Trinity Church

“Now, one Sunday morning I happened to go to Trinity Church, to hear a celebrated preacher, and finding myself rather early on the ground, I thought I would walk round to my chambers for a while.”

“Bartleby, the Scrivener,” by Melville was published in 1853.  The subtitle is “A Story of Wall-Street.”  The Trinity Church that the narrator mentions in the story is depicted in the following picture, at center left.  Here is the Wall Street of Melville’s time:

It is interesting to note that the Trinity Church is one of only three buildings that remain today from this scene.

Trinity Church is also known as Trinity Wall Street. It is located at the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street in New York City.  It is an historic, full-service parish church in the Episcopal Diocese of New York.

In 1696, the Church of England purchased land in Lower Manhattan for construction of a new church.  The first Trinity Church was a modest building that was constructed in 1698.  Queen Anne of England increased the parish’s land holdings to 215 acres in 1705.  The church was later destroyed in the Great New York City Fire of 1776.  This church saw the official end of the revolutionary war and is the resting place of many martyrs of the revolution, including Alexander Hamilton.  The Reverend Samuel Provoost was appointed Rector of Trinity in 1784.  The New York State Legislature ratified the charter of Trinity Church deleting the provision that asserted its loyalty to the King of England.  In 1787, Provoost was consecrated as the first Bishop of the newly formed Diocese of New York. Following his 1789 inauguration at Federal Hall, George Washington attended Thanksgiving service, at St. Paul’s Chapel, a chapel of the Parish of Trinity Church.  He continued to attend services there until the second Trinity Church was finished in 1790.  St. Paul’s Chapel is currently part of the Parish of Trinity Church and is the oldest public building in continuous use in New York City.  The second Trinity Church building was consecrated in 1790.  Here’s a view of it from 1830:

This structure was torn down after being weakened by severe snows during the winter of 1838–39.  It was rebuilt and completed by 1846. The 1846 Trinity Church building was designed by architect Richard Upjohn and is an example of Gothic Revival architecture.  This is the structure that the narrator in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” would have visited and it is the structure that we know today:

In 1976 the United States Department of Interior designated Trinity Church a National Historic Landmark because of its architectural significance and its place within the history of New York City.  That same year, Queen Elizabeth II visited this landmark.

Here is a modern-day view of the Trinity Church(before September 11):

And below is a modern-day picture of the Trinity Church as a part of Wall Street.  What would Melville think of the Wall Street of 2010?

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/LM/LM047-TRINITYCHURCH.htm

http://legacy.www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/art/print/exhibits/movingup/labelv.htm

What Does It Mean To Grow Old?

Thomas Cole

http://cedargrove.squarespace.com/thomas-cole-film/

“At first we want life to be romantic; later, to be bearable; finally, to be understandable.”   Louise Bogan

Throughout the Transcendentalist era and even presently many men and women try to express their vision of life via their artistic abilities, whether it is by pen or brush. The journey each artist takes us on during the nineteenth century teaches us to enjoy the romantic elements, bear and endure the devastating elements, and at the end through our faith we will be granted an understanding by a view of the whole picture of life. The key to the grand picture is to move in faith. The elements that one will encounter will be of both good and evil but it is in one’s adoration that we will be able to see beauty in the darkest of places.

American Landscape art became an art form that described the spiritual impact experienced by a journey through the Hudson River Valley. Many artists wrote and sketched their vision of nature as a divine presence. Among these artists one was looked to as a forefather of their movement, Thomas Cole. Cole was not formally taught but by the 1830s had an overwhelming need to share the beauty, divinity, and sanctity he envisioned in the surrounding landscapes. Known for many of his paintings his most influential was a series of four paintings entitled The Voyage of Life. Within these canvases Cole thought to transcend a moral and religious impression on the audience. The paintings follow a pilgrim from infancy to adulthood and eventually death; but lead by the hand of an angel. The portraits of landscape lead the viewer through a reflection of one’s life. Among the challenges experienced over a lifetime one’s faith is constantly tested but will ultimately lead to one’s salvation. Cole has been noted as saying “There are many windings in the stream of life and on this idea I have proceeded, its course toward the ocean of eternity, we all know it to be certain but not direct… (Cedar Grove)”

The landscape art developed in this time period helped to shape a nation. The vision was to embrace the purity and beauty of nature in the sublime and transcend that into one’s everyday life.  Once this incorporation has been achieved even in the most minimal of senses one may uncover his or her personal merits for growing old.

