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Bound Together: The Intimacies of Music-Book Collecting in the Early American Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2020

GLENDA GOODMAN
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Abstract

This article is a microhistory of music collecting in eighteenth-century America. It focuses on the life and collection of an elite white woman, Sally Brown, who gathered an amount of music that was unusual for women in the USA at that time. She was able to do so because her family had a successful mercantile business, one that included the slave trade. Sally’s experiences shed light on the gendered history of amateur music-making, which this article posits were connected to other gendered forms of domestic labour in the early American republic. By tracing how Sally acquired music, this article demonstrates the importance both of affective, personal ties and of the anonymized labour of the global trade network, which supplied her and other consumers with music-book materials. This article argues that, in ways with which musicological scholarship has yet to reckon, intimacy and labour contributed to music collecting at both individual and structural levels.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 145 , Issue 1 , May 2020 , pp. 1 - 35
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

Thank you to Emily Abrams Ansari, Candace Bailey, Mary Channen Caldwell, Emily Green, Jeffrey Kallberg and Kate van Orden, whose comments and suggestions have made this article immeasurably stronger; to Elisabeth Le Guin for responding creatively to an early presentation of this research at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in 2014; and to Lydia Barnett, Andrea Bohlman and Mitch Fraas for helping me to bring it across the finishing line.

References

1 Rosina. Providence, RI, Rhode Island Historical Society (hereafter RIHS), Herreshoff Music Collection, MSS 490, Box 1. Untitled music books in the Herreshoff Music Collection are referred to here by the title of the first piece they contain. Herreshoff was Sally Brown’s married name.

2 The two boxes of the Herreshoff Music Collection (MSS 490) at RIHS contain the music owned by Sally and her descendants. A preliminary unpublished inventory prepared by Arlan Coolidge in 1975 is available at the RIHS. Appendix 1 below summarizes the collection’s holdings; Appendix 2 itemizes the materials owned by Sally.

3 Jeanice, Brooks, ‘Musical Monuments for the Country House: Music, Collection, and Display at Tatton Park’, Music and Letters, 91 (2010), 513–35Google Scholar. Extant sources from the USA suggest that white women and men typically owned no more than one or two music books (if any). See Fuld, James J. and Davidson, Mary W., 18th-Century American Secular Music Manuscripts: An Inventory (Philadelphia, PA: Music Library Association, 1980)Google Scholar; Kate Van, Winkle Keller, Popular Secular Music in America through 1800: A Preliminary Checklist of Manuscripts in North American Collections (Philadelphia, PA: Music Library Association, 1981). On the broader cultural and material history of amateur music-making in early America, see Glenda Goodman, Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).Google Scholar

4 James Brown’s ship the Mary went to the African coast in 1735–6, with Obadiah Brown serving as the supercargo. John Brown (Sally’s father) was involved in the next attempt in 1759, which was thwarted by French privateers off the coast of Africa. James Blaine, Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952–68), iGoogle Scholar: Colonial Years (1952), 71–80. Also see Stephanie, Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

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6 On the Browns’ smuggling during the Seven Years War and supplying the Continental Army during the Revolution, see Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations, i, 43–69, 215–39. Fewer than half of Providence’s elites made it through the war with their economic positions intact.The four Brown brothers – Nicholas, Moses, John and Joseph – ranked first, second, third and eighth in terms of assessed wealth. Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island, 44–5, 87.

7 On the trans-European music-print trade, see Sarah, Adams, ‘International Dissemination of Printed Music during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, The Dissemination of Music: Studies in the History of Music Publishing, ed. Hans, Lenneberg (Lausanne: Gordon & Breach, 1994)Google Scholar, 21–42.

8 Wolfe, Richard J., Early American Music Engraving and Printing (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Richard, Crawford and Krummel, Donald W., ‘Early American Music Printing and Publishing’, Printing and Society in Early America, ed. Joyce, William L., Hall, David D., Brown, Richard D. and Hench, John B. (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), 186–227 Google Scholar.

