In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America

Preface

Preface We covet old letters as special windows into the past. Sometimes they reveal the private lives of public figures: a political giant like John Adams or a literary lion like Herman Melville. At other times they bring us in touch with ordinary people who experienced extraordinary events, such as soldiers in the American Civil War. Reading letters from the past is a way of escaping the lifeless parade of historical dates one learns in grade school. We can instead witness history from the ‘‘inside,’’ full of the kinds of uncertainties and fallibilities we find in our own lives in the present. No matter how technologically advanced our modern world might seem compared to the past, there is something gratifying in reading how people once fretted about their family or grumbled about their work, just as we do in the present. And it is especially vivifying to read the letters of ordinary people who did not fully comprehend the magnitude of their own unfolding moment in history—even as it suddenly somehow became ‘‘historic’’ through, say, the outbreak of war or the advent of a new technology. So might we, in our own ordinariness, be eyewitness to historic change in our time. So I have been told, anyway, whenever I self-interestedly asked people why they enjoy reading letters from the past. There is unabashed narcissism , of course, in this kind of fetishizing of ordinary people, and private life, and mundane experience: all taken to be more meaningful to the future than could ever be realized at the time. Yet in our haste to immerse ourselves in the mystery and magic of old letters, an essential historical question is rarely asked. There is not only the importance we assign to such letters—as we witness ‘‘historic’’ events through the eyes of the people experiencing them firsthand—but there are also the meanings they assigned to the writing and conveying and reading of letters . What did people in the past imagine that letter writing could do in their lives? It was certainly not to enlighten us in the future. How much did letter writing enable them to apprehend the world around them, and how much did it enable them to take action in that world? How much, in other words, did letter writing enable people to imagine themselves making history, not just witnessing it? These questions were crucial in the eighteenth century because letter xii Preface writing then became a new social practice for many kinds of people throughout the anglophone Atlantic world: both Britain and its American colonies. The best modern analogy might be the arrival of email into the life of the late twentieth century, spreading from military applications in the 1960s to business use in the 1970s and finally to general use in the 1990s. Email now seems ubiquitous: an activity of daily life and a detail in Hollywood films. Letter writing achieved in the mideighteenth century a comparable magnitude of social expansion and cultural salience. More and more people heard about it; they learned how to do it from manuals and schools; they bought the technology to do it; they fussed over the precision of their words; they gradually came to use letter writing for more and more of their activities in life; and ultimately they came to take it for granted, as if letter writing had always been part of their everyday world. This book is about two waves of historical transformation in the eighteenth century: a first wave when letter writing beckoned as an exciting new mode of communication and expression for many people, and a second when they turned it into routine and presumption. Old letters can serve as special windows into past experience, but above all into the intersection of cultural imagination and social action. This book is therefore about people aspiring, striving, and investing—an energetic if uncertain commitment to innovation. And it is also about people mastering , utilizing, and internalizing—the fading of innovation into unconscious routine. Ultimately, the history of letter writing in the eighteenth century is about the construction of a powerful myopia: not obliviousness to a future that people in the past could not possibly predict, but blindness to an accumulation of social and cultural power far beyond their intentions or recognitions at the time. We rightly devote the study of history to the exercise of power in the past, particularly the domination of one group over another, but this book is about another form of covert power...