(n.d.). Retrieved from Cedar Grove: http://cedargrove.squarespace.com/thomas-cole-film/

Bartleby the Scrivener: Dead End Letters & Wall Street

Eyad Mustafa

At the end of “Bartleby the Scrivener,” the narrator (the Lawyer) reveals the one clue he has to Bartleby’s history: a rumor that Bartleby once worked in the dead-letter office. The Lawyer believes this is the cause of Bartleby’s strange behavior: “Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?” The Lawyer’s theory is that reading all those dead letters, intended for people who are dead or gone, must have been so depressing that it drove Bartleby slowly to his apathy and emotional detachment. Working at a law firm at Wall Street can be very, very boring. There is no view of the beauty of the outside world, no nature; just blank walls and cubicles. It is the opposite of what you need to live. The letters could also make a good metaphor for the drudgery of the emerging middle-class, blue-collar job. Sorting letters day in and day out could eventually be difficult for anyone to endure for a long time, and such repetitive tasks are, even today, a common source of depression for some employees. By making them dead letters, Melville makes the depressing nature of such a task more explicit. When he changes jobs, Bartleby is willing to write letters or copies for some time, but when he is asked to read them, he would “prefer not to.” For a short time, he finds some satisfaction in the creation, rather than the destruction, of letters, but finally he is unable to do even that.

Bartleby counts for no more than a commodity in the lawyer’s office. But he prefers not to be one, which makes him the “forlornest” of mankind. The lawyer describes him as a “lean, penniless wight”, one who spends all his days copying for “four cents a folio”. He cannot escape from the work place; in fact, the lawyer eventually discovers that he lives at the office, among the emptiness of Wall Street. As the lawyer says, “what miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall Street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is emptiness”. Bartleby lives among the walls of Wall Street which has led to his strange and lonely behavior.

Nemesis

“Justice is the rhyme of things; Trade and counting use the self-same tuneful muse; and Nemesis, who with even matches odd,  who arthwart space redresses the partial wrong, fills the just period, and finishes the song.”

-Excerpt from Merlin II, Emerson, 1847

Today, we define the word nemesis as, “something that a person cannot conquer, achieve, etc,” or as, “an opponent or rival whom a person cannot bet or overcome” (dictionary.com).  When Emerson mentions Nemesis in Merlin II, he is referring to the Greek goddess of Fate (Heath Anthology of American Literature, 1676).

Nemesis, Roman marble from Egypt, 2nd century AD (Louvre)

Also known as Rhamnousia/Rhamnusia, Nemesis was the goddess “of divine retribution against those who succumb to hubris,” or in other words, extreme haughtiness or arrogance.  She “punished excessive pride, evil deeds, undeserved happiness or good fortune, and the absence of moderation.  She was the personification of the resentment aroused in both gods and mortals by those who committed crimes with impunity, or who enjoyed undeserved luck” (http://thanasis.com).  The word nemesis stems from the Greek word, nemein, which means, “to give what is due.”  Nemesis’ intent was to strip away this arrogance caused by extreme fortune or impunity by invoking loss and suffering on the guilty party so they will become humble.

Nemesis, by Alfred Rethel (1837

She was the opposite of Tykhe, the goddess of Fortune, and was the check and balance of lives regarding undeserved extreme happiness or fortune.  One couldn’t have too much of it, because Nemesis would then change their fate.  Because of this, the Greeks thought of her as a spirit void of remorse.

Nemesis and Tykhe

The Pearl and New Orleans

 ”The public and shameless sale of beautiful mulatto and quadroon girls has acquired a notoriety, from the incidents following the capture of the Pearl…speech of Honorable Horace Mann, ‘In that company of seventy-six persons, who attempted, in 1848, to escape from the District of Columbia in the schooner Pearl, and whose officers I assisted in defending, there were several young and healthy girls, who had those peculiar attractions of form and feature which connoisseurs prize so highly. Elizabeth Russel was one of them. She immediately fell into the slave-trader’s fangs, and was doomed for the New Orleans market’ “(Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin,619-620).                                

