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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 © 2015 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production and book design, Laurie D. Searl Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo 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 chal- lenged 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 ethnohis- tory 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 his- tory 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 liter- ary 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 com- munity; 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 demon- strates 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
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