and had a book published in 1841 with Pennington’s help” (he wrote its introduction; 11), and as a teacher at the Elm Street school “in the Zion Methodist Church” (13). ———. “Hartford’s African Schools, 1830–1868.” Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 39, no. 2 (April 1974): 47–54. ———. “Hartford’s African Schools, 1830–1868.” Manuscript with endnotes. Folder 378. Box 303. Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford. ———. “History of the Metropolitan AME Zion Church, Hartford, Connecticut.” 1974. White, Newman Ivey, and Walter Clinton Jackson, eds. An Anthology of Verse by Ameri- can Negroes. Durham, NC: Trinity College Press, 1924. This compilation does not include poems by Ann Plato, but the editors mention her twice, unconvinced that she would have been of service to her race and curious as to why she ignored slavery in America. Williams, Kenny J. introduction to Essays: Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry, by Ann Plato, xxvii–liii. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Originally published in Hartford, CT, in 1841. ———. “A Reconsideration of Afro-American Literature.” Academic Questions 6, no. 1 (March 1992): 24–40. Wright, Michelle Diane. Broken Utterances: A Selected Anthology of 19th Century Black Women’s Social Thought. Baltimore, MD: Three Sistahs Press, 2007. Xavier, Silvia. “Engaging George Campbell’s Sympathy in the Rhetoric of Charlotte Forten and Ann Plato: African-American Women of the Antebellum North.” Rhetoric Review 24, no. 4 (2005): 438–46. Select Bibliography 263

Zafar, Rafia. Review of Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing, by Katherine Clay Bassard. African American Review 34 (Winter 2000): 709–10. The Free Library by Farlex. Accessed 18 July 2014. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Spiritual+Interrogations%3A+Culture,+Gen der,+and+Community+in+Early...-a070434338.

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Index

Abbott, Jacob, 119–21, 176, 184–85, Juno After King Philip’s War: Presence and and Georgie, 121 Persistence in Indian New England, Account of the Empire of Morocco, An, Colin G. Calloway, editor, 7 James Gray Jackson, 167 Allen, Madge Barnes, 219–20n16 Advice to Young Ladies on the Amistad Mendi slave case, 22, 131 Improvement of the Mind, Thomas And They Were Related Too, Vicki Welch, Broadhurst, 1808, 122, 176 6, 88 African Americans, xii, 3, 5, 8, 11, 21, 48, Anonymous, “Hints to Young Ladies,” 144 52, 71, 84, 86, 95, 96, 108, 11, 121, Apes, Gilbert, 90 152, 153, 174, 187, 214 Apes, Louisa/Lois, 89–90 history, xii, 12, 53 Apes, Rosella, 89 literary history, xi, 1, 3, 17, 19, 21, 23, Apes/Apess surname, general, 107 33, 131, 139, 196, 197, 198 “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the Native identity in African America, 4, White Man,” 43, 101 9, 11, 15, 21, 22, 24, 25, 47, 54, 63, Eulogy for King Philip, A, 38, 39–40 72, 73, 76, 78, 81–82, 84, 86, 87, 94, Experiences of Five Christian Natives 97, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107 of the Pequot Tribe, The Indian Plato, Ann, as African American, xi, 2, Nullification, 38, 101 15 William 7, 9–10, 34, 47, 72, 90, 95, African Methodist Episcopal Church 100, 103, 114, 172, 173, 192 (A.M.E.), 87, 90, 95, 97, 152, 222n27 African Methodist Episcopal Zion Babcock surname, 92, 235n41 Church (A.M.E. Zion), 9, 29, 93, 95, Benjamin, 90 96, 234n30. See Spywood, George Christiana Babcock Carteaux, 4, 218n9 African Religious Society, 10–11, 28, 66, 87 Primus, 88, 234n32 Afrocentricism, 5, 103 Susan, 129