  ”The Pearl,” is the name of a sixty-five foot Chesapeake Bay schooner that played a significant role in the transportation of enslaved people to safe harbors from Washington, D.C. In 1848, the Pearl was chartered by free African Americans for $100 to help 77 people escape the opppression, degradation, and shackles of slavery. This heroic, yet, risky, journey has been documented and is one of the most upsetting stories of the underground path to freedom. Unfortunatley, the free and enslaved passengers were ultimately captured in the Chesapeake Bay and returned to D.C.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         When it comes down to New Orleans, Louisiana, as well as other southern states and the fair-skinned or lighter complexioned slaves, in particular the women, it can be safe to assume that these women were sold to the “market” for prostitution. Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology at Ferris State University, wrote an essay titled: Jezebel Stereotype , an essay from information he gathered from other people’s research on the portrayal of African American women in America from slavery, up until present day. In this essay, there is research done by a contemporary sociologist, K.Sue Jewell, whose conceptualization is based on a kernel of historical truth. Jewell says that during the slavery-era, many mulatto’s were sold into prostitution, as well as the free-born light-skinned women. These women became the willing concubines of wealthy, white, southern men. This system is called placage, which is a formal arrangement for the white suitor/customer to financially support the black woman and her children in exchange for long-term sexual services. Moreover, in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the chapter titled: The Quadroon’s Story, the character Cassy, tells Tom her life story about how she was a daughter of a slave (mother) and slave owner (father) in New Orleans, and when her father died, she was introduced by a lawyer to a young, handsome man who , “had paid two thousand dollars for me, and I was his property…He put me into a beautiful house with servants, horses, and carriages, and furniture, and dresses…I did want him to marry me…But he convinced me that it would be impossible,” (516-517).

     Ultimately, Cassy wounded up with Legree, as well as Emmeline, who was also picked by Legree because of her distinctive looks to satisfy him sexually. Then there was Eliza, also a fair-skinned slave, whose appearance infactuated the trader, Haley. Haley told Mr. Shelby, “You might make your fortune on that ar gal in Orleans, any day. I’ve seen over a thousand, in my day, paid down for gals not a bit handsomer” (45). These unfortunate tales in this story was Stowe’s way of condemning the slave-owners without being too overt, especially about the treatment of lighter-skinned slave women. She always made refernces to selling the women to New Orleans, but never actually made it out to be for prostitution, or placage.

     Jewell, also noted that, “it is a mistake to assume that only, or even mainly, fair-complexioned Black women were sexually objectified by the larger American society. From the early 1630′s to the present, Black American women of all shades have been portrayed as hypersexual ‘bad-black girls’ “. Pilgrim, notes that Black women stereotypes were that they were lascivious by nature; seductive, alluring, beguiling, tempting, and lewd. Meanwhile, White women were known as models of self-respect, self-control, modesty, and sexual purity. Perhaps, that is why the wealthy, white men preferred the “quadroon or light-complexioned women”, because they were good for “passing”, but since they had black-blood in them, they were only good for the reputations black women were stigmatized with.

                                                                                                                                         

Works Cited

Stowe, Harriet Beecher,Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly.

  (New York: Penguin Group, 1981), 7-629

http://www.southernexposuresbycarol.com

http://www.pearlcoalition.org/

www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/jezebel/

indentured servitude – by kasie wong

Kasie Wong

Carol Singley

March 31, 2010

AMII: Image Gloss II

Indentured Servants

An indentured servants’ contract is typically three to seven years long, where a person works to learn a trade and exchange, they are provided with transportation, food, clothing, lodging and other things a person might need for a day to day living. Unlike slavery, an indentured servant only has to work for a designated time period and after they are finished with their years listed in their contract they are free to go with two pairs of clothing items and $50 as well as a new trade under their belts.