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12 Although there is little scholarship addressing manuscript music circulation in nineteenth-century America, evidence of the practice can be found in the digital database American Vernacular Music Manuscripts, ca. 1730–1910, <http://popmusic.mtsu.edu/ManuscriptMusic/> (accessed 26 April 2018). Also see Candace, Bailey, ‘Binder’s Volumes as Musical Commonplace Books: The Transmission of Cultural Codes in the Antebellum South’, Journal of the Society for American Music, 10 (2016)Google Scholar, 446–69. The circulation of manuscript music in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe is acknowledged as an important factor in music publishing. See Steven, Zohn, ‘Telemann in the Marketplace: The Composer as Self-Publisher’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 58 (2005), 275–356 Google Scholar, and Harris, Ellen T., ‘Music Distribution in London During Handel’s Lifetime: Manuscript Copies versus Prints’, Music in Print and Beyond: Hildegard von Bingen to the Beatles, ed. Monson, Craig A. and Roberta Montemorra, Marvin (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 95–117 Google Scholar. On the scribal publication of music, also see Harold, Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication of Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

13 Shields, David S., ‘The Manuscript in the British American World of Print’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 102 (1993)Google Scholar, 403–16; Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America, ed. Catherine La, Courreye Blecki and Wulf, Karin A. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997 Google Scholar); Hall, David D., Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

14 David, McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. On the need to consider music across formats, see Glenda, Goodman, ‘Transatlantic Contrafacta, Musical Formats, and the Creation of Political Culture in Revolutionary America’, Journal of the Society for American Music, 11 (2017), 392–419 Google Scholar.

15 An early American example is Jane Aitken, a printer in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia. On British female printer-publishers, see Lesley, Ritchie, Women Writing Music in Late Eighteenth-Century England: Social Harmony in Literature and Performance (Aldershot: Routledge, 2008), 78 Google Scholar. The scholarship on women and book history is large and growing. Particularly salient examples for this article are Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), and Helen, Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

16 Richard, Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Judith, Tick, American Women Composers before 1870 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1995), 13–20 Google Scholar; Matthew, Head, ‘“If the Pretty Little Hand Won’t Stretch”: Music for the Fair Sex in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 52 (1999), 203–54Google Scholar.

17 On how to reconcile scale and scope in microhistory, see Lara Putnam, ‘To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2006), 615–30.

18 Jill, Lepore, ‘Historians who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography’, Journal of American History, 88 (2001)Google Scholar, 129–44. Microhistory can also be compared to the more clinical ‘case study’ model. See Rebecca, Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden, ‘Music as Feminine Capital in Napoleonic France: Nancy Macdonald’s Musical Upbringing’, Music and Letters, 100 (2019), 302–34, esp. p. 306 Google Scholar.

19 Often these marginalized subjects are tracked by historians using police and court records, as Natalie Zemon Davis did for the fraudulent Basque peasant Martin Guerre, and Carlo Ginzburg did for the heretical Italian miller Mennochio. Davis, , The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Ginzburg, , The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John, and Tedeschi, Anne C., rev. edn (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)Google Scholar. Ginzburg’s work, which attends to the books that influenced Mennochio, has also been influential in book history, and thus is a particularly apt touchstone here.

20 The materials are part of the extensive collections of her family’s papers at the RIHS, including the Herreshoff-Lewis Family Papers, MSS 487; the John Brown Papers, MSS 312; the Francis Family Papers, MSS 426; and the James Brown Papers, MSS 310.

21 As Thomas Cohen notes, ‘Microhistory is, far more than most other studies, intimate with its subject.’ Cohen, ‘The Macrohistory of Microhistory’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 47 (2017), 54–73 (p.55).

22 Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830, ed. John, Styles and Amanda, Vickery (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 2006)Google Scholar. Also see Breen, Timothy H., ‘“Baubles of Britain”: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 119 (1988), 73–104 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Maxine, Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

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24 Breen, Timothy H., The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

25 Providence Gazette, 24 July 1784.

26 Ibid., 8 November 1783.

27 Ibid., 13 July 1799. I have not been able to locate a copy of the catalogue.

28 Adams, ‘International Dissemination of Printed Music’; Mace, Nancy A., ‘The Market for Music in the Late Eighteenth Century and the Entry Books of the Stationers’ Company’, The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 10 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 157–87; Bryan, White, ‘Music and Merchants in Restoration London’, Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England, ed. Linda, Austern, Candace, Bailey and Amanda Eubanks, Winkler (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017)Google Scholar, 150–64.

29 Of the 152 towns listed in the 1771 tax valuation list, 80% of those east of Worcester had at least one shop, while the chances of finding a shop in the newer, poorer and mountainous towns to the west was halved (excluding those on the Connecticut River, which had access to more merchandise and easier transportation). Richard, Bushman, ‘Shopping and Advertising in Colonial America’, Of Consuming Interest: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Ronald, Hoffman, Albert, Peter J. and Cary, Carson (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 233–51, esp. pp. 239–40Google Scholar.

