Reprinting the Literature of the Middle Ground

In the last ten years, the field of early American literature has witnessed a growing body of well-edited primary works to complement the major theoretical and historiographic revisions that marked the critical discourse of the 1990s. Scholars and students now have access to many new editions of primary texts that illustrate the role of print culture in the “republic of letters,” the importance of manuscript coteries to the development of civil society, the transatlantic, transnational, and hemispheric nature of literary and cultural formation in the American colonies, and the inflections of gender and race in the production and reception of literary works.¹

The middle ground, however, has appeared somewhat resistant to this reprinting impulse. Defined in 1990 by historian Richard White as “the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the non-state world of villages” (x), this early American geopolitical region and space of cultural production has remained elusive. In a recent reappraisal of White’s work on the middle ground, Philip Deloria argues that despite some critics’ rather sloppy use of the term as a metaphor rather than an explanatory description of a historical space, the middle ground remains important as a term in early American studies because it continues to focus our attention on “new cultural production within the frame of encounter” (23).

While some anthologists and editors have argued that creole nationalism was the primary engine of cultural production in the early Americas,² others have looked to White’s “non-state” world, concentrating on cultural encounters between Native and non-Native peoples as well as on those that took place among diverse indigenous nations. Scholars such as Deloria, James Merrell, and Daniel Richter have focused on “finding critical points of relations between Indians and non-Indians that lie outside military conflict, political negotiation, and economic exchange” (Deloria 23). It is in such relations, they argue, that one may find the seeds of a uniquely American body of letters, emerging from what Merrell calls the “cacophonous, kaleidoscopic frontier” (51).

Merrell’s Into the American Woods (Norton, 1999) offers us a tantalizing if speculative glimpse of the sort of “authors,” writers, or “speaking subjects” who inhabited the middle ground of late eighteenth-century British America. His portrait of John Pumpshire (Cawkeeponen)—a Christianized Delaware missionary and diplomatic go-between whose ability to read and write English made him a major player in backwoods Pennsylvania politics—is engaging for its imaginative depiction of a nascent literary culture in the middle ground:

Preparing for a trip, [Pumpshire] donned shoes and stockings to go with his ruffled shirt and waistcoat, packing spare clothes in a portmanteau. In that bag he might also put a Bible and a treaty to read en route, along with pencil and paper so that he could write a letter back to his colonial sponsors. On his return he might take tea with colonists in Reading or stop in Philadelphia to see his children, enrolled in school there.

(90)

As literary historians, we are dying to know exactly what was in John Pumpshire’s portmanteau. What sort of reading, besides the Bible, occupied his time? What sort of writing? What sorts of texts originated with writers like him, from deep within the “American woods?” How did they make their way into print and manuscript?

Two recently reprinted works from the middle ground offer some possibility of entering John Pumpshire’s world. The first, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake: The Story of a Soldier, Adventurer, and Emissary to the Cherokees, 1756–1765, has been edited by Duane H. King, executive director of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles and author of several important works on the...