The Ardent Desire

Picking up on the discussion of broadsides in a previous post, today we’ll highlight another broadside from the collection: The Ardent Desire. No, this isn’t a delayed Valentine’s Day post; instead this broadside deals strictly with religious ardor. Printed in 1728, it is only the fifth item published in the state of Rhode Island*, and it was published by James Franklin, brother of Benjamin and the state’s first printer.

The Dictionary of Literary Biography** describes Franklin as “America’s first crusading editor and first major defender of press freedom,” but this broadside religious poem is not one of his more radical publications. Franklin brought Rhode Island its first press when he moved to Newport from Boston in 1726, and he continued printing there until his death in 1735. (His wife Ann took over after his death and ran the shop for thirteen years before passing it on to her son.) The transfers of location and ownership are evident on the page itself in the ornamental border surrounding the poem. The border is made up of various type ornaments, all of which James had used in Boston and then taken with him when he moved his shop to Newport. The crown and rosette combination in the upper left and right corners, for instance, is first used by James in 1719 in The Isle of Man and then again after the move to Newport in 1728’s Jesus Christ an Example to His Minister. In 1735, the year of James’ death, Ann uses the ornament again in A Brief Essay on the Number Seven; and, finally, James (James’ and Ann’s son) uses them in governmental publications of the 1750s.***

And one more reminder not to miss the opening of the exhibition “Rhode Island in the Time of Lincoln” at 7:00 this evening at the Aldrich House. More information available on the Society’s website.

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* See Alden, Rhode Island Imprints: 1727-1800. New York: Bowker, 1949, #5. Also:

** Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 43: American Newspaper Journalists, 1690-1872. Edited by Perry J. Ashley. The Gale Group, 1985. pp. 212-218. Also see Douglas McMurtrie’s “The Beginning of Printing in Rhode Island,” Americana 39.4 (1935): 607-629.

*** See Reilly, A Dictionary of Colonial American Printers’ Ornaments and Illustrations. Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1975. Numbers 472, 473, 482, 672, 674 and 709. In the entry for the ornament discussed above (no. 709), The Isle of Man is incorrectly listed as a Newport, rather than Boston, publication.

Chronicles of Brunonia

A fascinating collection of student-produced historical narratives (a number of them using materials from the Rhode Island Historical Society’s collections) are available at Brown University’s Chronicles of Brunonia website. The narratives are the final product of work done by students in Beth Taylor’s creative nonfiction writing workshops, and they draw their inspiration from primary-source materials at institutions like the Historical Society and Brown’s John Hay Library. The following is a list of stories that make use of RIHS materials (with précis provided by the authors):

• “Charlotte Perkins Gilman; letters to Martha” (Abigail Rabinowitz)
  Starting in 1878, teenage friends on the East Side of Providence
  become inseparable, then go their separate ways when Martha weds. But even as Charlotte gains fame as the writer of The Yellow Wallpaper and as an activist for women’s rights, she never forgets Martha.
• “Little Caesar(historical narrative)” (Austin Kennedy)
  The Diary of Giuseppe Zambarano offers a glimpse into the life of a
  young immigrant from Italy in the late 1800s, who builds a business
  and family on Federal Hill in Providence.
• “Lucy and the Chinese bandits” (Meryl Rothstein)
  Lucy Truman Aldrich, born in 1869 to a prominent Rhode Island family, travels to China in 1923 and is kidnapped by bandits.
• “Miss Edna Krouner at Vassar in 1908″ (Elizabeth Loeb)
  Miss Edna Krouner, of Wakefield, Rhode Island, embarks on her first
  year at Vassar College and learns about everything from crushes to
  Marxism and the Vote for Women.
• “Mutiny! A high seas misadventure” (John Sheehy)
  A tale of piracy aboard the Vineyard, a brig, that set sail from New
  Orleans to Philadelphia on November 9, 1830.
• “Providence’s Black Chinese; a love story” (Luke Tsai)
  In 1901, Chung Yik, one of the city’s “best-known Chinese
  restauranteurs” and his wife, Cynthia Monki, survived the burning of
  their Charles Street apartment.
• “Searching for home; accounts of a sea captain’s wife” (Stephanie Bernhard)
  Cynthia Sprague Congdon’s tales of being aboard ship then recording
  her life in East Greenwich, R.I. when she received word that her
  husband was lost at sea during a storm
• “States of mind; the founding of Rhode Island’s first hospital“
  (Alex Eichler)
  The story of the founding of Butler Hospital in Providence, R.I. or,
  as it was originally called, Butler Hospital for the Insane.
• “Stories from the Good Doctor’s farm; colonial southern Rhode Island“
  (Alison Klayman)
  For a short period in the mid-18th century, the MacSparren farm
  flourished at the hands of an assortment of free, enslaved and
  indentured workers. In such a small-scale plantation, typical of
  colonial southern Rhode Island, the social hierarchy was constantly
  repositioning itself to accommodate emerging colonial ideas about
  race, sex, and religion. This story, based on the diary of Reverend
  MacSparren and other historical documents, imagines the personal
  relationships between those who worked and lived in such close quarters.
• “The things they planted” (Molly Jacobson)
  Almost four hundred years ago, Roger Williams and his companions
  paddled down the Seekonk River and landed on the Rhode Island shore. Surrounded by wilderness, with no outside aid and scarce resources, these first settlers slowly raised their farms and homesteads, scavenged for food, and drafted laws for their community.
• “The vampire disease” (Victoria Chao)
  At the turn of the century, a deadly disease swept Europe and the
  Eastern United States. In the span of four years, George Brown, a
  farmer in rural Rhode Island, lost his wife and two daughters to the
  disease. Faced with the prospect of losing his only son, George is
  convinced to seek and destroy the alleged vampire responsible for
  these deaths…
• “Waiting, 1938″ (Alice Lovejoy)
  The story of the famous hurricane of 1938 as revealed by the
  meticulous notes of David Patten, managing editor of the Providence
  Evening Bulletin at the time.
• “The wreck of the Bark Montgomery; an East Greenwich family at home and at sea” (Margo Irvin)
  The story of a storm at sea from both the point of view of the
  captain, John Congdon, and his wife on shore, Cynthia.

