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IN 1825, John Farmer, Whom Some Have Touted As Lineage as Capital: Genealogy in Antebellum New England francesca morgan N 1825, John Farmer, whom some have touted as “the I father of American genealogy,” encouraged his friend Joseph Willard to compose his own “family sketches.” Willard declined. He condemned his extended family as a “degenerate race.” “I have no inclination & feel no necessity to acknowledge kith or kin with any of them,” he explained. “Paul W[illard] is of this clan, a man who has [received] an education & is a sort of higher intelligence amongst them—but he is to me an exceedingly disagreeable man, and I hope you will not pump him in genealogy.” Farmer, who usually celebrated the un- earthing of colonial lineages, reassured Willard that he should feel no compulsion to “acknowledge kith or kin with” family members he disdained. “I did not know,” Farmer wrote, “that the descendants of so worthy an ancestor [as Major Simon Willard] had degenerated. But this need not discourage you, as it is probable they do not know their honorable descent.” If they did not, Farmer implied, those undesirable kin could eas- ily be ignored. Worthless lineages should in no way dissuade For their help with this article, I wish to thank Sven Beckert, Nancy Isenberg, Susan J. Pearson, Linda Smith Rhoads, Charles R. Steinwedel, Karin A. Wulf, the unnamed reader for the New England Quarterly, and, for a grant in 2006–7, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium. This article also benefits from audience questions at brown-bag lunches in 2006 at the Massachusetts Historical Society and the New Hampshire Historical Society as well as at the 2007 meeting of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, Worcester, Mass. I also acknowledge the New Hampshire Historical Society, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, and the Massachusetts Historical Society for kindly permitting me to cite and quote from materials in their collections. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXIII, no. 2 (June 2010). C 2010 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 250 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 251 Willard from constructing a genealogy of which he could be 1 proud. Farmer and Willard’s exchange reveals a good deal about the practice of genealogy in the antebellum United States. Genealogy was then emerging from the long shadow cast by the American Revolution but had yet to achieve the mass appeal it would enjoy in the twentieth century. During the American Revolution, as they threw off monarchical and aristocratic rule, Britain’s rebellious colonists effectively severed lineage from governance. Although some governments within the new United States continued to sustain one emphatically hereditary institution—slavery—Americans consigned genealogy, the 2 study of lineage, to their private lives. Fifty years after the Revolution, however, leisured white men and women in the country’s Northeast, especially in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where pedigree and power remained particularly intertwined, began to form public institutions devoted to 3 genealogy. Some of those individuals also pursued heraldry, 1 Joseph Willard to John Farmer, 25 December 1825; Farmer to Willard, 31 December 1825,p.2,folder7,box2, John Farmer Papers, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord. For Farmer as “the father of American genealogy,” see Franc¸ois Weil, “John Farmer and the Making of American Genealogy,” New England Quarterly 80 (September 2007): 418 (quotation); John A. Schutz, A Noble Pursuit: The Sesquicen- tennial History of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1845–1995 (Boston: NEHGS, 1995), p. 18; New England Historical and Genealogical Register 1 (January 1847): 21 (hereafter NEHGR) (“the Father of Genealogy in New England”); “American Genealogy,” Literary World 8 (14 June 1851): 473. 2 Both the Articles of Confederation (1777), article 6, and the U.S. Constitution (1787) (article 1, section 9) specifically outlawed titles of nobility. Personal communi- cation, Sven Beckert, 20 October 2009; Karin A. Wulf, “Representing the Family to the State; or, Lineage in a New Nation” (presented at the 2006 meeting of the Orga- nization of American Historians, Washington, D.C.); Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 281–316; Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolu- tion: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 129–60. Throughout the history of slavery in British North America, enslaved people, by law, inherited their slave status from their mothers. See, esp., Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 128–35; Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 161, 220–57. 3 Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture and Society 3 (January 1982): 33–50; Peter Dobkin Hall, “What the Merchants Did with Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 252 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the study of family coats-of-arms and crests, to establish their 4 descent from English nobles. “The study of genealogy will never become a popular pur- suit,” a president of the first U.S. organization devoted to genealogy—Boston’s New England Historic Genealogical So- ciety (NEHGS), founded in 1845—emphatically pronounced 5 in 1853. In the antebellum era, genealogy’s exclusivity was in fact its allure, for genealogy affirmed contemporary class distinctions and enhanced the rightful status of elites. But as the Farmer-Willard vignette suggests, genealogy simultaneously Their Money: Charitable and Testamentary Trusts in Massachusetts, 1780–1880,” in Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700–1850, ed. Conrad Edick Wright and Katheryn P. Viens (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1997), pp. 365–421; Robert F. Dalzell Jr., Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Richard H. Abbott, Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 1854–1868 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), esp. pp. 10–11;RonaldStory,The Forging of an Aristoc- racy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800–1870 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980); P.A. M. Taylor, intro. to More Than Common Powers of Per- ception: The Diary of Elizabeth Rogers Mason Cabot, ed. Taylor (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), pp. 1–30. Antebellum genealogical activity outside of institutions was not limited to New England. A lively genealogical culture existed within the Quaker upper classes of Philadelphia at the nineteenth century’s turn. See Karin A. Wulf, “‘Of the Old Stock’: Quakerism and Transatlantic Genealogies in Colonial British America,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 304–20,and“Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: Documenting Culture and Connection in the Revolutionary Era,” in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America, ed. Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Wulf (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer- sity Press, 1997), pp. 14–19; Susan M. Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), esp. pp. 1, 6–16; Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 5–6, 133, 157–58, 205–9. Also see Hampton L. Carson, A History of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1940), 1:79 and elsewhere. 4 “Heraldry,” NEHGR 1 (July 1847): 225. Heraldry has many purposes in addition to representing nobilities. However, nineteenth-century New Englanders focused specif- ically on trying to establish their descent from English families who had undergone “Visitations” by heralds during Henry VIII’s reign (1509–47) in the regime’s attempt “to better regulate the use of [family] arms.” See Erik Eckholm, “A Federal Office Where Heraldry of Yore Is Only Yesterday,” New York Times, 13 June 2006; David T. Thackery, “Back to Adam”: A Survey of Genealogy in the Western World, as Illus- trated in the Collections of the Newberry Library (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1992), pp. 13–14 (quotation). 5 William Whiting, “An Address Delivered to the Members of the New England Historic-Genealogical Society,” NEHGR 7 (April 1853): 106. Whiting was a Boston attorney. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 253 exposed the mutability of social hierarchies. Those who prac- ticed and promoted genealogy were not necessarily engaged with lineage for the same reasons as the elite whose sources they required and whose families they sought to document. This tension between proto-professional concerns and upper- class privilege is evident in the work of five New Englan- ders influential in genealogy’s newly public culture—Farmer, Charles Ewer, Lemuel Shattuck, Eliza Susan Quincy, and Electa Fidelia Jones. All stood at the margins of the social spheres to which they wished to belong. However, their abil- ity to map their seventeenth-century origins as well as their eagerness to publicize that ability afforded them a degree of social capital, capital they could then expend to facilitate re- lationships with other aficionados—individuals often wealth- 6 ier or more influential than they. Among those at the top of class hierarchies, however, even among persons clearly en- tranced by genealogy, publicly airing an interest in lineage was considered declass´ e,´ akin to boasting of one’s wealth, and smacked of the bourgeois sin of social climbing.
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