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American Lucifers: Makers and Masters of the Means of Light, 1750-1900 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Zallen, Jeremy Benjamin. 2014. American Lucifers: Makers and Masters of the Means of Light, 1750-1900. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274111 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA American Lucifers: Makers and Masters of the Means of Light, 1750-1900 A dissertation presented by Jeremy Benjamin Zallen to The Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2014 ©2014—Jeremy Benjamin Zallen All rights reserved. American Lucifers: Makers and Masters of the Means of Light, 1750-1900 Abstract This dissertation examines the social history of Atlantic and American free and unfree labor by focusing on the production and consumption of the means of light from the colonial period to the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing from archives across the country, I reconstruct the ground-level experiences and struggles of the living (and dying) bringers of lights—those American lucifers—and the worlds they made in the process. I begin by arguing that colonial American deep-sea whaling voyages triggered an Atlantic street lighting revolution radiating from London, while a New England run candles-for-slave(ry) trade helped illuminate and circulate processes caught up in colonial transatlantic sugar slavery. Later, American whale oils lubricated an industrial revolution in cotton manufacturing, overwhelming the capacity of the American fishery to meet the demand for both light and lubrication. Meanwhile, as cotton spindles spun whale oil away from lamps, a new antebellum geography of light and risk emerged. Next, I turn my analysis inland to turpentine, coal gas, and lard oil. In the urban cores, monopoly gasworks threaded coal-gaslights in and around bourgeois space, while outworking seamstresses labored late into the night with cheap, explosive turpentine lamps. At the peripheries, mixed armies of enslaved and waged laborers worked ever-more dangerous coal mines, planters coerced slaves into tapping remote southern pines, and all struggled to assert some control over this antebellum empire. In the Ohio Valley, meanwhile, a new geography of life and death made and unmade hogs so successfully that wage-worked by-product industries in candles, lard oil, and soap became not only possible, but enormously profitable. iii The combined onslaught of Pennsylvania petroleum and the Civil War radically reoriented the possibilities and geographies of light in America. As the war destroyed turpentine camps, whaleships, and southern coal mining, forcing a sharp turn away from slavery, the reservoirs of American light shifted their center of gravity markedly northward and westward. I conclude by exploring the rise of an electric ecology organized around western copper mines and a spectacularly staged future of electrically illuminated spaces that obscured any past (or ongoing) relations between labor, violence, and light. iv For Jenny v TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations ................................................................................................ vii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................... ix Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One “Dragged up Hither from the Bottom of the Sea”: Whales, Whalers, and the Political Worlds of Whale Light ................................. 18 Chapter Two Piney Lights: Turpentine Slaves, Seamstresses, and Perilous Antebellum Lamps .......................................................................... 98 Chapter Three Dungeons and Dragons: Slavery, Industry, and Modernity in Coal Mines, Gas Works, and Antebellum Gaslights ..................................... 182 Chapter Four “Prairie Whales”: Hogs, Lard Lights, and the Temporal Politics of Life and Death in the Antebellum Ohio Valley ............................................ 250 Chapter Five The War Between the Lights: Slavery, Industry, and Fossil Fuel Lights in Western Virginia and Pennsylvania during the Civil War .......................................................................................... 335 Chapter Six Staging Lights, Burying Labor: Dreams, Machines, Copper Mines, and the Spatial History of Electric Illumination ................................................ 412 Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 468 Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 483 vi ILLUSTRATIONS MAPS Map 1 Voyage of the Maria to the first kill ......................................................... 66 Map 2 Complete Voyage of the Maria ............................................................... 85 Map 3 The Turpentine region of North Carolina, showing Grist Camps in operation from 1850-1860 ............................ 133 FIGURES Figure 1.1 “The Maria… with a whale alongside cuting in,” drawn by Richard Hixson ................................................................ 26 Figure 1.2 The Packaging – New Bedford whale oil invoice ............................. 56 Figure 1.3 “A view of the Maria’s boats, battling a large whale…” drawn by Richard Hixson ................................................................ 74 Figure 2.1 Cutting a box .................................................................................. 125 Figure 2.2 Chipping a turpentine face with a round shave .............................. 14 Figure 2.3 Dipping (and scraping) and hauling, drawn by Harry Fenn .......... 142 Figure 2.4 “A North Carolina Turpentine Distillery” ..................................... 165 Figure 2.5 “Charging the Still” and “Spirit Tub—Filling the Barrels,” drawn by Jas. E. Taylor .................................................................. 166 Figure 3.1 “Making Gas” ................................................................................. 193 Figure 3.2 “Explosion of Fire-damp” ............................................................... 210 Figure 3.3 Safety lamps .................................................................................... 218 Figure 3.4 Gasworks and gasometers ............................................................... 237 Figure 4.1 “The Death Chamber” .................................................................. 321 Figure 4.2 “Hog-Slaughtering and Pork-Packing in Cincinnati,” drawn by H. F. Farny ..................................................................... 324 vii Figure 5.1 Crosscut of the Kanawha River coalfields, drawn by D. T. Ansted ................................................................... 352 Figure 5.2 “Grand Ball Given by the Whales in Honor of the Discovery the Oil Wells in Pennsylvania” ...................................... 390 Figure 5.3 Pork Packing in the major Mid-western cities 1842-76, by Margaret Walsh ......................................................................... 396 Figure 5.4 Candles and Lard Oil Exported from Cincinnati, 1846-1866 ....... 399 Figure 6.1 Bijou Light ...................................................................................... 414 Figure 6.2 Schneider Candle Ad ..................................................................... 422 Figure 6.3 Miner’s candlestick and candle ....................................................... 443 Figure 6.4 Miner’s candlestick driven into stull ............................................... 444 Figure 6.5 Daily Graphic Bijou Representation ................................................. 455 Figure 6.6 “The Electric Light in Houses—Laying the Tubes for Wires in the Streets of New York” ............................................ 458 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project began with a desire to pick away at a foundational myth of invention, individualism, and the self-directed Progress of Man. Whether or not I have succeeded in doing so in these pages is up to the reader, but my own experiences over the last several years have taught me one thing for sure. It was not just Thomas Edison who benefitted from the kindness and sacrifices of others. No one builds anything alone, and I hope to be more gracious in recognizing that assistance than the Wizard of Menlo Park. This project would not have been possible without the extraordinary generosity of friends, family, mentors, and strangers. I am deeply in their debt, and ever will be. Thanks to Eric Olsen, Joe McCoy, and Helene Lerner for changing how I thought about school and for teaching me to love to write. To Paul Olson, Priya Satia, and Richard White for inspiring me to pursue scholarship as a career. To my friends and family for all the joy, all the support, and all the perspective. To Richard White, Zephyr Frank, Jon Christensen, and Erik Steiner for the opportunity to work in the Spatial History Lab and for convincing me of the importance of space. Thank you to the departments of history