A Day of Humiliation and Mourning

On this, the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (and Charles Darwin’s), we’ll take a moment to look back at the nation’s (and Providence’s) response to his death.

As noted in the previous post, mourning over Lincoln’s assassination took place across the nation, and Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, declared 1 June 1865 a national day of “humiliation and mourning,” describing the country in the proclamation as “one great house of mourning.” (Text of the proclamation and a description of the activities in New York available through the New York Times website.)

It was a distinctly religious undertaking: Johnson declared the purpose of the event to be “humbling ourselves before Almighty God” and called for the nation to “assemble in their respective places of worship.” The service in Providence was held at the Beneficent Congregational Church, and the program (image of cover to the left—click to view enlargement) reprints the chorus of “Columbia Mourns,” which was sung during the service:

“Columbia, mourn! His course is o’er; the brave, the mighty is no more! Mourn Columbia! let all you streams of sorrow flow. We have sinned; we fell; we scorned our God! He died beneath the assassin’s rod. O day of bitterness! O day of woe! Mourn, Columbia! Mourn!”

In addition to displaying a marked fondness for the exclamation point, the author captures the biblical and apocalyptic element of the national response to Lincoln’s assassination.

The high point of the service was William Binney’s oration on Lincoln. The June 3rd issue of the Providence Journal provided the following assessment: “No higher praise can be awarded it than to say that it rises to the height of the great occasion and the great theme.” The text was printed in a limited edition of 25 copies (ours is no. 1) by Knowles and Anthony for George Taylor Paine, who would later become secretary of the Rhode Island Historical Society.

Lincoln and Rhode Island

In the spirit of the widespread celebrations of Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday, we’ll be highlighting a few of the Lincoln-related items in our collections over the next week or so. (Many of the items mentioned will be on display in an exhibition of Lincolniana at the Aldrich House. Also, be sure to attend “An Evening with Lincoln” on February 12th at the First Unitarian Church. See the RIHS website for more details.)

The first item is a broadside poem titled “Lincoln Lies Sleeping” by Nathan Upham. The poem is a quite melancholy dirge (a good deal of “bewailing” and “deep gloom”) that also manages to rise to a political crescendo in which Lincoln offers a posthumous prayer for the forgiveness of John Wilkes Booth and the nation rallies for unity. The somewhat maudlin text is matched by a melody taken from Stephen Foster’s “Under the Willow She’s Sleeping,” a song in which a mother laments the death of her child.

Broadsides of the poem seem to have been quite popular: Edwin Wolf’s American Song Sheets (entry #1263) lists five separate publications; Brown University’s Lincoln Broadsides (search for “Lincoln Lies Sleeping”) provides images of three of them and another two not listed in Wolf.  This is the only variation published in Providence, and the imprint credits “Theodore B. Stayner,” whose only other publication seems to be “Wake Nicodemus,” a widely-published song. Publishing may have been a temporary occupation for Stayner: the 1900 census includes a 59 year old “Theodore B. Stayner” who listed his occupation as “advertiser.”

Lincoln’s assassination prompted national mourning, so it comes as no surprise that “Lincoln Lies Sleeping” is just one example of printed Lincoln ephemera. In addition to Nathan Upham’s poem, a Louise Upham offered “The Nation is Weeping”, which set a similar poem to the same melody.

The Providence response to the Lincoln’s assassination will be the topic of a future post, as will another broadside—one that is also among Rhode Island’s earliest imprints.

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—Additional Resources—

For background information on broadsides, see The Encyclopedia of Ephemera.

To view more early broadsides, try:

• “An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera” (Part of the Library of Congress’ American Memory project. Includes nearly 200 Rhode Island related broadsides.)
• “Dying Speeches & Bloody Murder” (The Harvard Law School Library’s collection of over 500 crime broadsides.)
• The English Broadside Ballad Archive & The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads