“Across the Continent … and Still the Republic!” Inscribing Nationhood in Samuel Bowles's Newspaper Letters of 1865

Abstract

On a trip across the continent in the summer of 1865, newspaper publisher Samuel Bowles recorded his experiences in a series of letters to the readers of his newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts. Reprinted in newspapers across the country and collected later that year as Across the Continent: A Summer's Journey to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States, with Speaker Colfax, Bowles's letters provide a view of the frontier and its people, as well as a discourse of nationalism. Building on a framework of epistolary journalism, and with theoretical models of nationalism in mind, this study explores how Across the Continent provided evidence of a new nationhood for the readers of 1865. It examines passages in which Bowles directly articulated a philosophy of nationhood as well as those passages in which he indirectly supported the work of ideological and economic nation-building through an exploration of landscape, a profile of the citizenry, and challenges to national sovereignty. It also discusses the ideological linchpin and guarantor of Bowles's philosophy of nation, the transcontinental railroad.

Notes

Samuel Bowles, Across the Continent: A Summer's Journey to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States, with Speaker Colfax (Springfield, MA: Bowles, 1865).

Greeley's trip in 1859 is well known for his interview with Brigham Young. See Charles T. Duncan, ed., An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 by Horace Greeley (New York: Knopf, 1964). Though not the first, Greeley's high-profile trip set the tone, and an 1866 review of Across the Continent called Bowles the latest in a series of westward-traveling newspapermen: “Since Mr. Greeley set the example, it has been the manifest destiny of every enterprising journalist to take an occasional trip across the continent, and personally inspect his subscribers.” See T. W. Higginson, “Reviews and Literary Notices,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1866, 524–525.

During the 1860s, the Springfield Republican enjoyed quickly expanding circulation, according to Willard Bleyer, from 11,280 subscribers to the weekly edition in 1860, “distributed over almost every state and territory in the Union,” to nearly double during the Civil War. See Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 261. James Melvin Lee lists Bowles as one of the nine “editorial giants” of the day. The Springfield Republican, he stated, “even before the war... had become one of the most influential papers of the provincial press.” See James Melvin Lee, History of American Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 276, 319. For more information about the Springfield Republican, see George S. Merriam, The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles (New York: Century, 1885), and Richard Hooker, The Story of an Independent Newspaper: One Hundred Years of the Springfield Republican, 1824–1924 (New York: Macmillan, 1924).

Bowles, Across the Continent, vii. A former newspaperman from South Bend, Indiana, Colfax (1823–1885) was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1854, chosen as speaker in 1863, and elected Ulysses S. Grant's vice president in 1868. During the time of the trip, Colfax was enormously popular and viewed by many as a potential Republican nominee for the presidency. Seven years later, Colfax became embroiled in the Crédit Mobilier scandal and was not renominated to appear on the presidential ticket.

This study will identify Bowles's letters with the Roman numeral format he used in Across the Continent.

Newspaper archives show Bowles's letters were reprinted in newspapers across the country, from New York to San Francisco.

When Across the Continent was published in November 1865, it achieved immediate popularity, selling 10,000 copies in its first three months and, according to Merriam, a total of 15,000 copies, with a second edition published in 1866. Contemporary newspaper articles indicate that the book was widely anticipated following the trip, and it quickly became a topic of press and public interest, the subject of book reviews and reading circles. See Merriam, Life and Times of Samuel Bowles, and Hooker, Story of an Independent Newspaper.

Bowles, Across the Continent, 159.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). Anderson's influential work was originally published in 1983.

Ibid., 6.

E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 90.

Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24–25.

Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002), 3.

Lawson, Patriot Fires, 12. In 1863, Edward Everett Hale published The Man Without a Country, the story of an American Army lieutenant who denounces the United States, in the Atlantic in December 1863, ultimately selling more than a half million copies in book form. For a survey of Civil War–era preachers, poets, and other intellectuals who urged and enshrined patriotic conceptions of the nation in poetry, sermons, and books, see also Paul C. Nagel, This Sacred Trust: American Nationality, 1798–1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

Lawson, Patriot Fires, 181.

Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1977), 39.

Keller, Affairs of State, 39.

Bowles, Across the Continent, 222.

Ibid., v. Bowles contrasts his work with previous accounts of the West, among which he found “no connected and complete account of this great Western Half of our Continent” (iv).

Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) is William Merrill Decker's authoritative work of critical letter theory in which he theorizes letter writing in its structural sense and examines the rhetorical and historical contextualization of the epistolary act.

