Troubled manhood in the early republic: The life and autobiography of Sailor Horace Lane

Journal of the Early Republic

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 59-93

  Glenn, Myra C ^a  

^a ELMIRA COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950188756     PISSN: 02751275     EISSN: 15530620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jer.2006.0008     Document Type: Article

References (100)

1. Horace Lane, The Wandering Boy, or Careless Sailor, and Result of Inconsideration. A True Narrative (Skaneateles, NY, 1839)
2. Although various editions are given for the latter book, they all refer to the same 1835 text. See Carol Rinderknecht, comp., A Checklist of American Imprints for 1835 (Metuchen, NJ, 1985), 245.
3. See the following records of the Sailors' Snug Harbor, Sealevel, NC: "Register of Pensioners," vol. 1 (Aug. 1, 1833-Nov. 28, 1854), 73;
4. "Register of Inmates Admitted to Sailors' Snug Harbor," vol. 1 (1833-1894), 14.
5. "Record of Deaths and Burials" (1834-1908), 46, see no. 632 for Lane.
6. Scott A. Sandage, "Deadbeats, Drunkards, and Dreamers: A Cultural History of Failure in America, 1819-1893" (Ph.D. diss., State University of New Jersey at Rutgers, 1995);
7. Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001).
8. See also Toby L. Ditz, "Shipwrecked; Or, Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," Journal of American History, 81 (June 1994), 51-80;
9. Anthony E. Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993), 178-85.
10. On the historiography of antebellum sailors see Paul A. Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia, 2004);
11. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA, 2000);
12. Margaret S. Creighton, Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830-1870 (Cambridge, MA, 1995);
13. W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA, 1997);
14. and Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720-1870 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000).
15. Some historians have begun focusing on sailors' lives after they ended their seafaring careers. See, for example, Daniel Vickers and Vince Walsh, "Young Men and the Sea: The Sociology of Seafaring in Eighteenth-Century Salem, Massachusetts," Social History, 24 (Jan. 1999), 17-38,
16. and Daniel Vickers, "An Honest Tar: Ashley Bowen of Marblehead," The New England Quarterly, 69 (1996), 531-53.
17. On Hewes, see Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston, MA, 1999).
18. See also Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York, 2004).
19. The following works are a useful introduction to the changes transforming the antebellum literary marketplace: Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000);
20. Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York, 1993);
21. William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835 (Knoxville, TN, 1989);
22. Ronald J. Zboray, "Antebellum Reading and the Ironies of Technological Innovation" in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore, MD, 1989), 180-200;
23. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York, 1986), see esp. 3-79.
24. Louis Kaplan, comp., A Bibliography of American Autobiographies (Madison, WI, 1961), lists approximately sixty antebellum autobiographies by sailors.
25. Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York, 1996), esp. 72-97;
26. Phillippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin (Minneapolis, MN, 1989);
27. Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY, 1999);
28. Eakin, ed., American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect (Madison, WI, 1991);
29. James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ, 1980);
30. and Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meanings of Autobiography (Princeton, NJ, 1972).
31. Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (Princeton, NJ, 2000);
32. Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, CA, 2000);
33. Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA, 2000).
34. See also Appleby, ed., Recollections of the Early Republic: Selected Autobiographies (Boston, MA, 1997)
35. and Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997).
36. See also Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York, 2004), xv-xxi, 119-36.
37. Lane, The Wandering Boy, 191-92.
38. Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester, History of Saratoga County, New York. With Illlustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (Philadelphia, PA, 1878).
39. For discussion of how the market economy transformed the Hudson Valley area, see Martin Bruegel, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860 (Durham, NC, 2002).
40. Lane, The Wandering Boy, 10-12, 19-20.
41. For discussion of these developments see Jack Sweetman, American Naval History: An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present (Annapolis, MD, 1984), esp. 15-39;
42. Benjamin W. Labaree et al., America and the Sea: A Maritime History (Mystic, CT, 1998), 165-233.
43. See also Michael A. Palmer, Stoddert's War: Naval Operations During the Quasi-War with France, 1798-1801 (Columbia, SC, 1987)
44. and Howard P. Nash, Jr., The Forgotten Wars: The Role of the U.S. Navy in the Quasi War with France and the Barbary Wars 1798-1805 (South Brunswick, NJ, 1968).
45. and Palmer, Stoddert's War, 149.
46. Various scholars have noted that manhood is a dynamic, contested, ideological process that changes over time. See, for example, Michael Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (1978; rep., New York, 1990);
47. and Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, IL, 1995), esp. 5-30.
48. Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right To Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York, 1998), esp. 236-45.
49. Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: Mational Politics in the Mew Republic (New Haven, CT, 2001).
50. Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana, IL, 1989), esp. 26-27, 44-47, 300-309;
51. Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (Baltimore, MD, 1987).
52. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working-Class (1991; rev. ed., London, 1999).
53. Louis P. Masur, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Boston, MA, 1993)
54. and David W. Blight, ed., Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston, MA, 1993).
55. James Fulton Zimmerman, Impressment of American Seamen (New York, 1925) remains the standard work on this topic. Lane noted the following impressments in his pension application to Congress (see note 2): in 1801 impressed on board the Coromandel, in 1806 on board the Cormorant, and in 1811 on board the Prometheus. He also stated that in 1813 he was impressed for four days on board a British ship in Lisbon but was discharged when he "refus[ed] to do duty."
56. See also Lane, The Wandering Boy, 77-78, 85-86.
57. and Robert J. Hanks, "Sea Fight at Fayal," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, 93 (1967), 157-60.
58. "The Yankee Boy that went to Sea from 99 to 43" (John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, RI).
59. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, (1938; 2nd ed., rev., New York, 1989),
60. Lane, The Wandering Boy, 63-64, 68.
61. Myra C. Glenn, Campaigns Against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (Albany, NY, 1984), 155-64,
62. and Glenn, "The Naval Reform Campaign Against Flogging: A Case Study in Changing Attitudes Towards Corporal Punishment, 1830-1850," American Quarterly, 35 (Fall 1983), 408-25.
63. Thomas W. Laqueur, "Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative" in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, CA, 1989), 176-204.
64. For discussion of these issues see Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1998);
65. Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 1998);
66. Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860 (New York, 1993), 167-253.
67. See also Glenn, "Naval Reform Campaign Against Flogging" and Glenn, Campaigns Against Corporal Punishment.
68. Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), discusses the privatization of punishment and increasing isolation of convicts in postrevolutionary American prisons.
69. On antebellum sailors' resistance to flogging see Samuel Leech, Thirty Tears from Home . . . the Experience of Samuel Leech, Who Was for Six Tears in the British and American Navies . . . (Boston, MA, 1843), esp. 59-64, 87-90;
70. George S. Brooks, ed., James Durand: An Able Seaman of 1812. His Adventures on "Old Ironsides" and as an Impressed Sailor in the British Navy (1817; rep., New Haven, CT, 1926), 32-34;
71. James Wordon, The Life and Adventures of James M. Wordon, Who Visited a Great Part of the Habitable and Unhabitable Globe . . . (New London, CT, 1855), 22, 29;
72. Jacob A. Hazen, Five Years Before the Mast, or Life in the Forecastle Aboard of a Whaler and Man-of-War (Philadelphia, PA, 1854), 110-13.
73. Elaine Frantz Parsons, Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Baltimore, MD, 2003)
74. and Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 113-31;
75. Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours' Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England (Ithaca, NY, 1992), esp. 101-30;
76. William R. Sutton, Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore (University Park, PA, 1998), esp. 267-76.
77. W. David Lewis, From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, 1796-1848 (Ithaca, NY, 1965), 54-135.
78. Lane, Five Tears in State's Prison, 7-10;
79. Lewis, From Newgate to Dannemora, esp. 136-56. For quote see 142.
80. Lane, Five Years in State's Prison, 12.
81. For quote see Reuben Delano, Wanderings and Adventures of Reuben Delano . . . (New York, 1846), 66.
82. See also Leech, Thirty Years from Home, esp. 65-67, 109-11;
83. James Fenimore Cooper, ed., Ned Myers; or, A Life Before the Mast, introduction and notes by William S. Dudley (1843; rep., Annapolis, MD, 1989), esp. 53, 215, 243-46;
84. and Jacob Carter, My Drunken Life in Fifteen Chapters . . . (Boston, MA, 1847).
85. For discussion of these issues see Graham Donald Warder, "Selling Sobriety: How Temperance Reshaped Culture in Antebellum America" (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2000);
86. David S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal, eds., The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature (Amherst, MA, 1997).
87. The standard works on antebellum temperance remain essential reading. See particularly Ian R. Tyrrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800-1860 (Westport, CT, 1979).
88. Philip F. Gura, ed., Memoir of Stephen Burroughs. . . (Boston, MA, 1988) and Edmund Pearson, ed., The Autobiography of a Criminal: Henry Tufts (New York, 1930);
89. Richard B. Stott, ed., William Otter: History of My Own Times (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 44.
90. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, MA, 1988), esp. 54-91, discusses the subversive nature of reform literature.
91. Lane, The Wandering Boy, v, 209 for quotes.
92. For discussions of the antebellum self see Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA, 1997), esp. 109 ff.;
93. Louis P. Masur, '"Age of the First Person Singular': The Vocabulary of the Self in New England, 1780-1850," Journal of American Studies, 25 (Aug. 1991), 189-211.
94. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT, 1989).
95. See also Sutton, Journeymen far Jesus;
96. Jama Lazerow, Religion and the Working Class in Antebellum America (Washington, DC, 1995);
97. Ronald Schultz, "God and Workingmen: Popular Religion and the Formation of Philadelphia's Working Class, 1790-1830," in Religion in a Revolutionary Age, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, VA, 1994), 125-55;
98. Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1994).
99. See "General Armstrong, U.S. Armed Brig. Officers and Men and Marines," Office of Naval Records and Library, RG 45, Box 223 (National Archives).
100. See also William H. Glasson, Federal Military Pensions in the United States, ed. David Kinley (New York, 1918), 108-13.