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C h a p t e r 2 The Writerly Worlds of Joseph Johnson References to the pocket watches owned by a number of students and teachers affiliated with Moor’s Charity School are scattered among Eleazar Wheelock ’s accounts. Throughout the eighteenth century, watches were markers of bourgeois status, one item in a growing consumer marketplace that provided hitherto unheard-of goods and services for the colonial populace. Although watches seem to have been relatively widely available,1 they were still expensive and required care and attention, making it somewhat puzzling that members of Wheelock’s school would have such items. Norwich, just up the road from Wheelock’s school, is thought to have had the first watchmaker in America, when Thomas Harland settled there in 1773.2 But because watches were used by Wheelock’s students as much as a decade earlier, they must have been imported . Moses Peck, a financial agent and avid supporter of Wheelock’s school, was a Boston merchant occasionally identified as a watchmaker: perhaps he was a source for the watches at the school.3 We know that most of the white teachers and missionaries at Moor’s Charity School owned them: the names of Ralph Wheelock (Eleazar’s son), Jacob Johnson, Samuel Kirkland, Theophilus Chamberlain, Samuel Wales, and Amzi Lewis all come up in Wheelock’s account books as owners of watches, and all of them served at some time as schoolmasters of or missionaries for the Charity School. All these men needed to have their watches mended at one point or another, an expense Wheelock carefully noted in his accounts (the unfortunate Samuel Wales has his watch repaired three times, once replacing his watch key in Hartford and twice having work done to the watch itself). We also know that at least one of the Native pupils (and eventually a schoolteacher) at Wheelock’s school had a watch: Hezekiah Calvin (Delaware), owned a silver watch that his father gave to him (McCallum, 65). Indeed, in October 1767, after a two-year stint as schoolteacher among the Mohawks in upstate New York, Calvin wrote anxiously The Writerly Worlds of Joseph Johnson 75 to Wheelock wondering whether his fellow student Aaron Occom would be returning to Lebanon. “If not,” he writes, “I must go & get my watch for he has got it, I do not Love to lose it so” (McCallum, 59). A year later Calvin is angrily telling the Narragansett Indians of Charlestown, Rhode Island, that among the various indignities Wheelock has committed against his students is the fact that he took Calvin’s watch from him, supposedly finding it too fancy for a mere Indian (McCallum, 65). Most if not all of Wheelock’s male students, Indian and white, were outfitted with waistcoats or vests made just for keeping items like pocket watches readily at hand. Even if they did not own watches, it seems, there was every expectation that they would desire and one day come to own such an object— although perhaps not one as fancy as Calvin’s silver one. These fragmentary records give us a glimpse at a tantalizing object, one that seems to have marked the divide between savagery and civilization so clearly that even the charity scholars of Wheelock’s school were deemed appropriate recipients of such a luxury—that is, unless they failed to meet Wheelock’s standards. At Moor’s Charity School, it seems, the connection of watches to mission work was so self-evident that Wheelock paid for their repair out of the school’s accounts. Watches were one of the most potent symbols of English order and authority, at once concealed in a pocket and yet constantly pulled from hiding to enforce English standards of regulation. They transformed the way individuals and communities related to each other and to the larger world by restructuring time from its fluid, seasonal passage to a rigid and unchanging process of mechanical motions regardless of individual circumstance. Watches separated the notion of time from light, weather, and season; days and nights were divided into fractions through minutes and hours rather than through mornings, afternoons, and evenings. Watches made beginnings and endings more or less arbitrary in relation to any given task; because of watches and clocks students ended their day at a fixed time, not when they had accomplished the lesson of the day or when the light started to fade. With watches as opposed to clocks, scheduled time and its enforcement were in the hands...

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