283 284 Index

Bannister, Edward Mitchell, 4 Bruyneel, Kevin, 106–07 Baron, Donna Keith, J. Edward Hood Bush-Banks, Olivia, 13, The Collected and Holly V. Izard, “They Were Works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, 22 Here All Along,” 8 Byrd, Jodi A., 106 Bassard, Kathleen Clay, 15, 21, 23, 53, 64, 73, 83, 134, 137, 139, 140, 173, 174, Canright, Dudley Marvin, 139–40 195, 196, 197–98, 200–01 Caste, 7, 81, 104 Beeching, Barbara Catalogue of the Talcott-st. Congregational “African Americans and Native Church of Hartford, xviii, 17, 86, 89 Americans in Hartford 1636–1800, Caulkins, Francis Manwaring, The 53, 107, 184, 248–49n15 History of New London, 75–76 “The Primus Papers,” 68, 231n81, Chamberlain, Betsey, 23, 114, 175 232n84, 234n92 Charter Oak, newspaper, xviii, 126 Behrend, Steven, 134, 137–38 Cheatham, Adolphus “Doc,”4 Beman, Amos G[erry], xvii, 9, 11, 26, Cherokees, 36, 39, 79, 153, 191, 214 59, 66, 88–89, 91–94, 113, 115, 131, Removal, 100, 187 159–62, 188, 190, 214 Cisco, George, 89–90, 235n41 Scrapbooks, 93, 161 Colored American, xvii, xviii, 11, 12, 17, Big Eagle, Chief (Aurelius Piper) with 24, 25–27, 95, 101, 105, 112, 131, Claude Clayton Smith, Quarter-Acre 144, 148, 159–60, 182, 188, 205, of Heartache, 8, 47–48, 249n24 222n26, 238n4, 241n50, 245n21 Black Roots in Southeastern Connecticut Colored Congregational Church. See 1650–1900, comps. Barbara W. Talcott Street Congregational Brown and James M. Rose, 6, 20, Church 53, 60–63 “colored elegy,” 132 Bloomfield, Robert, “The Farmer’s Boy.” Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. See 157, 162, 163, 206 African Methodist Episcopal Church Bragdon, Kathleen, 45 Columbus, 42, 148, 151, 155, 207 Bridgeport, Connecticut, 47, 48, 76, Common School Report, 8 March 1845, 84–85, 96, 103, 181, 185–86, 249n24 Connecticut Courant, Supplement to Ethiope, 84 the Courant, xviii, 14, 124 Liberia, 84 description of schoolroom, 124 Brilvitch, Charles, A History of Comstock’s Philosophy (John Lee Connecticut’s Golden Hill Paugusett Comstock, A System of Natural Tribe, 7, 8, 47, 84 Philosophy), xvii, 118–19, 124–25 Brooks, Lisa, Common Pot, The Recovery Condall, 63, 89, 235n41, or Congdon, of Native Space in the Northeast, 9, 230n60 47–48 Congregationalism, 10, 14, 94, 96, 98, 121 Brotherton Connecticut’s “Black Law” of 1834, 22, Indians, 77 108, 111–113 path, 47, 107 Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin, 126 Brown, Addie, 67–68, 78 Consumption; tuberculosis, xviii, 10, 21, Brown, Barbara W., and James M. Rose. 121, 179, 180, 185, 187, 188, 200, 214 See Black Roots Cooper, James Fenimore, 36, 103 Brown, Sterling, 19 Cooperstown, New York, 135, 180, Brown, William J., 93–94, 241n52 188–90, 251n48 Index 285

