Crafting Citizens

This chapter explores the wooden legs donned by American male amputees after the Revolution through the only example known to survive: the prosthesis worn by politician Gouverneur Morris. Amputees’ bodily lack frightened America’s leaders, who sought to establish a self-sufficient male citizenry capable of heading households. Period associations of disability with poor morality also compromised amputees. Morris’s peg leg was manufactured by a Philadelphia cabinetmaker and allowed him to replenish his morality by borrowing the style of elite furniture. Moreover, Morris’s leg responded to fears that male amputation was akin to castration by supplementing his virility. Morris claimed that his prosthesis provided an example for other republicans, including new president George Washington, of how moderate consumption of goods could enhance civility. Morris’s success is evident in the choice to let him model for Jean-Antoine Houdon’s statue of George Washington.

Portraits in Stone

Elite residents of Charleston, South Carolina, sought a unique means of memorializing their dead: gravestones embellished with bust-length depictions of the deceased. Commissioned from stone carvers in Boston, these portrait gravestones reimagined the small, ivory form of the portrait miniature at a public scale suitable for the cemetery. This chapter examines why Charlestonians patronized this type of memorial, tying the gravestones to residents’ horror at the savagery unleashed upon corpses by putrefaction and to their desire to preserve bodies’ former politeness. Considering portrait gravestones along with mourning rituals and coffin construction illuminates the stones’ role as protective containers that kept savagery at bay, an important function given Charleston’s high death rate and steamy climate. Recognizing the memorials’ similarity to boundary markers, such as those erected to mark the Mason Dixon line, illuminates how the gravestones demarcated a space of colonial control. By erecting stone portraits of civil persons, Charlestonians created a social network with incredible permanence.

The Art of Concealment

As Americans created a new political republic in the years after the Revolution, they questioned whether women could be trusted to bear republican responsibilities or whether they were too duplicitous. A set of elaborate dressing tables and dressing chests produced for elite women’s use in New York City and Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1790s implicate elite women’s toilette rituals in debates over authenticity and deception. As women applied cosmetics before their mirrors they improved their faces and enhanced their civility, drawing comparison to portrait painters who similarly altered public personas. Women enjoyed a unique relationship with their dressing furniture, and pieces became a kind of body double for elite users, even being dressed in similar costume. Dressing tables and chests deceived viewers by hiding cosmetics inside concealed drawers and allowing women to keep secret their use of makeup. Even as dressing furniture anchored women’s attempts to move into new roles in the republic, it compromised their characters through fears of social counterfeit.

Masquerading as Colonists

This chapter studies a series of portraits of young women dressed for the masquerade, completed by English artist John Wollaston in Charleston, South Carolina. Although Wollaston painted the sitters in historic costume appropriate for a public masked ball, no masquerades were held in the British North American colonies. Instead, these fictional portrayals allowed colonial women to vicariously participate in the sexually riotous assemblies. For male colonists, the paintings underlined the need to contain women’s sexuality. In a colonial environment, many feared women’s proximity to native Americans would spur savage behaviors and compromise civil society. Most of the portraits feature young women about to be married, connecting their masked visages with the metaphor of a woman in courtship who masked her affections to attain the best husband. Wollaston’s adoption of mask iconography also resonates with the tumultuous 1760s, marked by the growing political crisis between Great Britain and her American colonies, when colonists questioned the nature of their identity as imperial subjects and feared British duplicity.

The Power of Paint

Chapter 2 focuses on mid-century Philadelphia’s burgeoning art community through the figure of travelling English portrait painter John Wollaston, who visited the city in 1752 and 1758/9. Wollaston’s presence encouraged the young student Francis Hopkinson to write a poem about the artist in the new periodical the American Magazine. By tracing the aesthetic responses that Hopkinson and the fellow students in his circle (including Benjamin West) had to Wollaston’s portraits the chapter charts Philadelphians’ engagement with the aesthetic debates raging in London over the role of the artist and the power of the portrait to civilize. Hopkinson embraced the new model of connoisseurship being popularized in the British art capital of London but recast it to argue that the portrait could civilize the sitter. Reading Wollaston’s portraits through the model of physiognomy reveals how viewers understood his paintings to improve sitters’ civility and how his paintings forged social connections between sitters.

Imprinting the Civil

This chapter explores a group of large city views, also known as long views, sponsored by local subscribers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, and engraved in London. These prints perfected urban environments by eliminating spaces of unruly commerce and crime and celebrating residents’ architectural accomplishments. They contributed to colonists’ efforts to reduce the wilderness by adapting the prospect view and drawing upon the science of surveying. The views allowed subscribers to articulate their common goals for urban planning and hope for their cities’ growth. Intended for a British imperial audience, the prints also asserted colonial Americans’ civic growth and reminded British viewers of North America’s large size. Whereas English thinkers belittled America’s fauna and her land, colonial city views proclaimed North America’s magnitude.

Epilogue

In the early republic, Americans faced the challenge of replacing colonial networks of objects with bonds of citizenship. Material goods became increasingly politicized, including Gilbert Stuart’s Lansdowne portrait of George Washington, which celebrates the first president as a civilian leader. New object types brought citizens together at a continental scale, including engravings of Washington, engraved city views, and creamware, or queensware, dining goods. Yet George Washington’s dentures point to the tensions in establishing civility that continued to haunt the new nation. Constructed from teeth taken from Washington’s slaves, the dentures suggest the barbarity that Americans sought to repress in their new political republic.

Introduction

Elite colonists in the port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston sought to construct a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. They turned to material artifacts as a means of building networks between people. Through purchase of common goods and similar modes of object use, colonial consumers formulated communities of taste that drew individuals together. Colonists relied upon the power of assemblage to transform their individual identities and to create a sensus communis. The portraits painted by Joseph Blackburn in Bermuda and New England illuminate the regional divergences in transatlantic polite culture and point to the local bonds forged through artifacts and objects’ power to assemble the social.