Elsewhere, I explore nineteenth-century epistolary journalism as an early form of literary journalism. The form is distinct, since epistolary journalism carries epistolary features rarely seen in other forms of reportage, features including structures, such as salutation of the reader, acknowledgment of separation, closing statements, and so forth; content, such as personal references, humor, shared experiences, and so forth; and authorship. The current study expands on the previous study by making a case that these features of epistolary journalism supported the business of ideological nation-building. For more complete information about epistolary journalism, see Katrina J. Quinn, “Exploring an Early Version of Literary Journalism: Nineteenth-Century Epistolary Journalism,” Literary Journalism Studies 3 (Spring 2011): 33–52.

As Elizabeth Hewitt argues, correspondence represents an alternation between absolute intimacy, in which the other is “co-extensive with our idea,” and radical solitude, in which the other is “withdrawn from our sight.” See Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 56–63.

From Lincoln's December 1, 1862, message to Congress. See William E. Geinapp, ed., This Fiery Trial: The Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 143–144.

See Janis P. Stout, The Journey Narrative in American Literature: Patterns and Departures (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983). Stout explores basic patterns of American journey narrative, roughly corresponding in periods of ascendance to chronological historical eras. The five patterns are narratives of exploration and escape; the home-founding journey; the return; the quest; and lost and wandering. While Stout limits her consideration to works of fiction and poetry, her conclusions may and should be applied to works of literary nonfiction as well. For a feminist investigation of how these journey narratives often constructed the land as a terrain that was to be explored, conquered, mined, etc., see Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).

Bowles, Across the Continent, 1.

Ibid., 13.

Quoted in Willard H. Smith, Schuyler Colfax: The Changing Fortunes of a Political Idol (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1952), 207. President Lincoln, in fact, met with Schuyler Colfax to discuss the trip just hours before he went to Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865. “Don't forget, Colfax,” the president said, “tell those miners that that is my speech to them [that western resources should be quickly developed], which I send by you. Let me hear from you on the road, and I will telegraph you at San Francisco. Pleasant journey and good bye” (quoted in Smith, Schuyler Colfax, 207).

Bowles, Across the Continent, 34.

Ibid., 79.

Ibid., 337–338.

Ibid., 284, 285–287.

Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979). See also Robert Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression: The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), for further discussion of the evolution of a landscape-based identity for Americans.

Bowles, Across the Continent, 223. Yosemite Valley was designated a state park in a grant to California from Congress, signed by Lincoln, June 30, 1864. It was designated a national park on October 1, 1890.

Ibid., 281–282.

Ibid., 224.

Many notable explorers and wealthy travelers of the nineteenth century published narratives of their journeys, including Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies, 1835 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956); George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, 1841 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and one of the most popular adventure books of the Old West, historian Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life, 1846, Bernard Rosenthal, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Notable landscape artists of the era included Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole. Bowles noted the influence of the German-born Bierstadt (1830–1902) in Letter XVIII, when he recognized a particular view of Mt. Hood, “that which Bierstadt has chosen for its perpetuation on canvas, and which is thus familiar to eastern eyes” (Bowles, Across the Continent, 191). Bierstadt attained great popularity for his paintings of the American West during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Runte, National Parks, 13. Bowles's writings about Yosemite joined a rising chorus of voices advocating preservation and redefining wilderness. His visit was recorded in a photograph of the Colfax party, joined by West Coast associates and noted landscape artist Frederick Law Olmsted. See also Merle Curti, The Roots of American Loyalty (New York: Russell & Russell, 1946, 1967).

Bowles, Across the Continent, 15.

Ibid., 14.

Ibid., 73.

Ibid., 2.

The evolution and permeation of popular culture imagery of westerners has been explored by scholars, most notably Arthur K. Moore, The Frontier Mind (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957, 1963); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); and Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950, 1978). See also Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).

Too large to dissect here, the complex idiom of the frontiersman is thoroughly traced in Moore, The Frontier Mind. For an analysis of post-Revolutionary print commentators who asserted lasting images of the West and Americanness, see Christopher M. Osborne, Written into the West: Print-Visions and the Revolutionary Inheritance in Early National America's “Western Country,” unpublished dissertation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2011). For more on the literary heritage of Western identity, see William R. Handley and Nathaniel Lewis, eds., True West: Authenticity and the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

Bowles, Across the Continent, 197.

Ibid., 41.

Ibid., 41–42.

See John Mack Faragher, ed., Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). Turner (1861–1932) first presented “Significance” in Chicago to a meeting of the American Historical Association at the World's Columbian Exposition on July 12, 1893. His philosophy, in part, derived from an 1890 report of the US Census, which deemed it was no longer meaningful to speak of a “frontier line,” formerly identified as the line between settled areas and those defined as wilderness—bearing a population of fewer than two persons per square mile.

Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, 53, 54–55, 59. The Turner thesis has permeated discussions of American history and its frontier, with subsequent scholars, even those seeking to revise or refute it, citing it as a starting point. For additional discussion, see Andro Linklater's The Fabric of America: How Our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged Our National Identity (New York: Walker, 2007).

Bowles, Across the Continent, 3–4. Bowles did not use the term “border ruffians” as a generic term; rather, the term was used in the years preceding the Civil War to identify pro-slavery agitators who had come to Kansas Territory from Missouri.

Ibid., 50.

Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, 33.

Bowles, Across the Continent, 183.

Ibid., 50.

Ibid., 327.

Ibid., 161. Another field in which Bowles finds an evolution taking place is in the West's approach to “good eating.” He wrote, “When the Puritans settled New England, their first public duty was to build a church with thrifty thought for their souls. Out here, their degenerate sons begin with organizing a restaurant, and supplying Hostitter's stomachic bitters and an European or Asiatic cook. So the seat of empire, in its travel westward, changes its base from soul to stomach, from brains to bowels.” Bowles, Across the Continent, 201–202.

Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 25.

The issue of polygamy and Mormon suppression, an issue directly tied to states’ rights debates between the North and South, reached a boiling point in the late 1850s with open conflict between the Mormons and the government in Washington, known as the Utah War of 1857. It was, in part, an intentional political strategy to divert attention from rising sectional conflicts. In fact, Ward cites presidential strategist Congressman Robert Tyler, son of former president John Tyler, who wrote to Buchanan: “The Popular Idea is rapidly maturing that Mormonism... should be put down and utterly extirpated. I believe we can supercede [sic] the Negro-Mania with the almost universal excitement of an Anti-Mormon Crusade. Should you... seize this question with a strong, fearless and resolute hand, the Country I am sure will rally to you with an earnest enthusiasm and the pipings of Abolitionism will hardly be heard amidst the thunder of the storm we shall raise” (quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, The West: An Illustrated History, New York: Little Brown, 1996, 176–177). After the Civil War redefined the parameters of states’ rights, the Mormon question was reopened. See Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). See also Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), and Richard Abanes, One Nation under Gods: A History of the Mormon Church (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002).

Bowles, Across the Continent, 107.

Ibid., 108.

In Letter I, Bowles noted that a pair of senators representing a joint committee of Congress had set out on an expedition to visit all the Indian territories in an effort to examine “the condition of the Indians and their relations to the whites, and report facts and suggestions, with a view to a more intelligent and effective Indian policy.” He also pointed out the hypocrisy of the senators’ generous escort of more than one hundred cavalrymen, sent to protect them from the very people with whom they were attempting to build relationships. Bowles, Across the Continent, 7–8.

Bowles, Across the Continent, 11.

Ibid., 8.

In Letter XXXI, Bowles listed the offenses of the white settlers against the Indian tribes, with two conflicting potential outcomes: “The great Oregon Indian war of some years ago was clearly provoked by whites, as a means of speculating in supplies for carrying on the war against them. The lust of coarse white men for their women; the introduction of whiskey among them; abuse and maltreatment in various ways are the origin of a good many Indian outrages, and these lead into almost necessary wars of extermination.... But this ought not to be necessary, and need not, if our Indian department were both vigorously and wisely administered.” Bowles, Across the Continent, 366–367.

Ibid., 366.

Ibid.

Bowles memorably recorded the highly anticipated—and anticlimactic—Continental Divide from the back of a mule: “It was no more than a ‘thank-ye-marm’ in a New England's winter sleigh-ride, yet it separates the various and vast waters of a Continent, and marks the fountains of the two great oceans of the globe. But it was difficult to be long enthusiastic over this infinitesimal point of mud; the night was very cold, and I was sore in unpoetical parts from unaccustomed saddles, and I got down from all my high horses, and into my corner of the stage, at the next station.” Bowles, Across the Continent, 75.

The railroad had been authorized by the Railroad Act of 1862, and construction began from Sacramento in 1863 and Omaha in 1864. Another bill in 1864 augmented territorial grants and financial support from the federal government, but progress was initially slow due to corruption and construction difficulties. The railroad was completed May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah, years ahead of schedule.

Bowles, Across the Continent, 257.

Ibid., 256.

Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 191.

Bowles, Across the Continent, 257.

Ibid., 273.

“Across the Continent,” North American Review, April 1866, 619–623.

Ibid., 622–623.

Ibid., 623.

“Geography and Travels,” Christian Examiner, May 1866, 240–241.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katrina J. Quinn

Katrina J. Quinn is a professor in the Communication Department, Slippery Rock University, 213H ECB, Slippery Rock, PA 16057, [email protected].