Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (46 page)

1
  In a peculiar way, the uprising of Fool, “the people under the stairs,” and the people of the neighborhood replicates the story of the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, a class-based uprising that included a few Native Americans and slaves as well as landless whites.

2
  Annalee Newitz,
Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 114–15.

3
  Michael Palencia-Roth, “Enemies of God: Monsters and the Theology of Conquest,” in
Monsters, Tricksters and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identity
, ed. A. James Arnold (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 23.

4
  See Fernando Cervantes,
The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 13–15.

5
  Peter Burke, “Frontiers of the Monstrous: Perceiving National Character in Early Modern Europe,” in
Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe
, ed
.
Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 28–29.

6
  Burke, “Frontiers of the Monstrous,” 239.

7
  Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes, “Introduction,” in
Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities
, 1–3.

8
  See David Armitage, “Monstrosity and Myth in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
,” and Andrew Curran, “Afterword: Anatomical Readings in the Early Modern Era,” in Knoppers and Landes,
Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities
, 200, 228–29.

9
  Winthrop Jordan,
White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 29.

10
Jordan,
White Over Black
, 30.

11
Robert Weir,
Colonial South Carolina: A History
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 8.

12
Fernando Cervantes provides a full discussion of this material in
The Devil in the New World
, 13–15, 35.

13
Quoted in Palencia-Roth, “Enemies of God,” 38–39.

14
Palencia-Roth, “Enemies of God,” 40, 43.

15
See Raymond DeMallie and Elian Jahner,
Lakota Belief and Ritual
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 166–70. Many thanks to Professor Lee Irwin, Religious Studies at the College of Charleston, for pointing me to this source. A variant of this folktale is the “Mysterious Deer.” This tale, common in the Appalachians, uses the white doe as a symbol of the vengeance of nature in which hunters shoot a mysterious white deer and wound only themselves. See “The Mysterious Deer,” in
The Greenwood Library of American Folktales
, ed. Thomas A. Green (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006), 2:197–98.

16
Full descriptions of the earliest colonization efforts by Europeans appear in works such as James Axtell’s
Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Karen O. Kupperman’s
Settling with Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).

17
Michael Leroy Oberg offers the best discussion of Roanoke in
The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). On the failed French settlement see Walter Edgar,
South Carolina: A History
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 27.

18
In 1965 Virginia Dare became the lead character in Phillip Jose Farmer’s tale of the lost colonists being abducted by aliens. See
Dare
(New York: Ballentine Books, 1965). Author Neil Gaiman also used the character in his Marvel comics series entitled
1602
and borrowed the mythology of Dare as shapeshifter.

19
Roger Manley,
Weird Carolinas
(New York: Sterling Publishing, 2007), 18
–
19.

20
Sallie Southall Cotten,
The White Doe: The Fate of Virginia Dare
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1902), 12.

21
O. R. Mangum, “The Lost Colony Found,”
Wake Forest Student
25 (1906); A. Denison Heart, “Raleigh’s Lost Colony,”
Southern Workman
, 1913.

22
James W. Baker,
Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday
(Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009) and Robert S. Tilton,
Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

23
Marjorie Hudson,
Searching for Virginia Dare
(Wilmington, N.C.: Coastal Carolina Press, 2003), 87–88.

24
A good introduction to this genre, complete with some examples of these narratives, can be found in Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, eds.,
Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676–1724
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press), 1981.

25
Edward Ingebretsen,
Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King
(Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 39.

26
See Henry Nash Smith’s classic discussion of the Western folk hero and his relationship to nature in Smith’s
Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).

27
The anti-immigrant hate site
http://www.VDARE.com
provides one example in which Virginia Dare serves as a symbol.

28
The classic argument for the significance of the Puritans for American culture can be found in Sacvan Bercovitch’s
Puritanism and the Origins of the American Self
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). A newer emphasis on regionalism and race in the development of American identity has complicated Bercovitch’s claims.

29
Owen Davies and Jonathan Barry, “Introduction,” in
Witchcraft Historiography
, ed. Owen Davies and Jonathan Barry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 4.

30
David D. Hall,
Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638–1693
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 22.