30 Clemens, Paul G. E., ‘The Consumer Culture of the Middle Atlantic, 1760–1820’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 62 (2005), 577–624, esp. pp. 580–7Google Scholar.

31 Norfolk Repository, 5 May 1807.

32 The 1810 census shows that Providence grew considerably faster than Dedham, with a population of 10,070, compared with 2,164 in Dedham.

33 Providence Gazette and Country Journal, 29 December 1792.

34 Charles F. Herreshoff, letter to Sarah Brown, 9 November 1798. RIHS, Herreshoff-Lewis Family Papers, MSS 487, Subgroup 2, Folder 1.

35 Crawford and Krummel, ‘Early American Music Printing and Publishing’, 214. To my knowledge, no one has done a study of imported sheet music in this period, which is unfortunate because it certainly accounted for a great quantity of the music in the British colonies and the early USA before the reprint trade took off in the 1790s.

36 Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser, 24 January 1795.

37 Crawford and Krummel, ‘Early American Music Printing and Publishing’, 191. As the number of music-book sellers and printers grew, the availability of domestically printed music for consumers like Sally Brown increased as well. Whether Sally acted as her own agent to purchase music is unknown, although other women in her position certainly engaged in rigorous and intelligent shopping, so it is not impossible.

38 Arjun Appadurai notes that such commodities represent ‘a special “register” of consumption’ that is defined by restricted access, specialized knowledge and codes that convey meaning to others about the person who owns or uses the luxury item. Appadurai, , ‘Introduction’, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Appadurai, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. p. 38.

39 On portraits’ lack of cash value, see Lovell, Margaretta M., Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 22 Google Scholar.

40 Professionally copied manuscripts were understandably more common in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England than in America, although some composer-publisher-teachers supplemented their incomes by selling manuscript collections. On professionally copied manuscripts in England, see Harris, ‘Music Distribution in London’, and Candace Bailey, ‘The Challenge of Domesticity in Men’s Manuscripts in Restoration England’, in Beyond Boundaries, ed. Austern, Bailey and Winkler, 114–26.

41 According to Crawford and Krummel, print runs of sheet music could be as low as 10–30, and rarely reached a number like 2,000, which was the break-even point for most sacred tune-books. ‘Early American Music Printing and Publishing’, 208–9.

42 Engraved sheet music was 12½ cents (or one shilling) for one page, and two-page songs were common. Crawford and Krummel, ‘Early American Music Printing and Publishing’, 210.

43 The Value of a Dollar: The Colonial Era to the Civil War, 1600–1865, ed. Scott, Derks and Tony, Smith (Millerton, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2005), 170, 173 Google Scholar.

44 On book ownership in the mid-Atlantic, including religious items such as hymn books, see Clemens, ‘The Consumer Culture’, 590.

45 The number of advertisements for British goods in general grew in the eighteenth century, with five or six per issue in New York newspapers in the 1720s and 1730s, a number that skyrocketed in the 1750s, until the 1770s brought 350–1,000 per issue. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution, 56. The growing number of newspapers also helped boost this growth.

46 The retailer was Charles Sigourney. Advertisement in the Independent Ledger and the American Advertiser (Boston, MA), 1 November 1784.

47 Providence Gazette and Country Journal, 31 May 1794.

48 Pennsylvania Evening Post, and Public Advertiser (Philadelphia, PA), 5 July 1782. Also see his advertisements for other kinds of paper, including music paper bound or in sheets: ibid., 25 November 1782.

49 Pennsylvania Packet and General Advertiser (Philadelphia, PA), 9 December 1783.

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54 Rosina, RIHS, Herreshoff Music Collection, MSS 490, Box 1.

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56 Sarah Brown, letter to John Brown, 29 November 1800. RIHS, John Brown Papers, MSS 312, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 23. The couple married in a grand wedding at the Brown mansion on 1 July 1801. Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations, ii: The Nineteenth Century (1968), 225–6.

57 Charles F. Herreshoff, letter to Sarah Brown, 9 November 1798. RIHS, Herreshoff-Lewis Family Papers, MSS 487, Subgroup 2, Folder 1.

58 Charles F. Herreshoff, letter to Sarah Brown, 10 December 1799. Ibid., Folder 2.

59 Charles F. Herreshoff, letter to Sarah Brown, 30 October 1798. Ibid., Folder 1.

60 Oeuvres de J. Haydn. Cahier VIII. XV Airs et chansons (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1799). The German Erato, 3rd edn (Berlin: H. Frölich, 1800). RIHS, Herreshoff Music Collection, MSS 490, Box 1.

