Making the Source Speak

Ulrich
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s most astonishing accomplishment in A Midwife’s Tale is that we do believe her when she tells us that this obscure, apolitical midwife led “a remarkable life.” It is indeed remarkable that Ulrich can go on for pages about laundry, weaving, cabbages, menstruation, and obstetrical science and leave her reader believing that she restores “a lost substructure of eighteenth-century life” as she promises. Ulrich’s argument is sustained by both a remarkable handling of her key source and a passionate belief in the significance of Martha Ballard’s mundane life.

Ulrich’s chapters are like magic acts. She opens each with a series of excerpts from Ballard’s diary, as if to illustrate the impossibility of the task she is about to perform. The entries are almost nonsensically terse, relentlessly routine. A typical entry is the one for August 15, 1787:

Clear morn. I pulld flax the fornon. Rain afternoon. I am very much fatagud. Lay on the bed & rested. The two Hannahs washing. Dolly weaving. I was called to Mrs Claton in travil at 11 O Clok Evening.

One’s first reaction is disbelief that Ulrich will accomplish the task she has set out for herself. Yet out of entries like this, the story expands into a rich portrait of eighteenth-century life. We learn that Martha Ballard ran a sizable textile operation out of her home, including linen made from the flax she grew; that Martha’s delegation of her washing to others typified New England family labor systems; that her midwifery was emblematic of a time when medical work was women’s work.

Ulrich’s success in telling this story stems partly from her finely-tuned knowledge of material culture, medicine, social mores, and local history of this time and place. Her exposition of Ballard’s diary is the most celebrated aspect of her book, but she relies on many other sources as well. She has scoured contemporaneous herbal guides, histories of medicine, and the archives of the Kennebec region of Maine. She has also spent a great deal of time with the museums and material culture experts of the region, as her acknowledgements suggest.

Ulrich’s acquired expertise shows. In Chapter Two, for example, Ulrich argues convincingly that “There were really two family economies in the Ballard household” and that “the house was every bit as much a workplace as the sawmill.” Ulrich uncovers a household economy and socio-economic web that Ballard hints at in brief entries about “boiling a Linning warp”, “fixing the loom”, trading “3 lb of flax” or “1 ounce salve.” We know much, presumably, about the mercantile trade, about New England’s exports and imports at this time. But Hallowell’s women, Ulrich shows us, were constantly in and out of each other’s homes, exchanging produce, medicine, cloth, and labor as both gift and payment. The “perishable and invisible nature of [women’s] work” does not make it insignificant. In Ulrich’s hands, Martha Ballard’s diary opens a window into what we suspected to exist two hundred years ago, but could not quite imagine: the ways in which “women negotiated the fragile threads of ordinary need that bound families together.” And we believe her in part because she has so thoroughly demonstrated her knowledge.

But Ulrich’s authority does not just lie in her expertise on the details of Martha Ballard’s diary or life in eighteenth-century Hollowell. Her portrayal is also believable because of a deep respect for Martha Ballard conveyed in her tone. There is no attempt to cast Ballard as an early feminist: we learn instead that “Martha disliked controversy. Only the most outrageous violations of neighborliness made it into her diary.” Nor does Ulrich try to “sentimentalize” Martha’s world as a “‘female world of love and ritual’” – it is enough to understand that “birth, illness, and death wove Hallowell’s female community together.” Ulrich’s high regard for Ballard is seen clearly as she summarizes Ballard’s life near the book’s end:

She was a gentle woman with a sense of duty and an anatomical curiosity that allowed her to observe autopsies as well as cry over the dead, a courageous woman who never quite learned to stay on her horse, a sharp-eyed and practical woman who kept faith in ultimate justice despite repeated encounters with suicide, murder, and war.

It is this esteem for her subject that gives Ulrich’s voice a remarkable unity with Ballard’s.

Out of 816 diary entries, a 352-page book. “The problem is not that the diary is trivial,” she claims improbably in her introduction, “but that it introduces more stories than can easily be recovered and absorbed.” Her skill as a storyteller is such that by the end of her tale, this claim is plausible. Ulrich accomplishes this feat by demonstrating her expertise and respectful understanding. She convinces us that she can speak for Ballard.

