Early American Archives and the Evidence of History

In 1792, the antiquarian and scholar Jeremy Belknap penned the introductory address to the first volume of the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. In the address, Belknap announced the society's ambition to "preserve authentic monuments of every memorable occurrence" in the new nation's short history (2). But Belknap also paused to consider the difficulties facing such a project in the young republic. Acknowledging that the United States lacked the monuments and statues of Old World civilizations, Belknap argued instead that the thriving print culture of the United States offered a more reliable way of preserving the past than the edifices of the ancient world. "The art of printing," he wrote, "affords a mode of preservation more effectual than Corinthian brass or Egyptian marble; for statues and pyramids which have long survived the wreck of time, are unable to tell the names of their sculptors, or the date of their foundations" (3). Preserving through multiple copies, print salvages text from crumbling mediums. Such a project Belknap saw as essential to fully understanding the past. Print can capture "[n]ot only names, dates, and facts" but also the "principles and reasonings" of great men and "causes and consequences" of events, allowing otherwise mute artifacts to assume their place in the cause-and-effect narratives of national history (2).

The Collections offered one particularly vivid illustration of Belknap's contention that print could carry out the work of memory previously performed by monuments. Alongside letters from Puritan forefathers and memoirs of the Revolutionary War, the volume reprinted an inscription copied from the gravestone of Silas Paul, a Wampanoag Indian and pastor buried on Gay Head in 1787. Belknap recorded the inscription in its original language, an alphabetized version of a Wampanoag dialect used by Christian Indians on Martha's Vineyard. As if to dramatize the fragility of this text, however, he also presented accompanying "Explanations": "1. Here. 2. The body. 3. Lies. 4. Silas Paul. 5. An ordained preacher. 6. Died. 7. Then, or in" (140). The rendering of the inscription in English coupled Belknap's version of media history with the familiar sentimental trope of the dying Indian. While the text would be worn away and the language forgotten, print had come to the rescue.

But the typeset pages of the Collections were not the marker's final resting place. It would have another life in a twenty-first century dispute about territory, sovereignty, and history. In 2008, representatives of the Wampanoag Repatriation Confederation approached officials in Warren, Rhode Island, about the possibility of reinterring tribal members in nearby Burr's Hill Park. The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) had long claimed the park as a royal burial ground, and mining operations in 1913 had unearthed numerous graves. The request sparked controversy, but not because of conflicts between town and tribe. The proposal was instead challenged by Pokanoket Wampanoags, who claimed rights to the park based on seventeenth-century tribal boundaries. The controversy pitted colonial-era tribal affiliations against a broader conception of Wampanoag identity. As Edith Andrews, a reparations officer for the Aquinnahs, explained, "[w]e're a confederacy, we don't come as one person or another person. We come as a nation . . . and we know it was the royal burial site" (Crocker). In this historical narrative, dispersed tribal members such as Silas Paul had not disappeared—they had yet to be truly buried. Colonial-era gravestones were a holding place, a temporary marker in the broader sweep of tribal history. As John Peters, a repatriation officer for the Aquinnahs, remarked, "It has been our policy to bring as many of our ancestors as close as possible to their final resting place" (Crocker). If Jeremy Belknap preserved the text of Silas Paul's...