The Age of Antiquarians

JF: Karen’s story spoke to the power of recovering the past. And this next story shows how that process of recovery is something Americans have been doing — or attempting to do — since at least the early 1800s.

Back then, the United States was still young. The nation was charging into the future, and cities were modernizing at a rapid pace. Most Americans were focused on the nation’s future. But not all.

JF: In this next segment, you’ll hear me chat with Seth Cotlar about early American “antiquarians,” people who made it their business to collect and preserve the past.

JF: Less dire, but no less moving (given the intellectual climate of April of 2020) was my interview with historian Seth Cotlar about early American “antiquarians” — people who made it their business to collect and preserve the past. The interview was fun — which is obvious when you listen to it. But what moved me was the ardent, sometimes unstructured and unplanned, often random, but heartfelt efforts of people in the early nineteenth century to record and collect memories and memorabilia of the American past. Of course, this was a white male past without question. But in the end, Seth and I were telling a story about people trying to recover the past in some way — and it drove home the undeniable realization that the past can never be recovered.

JF: So, here’s our conversation from the show “Saving American History.”

SETH COTLAR: My name is Seth Cotlar, and I teach history at Willamette University.
JOANNE: Cotlar says if a 19th-century American visited a Revolutionary War battlefield, they would probably just encounter apathetic farmers.

SETH COTLAR: People would come by, curious about these places, and would ask people about them. They’d say, oh yeah, I guess something happened here. I don’t know. Maybe it was over there.
[LAUGHTER]
Ask Bob. I think his farm is where they were fighting, or something.

JOANNE: Even some of our most revered historical sites were in danger of being flattened.

SETH COTLAR: Independence Hall– I think at one point they were considering just tearing it down because it was in the way of new, modern construction.

JOANNE: Why? I mean, it’s hard to imagine these places being really taken for granted in that way. So what do you attribute that to?

SETH COTLAR: I don’t know. Do you have theories about this? I mean–

JOANNE: Well, it’s a really interesting question. Maybe it really is that it isn’t the founding yet, to them. It’s just that stuff that just happened.

SETH COTLAR: Right. And the nation itself doesn’t feel monumental and grandiose yet? Perhaps that’s it? That it’s like a junior varsity country?

JOANNE: But that started to change by the 1820s. That’s when Americans realized that objects, and people, from the 18th century were starting to disappear.

SETH COTLAR: And then when Adams and Jefferson die on the same day of July 4th 1826, 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence, it leads again to this sense of the passing of this generation, who bequeathed to us this nation in which we now live.

JOANNE: Americans started snapping up biographies of George Washington and other political figures as part of this new appreciation for the past. These biographies were mostly written by elite men of property who knew the founding fathers. But less famous people began collecting stories from the past, too. They called themselves antiquarians

SETH COTLAR: Was it the age of antiquarians?
[LAUGHTER]

JOANNE: Yes. This is, indeed, the age of antiquarians. Now, Cotlar told me about one of the first antiquarians, a Philadelphia bank clerk named John Fanning Watson.

SETH COTLAR: In his 30s or 40s, probably, in the late 1810s or early 1820s, he just became obsessed with what he called ancient Philadelphia and the olden times and started collecting information in his spare time. And apparently he also did some of this on his work time, as well, which made the manager at his bank not very happy with him. One of his–

JOANNE: Well, and like what? What was he doing during work?

SETH COTLAR: He was probably looking over old books and taking notes on them, or– gosh, I don’t know. He certainly wasn’t browsing the internet.

JOANNE: Much of the best information on ancient Philadelphia– which, by the way, was pretty much the 18th century– was preserved in family letters stashed away in trunks. So, in the hope of saving some of that stuff, John Fanning Watson started walking around the city, knocking on the doors of prominent Philadelphians.

SETH COTLAR: And he would just go knock on the door and say, hey, did you know that your house was 100 years old? And, by his account, If we can trust him, people would be really excited about this and would want to know more and would start asking him questions. So I think he felt himself like he was sort of the Pied Piper of the olden days. He would try to go around and get other people excited.
He also liked to go around interviewing people, old people. He basically deputized a bunch of other people, who– hey, if you run into someone in their 80s or 90s– the list that I found had, like, 30 questions on it. It involved things like, tell me about Blackbeard and what you know about Blackbeard. Tell me about natural hair and the first time you ever saw natural hair, which I assume means men without wigs, not wearing wigs.

JOANNE: Wow

SETH COTLAR: He asked about carriages, to tell them about carriages. He asked them whether or not young people stayed out as late back in the days as they do now, whether people had porches on their houses or not. It was very much the stuff of what we, today, would call cultural history or social history. He wanted to know about the texture of daily life in the city of Philadelphia in the late 18th century 30 or 40 years in the past, with this sense that it was just really different. What it looked and smelled and felt like just was really different than what it is now.