Taylor
Alan Taylor is somewhat less literary in his approach to William Cooper’s Town, but the effect is similar. Starting with the papers of William Cooper, a seemingly marginal character in American history, Taylor calmly elucidates the frontier, regional rivalries, New York and national politics, and the changing character of the American people. In the rise and fall of William Cooper, Taylor argues, we see a crucial sea-change in American history from an aristocratic society to a democratic society, from “Fathers of the People” to “Friends of the People.”

Taylor uses a wide range of sources with great ingenuity. Woven throughout the text is The Pioneers, a novel written fifteen years after William Cooper’s death by his more famous son James Fenimore Cooper. Taylor uses the son’s imaginative reconstruction of William Cooper both to illuminate the father’s character and to reveal discrepancies between life and representation – James Fenimore Cooper’s vision of a stratified, deferential society was inherited from his father’s own desire to be seen as a gentleman. Often the selections from The Pioneers appear at the beginnings or ends of chapters in order to set the scene or to contrast with what we have just learned. For example, at the beginning of Chapter Eight, Taylor brings in James Fenimore Cooper’s recollections of Cooperstown as “a place where . . . pretentious but awkward structures sprouted among the lingering ruins of a formidable forest.” It is a highly evocative way to paint Cooperstown into the reader’s mind. At the end of Chapter Ten, Taylor again draws on The Pioneers, this time to illustrate the gap between fiction and history: “The novel betrays the rage that the novelist felt toward [commoners] for undermining the public authority of gentility,” Taylor writes, concluding that “ultimately [James Fenimore Cooper] indulged in historical denial and wish fulfillment.” Both techniques help to capture the reader’s imagination.

Other literary works make their way into the text as well, principally William Cooper’s Guide in the Wilderness, which is, like his son’s novel, a somewhat rosy reconstruction of his role in settling Cooperstown. Taylor uses it to probe the mind of William Cooper and to show how he engaged in his own kind of wishful thinking. We also read numerous excerpts from Cooper’s correspondence with urban gentlemen he wished to impress, where we see a boastfulness joined with vulnerability. “[I] Shall never be Easey,” he wrote to wealthy Philadelphian Henry Drinker in 1790, “Untill I see your Country in as flourishing Condition as those heretofore Setteled by me in the state of New York, wich hath gon forward to the great Surpise of all thinking People.”

What gives William Cooper’s Town its power is not just literary sources, but the combination of literary sources with maps, deeds, store records, and other quantitative sources. We learn of Cooper’s social vision not just in his how-to Guide but also in the ideal map of Cooperstown he commissioned. Through a later map we learn that the compact village Cooper envisioned became one of consolidated lots. Through deed and store records it becomes clear that, far from enjoying county-wide popularity, Cooper’s political support came mostly from those who depended upon him, either through land or store credit. In Taylor’s hands, even William Cooper’s library records tell part of the story. While living in Burlington, New Jersey, Cooper’s ascent was marked by his membership in the local library association, and his desire to cultivate gentility reflected in his turn from histories and biographies to poetry and “Polite Literature, or Belles Lettres.” Taylor documents this shift in the first three tables in the appendix.

Alan Taylor’s gift is in the marshaling of both qualitative and quantitative sources to powerfully convey change over time. He leaves little room for doubt that we have witnessed a transformation in William Cooper’s Town. Federalists and Whigs yielded to Republicans; gentility to democracy; deference to defiance. Taylor achieves such a winsome balance between letters and numbers that his argument is hard to counter.