In North America, many of the indentured servants were immigrants from Europe such as the Irish, Scottish, English, and Germans, in addition to the African slaves. Ideally, indentured servitude could be seen as a sort of apprenticeship, however, that wasn’t always the case as some were subject to violence that occasionally could result in death. In the Caribbean, indentured servants were also mainly European young males and their contracts didn’t differ much from the North American ways of indentured servants. The major differences was that these indentured servants were allowed to own their own lands and were able to go to a local magistrate if he was being treated badly by his master. In Australia and the Pacific, a much more violent history of indentured servitude was the case. Instead of voluntarily entering indentured servitude like most Europeans chose to do so, these islanders were kidnapped into long-term servitude, which was labeled as ‘blackbirding.’ Blackbirded islanders were taken to the sugar cane fields of Queensland, Australia. Because of these often, violent kidnappings it still remains unknown and controversial as to just how many islanders were kidnapped or coerced into indentured servitude.

Modern day examples of indentured servitude include practices held in the United Arab Emirates. Servants are generally from Pakistan and India where once they enter the Emirates, their passports are taken from them and are not told when they will be returned. The servants are then provided with basic necessities of every day life, but the people who hold their passports often decide their return dates.

The “Free” North of the 1800s

       History books have long taught slavery in a way that depicted the South as pro-slavery and the North as where freedom reigned. While the South was pro-slavery, exactly where the North stood on the issue is a bit murky. There were many abolitionists and anti-slavery advocate that were active in the northern colonies and territories, but the idea of a free black man still unnerved many people. Though slavery was not officially abolished by the United States government until 1865 with the passing of the 13^th Amendment, certain states took it upon themselves to outlaw slavery in their respective region. The abolition of slavery in 1802 by the Ohio Constitution was decades ahead of the nation as a whole with regards to slavery. However, just because slavery was outlawed, free black men still had extreme restrictions placed on them. Like their slave counterparts, free blacks lived an incredibly restrictive existence due to “Black Laws.” Blacks petitioned against these laws, but were told by the state legislature that they did not have the right to petition the government for anything whatsoever.

          In some places, Northern freemen were required to carry passes when traveling in some places, and in others they were forbidden to own property. Voting was out of the question, as most northern states passed disfranchisement laws, but despite this, free blacks were still taxed in New England. Some rules varied state to state, such as in Massachusetts, free blacks were required to work on roads a certain number of days in a year. In Boston, they could not carry a cane unless they were unable to walk without one.

         Pennsylvania colonies passed the “Act for the better Regulation of Negroes” that set penalties for any free blacks who harbored runaway slaves or received stolen property from masters. These penalties were often much higher than those for their white counterparts. Additionally, “if the considerable fines could not be paid, the justices had the power to order a free black person put into servitude. Under other provisions of the act, free blacks who married whites were to be sold into slavery for life; for mere fornication or adultery involving blacks and whites, the penalty for the black person was to be sold as a servant for seven years. Throughout Pennsylvania colony, the children of free blacks, without exception, were bound out by the local justices of the peace until age 24 (if male) or 21 (if female).”

            Similar to the enforcement of slave laws in the South and Midwest, adherence to these race laws was selective. The real “value” of such laws was the simple harassment and the constant threat being held over these individuals. Calling it ‘freedom’ seems like a sugar-coating on a still ugly fact. That so-called freedom was a notion that was held precariously at the tolerance of the whites. Even after the end of the Civil War, 19 of 24 Northern states did not allow blacks to vote. Nowhere did they serve on juries before 1860. They could not give testimony in 10 states, and were prevented from assembling in two. Several western states had prohibited free blacks from entering the state. Blacks who entered Illinois and stayed more than 10 days were guilty of “high misdemeanor.”

 Alexis de Tocqueville sums up exactly the comparison between the “free” North and the slavery south:

“So the Negro [in the North] is free, but he cannot share the rights, pleasures, labors, griefs, or even the tomb of him whose equal he has been declared; there is nowhere where he can meet him, neither in life nor in death.

In the South, where slavery still exists, less trouble is taken to keep the Negro apart: they sometimes share the labors and the pleasures of the white men; people are prepared to mix with them to some extent; legislation is more harsh against them, but customs are more tolerant and gentle.”

 

Works Cited

Harper, Douglas. “Exclusion of Free Blacks.” Slavery in the North. Douglas Harper, 2003. Web. 31 Mar 2010. <http://www.slavenorth.com/exclusion.htm>.

(1800 Census) http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1800-return-whole-number-of-persons.pdf

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ht/39.2/images/rael_fig03b.jpg

http://marksrichardson.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/reynolds-political-map-of-the-united-states_31.jpg