Corchaugs, 69, 232–33n100 East Hampton, Long Island, New York, Cornish, Samuel, objections to “African,” 14, 53, 56–58, 60–61, 107, 114, 95 232–33n100 Crandall, Prudence, school case, 22, 72, East Lyme, Connecticut, 14, 60–61, 96, 107–09, 111, 114, 152, 177 192 Ellsworth, William W., Crandall’s Easton, Hosea, 9, 87, 91–92, 105 counselor, 108 An Address: Delivered before the Judson, Andrew T., and Chauncey F. Coloured Population, of Providence, Cleveland, prosecutors, 108 Rhode Island, on Thanksgiving Day Critical race theory, 2, 77–81 Nov. 28, 1828, 105 Edgar, Chad, 137 Daggett, Chief Justice David, citizenship Eldred, Janet Carey and Peter and race, 108–09 Mortensen, Imagining Rhetoric: Dakota authors, 101 Composing Women of the Early Decorah, Iowa, xviii, 20, 215 United States. 29, 171–72, 174, 176, Deloria, Philip, 2 247n81 Den Ouden, Amy, Beyond Conquest: Elm Street School, xviii, 9, 71, 86, 92, Native Peoples and the Struggle for 124, 161 History in New England, 7, 75 as the South African School, 123 Diller, Ramik & Wight, Ltd., Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 146, 148, 175–76, Washington, D.C., 139–40 187, 196 Doughton, Thomas, “Unseen Neighbors: Emerson v. Davies, et al. [Frederick Native Americans of Central Emerson] (8 F. Cas. 615), Massachusetts, A People Who Had Massachusetts, 139 Vanished,” 7–8, 13 “End of Great Men, The” (Alexander Douglass, Frederick, 92, 100 the Great, Hannibal, Caesar, and Dying or vanishing Indian literary Napoleon) untitled themes (examples) 36–37 as “Four Great Murderers,” 161, Bryant, William Cullen, “An Indian at 246n55 the Burial Place of His Fathers,” 37 printing in Atkinson’s Casket, 160 Cooper, James Fenimore, 36, Last of Essays; Including Biographies and the Mohicans, The, 36 Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and “The Dying Indian,” 36 Poetry. Also, Essays. xi, xii, xvii, 1, Hemans, Felicia, “The Indian with 9–10, 12, 15, 17–19, 23–27, 29–30, His Dead Child,” 37 34, 35–36, 42, 45, 61, 71, 73, 78, Hope Leslie, Sedgwick, Catharine, 36, 121 89, 98–101, 111–112, 116, 118–21, “The Last Indian of the 124, 128, 129–31, 133–36, 138, 140, Narragansetts,” 36 141, 143–44, 146–48, 161, 168, 171, “Our Native Land,” 36 173–74, 175, 177, 179, 183, 199, 205, “Tahmiroo, the Indian wife,” 36 208–09, 213–15 Bibliographical Checklist of American Earle, John Milton, Report of 1859, 5, 8 Negro Poetry, A, Arthur A. East Granby Congregational Church, Schomburg, compiler (1916), 19 Connecticut, 193, Rev. Daniel Bibliographical and Critical Notes, in Hemenway, pastor, beginning in Newman Ivey White and Walter 1832, 193 Clinton Jackson, editors, 286 Index

Essays; Including Biographies and “A Mother to Her Fatherless Son,” Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and 145, 207 Poetry (continued) “The Natives of America.” See An Anthology of Verse by American “The Natives of America” Negroes (1924), 19 “Reflections, Written on Visiting the as a conduct book, 30 Grave of a Venerated Friend,” copies printed and extant, 131 95, 205, 207 early bibliography listings, Bibliotheca “The Residence of My Father,” 42, Americana: A Dictionary of Books 206, 107 Relating to America (1885), 18 “The Sick Child,” 200 physical dimensions, 130 “To the First of August,” 5, 13, 22, Essays; Including Biographies and 25, 33–34, 42, 99, 208 Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and “To the Memory of Gusteen,” 207 Poetry. Contents and additional “The True Friend,” 132, 136, 208 references Prose Biographies “Benevolence, 42, 119 Low, Elizabeth, 111, 135, 179, 183, “Death of the Christian,” 42, 170 188–90 “Decision of Character,” 42, 155–56 Pell, Julia Ann, 9, 22, 51, 61, 107, “Description of a Desert,” 101, 137, 111, 179, 181, 191–93 166 Seabury, Louisa, 89–90, 111, 130, “Diligence and Negligence,” 26, 150, 173, 179, 183–85 153, 158 Sherman, Eliza Loomis, 111, 145, “Education,” 43, 101, 113, 119, 121, 179, 185–88 135, 137, 149, 151, 177 Poetry “Eminence From Obscurity,” “Advice to Young Ladies,” 96, 114, 156–57, 162, 206 120, 122, 130, 132, 200, 207 “Employment of Time,” 136, 150 “Alone I’ve Wandered,” 205 “Lessons From Nature,” 43, 136, “Author’s Farewell,” 207 163, 169 “Daughter’s Inquiry,” 42, 130, “Life Is Short,” 169–70 145, 167, 207, (also “Daughter’s “Obedience,” 27, 135 Inquiry of her Father’s Absence”), “Reflections Upon the Close of Life” 208 “Religion,” 136, 147–49, 177 “The Departed In Christ,” 207 “Residence in the Country” 168, 173 “The Dismissal of a School Term,” “Two School Girls,” 136, 145, 154 132, 207 “Written on Visiting the Graveyard “Forget Me Not,” 201–03, 211 at New Haven, CT,” 95, 131 “The Grave,” 207 “I Have No Brother,” 34, 98, Faith Congregational Church. See Talcott 186–87, 207 Street Congregational Church “The Infant Class,” 130 Fayerwether, George, III. See Harris, Sarah “Lines,” also “On examination for a Finney, Rev. Charles Grandison, 96, 145, Teacher,” 130, 131 153 “Lines, Written on Visiting the First Congregational Church, UCC, Grave of a Venerated Friend,” Decorah, Iowa, 215 131 Fish, Betsy [Elizabeth], 9, 92, 117 “Memory of Mary,” 207 Forbes, Jack, 9, 12, 79 Index 287

