Personating Stephen Burroughs: The Apparitions of a Public Specter

For the past two decades, questions of the public and publicity have taken center stage in studies of early American literature and culture. At the same time, considerations of performance, theatricality, and the theatrum mundi also have garnered increased attention. This essay examines the intersection of theatricality and publicity in early America through what at first may seem an unlikely body of work: the Memoirs and other texts of Stephen Burroughs, the early republic's most notorious confidence man. Burroughs's writing and practice, I argue, can unsettle received models of publicity by highlighting a quasi-theatrical mode of performance that divorces character from integrity. Republican notions of virtue notwithstanding, Burroughs's dis-integrated character does not simply collapse in contradiction but rather lives on spectrally. By following the trajectory of his name and character, I outline a renewed understanding of the early national public, which departs both from the Habermasian account of the public sphere and from subsequent revisions to that narrative. By attending to the public significance of persons and personae in Burroughs's work, I argue for a new perspective on the relation between publicity and performance, crystallized in the eighteenth-century term personating. I thus show how both early American and contemporary understandings of character and politics are unsettled by the apparitions of a public specter.

A Bold Stroke

In early 1792, a Bridgehampton, Long Island, schoolmaster brought about a minor scandal with his method of instructing his advanced students in "mathematics, geography, and rhetoric":

In paying attention to the latter, they had committed to memory a comedy of "A Bold Stroke for a Wife." After practicing it for a while in private, they formed a purpose to exhibit the performance in public. As there was no situation, the meetinghouse excepted, convenient for such an exhibition, it was determined, after consulting some of the leading men in the parish, to have the comedy performed in the meetinghouse. It was accordingly performed before a crowded audience.

(Burroughs, Memoirs 278–79)

Susannah Centlivre's 1717 play A Bold Stroke for a Wife follows the efforts of the resourceful Colonel Fainwell to win the hand of the clever heiress Anne Lovely by playing a series of roles—a fop, a mysterious traveler, a Dutch merchant, a country steward, an itinerant Quaker—calculated to obtain the consent of each of Mrs. Lovely's four guardians.¹ Full of comic pratfalls, broad asides to the audience, and bawdy humor, it celebrates the efficacy of "all the counterfeits performed by man," as Fainwell's disguises win the day and Mrs. Lovely (Centlivre 50). The rakish hero, who describes himself as "Mr. Proteus," sums it up thus: "From changing shape, and imitating Jove, / I draw the happy omens of my love. / I'm not the first young brother of the blade, / Who made his fortune in a masquerade" (42).

This spectacle, rather licentious fare for performance in church, ran afoul of Bridgehampton's Deacon Hedges, who "had not been consulted on this business" and "was much offended at the circumstance"; he "viewed the house polluted in consequence of the performance" (Burroughs, Memoirs 279). The comedy's successful staging, in fact, amounted to a double coup de théâtre: it not only provoked the deacon's impotent rancor but also, in figuring Fainwell's cunning assumption of dramatis personae, cleverly mirrored the real-world exploits of the schoolmaster-director: the notorious Stephen Burroughs, the most celebrated confidence man of late eighteenth-century America, whose Memoirs records this episode. Burroughs had made a peripatetic living variously as a ship's doctor, a preacher (he was trained as neither), and a teacher under a variety of names—on Long Island he "passed . . . for an Englishman lately from London" named Stephen Edenson (247).² His foray into the theater restaged his own protean antics; moreover, by importing a theatrical spectacle into the site of both ecclesiastical and municipal authority, it lampooned the antitheatrical prejudice of conservative Bridgehampton residents (a prejudice that also likely marked his own upbringing as the son of a Presbyterian minister).³ Both the play Burroughs staged and his...