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63 Charles F. Herreshoff, letter to Sarah Brown, 17 June 1800. RIHS, Herreshoff-Lewis Family Papers, MSS 487, Subgroup 2, Folder 3.

64 Janet, Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986)Google Scholar; Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992 Google Scholar); Reddy, William M., The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the importance of sensibility in eighteenth-century American civil society, see Mary, Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar, and Sarah, Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

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66 Charles F. Herreshoff, letter to Sarah Brown, 2 December 1798. RIHS, Herreshoff-Lewis Family Papers, MSS 487, Subgroup 2, Folder 1.

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75 Ann Smart Martin, ‘Ribbons of Desire: Gendered Stories in the World of Goods’, Gender, Taste, and Material Culture, ed. Styles and Vickery, 179–200. On women as shopping experts, see Berg, Luxury and Pleasure, 267–70.

76 Manuscript copying was not unusual in the eighteenth century, perpetuating long-standing commonplacing practices; moreover, copying music by hand was both an important pedagogical tool and a sign of elite refinement in the early USA. Mary Thomas, Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. On manuscripts and elite refinement, see Shields, ‘The Manuscript in the British American World of Print’.

77 Matthew Head discusses the coercive element of female musicking, and also calls into question the presumed idleness associated with femininity: ‘“If the Pretty Little Hand”’, 209–10.

78 This is distinct from the organized scribal publication discussed in Harris, ‘Music Distribution in London’, and more closely resembles the ad hoc copying of music in eighteenth-century Germany described in Andrew, Talle, Beyond Bach: Music and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 237, 250 Google Scholar. I have not found any examples of female copyists working for pay in eighteenth-century America.

79 Pennsylvania Chronicle, 8 February 1769.

80 Hartford, CT, Connecticut Historical Society, MS 74251. The price listed is ‘2/3’, but the currency is not noted.

81 Rosina (see above, n. 1).

82 Adieu. RIHS, Herreshoff Music Collection, MSS 490, Box 1, pp. [2]–[5], [10]–[11], [8]–[9].

83 Betty, Ring, Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework, 1650–1850, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993 Google Scholar); Ann, Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

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85 On handwriting and gender, see Tamara Plakins, Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 39–40 Google Scholar.

86 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich notes the importance of women’s liberty to determine the use of their own labour. She also points out the fact that homespun and commercially available goods coexisted in the late eighteenth century. Ulrich, ‘Wheels, Looms, and the Gender Division of Labor in Eighteenth-Century New England’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 55 (1998), 3–38.

87 Institutes of Music, or easy Instruction for the harpsichord […] By Edward Miller organist at Doncaster (London: Longman and Broderip, [c.1790]). RIHS, Herreshoff Music Collection, MSS 490, Box 2. Into the back of this volume were bound three pieces of manuscript music and three additional pieces of printed sheet music.

88 The Nativity, RIHS, Herreshoff Music Collection, MSS 490, Box 2. The handful of songs Anna Francis Herreshoff copied were the light British comic opera fare favoured by her mother.

89 Abigail Brown Francis, diary, 28 December 1819. RIHS, Francis Family Papers, MSS 426, Folder 6. On Charles Herreshoff’s failed business efforts, see Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations, ii, 226–31.

90 Charles F. Herreshoff, letter to Sarah Brown Herreshoff, 3 April 1818. RIHS, Herreshoff-Lewis Family Papers, MSS 487, Subgroup 2, Folder 4.

91 Snyder, Terri L., ‘What Historians Talk About When They Talk About Suicide: The View from Early Modern British North America’, History Compass, 5 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 658–74; ‘circumstances’ are discussed at p. 667.

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93 Abigail Brown Francis, diary (see above, n. 89), 28 December 1819.

94 The RIHS has two diaries from Sally, dated 1796 and 1841 respectively. RIHS, Herreshoff-Lewis Family Papers, MSS 487, Subgroup 2, Folder 10.

95 The earliest datable item is a printed score for three Ignace Pleyel trio sonatas (printed by J. J. Hummel in Berlin c.1794); the latest is a hand-copied extract from Timothy Flint, Lectures upon Natural History, Geology, Chemistry, the Application of Steam, and Interesting Discoveries in the Arts (Boston, MA: Lilly, Wait, Colman & Holden, 1833).

