Chapter 2: To See Ourselves as Others Do
Supplement to Endnotes
Endnote 1) On Rachel Cole: Cornelius claimed that their “tenderhearted mother,” and her hatred for cruelty and viciousness, shaped the family’s politics. Americans who supported the war with Mexico tended to not only believe in America’s divine calling to spread its empire to the Pacific Coast, or even from Canada to Chile, but to bring slavery with it. Rachel Cole’s anti-slavery feelings perhaps spared her boys from hasty graves in Tabasco, Churubusco, Vera Cruz and Mexico City. The Coles appear to have identified with anti-slavery Democrats who tended to focus less on the suffering that slaves endured, and more on slavery as a threat to prosperity for common white men.
If sentimental disgust lay behind the anti-slavery politics held by Cornelius, he was converted after the war with Mexico. His first presidential vote was cast for James K. Polk, a proslavery, pro-expansion Democrat, over the Whig, Henry Clay, who was a hero for many self-made men like Lincoln. Cornelius’s politics changed, probably when he studied law under William Henry Seward in the end of the 1840s. At the time of the war against Mexico, George’s oldest brother, Elijah, would have just entered his thirties. George had just turned nineteen. Brothers David, Gilbert, and Cornelius were all in their twenties. It appears that Rachel Cole’s influence helped prod her boys along the axis from an anti-slavery faction in the Democratic Party toward the newly formed Republicans. See: Catherine Coffin Phillips, Cornelius Cole, California Pioneer and United States Senator: A Study in Personality and Achievements Bearing upon the Growth of a Commonwealth (San Francisco: J. H. Nash, 1929), pp. 54-5; for Cornelius as an anti-slavery Democrat, see: Cornelius Cole, Memoirs of Cornelius Cole: Ex-Senator of the United States from California (New York: McLoughlin Brothers, 1908), pp. 109, 135.
Endnote 5) It isn’t even clear when Mary was born. According to some records -- pensions, census records -- she would have been nineteen when she married George. According to others, she would have been as young as fifteen. The 1880 census recorded her birth year as 1832; the 1870 census dates it as 1836. See Cole’s pension for affidavits about their marriage.
Endnote 6) Mary Barto Cole’s maternal grandfather, Silas Halsey, had been one of the area’s first white settlers. Only four years after Sullivan’s Raid, Silas began squatting on land two miles north of the site where the Coles would soon establish their own farm. He eventually built a grist mill on a local creek, a sorely needed enterprise for scattered settlers who until then had to travel across Seneca Lake to turn their grain into flour.
Endnote 7) Havana locals anticipated a series of canals and other railroads under construction that would pass through the village, connecting Havana to larger nearby towns, like Elmira and Corning. This promised to connect the town to the extensive deposits of coal and timber in Pennsylvania, which would make it, many hoped, one of the most important feeder towns for the Erie Canal. Pondering how New York City would soon be only fourteen to sixteen hours from their village because of transportation infrastructure, the Havana Journal exulted in late 1849: “Thus is space annihilated, and time economized by the triumphs of human skill and industry.”
Endnote 9) On George Cole's store in Havana: Cole would often run five or six advertisements at once. He also sold Spanish blood purifier, Jamaican ginger (which some customers would have used for its alcohol content), and imported wines and liquors (which Cole, the abstaining Methodist, maintained was “for medicinal purposes”). Coming soon: link to images from his advertisements.
Endnote 10) The families of farmers, clerks, lawyers, teachers, and artisans could not afford the mansions of America’s aristocratic planters and great merchants. But Americans maintained that nothing should prevent those of more modest means from aspiring to live like any other man. Timing it just right, an army of artisans, industrialists, architects, salesmen, entrepreneurs and storekeepers like George Cole, made possible the access to cheaper objects and clothing that emulated the possessions of Old World aristocracy. The courtly life of kings and noblemen, no matter how much despised in the American Revolution and after, remained the measure of men’s prosperity. Thanks to the marriage of the spreading desire for gentility and increasingly cheap clocks, sofas, lamps, bookcases -- Americans began consuming their way into a kind of democratic gentility.
The Market Revolution was not like some Atlantic tidal wave that began around New York City or the cloth mills in Massachusetts and came crashing down on the barter economies in small towns of interior America. Instead, over the first half of the nineteenth century market society largely emerged from the interior. Artisans, inventors and shopkeepers in the Yankee hinterlands helped transform people’s relationship to things. Machinists and artisans sought out methods for producing goods more uniformly and with less skilled labor. Objects of refinement grew cheaper and within the reach of aspiring, ordinary folks. Salesmen and producers stoked desire for those goods through print, especially newspapers -- exploiting the “village enlightenment” of schools, lyceums, and bookshops taking place throughout Yankee hinterlands. In short, families from small towns were not simply enticed by urban manufacturers to consume more and finer things. Rural and small-town Americans worked up the longing all their own. See: Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1993); Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1987); David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Endnote 11) Richard Bushman argues that although members of America’s new middle class were reluctant to admit it, they emulated European aristocracy by buying home decor and furniture. Rather than reject aristocracy, they came to believe that it was within reach of deserving folk—a matter of merit. In doing so, they became people who fretted over building and improving outward appearances. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1993).