Fordham, Monroe, 100, 145, 153 Gardner’s Hartford City Directory, for Forten, Charlotte, 29–30, 174, 176 1838, 88 Fortune, T[imothy] Thomas, 4, 218n9 for 1839, 130 Foster, Frances Smith, 18, 23, 25, 33–34, for 1841, 130, 236n44 53, 173 Geer’s Hartford City Directory, xviii Foster, Sarah Jane, 112 for 1843, 65 Franklin, Benjamin, 136, 148, 156, for 1843 and 1845, 90 158–59, 162, 207 for 1845, 1846, and 1847, 127, Freeman, Henry and Deborah, 65, 68 236n44, 241n58, 242n7 Freeman surname, 92, 84 Hartford Hospital, 214 Freneau, Philip, 35 Hartford, Indians in, xi–xii, 2–3, 5–6, 8–9, 11, 13–15, 21, 24, 28, 34, 47–50, Garnet, Henry Highland, 11, 103–06 51, 53, 58, 68, 76, 84, 89–92, 95–97, Gates, Henry Louis, 3, 18 106–07, 179–94, 213–14 Gaul, Abram, 131–32, 242n11 names listed in Catalogue of the Gioia, Dana, on proto-Modernism 196, Talcott-st. Congregational Church of 253n1 Hartford, 89 Godey’s Ladies Magazine, 36 names listed in Geer’s Hartford Governor and Company of Connecticut, Directory, 1845, 90 and Mohegan Natives, by their Hazard or Hazzard surname Guardians. Certified Copy Book of Lester, 90 Proceedings before Commissioner of Silas, 191 Review, 1743, 1769 (1769), 75 Hemans, Felicia, xvii, 44, 122, 138, Granby, Connecticut, 90, 111 198–203–04 Great Awakening, 10, 54, 95 “The Aged Indian,” 201 Great Awakening (second), 96, 98, 146 The Forest Sanctuary, 43 Griswold, Hayden, 49–50 “The Indian with His Dead Child,” Groton, Connecticut, 62, 76, 182, 194 37 “Leave Me Not Yet,” 201 Harris surname, related to Mohegan “A Parting Song,” 203 Charles, 109 “A Poet’s Dying Hymn,” 201–02 Gertrude Fielding, 109 Hockanum, 50 Gertrude M., 109 Hope Leslie, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Jeremiah, 109 Magawisca (female character), Mary, 108–09 121 Olive May Harris Coderre-Picozzi, Hudson River School, painters, Thomas 238n86 Cole, Asher Durand, 36 Sallie Prentice, 109 Hymnody, 209–10 Sarah Harris, 108–09, 238n83 common meter, 200, 203, 207 William, married Gertrude M. Harris, common meter anapestic, 254n30 109 common meter and women poets, William Monteflora, 109 208–10 Hartford Asylum, 214 common meter as a Christian imbued Hartford City Directories technique, 196 Bolles, New Directory and Guide Book long meter, 209 for the City of Hartford, 1842–1847, Lucy Larcom, New England Girlhood, 127 A, on hymns, 208–09 288 Index

Hymnody (continued) Longfellow, Henry W., xvii, 122, 132, Samuel Willard, Sacred Poetry and 138, 141, 198, 242n11 Music Reconciled, 209–10, 254n30 Loveridge, Prince, 238n4, objections to “African,” 95 Indian removal, 21, 30, 37, 40, 43, 63, Low surname 74, 99–100, 102, 104, 158, 166, 177, Robert Low, 189–91 187–88 William Low, also Lowe, 190–91 Infant schools, 115–16, 150 Lyme, East Lyme, and Old Lyme, Iowa Census, 1870, xviii, 29, 45, 73, 82, Connecticut, 7, 14, 60–64, 96, 107, 214–15 184, 192, 228n42