96 Walter, James, The Letters of Charlotte during her Connexion with Werter, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1786)Google Scholar.

97 Todd, Sensibility, 53. On musical cross-pollination of Continental and British ideas about sensibility and Empfindsamkeit, see Cowart, Georgia J., ‘Sense and Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought’, Acta musicologica, 56 (1984), 251–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 On the backlash against sensibility in Britain, see Todd, Sensibility, 130–46. As Sarah Knott shows, there was no simultaneous anti-sensibility backlash in the USA; instead, it remained a cultural and social value. Knott, , ‘Sensibility and the American War for Independence’, American Historical Review, 109 (2004), 19–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 34–5.

99 James, The Letters of Charlotte, i, pp. ii–iii. On James and his publications, see Charles, Ryskamp, ‘Boswell and Walter James; Goethe and Daniel Malthus’, Eighteenth-Century Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde, ed. William Henry, Bond (New York: Grolier Club, 1970)Google Scholar, 207–29.

100 The Sorrows of Werter, Translated from the German of Baron Göethe by William Render; To Which is Annexed, The Letters of Charlotte to a Female Friend, during her Connection with Werter (Boston, MA: Andrews & Cummings, 1807).

101 Select Musick, RIHS, Herreshoff Music Collection, MSS 490, Box 2, p. [36].

102 Benjamin Carr published the sheet music himself in Philadelphia c.1798.

103 Charles F. Herreshoff, letter to Sarah Brown, 30 October 1798, 7 November 1798 and 20 January 1799. RIHS, Herreshoff-Lewis Family Papers, MSS 487, Subgroup 2, Folders 1 and 2.

104 David, Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. Recent historical studies of particular commodities elaborate on the complexity of Atlantic world (and often global) trade in this period. See for example Robert, DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

105 Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer, 66. Shammas conservatively figures that 30% of income was spent on imports per capita (p. 68). T. H. Breen influentially argues that the consumer revolution Anglicized and standardized American consumption. Breen, ‘Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology, and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 50 (1993), 471–501, esp. p. 484.

106 Roger, Mellen, ‘The Press, Paper Shortages, and Revolution in Early America’, Media History, 21 (2014), 23–41.Google Scholar

107 The exception to this trend were quills: North American goose quills were exported to European markets. Michael, Finlay, Western Writing Implements in the Age of the Quill Pen (Wetheral: Plains Books, 1990), 4 Google Scholar.

108 The first paper mill in colonial America was established in 1690 in Germantown, PA, and had a monopoly until 1726. Dard, Hunter, Papermaking in Pioneer America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952), 11 Google Scholar.

109 Domestic paper manufacture improved in quality and quantity by the first decade of the nineteenth century, and was finally able to supply printers with reliable stock. Wolfe, Early American Music Engraving and Printing, 147–51.

110 The African ‘slave coast’ was also the ‘gum coast’, and gum came to be one of the most lucrative trades after human trafficking. European traders fought ‘Gum Wars’ in the early eighteenth century for access to the local traders. JrWebb, James L. A., ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic: Prelude to French Conquest in Senegal’, Journal of African History, 26 (1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 149–68.

111 Syrian regions for oak gall are discussed in Konstantin, Dierks, In my Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 181 Google Scholar. Also see William, Barrow, ‘Black Writing Ink of the Colonial Period’, American Archivist, 11 (1948), 291–307 Google Scholar.

112 Providence Gazette, 24 July 1784.

113 On similar complicity between genteel music-making and the slave trade, see David Hunter, ‘Graduates of Princeton and their Engagement with Slavery and Music: A Case Study in the Use of the Profits of the Slave Economy to Foster Music’, paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for American Music, Kansas City, MO, 1 March 2018.

114 Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations, i, 71–80.

115 Ibid. Such a high cost in terms of life was a huge business failure, although suicides and disease were horrifyingly – and understandably – common on slave ships. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery.

116 Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations, i, 82.

117 John Brown also served one term in Congress, where, not surprisingly, he worked to oppose limitations on the slave trade. Ibid., 82–4.

118 The slave trade was probably at least a point of sensitivity for the siblings. In 1785, a frustrated suitor who was awaiting word from John Brown as to his quest for Abby’s hand lashed out in a letter, writing to Abby, ‘We are neither Beasts or Slaves, set up at Auction to the highest Bidder, but Rational creatures.’ (She did not marry him.) Frederick (surname unknown), letter to Abigail Brown, 5 November 1785. RIHS, Francis Family Papers, MSS 426, Folder 6.