Endnote 12) On things as a marker for the kept promises of the American experiment: In northern towns and cities especially, an emerging, well-mannered middle class, with its accumulation of mass market things, was assurance that America was a republic of merit. Eric Foner shows how by the eve of the Civil War, Americans, especially those who funneled into the Republican Party, came to see the middle-class as the test for a healthy republic, proof that class had not hardened into rigid castes. One of the most trenchant criticisms from northerners of southern slavery was that the South lacked a middle class (and was therefore a negation of the ideals of the Founding Fathers). Bushman, The Refinement of America, p. xiv, 405-407. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Endnote 13) The reading and owning of books was essential to the growing aspirations of many antebellum Americans: In Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s novel Home (1835), the young protagonist, William Barclay, was blessed with a mother who understood that her most important duty was to provide “a good education for her son.” In the tale, William eventually renounces formal education and by his “own exertions” learns the craft of printing and ascends to the head of one of New York’s most valuable presses. When his earnings were sufficient to enable him to maintain a family and “go ahead,” he marries and then buys a modest home in the city. He pleases his newlywed when he reveals that he purchased simple furniture and “no gewgaws of any kind.” Instead, he puts the savings towards a large library that included various works including a five-volume biography of George Washington, and an English dictionary by Samuel Johnson. The “one luxury,” Sedgwick told her readers, which was “essential to happiness” was “a book-case filled with well selected and well bound volumes.” See: Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Home: A Story of New England Life (New York: Worthington Co., 1890 [1835]), pp. 9-11.
Endnote 15) On books in George’s store, etc: Mental culture, though, did not fit comfortably with the relentless pursuits of business. One of the Havana pioneers, Charles Cook, was an unschooled man who collected books along his journey to wealth. A driven speculator and builder, he had helped build the Canal Building that Cole would use for his bookstore. Cook was said to have “accumulated quite a library.” Several years after Cole had come to Havana, Cook’s worldly pursuits sapped him of his energy and time. He told others that he wished he could surround himself with his many books in the new Bank Building, which was still under construction, and “give himself up to their uninterrupted enjoyment.” But, as the story goes, Cook never finished the building and “his valued books were scattered.” Wayne E. Morrison, Early History, &c., the Village of Havana, N.Y. ([Ovid, NY?]: W. C. Morrison, n.d.), pp. 119-120.
Endnote 19) COMING SOON Images here. One image is of Brown’s Gallery. Another image is taken from the larger newspaper page where George Cole took out an advertisement for his gallery. Another image is of a large, ornate contemporary gallery in Cincinnati-- a frontier city filled with citizens anxious to prove their standing. Also, photo from Ebay folder, in my possession). Also see Daguerreotype of woman and two daughters (from West, prob Cincinnati); notice how this yearning to capture one’s image spreads to even the frontier); this image helps us imagine what Mary and her two daughters might have looked like. Here.
Endnote 21) On Havanan and malaria: Widespread suffering from the malaria ague was not something that Havana’s boosters touted in the papers. But local legends and critics from surrounding towns, especially nearby villages competing for investment, future citizens, or the county seat, were prone to describe Havana as a one-horse town surrounded by deep ravines and miles of tree-choked swamps -- a frog swamp swarming with mosquitoes. See: Morrison, Early History, pp.12, 22, 183-4.
Endnote 23) On agricultural colleges and new farming technologies: New York had just chartered one of the nation’s first agricultural colleges in 1853, only to charter another one in 1855 which was the first to open its doors. The school’s trustees purchased 686 acres in Ovid, a few miles from Cole’s farm, and approved a curriculum that included machinery, agronomy, horticulture and farm engineering. Future plowmen studied laws related to highways, fences and contracts. They were learning to be businessmen, reliant on technological progress. The first mowing machines had just begun appearing on the region’s farms in the 1850s alongside greatly improved irrigation with the use of drainage tiles.
Because of complications the first college never opened. The first charted agricultural college opened its doors in 1860 but closed the next year because of the Civil War. William H. Beach, “The Old Farm and the New,” in Papers read before the Seneca Falls Historical Society, including the History and Centennial Proceedings of the First Presbyterian Church, Seneca Fall, N.Y., for the year 1907, pp.16-28; Alfred Charles True, A History of Agricultural Education in the United States: 1785-1925, pp. 51-53. For the kinds of crops grown at midcentury, see: David C. Smith, “Middle Range Farming in the Civil War Era: Life on a Farm in Seneca County, 1862–1866,” New York History 48, no. 4 (October 1967), p. 366.
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