Jackson, Holly, 3–4, 24–25 Magawisca. See Hope Leslie Johnson, Guy, 77 Mandell, Daniel R., Tribe, Race, History: Johnson, Sir William, 13, 77 Native Americans in Southern New Johnson, Steven F., Ninnuock, 45 England, 1780–1880, 7, 13 Journal of Education and Weekly Mandell, Laura, 137–38 Messenger, xviii, 25–26, 238n4 Manrique, Jorge, 131, 141 “Coplas de Manrique” and Kelley, Emma Dunham, 3–4, 217n7 Longfellow, 141, 242n11 King Philip, and King Philip’s War, 40, Marshpee Indians (Mashpee 47, 51, 52, 91, 96 Wampanoags), 38–39, 91 Kingsbury Negro Census, 184 Mason (surname; also Meason and Knickerbocker; or, New York Monthly Meazen), 92, 235n41 Magazine, 131–32, 141 Abba, 62, 181 Kristeva, Julia, 15, 140 Achsah (“Axe”) daughter of Cooley and Clorinda, 62 Ladies Companion and Literary Exposition, Amos, 90, Joseph, 62 36, 122, 203 Mary Ann, 89 Ladies Pearl, 36 Mary Mason Bouge, 62 Landers, Frederick B., residence, 20, 215 Sarah and Betty, 62 Carrie Mcnair, resident, 215 William, 234n32 Letters to Young Ladies. See Sigourney May, Caroline, American Female Poets Lewia surname (1848), 198 James (marries Harriet Plato), 61 Mays, Benjamin, 19 Lewis, 61 Mazzeo, Tilar J., 141 as Lewis, 61, 64, 229n4 McCoy, Laura Belle, 219n16 Margaret Griswold, 61 Menta, John, The Quinnipiac: Cultural Liberator, 37, 95, 109, 238n4 Conflict in Southern New England, 7, 13 Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories, Messenger, Ann, Pastoral Tradition Rebecca Harding Davis, 103, 138 and the Female Talent: Studies in “Little Harriet,” xviii, 25–27, 34, 82, 95, Augustan Poetry, 35, 37, 207 112–13 Miss Plato Jewell household, 26–27, 112–14, 191 Iowa census, xviii, 20, 125, 215 Loggins, Vernon, 18–19, 188 Knickerbocker, 131–32 Long Island Sound, ix–x, 2, 6, 8, 9, 12, Robbins report, 127 13, 14, 42, 45–48, 50–53, 60, 73, 75, Missinnuok, Narragansett term, 6–8, 84, 180 12, 14–15, 24, 28, 45–48, 50, 51–52, Index 289