31
Richard Godbeer,
The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 192.

32
Ingebretsen,
Maps of Heaven
, 47.

33
Marion L. Starkey,
The Devil in Massachusetts
(New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1949), 239.

34
An examination of these misogynistic beliefs from a psychological and cultural perspective can be found in Lyndal Roper,
Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe
(New York: Routledge, 1994).

35
Bryan F. Le Beau,
The Story of the Salem Witchcraft Trials
, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2010), 31.

36
Charles Upham,
Salem Witchcraft
(Boston: Wiggin & Lunt, 1867), 451–52.

37
Herbert Leventhal,
In the Shadow of the Enlightenment
:
Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth Century America
(New York: New York University Press, 1976), 77.

38
Yvonne P. Chirau,
Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 67, 70–71.

39
The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau
,
1706–1717
, ed. Frank J. Klingberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 25, 30.

40
Richard Godbeer,
The Devil’s Dominion
,
and idem,
Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Beliefs in Early New England
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

41
Cotton Mather quoted in James A. Morone,
Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 86.

42
Richard M. Dorson,
Man and Beast in American Comic Legend
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 64.

43
The best description of this pastime appears in Burkhard Bilger,
Noodling for Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish and Other Southern Comforts
(New York: Scribner, 2002).

44
Jan Harold Brunvand,
American Folklore: An Encyclopedia
(New York: Routledge, 1998), 270–72.

45
Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia
(New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 37–57.

46
Paul Semonin,
American Monster
(New York: New York University Press, 2000), 6, 176.

47
See Robert Annan, “Account of a Skeleton of a Large Animal, found near Hudson’s River,” in
Memoirs of the Academy of Arts and Sciences
(Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1793), 160–68.

48
Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia
, 37–43.

49
Quoted in Semonin,
American Monster
, 178.

50
John Filson,
The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky
(New York: printed and sold by Samuel Campbell, no. 37, 1793), Early American Imprints. Series I, no. 25648, 32.

51
Filson,
Discovery
, 36.

52
Richard Slotkin,
Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 278–312.

53
Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia
,
133.

54
Semonin,
American Monster
, 219–20.

55
David Brion Davis,
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 84–102, 124–40.

56
A layperson’s history of the trade can be found in Hugh Thomas,
The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).

57
Marcus Rediker,
The Slave Ship: A Human History
(New York: Viking, 2007), 299.

58
Equiano’s Travels: His Autobiography
, abridged ed., Paul Edwards (London: Heineman Press, 1967), 25–26.

59
A full account of these beliefs and a sampling of the mountain of evidence for them appears in William D. Pierson, “White Cannibals, Black Martyrs,”
The Journal of Negro History
62, no. 2 (1977): 147–49.

60
John Thornton, “Cannibals, Witches and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World,”
The William and Mary Quarterly
, 3rd ser., 60, no. 2 (2003): 273–94.

61
Josiah C. Nott, “Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Race” in
The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860
, ed. Drew G. Faust (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1981), 206–38.

62
For a discussion of Hammond and of paternalism more generally, see Drew Gilpin Faust,
James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), esp. 72–73.

63
“Charlestown,”
South Carolina Gazette
, February 25, 1737, special collections, Charleston County Library.

64
A number of scholars have discussed the paradox of the slave as monster and faithful servant. On the varieties of slave resistance, see Peter Kolchin,
American Slavery: 1619–1877
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), 155–68. On paternalism and its contradictions, see Eugene Genovese,
Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made
(New York: Vintage Books, 1996), see esp. 89–93.

65
Elizabeth Young,
Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor
(New York: New York University Press, 2008), 19–20.

66
William T. Cox,
Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods
(Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2007), 15.

67
The story about a South Carolina planter who disguised himself in a devil costume is described in a religious tract from the early nineteenth century entitled “The Devil Let Loose” (author unknown) (New York: n.p., 1805).

68
See Charles Sellers,
The Market Revolution
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 5–10. For a different view of the same process, see Gordon S. Wood,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
(New York: Vintage Books, 1993) 254–55, 365–69.

69
A discussion of Douglass’ 1860 speech appears in Young,
Black Frankenstein
, 45–46.