JOANNE: But so he’s giving these lists, seemingly, to his friends to ask old people. So it’s not even just– a historian might say, oh, I want to understand what this period was like. But this is bigger than that, right? He’s collecting on a much wider scale, right?

SETH COTLAR: Right. Yeah. And there really is a sense that he wants to preserve this. He strikes up these conversations with people on a canal boat, and it turns out that this person just happens to have fought in the Battle of Saratoga. And, oh, look, they happen to have a bullet with them in their pocket!
[LAUGHTER]

SETH COTLAR: [INAUDIBLE] And they just give him this stuff. Sometimes it’s kind of hard to believe, like, really? But there’s a way in which, when he when he starts asking these questions about the olden times of people who he meets, that frequently he meets with the response of, wait a minute! You’re actually interested in this? Well, let me tell you– And then people just kind of unburden themselves and start talking about this. It was almost like– not a taboo– but it was almost something that people were slightly ashamed, or felt was devalued, talking about this past of 40 or 50 or 60 years ago.

JOANNE: So we know that Watson certainly wasn’t the only person running around and collecting pieces of wood from old houses and pieces of clothing, and asking people about hair. But why don’t you tell us about some of the other people that were doing the same thing?

SETH COTLAR: Yeah, so there was a whole network of these local historians that began to emerge in the 1820s and ’30s. And they became aware of each other as a kind of loose community of antiquaries. Probably the most important antiquary– and that’s what they called themselves, they were antiquaries– of the 1820s and ’30s was a man named Christopher Columbus Baldwin, who was the first professional librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, which today, the historians in the audience will know, is probably the most important archive for studying the history of 18th- and 19th-century America. Christopher Columbus Baldwin took it upon himself to try to collect every single thing printed in North America before the time he was living.

JOANNE: Wow.

SETH COTLAR: In other words, he would hear about some old tavern in Boston that apparently had a full year of the Boston Gazette from the 1760s. And he would go to Boston and go to that tavern keeper and give him money to get that one year of the Boston Gazette that they didn’t have in their collection. He has this great account in his diary where he spends a week in Boston in August, sweating bullets in an attic going through all of these papers, part of which included part of Cotton Mather’s diary, which he saved from oblivion, because it was about to be just thrown out and burned because the person who had lived in the house had died. And he took all that stuff. And he rented several carts with– I think it was something like 2,000 to 3,000 pounds worth of materials–

JOANNE: Wow.

SETH COTLAR: –and trucked it all back to Worcester, Massachusetts to be housed in the American Antiquarian Society.
So I think they almost felt themselves to be a bit like the collectors of things that other people would do important work with. And Watson himself says that’s exactly what he intends. He’s just collecting as much stuff as he can, in really no particular order, and other people will then make of it what they will.
And that’s kind of interesting. His capacious understanding of what counts as history is something that makes him feel really modern to us– that he cares about what people’s hair looked like! I don’t think he knew why anybody would care, and I don’t think he even knew why he was interested in it. He just knew he was curious about it. And, thankfully, he was, because now, if we want to write about the history of hairstyles or the history of fashion– for example, one of the things he did in his manuscript version of the Annals is that he clipped sections of the dresses that women wore to the Meschianza in the 1780s in Philadelphia–

JOANNE: –which was this grand ball. It was a big dance, the Meschianza.

SETH COTLAR: Right, this big dance held by British officers stationed in Philadelphia, which is an event that a lot of historians have subsequently written about as this window into the culture of Philadelphia in the 1780s. And a lot of the raw materials that we use to do that were collected by people like John Fanning Watson.

JOANNE: So I have a question for you, Seth. So how do these people feel about the past? Are they collecting all these things because they’re longing for that time, and they want to go back to that time?

SETH COTLAR: I think that there’s an element of that. There’s a degree of melancholy about this, a sense of loss, that can’t be made better. But I think they understood that that past was not coming back. They understood that the railroad was here and was here to stay. What they’re registering is, when change happens, it produces both new things that are liberating and wonderful in some ways, yet, in the process of producing that new, it also destroys things from the past that we also maybe really like and really want.
And so it’s a way of kind of naming the harm that comes with change. The ideology of modernization tells you, you’re not allowed to feel that way. We’re not allowed to be sad and mournful for the days of walking between towns, or whatever it might be. That’s just silly, devalued nostalgia. But yet there’s also pleasure. This nostalgia always has– it’s always a mixture of pleasure and pain.

JOANNE: And all the more pleasurable, as you say, because they know they can’t have it again.
SETH COTLAR: Yeah, there’s a kind of bittersweetness to it, and a kind of acknowledgement of the pain of change, but without this kind of humorless desire to just stop it in its tracks and keep everything the same.

Seth Cotlar is a historian at Willamette University. He’s working on a cultural history of nostalgia in early America.