54, 69, 73–77, 79, 81, 84, 86–87, O’Brien, Jean 89, 94–96, 102, 106–07, 128, 180, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land 213–14, 225n7 and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, Ninnimissinnuok, Ninnimissinnuwock, 1650–1790, 7 45 “’Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance Ninnuock, 45 and Survival of Indian Women in Mixed ancestry, 13, 63, 182, 190 Eighteenth-Century New England,” 7 Mixed race, xii, 2, 5, 78–82 Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Mohegans, 13–14, 28, 36, 47, 54, 74–77, Out of Existence in New England, 7 107–09, 191, 235n42 Occom, Samson, 13, 52, 54, 75, 76, 77, Momaday, N. Scott, 50, 180 98, 99, 100, 103, 107, 109, 113, 173 Montauketts, 7, 13, 14, 18, 2, 39, 53–56, described as “Black.” 76–77 59, 64, 66, 69, 74, 77, 81, 88, 96, 97, Opie, Amelia, xvii, 35, 122, 138, 162, 174, 224n20, 227n11, 246n56 198, 204 Montville, Connecticut, 7, 60, 65, 68, 75, Adeline Mowbray, 204 81, 107, 111, 180–81, 190–92 Black Man’s Lament, The. 35 Moon, Rev, Jerry, 140–41 Illustrations of Lying, in All Its Branches, 204 Narragansett, 4, 6, 7, 29, 45, 53–57, Poems, 34 60–61, 63, 77, 96, 102, 113, 161, “Song,” 204 191, 225n7, 235n41, 238n83, 241n52, Warrior’s Return, The, 34 248n5 “oppress,” 38 Natick Dictionary, Trumbull, 45 “oppressed,” 39 Native Americans, and black identity, 72, “oppression,” 37–39, 40, 43, 103, 105–06, 150 73, 76–78, 80–81, 83–85, 87, 89, 94, 97, 102–09, 181, 194 Pancko, 131–32, 242n11 Native Hubs (Ramirez), 46 Parker, Robert Dale, 241n52, 242n11 “The Natives of America,” x, 1, 2, 3, 4, Paugusetts, 7–8, 48, 84–85, 96, 102–03, 5, 9, 13, 33–44, 132, 201, 207 180–81, 185–86, 229n24, 250 departure from vanishing Indian Pell, Julia, 191, 252n62 genre, 36 Pell surname in Montville as poem of protest, 38 Fanny, 192 Nehantics (Western Niantics, Western Japhet, 192 Nehantics), 56, 61, 89, 106, 228n42, Lewis Pell, junior, 191–92 229n47 Lewis Pell, senior, 191– 93 reservation at Black Point, 61, 89, 103, Lucinda Pell, 192 106 Nancy, 192 New Divinity Calvinism, 144–45, 151–52 other Native Pell names: Pells New Haven, Connecticut, 22, 26–27, 47, (Wampanoag), 192 58, 69, 76, 107, 113–14, 161, 170, Pennington, Rev. James C., xviii, 5, 8, 19, 205, 222n25, 247n77 21, 28–29, 65, 67, 72–73, 78, 82–83, New Light Congregationalism, 30, 98, 86, 92, 96–97, 99–100, 110, 112, 115, 188 123–24, 127, 129–32, 148, 173–74, Niantics (Eastern)(Niantic-Narragansett), 193, 197 53, 56, 60, 88–94, 96 Text Book of the Origins and History of North African School (at Talcott Street the Colored People, A, 129 Congregational Church), 86, 125 “To the Reader,” xvii, 29, 72, 129, 130 290 Index

Pequots, communities critical strategies about, 18–19, 21–23 Mashantucket, 48, 75, 192, 226n12 desert as moral metaphor, 166–68 Stonington, 28, 60, 62, 74, 76, 235n41 education possibilities, 111–22 Pequot surnames, Charles, George, eulogies as a framework for Native Poquonup, and Skesooch, 76 cultural allegiance, 179–94 Petitions by Indians invitations to Thomas Robbins, 125–27 Benoni Occom, 1819, to Connecticut issue of plagiarism, 138–41 General Assembly protesting Pennington’s ascription of race, 72, 83 presence of “negroes or any mixed personality, 14 persons” on Mohegan lands, 76 raceless projection, 80 Ebenzer Attaquin and Israel Amos rebukes Catholicism, 151 to Harvard on sympathies to the relationship to other Platos, 60, 61, Cherokees but not to the Marshpee, 63–69 39 as religious writer, 10, 30, 131, 140, Mohegans, 1817, to protect tribal 144–45, 211 identity, 76 resistance to African American Mohegan petitions, 75–77, 109 consciousness, 15 Silas Charles (Montaukett), to New reticent about identity, 22 York colony governor protesting as rhetorician, 171–77 settler encroachments, 39 speculated period of birth and location, Samson Occom, protesting non- xvii, 20, 23, 45, 61, 231 Mohegans on tribal lands, 75 “stranger” theory, 28–29 Southold Indians, 69 as teacher, 9, 123–28 Tom, Eunice, and Sarah Sherman theme of death, 172 to Connecticut General Assembly uncommital on politics, 100, 104, 150 regarding landconcerns, 186 Yennecocks (Yennecotts), Long Island Pettiford, Oscar, 4 North Fork, 69, 232–33n100 Plagiarism, 14, 137–41, 243n8 Plato, Benajah, 66–68, 89, 92, 103, 231n81 Benevolent, 137 Plato, Betsey and Betsy, 59 Culpable, 141 Plato, Gertrude, 29, 58, 64–69, 78, 89, Poetical, 141 104, 232n93 Religious, 140 Plato (Lewia), Harriet, 9, 59–60 Plato, “an Indyan servant,” 1675, 53 Plato, Henry, 63–65, 68, 89, 97, 103, 183 Plato, Abraham, 60, 62–64, 88, 97, Deborah Freeman Plato, 64, 68 230n62 Henry and Deborah Plato family, 64, Plato, Alfred, 23, 65–66, 89, 127 69, 73, 81, 86 Plato, Ann Plato, Isaac, 57–60, 64, 97 absence from Beman’s appreciation, 92 as Copt Plato, 57 absent mother, 27, 81–82 Plato, Jason, 60, 62–64, 97 admiration of historical conquerors, Plato, Martin, 57–60 159–61 Plato, Phebe, 57, 60–61 church membership, 89 Plato, Solomon, 63 “the colored Sappho,” 18, 220n4 Plato surname, German (Plat, Plate, compositional craft, 135–37, 195–211 Plath, Platow), 54, 227n9 conflict over Native ancestry, 5, 34, 81 Plato surname, using Montaukett as Congregationalist, 10, 94, 98 linguistics, 55–56 Index 291

