Dungeons and Dragons and Gaslights

Antebellum ruling classes debated the role and relationships of states, commerce, industry, and slavery surrounding gaslight. For boosters in New Orleans and other Southern cities industrial slavery was the sine qua non of their gaslit modernity. For Northern industrial heralds, it was the automation and absence (or invisibility) of labor that made gaslight systems at once so attractive and so contentious. But it was in the spaces of production that slavery, freedom, and industry were most violently configured. Frontiers of bituminous (gas) coal accumulation multiplied deep underground, and in the eastern seaboard, that meant Richmond mines. There, planters and industrial slaveholders used slave life insurance policies and safety lamps to recruit and compel mixed armies of slaves and wage laborers to work ever-more dangerous coal mines, while all struggled to assert some control over this antebellum empire of light and energy. When it came to light, the arrow of change in the antebellum United States seemed to point towards an increasing role for slavery within processes of industrial capitalism rather than its displacement by free labor regimes. Looking at the production and consumption of gas coals changes how we must think of the making of the “modern” or “liberal” city.

Prologue

The prologue introduces the history, historiography, and myths of light. It begins by exploring two “pre-industrial” modes of producing light, first telling the story of how Martha Ballard, in the late eighteenth century, butchered a cow, rendered its fat, and dipped her own candles. Second, the prologue explores the making and use of tallow candles in Potosí. The prologue contrasts these accounts of tallow candles with end-of-the-nineteenth-century accounts of how electricity had transcended labor and history. It shows how this familiar before-and-after narrative is flawed, and we need to reexamine what came between, paying special attention to work, energy, and power struggles.

Epilogue

The epilogue provincializes what is usually the start or climax of any history of illumination, the emergence of Thomas Edison’s incandescent light. Taking a fresh look at the process historians have called “electrification,” the epilogue re-entangles two stories that should never have been so neatly separated. The first story follows the staging of performances of electric light. It begins in 1882, with the opening of the Boston Bijou Theatre, the first electrically lit theater in the United States, and concludes in 1893 with the electric utopianism on display at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The second story delves into the underground politics of copper lode mining. It, too, begins in 1882 and ends in 1893, years that marked the beginning of Butte’s rise as the undisputed copper capital of the world and the formation of the Western Federation of Miners, one of the most radical and influential labor organizations in the history of the United States. Weaving these two narratives back together brings into sharp relief the tensions and contradictions that gripped Gilded Age society and illuminates, too, the curious dialectic of risk and inequality that accompanied the seemingly miraculous progress of electrification.

Dragged up Hither from the Bottom of the Sea

Beginning with the rise of the American whale fishery in the 1750s, this chapter explores the violent accumulation and circulation of energy embodied in whales. The lives and struggles of workers across the Atlantic world were caught up in the politics and processes of producing oil lights. Enslaved Africans forced into nightwork in West Indian sugar houses, the London poor confronting new state-sponsored street lamps, cotton mill laborers, and Pacific mariners were tangled together around common threads of American whale oils. American deep-sea whaling voyages first triggered a street lighting revolution that radiated from London to Europe and America, while a New England run trade in spermaceti candles, whale oil, slaves, and sugar helped illuminate and circulate the people and goods caught up in colonial transatlantic sugar slavery. Later, American whale oils lubricated an industrial revolution in cotton manufacturing, while fugitive slaves and free blacks carved out a geography of freedom in the globe-spanning Quaker-run fishery. As these entwined revolutions in night and cotton intensified in the antebellum period, they overwhelmed the capacity of the American fishery to meet the demand for both light and lubrication, even as ship masters drove whalemen on harder and longer voyages for less pay.

Rock Oil, Civil War, and Industrial Slavery Interrupted

This chapter examines how the contingently timed and combined onslaught of Pennsylvania petroleum and the Civil War radically reoriented the possibilities and geographies of light in North America. On the eve of war, free-labor western Pennsylvania and industrial-slavery western Virginia were both poised to capture and launch fossil fuel revolutions in power and light. This chapter uses business, court, and military records along with newspapers and trade journals to explore how one of these revolutions—that based on free-labor and ownership of a mineral liquid “distilled by nature free of charge”—came to triumph over the other—that based on industrial slavery and capital-intensive coal oil—and how that triumph was understood then and subsequently as an inevitable stage of “progress.” As military clashes interrupted and destroyed turpentine camps, whaleships, and southern coal mining, the reservoirs of American light shifted their center of gravity markedly northward and westward. A period of widely increased access to illuminants, it was also a time of deepening monopoly control over the means of light. This chapter explores the centrality of political economy and organized violence to any true understanding of the histories of labor, energy, and technology.

Lucifer Matches and the Global Violence of Phosphorus

Sulfuric acid also made possible the other revolutionary lighting technology of the nineteenth century: lucifer friction matches. Those phosphorus matches, incredibly cheap, found their way into the hands of the highest and the lowest, everyone now a strike or a jostle away from producing instant, useful, but also potentially devastating flames. Using thousands of tons of coal and sulfuric acid, European chemical manufacturers extracted hundreds of tons of elemental phosphorus from the mountains of bones left in the wake of the slaughter of Pampas cattle in the South American port cities of the Río de La Plata and, later, from phosphates mined on West Indian guano islands. In American cities, thousands of child workers used that European phosphorus to mass-produce incredibly cheap lucifer matches, a process that starkly illustrated the hidden politics and slow violence of producing the means of light. Struggling to work and, even more pressingly, to live in the inescapable ecology of toxic phosphorus, lucifer-making children attempted to change work environments and win powerful allies, all while trying to survive and mitigate an agonizing, degenerative, disfiguring illness from phosphorus poisoning they called “the compo” and officials called “the jaw disease.”

Lard Lights and the Pigpen Archipelago

In the Ohio Valley, a pork industry emerged in the geographic and ecological interstices of slavery and free labor to propel millions of hogs from farms and cornfields into a constellation of seasonal deathscapes centered in Cincinnati. This geography of life and death unmade hogs so successfully that, in combination with the new industrial chemistry of sulfuric acid, wage-worked by-product industries in stearine candles, lard oil, and soap became not only possible but enormously profitable. One of the most important formations to emerge in this geography was what this chapter calls “the pigpen archipelago.” Hogs in the antebellum Ohio Valley were born, raised, and marched toward death through spaces their captors increasingly circumscribed by constructing chains of wood-enclosed islands. From breeding pens to field pens to fattening pens to the pens on the ferries and railroads, at the “hog hotels” where droves rested and refueled, and in the massive pens surrounding slaughterhouses, the always contested movements of the hogs within and between the pigpens transformed the region. This chapter looks at how both human and nonhuman actors were responsible for making Cincinnati and its hinterlands into the epicenter of a new dialectic of mass-produced animal life and death and light.

Piney Lights

In the urban peripheral spaces of antebellum tenements, domestic workers and outworking seamstresses labored late into the night with cheap, explosive turpentine lamps. Using newspaper accounts, travel narratives, and letters between turpentine camp overseers and slaveholders, this chapter explores how the gendered politics of space and time in the ready-made clothing revolution were made through a new slave-produced illuminant called “camphene.” A volatile mixture of spirits of turpentine and high-proof alcohol, camphene connected outworking seamstresses in New York with the enslaved woodsmen laboring in remote North Carolina turpentine camps to accumulate nearly every drop of turpentine in the United States. Reading against the grain, the chapter reconstructs how seamstresses and slaves attempted to navigate, shape, and sometimes escape from spaces and work processes dominated by slaveholders, clothiers, and husbands. Through the antebellum making and using of this piney light, white women working in the home and black men tapping pines far from plantations endured terrible violence and danger, rendered spatially, temporally, and culturally invisible, to underwrite the worlds of Northern and Southern white men. The chapter attempts to pull this antebellum relation out of the shadows by exploring the worlds of freedom, slavery, and gender made through piney light.