119 The 1774 census reveals the Browns had two enslaved people living with them, and the 1782 census lists four enslaved people. Bartlett, J. R., Census of the Inhabitants of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Taken […] in the Year 1774 (Providence: Knowles, Anthony & Co., 1858), 38 Google Scholar; Jay Mack, Holbrook, Rhode Island Census 1782 (Oxford, MA: Holbrook Research Institute, 1979), 19 Google Scholar. Slavery was common in the north, and in Providence at the beginning of the Revolution 9% of the population was non-white. Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island, 71.

120 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich makes a similar connection between New England cloth-making and the use of cotton grown and harvested by enslaved labour. Ulrich, The Age of Homespun, 38.

121 As Lisa Lowe notes, colonial labour is particularly obscured by Marx, whose focus on British manufacturing in his framework of alienated labour in commodity fetishization did not take colonial labour systems sufficiently into account. See Lowe, , The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015)Google Scholar, 83–4.

122 Fuld and Davidson, 18th-Century American Secular Music Manuscripts, ix. Fuld’s collection went to the Morgan Library, New York, on his death in 2008.

123 Jill Lepore captures this dynamic when she describes stroking a lock of Noah Webster’s hair in an archive. Lepore, ‘Historians Who Love Too Much’. The idea of attachment to a musicological research subject is addressed in the special forum on ‘quirk historicism’ edited by Nicholas Mathew and Mary Ann Smart in Representations, 132 (2015), 61–129; see in particular Mathew and Smart, ‘Elephants in the Music Room: The Future of Quirk Historicism’, loc. cit., 61–78, and James Q. Davies, ‘On Being Moved/Against Objectivity’, ibid., 79–87. My article takes a different approach by foregrounding the potential of historical methodology for generating intimacy, rather than the new historicist genealogy of quirk historicism.

124 Ann Laura, Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 7 Google Scholar.

125 Ibid., 20.

126 It is noteworthy that Sally’s collection contains nearly no sacred music, with the exception of one book, given to her by her oldest daughter: Oliver, Shaw, The Providence Selection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes (Dedham, MA: H. Mann & Co., 1815)Google Scholar. The flyleaf displays the dedication: ‘Sarah Herreshoff presented by her affectionate A[nna] Francis Dec. 23’. RIHS, Herreshoff Music Collection, MSS 490, Box 1. It was common for early American amateurs to copy sacred and secular music together.

127 Adieu, pp. [38]–[40]; Rosina, p. [22]. The ‘favourite song’ formula was of course also a marketing device used to disseminate popular repertory associated with specific singers. Michael Burden, ‘From London’s Opera House to the Salon? The Favourite (and Not So “Favourite”) Songs from the King’s Theatre’, Beyond Boundaries, ed. Austern, Bailey and Winkler, 223–37.

128 The imbuing of material artefacts with personal and emotional content is explored in Stabile, Memory’s Daughters.

129 Jeanne, Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Nancy, Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780–1835, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. Also see Mary Beth, Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1980)Google Scholar, and Rosemarie, Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

130 Elizabeth Dillon discusses this intersection as it pertains to liberalism, calling out the ‘insistently white’ character of the private woman. Dillon, The Gender of Freedom, 3.

131 Furniture and other items (including tea sets, silver and mahogany pieces) are preserved today in the John Brown House Museum. See Anderson, Jennifer L., Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

132 This line of thinking is influenced by Dierks, ‘Letter Writing’.

133 A classic, trenchant examination of archival erasure and silence is Michel-Rolph, Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1995)Google Scholar. On the need to acknowledge and attempt to recover lost perspectives, particularly of marginalized and oppressed peoples, see Fuentes, Marisa J., Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

134 Such ties do not bring parity, however; Lowe advocates a focus on the ‘convergence of asymmetries’ – a phrase that aptly characterizes the unequal labours and privileges examined here. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 11.

135 Michel, Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. Sheridan Smith, A. M. (New York: Pantheon, 2009), 4–5 Google Scholar.

136 For a nuanced critique of the effort of archival recovery, see Laura, Helton, Justin, Leroy, Mishler, Max A., Samantha, Seeley and Shauna, Sweeney, ‘The Question of Recovery: An Introduction’, Social Text, 33 (2015), 1–18 Google Scholar.

137 On the intersection of intimacy and ignorance in microhistory, see Cohen, ‘The Macrohistory of Microhistory’.