Podunk Indians, 47, 50 Roberts, Rita, “We Do Not All of Us Prettyman, Quandra, 18, 21, 23 think Alike,” in Evangelicalism and Price, George R., with James Brewer the Politics of Reform in Northern Stewart, 91, 105–06 Black Thought 1776–1863, 95, 103 Primus surname, 67 Rosaldo, Renato, 35 “Father Primus,” 235n42 Ross, Marlon, 43–44 Flora, daughter of “Father Primus,” 235n42 Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, 14, Holdridge, father of Rebecca, 68 22, 39, 53, 56–57, 58–59, 61, 64, 96 Margaret, 90 Schaghticoke Indians, 51, 102, 185–86 Mehitible Jacobs, mother of Rebecca, Schools, seminaries and academies 235n42 Academical School, Windsor, Nelson, brother of Rebecca, 66 Connecticut, 117 Rebecca, schoolteacher and Canterbury School, Connecticut correspondent with Addie Brown, (Prudence Crandall), 108 67–68, 89, 103 Cherokee Female Seminary, Indian Primus Papers, The, 68 Territory, 214 Clinton Academy, New York, 114 Quarter-Acre of Heartache, A. See Chief Hartford Female Seminary, 113, 116, Big Eagle 117 Quinnipiac Indians, 7, 96, 150 Miss Cornwall’s School for Young Ladies, Cheshire, Connecticut, 117 Ramapough Lenape Indians, 97 Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Ramirez, Reyna K., 46–47 South Hadley, Massachusetts, 116, Randall surname, 51, 90, 235n41 117 Benjamin, 89 Mt. Vernon Female School, Boston, Dean, 90 119 Hanabel, 90 New Hampton Female Seminary, Hannah, 90 New Hampshire, 199 Hannibal, 89 Noah B. Clark Seminary, Hartford, Henry, 90 117 Jabez, 90 Noyes Academy, Canton, New John, 89–90 Hampshire, 152 William, 90 Wethersfield Academy, Connecticut, Ranta, Judith, 23, 33, 42 117 Ray, Stephen G., 94, 107 Seabury, Lemuel, 184 Red-Black people (Forbes), 9, 12, 79–80 Seabury, Mary, 89–90, 183 Redding, J. Saunders, 1, 3, 18, 19, 197, Seabury, Samuel, 184 207 Seamen’s Protection Certificates, 109, 184, Refsal, Harley, Scandinavian Studies, 248n14 Luther College, 20 Seketau, Ella Wilcox, with Ruth Robbins, Thomas Wallis Herndon “The Right to a invitations from Ann Plato, xviii, 125, Name: The Narragansett People 127 and Rhode Island Officials in the school visits and reports, xviii, 124, Revolutionary Era,” 7 127 Seventh-day Adventism, 139–40 292 Index