Heyrman
At first blush, Christine Heyrman seems to be making a quantitative argument as well: evangelical church attendance among whites in the South rose from some 25% in 1776 to about 65% in 1835. She wants to explain how evangelicals (mostly Baptists and Methodists) achieved that remarkable success, and why it took them so long. But Heyrman is also concerned with the cultural influence of evangelical Christianity, and for that she brings in literary evidence, the journals and published memoirs of evangelical preachers. Where she diverges from the approaches of Ulrich and Taylor is in geography and biography. She is telling the story of an expansive South – Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois – through the eyes of many preachers. Thus, unlike Midwife’s Tale and William Cooper’s Town, we are never thoroughly acquainted with any individuals or places. She accepts the risk of over-generalizing in order to make a bolder argument

Heyrman’s strength is her fluid, colorful writing style, bolstered by an effective use of quotations and logical arguments. She knows how to engage her audience’s attention: “William Glendinning pressed a razor against his pulsing throat,” she begins her first chapter, “and awaited the worst.” And she has organized her quotations well. One paragraph opens: “The distress that they often met with among devout lay people also heightened the clergy’s sense of the dangers lurking along the way of the cross.” She then supplies five examples from the journals of preachers to back up her statement.

But there is a danger of over-generalization. For example, Heyrman tells us that “Everywhere in the South, white men cherished idiosyncratic, often wildly heterodox, religious opinions.” Indeed, she contends, “more men” elaborated “highly individualized theologies” than joining denominations, equating the acceptance of “formal systems of religious orthodoxy with surrendering the habits of independence essential to self-mastery.” This is a fascinating claim, but she cites only six of these “idiosyncratic” laymen.

In other places Heyrman simply leaves connections unexplored. When faced with the question of whether a congregant should divorce his unbelieving wife, Jeremiah Norman “promptly delivered his view that ‘if the unbelieving Wife be pleased to dwell with her Believing Husband, Let him not put her away,’ an opinion loudly sustained by two laywomen.” This is almost a direct quote from the apostle Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, which reads, “If any brother hath a wife that believeth not, and she be pleased to dwell with him, let him not put her away.”

Later, in describing the “family values” of evangelical churches, Heyrman explains that evangelicals “applied familial titles and metaphors to describe relationships among believers as well.” She goes on to not that “among many younger clergymen, the identification of older preachers with fathers was more literal.” And yet she does not trace the connection to the Bible’s frequent use of familial titles. In his letters Paul called Timothy his “son in the faith” and his “dearly beloved son.” Elsewhere Paul urged Timothy to treat older men and women as fathers and mothers, younger men and women as brothers and sisters, “with all purity.” How much were the young preachers that populate Heyrman’s story governed by the words of Paul to his protégé Timothy (and, for that matter, Titus)?

Finally, Heyrman makes much of the phrase “mother in Israel.” It is the title of Chapter Four, and she speculates in the endnotes that “English Quakers in the seventeenth century appear to have coined the term.” But a quick search of a biblical concordance turns up two references. In the book of Judges, the famous female judge of Israel Deborah proclaims, “I, Deborah, arose. I arose a mother in Israel.” In the second book of Samuel, a “wise woman” confronts the commander of Israel’s armies, giving herself the same title. That these women are among the most assertive in the Bible could have made for interesting analysis, but Heyrman misses the opportunity.

There is no contradiction between what these biblical passages say and Heyrman’s argument. But they raise questions about how well Heyrman understands evangelicals. She traces their origins to the Great Awakening, and identifies their obsession with “self-abasing inwardness” as “a defining feature.” Judging by the language in the quotations Heyrman uses, however, a high regard for the Bible as the rule of life was also a key feature.

Heyrman writes masterfully, and her argument is compelling, but these subtle inconsistencies are troubling. Combined with the presentist concern evident in the book’s title, asides throughout the text, and the epilogue (in which Heyrman traces the connections between the evangelicals of the early republic and contemporary megachurches and parachurch ministries like Promise Keepers), these details cast doubt on Heyrman’s authority.

Ulrich and Taylor manage to avoid this trap. Ulrich’s respect for Martha Ballard is such that it is hard to doubt her representation. Taylor exhibits the rare ability to remove himself almost entirely from the story, and so we trust his analysis. Heyrman’s challenge is dealing with more people and more space, and she handles this with notable skill. What most damages her argument, however, is a failure to analyze evangelicals on their own terms. The difference between Heyrman and Ulrich and Taylor is an instructive one for historians laboring to make their sources speak: intimate knowledge of the key sources goes a long way toward establishing the historian’s authority. The historian’s authority, in turn, is a solid foundation for a persuasive argument.