Sherman surname Skinner, L. (Lewis), xviii, 119, 129–30 Christian (Petawam), 186 Smith, Charlotte Turner, 122, 138, 157, David, 186 206 George, 185 Smith, Howard Tredwell, 230n67 Hannah, 186 Smith, Katherine Capshaw, 23 Henry, Eliza’s father, 185–86 South African School. See Elm Street toddler Henry, 186 School Henry Levi Sherman, 186 Southampton, Long Island, New York, Peter Sherman, 186 53, 56, 58, 59, 69 Petrus Sherman, 186 Southold, Long Island, New York, 51, Sarah, 186 69, 232–33n100 Thomas (Tom) and Eunice, 185 Spiess, Mathias, 49–50 Tsherry (Solomon), 186 Spiritual Interrogations, Bassard, 23, 73, William, 185, 229n24, 250n29 137, 196 Shockley, Ann, 18, 21, 23, 61, 196 Sprague, Charles, “The Last Indian,” 37 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, xvii, 10, Spywood, Rev. George A., 9, 10, 11, 29, 14–15, 30–31, 36, 112, 118, 122, 87, 90, 91–93, 94 130–41, 143, 146, 148, 157, 168–69, Stewart, Maria, 21, 114, 172, 175 174, 189, 196, 198–99 Stone, Gaynell, editor “The Ark and the Dove,” 37 History and Archaeology of the Montauk, “The Boy and His Garden,” 136, 171 The, 6 “Cheerfulness,” 137 Shinnecock Indians: A Culture History, “Early Recollections,” 136, 163 The, 6 “Easy Studies, 135, 136, 154 “Strange Indians,” or strange Natives, “Education,” 136, 149 2, 13, 28, 45, 74–75, 107, 108 Girl’s Reading Book, The, 14–15, 30, 37, Strong, John, Montaukett Indians of 112, 133–38, 140–41, 143–44, 146–47, Eastern Long Island, The, 6 154, 163, 168, 175, 177 Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Lessons in the Fields, 136, 163 Island: A History, The, 7. 6–7 “Letters to the Females of Greece,” Suckiaug (also Sociag, Socaog), 47, 48, 50, 159 84, 226n13 Letters to Young Ladies, 117, 133, 151, Sweet, John Wood, Bodies Politic: 153 Negotiating Race in the American Moral Pieces, in Prose and Verse, 133 North, 1730–1830, 7, 98–99 “Perseverance,” 171 Pocahontas, and Other Poems, 36 Talcott Street Congregational Church, Poems, 201 50, 85–87, 92, 123 “The Poor,” 136, 165–66 anniversary bulletins, 87, 94, 234n31, “Religion,” 148 234–35n32 “Remember Me,” 202–03 as Colored Congregational Church: “The Summer Sun,” 136, 158 xvii, 1, 5, 11–12, 14, 17, 28, 65–66, Traits of the Aborigines of America, 36, 71, 85–86, 161 38 Faith Congregational Church, 87, “The True Friend,” 136 234n28–32 “Value of Time,” 137 Tantaquidgeon, 60 Siminoff, Faren, N., 45 Tantaquidgeon, Gladys, 224n23 Index 293

Terry, Seth. Seth Terry’s Book of Estates Weekly Messenger, The. See Journal of Agencies Trusts, 66, 123 Education and Weekly Messenger Theory of the stranger, 28–29 Wheatley and Occom, 98, 99, 100 “To the Reader.” See Pennington Wheatley, Phillis, 3, 15, 98–99, 100, 122, Tredwell, Daniel M., 82 137, 140, 163, 196–99, 201, 207, 208 Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, White, David O., 22, 23, 88, 123, 126, Ann Plato postdoctoral fellowship, 129–30 4 White, Ellen G., and Great Controversy, Trumbull, Connecticut, 48, 84, 181, 185 The, 139–40 Trumbull, James Hammond, 45, 47. See White, Newman Ivey, and Walter Natick Dictionary Clinton Jackson, 19 Tuberculosis. See consumption Williams, Kenny G., 23, 42–43, 73, 83, 129, 170, 174, 196–98 Unkechaug Indians, 7, 22, 54, 69 Williams, Roger, Key into the Language Urban Indian experience, Northeast, xi, of the Americas, A, 45, 55–56 6, 8, 11–13, 24, 25, 34 Wollstonecraft, Mary, influence by, 134, 135 Vanishing Indian belief and rhetoric, 5, Wordsworth, William, xvii, 122, 138, 198, 33, 36, 39, 74, 94, 104, 107, 140, 166 204–05 Vizenor, Gerald, 82, 225n7 “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” 204

Walker, David, 21, 100, 114 Xavier, Silvia, “Engaging George Walzer, Kevin, on proto-Modernism 196, Campbell’s Sympathy in the 253n1 Rhetoric of Charlotte Forten and Wangunk Indians, 47 Ann Plato, African American Watts, Emily Stipes, 36, 197, 200 Women of the Antebellum North.” Watts, Isaac, “Against Lying,” 26 29, 174, 176 Webber, Christopher L., American to the Backbone, 129–30 Zafar, Rafia, on Spiritual Interrogations, 196