Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting
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Mather obviously does not use the word “entertain” in the contemporary sense. And yet his conception of “entertainment” bears some relationship to the more modern usage of the term. Mather believed that his dark entertainments warned and admonished, but a delicious thrill accompanied them as well. Mather himself sounds like a carnival barker when he promises frightening spectacles that his readers “do expect and shall receive.” Historian of Salem Marion Starkey, in The Devil in Massachusetts, notes that for all of Mather’s righteous chest-thumping over the danger the New England colonies faced from the assaults of Satan, it is hard not to see him “unconsciously submerged in the thrill of being present as a spectator.” He provided his readers the same thrill.33
This thrill had clear erotic undertones, underscoring the close connection between horror and sexuality that became a persistent thread in American cultural history. The genealogy of the witch in western Europe already included many of the ideas that aroused, in every sense, the Puritan settlements. Folklore taught that any gathering of witches, known as the “witches sabbat,” included orgiastic sex, even sex with Satan and his demons. European demonologists frequently connected the tendency to witchcraft with a propensity toward uncontrolled sexual desire.34
Such ideas appeared again and again in the New England witch hunts. The trial of indentured servant Mary Johnson not only included accusations that she had used her relationship with Satan to get out of work for her master, but also the assertion that she had flirted, literally, with the devil. Cotton Mather wrote that she had “practiced uncleanness with men and devils.” One of the first women accused of witchcraft in Salem village had a reputation for sexual promiscuity, while male testimony against women accused of witchcraft often included descriptions of them as succubi, appearing at night dressed in flaming red bodices. The witch was not only one of the first monsters of English-speaking America. The witch also became America’s first sexy monster and one who would be punished for her proclivities.35
The end of the witch trials in 1693 came with numerous criticisms of how the cases had been handled. Petitions on behalf of the accused began to appear in the fall of 1692. In October of that year, Boston merchant Thomas Brattle, a well-traveled member of the scientific Royal Society with an interest in mathematics and astronomy, published an open letter criticizing the courts. He especially critiqued the Puritan judiciary for allowing “spectral evidence,” evidence based on visions, revelations, and alleged apparitions. Significantly, Brattle did not challenge the idea that supernatural agency had been involved in the trials, only that it had worked by different methods than the Puritan judiciary had supposed. Brattle wrote that the evidence of witches sabbats and apparitions put forward by those who accused (and by those who confessed) represented “the effect of their fancy, deluded and depraved by the Devil.” In Brattle’s mind, to accept such evidence would be tantamount to accepting the testimony of Satan himself. Like many skeptics during this period, Brattle challenged the courts on how they had used the belief in monsters, without questioning the reality of the existence of monsters.36
Salem did not mark the end of the witch trials in America. Fear of that old black magic remained a crucial part of early American life. Marginalized women and enslaved Africans remained the most common target of the witch hunt. In 1705–1706, a Virginia couple, Luke and Elizabeth Hill, accused Grace Sherwood of witchcraft. Although the Virginia courts at first found little evidence for the charge, the time-honored search for the witch’s teat soon revealed “two things like titts with Severall other Spotts.” Sherwood next underwent the infamous “water test” in which the suspected witch was thrown into water to see if she floated or sank. Sherwood floated and faced reexamination by some “anciente women” who, this time, discovered clearly diabolical “titts on her private parts.” She was subjected to another trial, although the record breaks off at this point, making her fate unclear.37
Enslaved Africans faced accusations of a special kind of witchcraft known as “conjuration” or, more simply, “sorcery.” The use of black magic against the white master class became a common charge against the instigators of slave rebellions. In 1779 a trial of slave rebels in the territory that would later become the state of Illinois ended with the execution of several slaves for the crimes of “conjure” and “necromancy.”38
The Puritans clearly had no monopoly on the belief in witchcraft. Even in parts of colonial America without a strong tradition of witch trials, beliefs that supported such trials remained strong. An Anglican missionary in colonial Carolina, Francis Le Jau, complained in a 1707 journal entry that the colonial court had not severely punished “a notorious malefactor, evidently guilty of witchcraft.” While the Puritans pursued their obsession with the most vehemence, the belief in dark powers inhabiting the American landscape remained common throughout the eighteenth century.39
Puritans found more monsters in their new world than the witch. Although we tend to picture the dour Puritans in their equally dour meetinghouses, taking in Calvinist theology and morality in great drafts, the actual Puritans lived out at least part of their experience in what David D. Hall has termed “worlds of wonder.” The work of Hall, and of colonial historian Richard Godbeer, has uncovered a variety of magical traditions, astrological beliefs, and conceptions of monstrosity among the Puritans that kept alive older European wonder-lore. Puritan conceptions of original sin, for example, contributed to their interest in abnormal births, often termed as “monstrous births,” that functioned as signs and omens. Spectral, shape-shifting dogs haunted the edges of the Puritan settlements, as did demonic, giant black bears.40
Predictably, much of the Puritan ministry saw any portents in nature as signs of the New Englanders’ divine mission. The same clergymen, just as predictably, ascribed a diabolical character to any marvel or wonders, that did not fit into their theological paradigm. For Puritan clergy, it came as no surprise to find the forests of New England populated with marvelous creatures. Their new world was surrounded by evil spirits of all kinds, as numerous as “the frogs of Egypt” according to Cotton Mather.41
Reaction to an alleged sighting of a sea serpent early in the Puritan experiment showcases this attitude. Puritan observers claimed to have encountered sea serpents long before the nineteenth-century sightings in Gloucester harbor. They also more quickly ascribed dark religious meanings to the appearance of the creature off their shores. In 1638 New England settler John Josselyn reported that recent arrivals to the colonies had seen “a sea serpent or a snake.” Nahant native Obadiah Turner described the same creature and worried that “the monster come out of the sea” might be “the old serpent spoken of in holy scripture … whose poison hath run down even unto us, so greatly to our discomfort and ruin.” The monster could be a portent of divine providence or judgment. The only other possible explanation was that it was a creature of Satan.42
Puritans were not alone in finding monsters on the American frontier. Sea serpents swam in many American waters, and strange beasts populated the wilderness that surrounded most new American settlements. But the American response to the monsters they met was not uniform and did not always share the Puritan desire to destroy the monster and cleanse the American landscape. Some even saw the monster as a strange partner in mastering the unruly frontier.
Mastering Frontier Monsters
A practice known variously as “noodling,” “ bumming,” “tickling,” or “grabbling” still maintains some limited popularity in the American South and Midwest. Skilled noodlers reach into rivers, their fingers exploring crevices where large, sometimes gigantic, male catfish guard thousands of eggs recently laid by females. The noodlers soon find their hands in the gullet of an enormous and angry fish. Wrenching the creature out of the water in a feat of strength, they both catch their supper and prove their masculinity to the small cadre of fellow noodlers who view this as both sport and initiation ritual. Expert noodlers show off their deeply scarred forearms as proof of their skill.43
The roots of this strange pastime are planted firmly in rural traditions of masculinity that are very much a part America’s frontier experience. It draws on a fund of folklore about the monstrous beings that swim America’s waters. Through this act noodlers perform an ancient rite that displays masculine strength. Mastery over the monster represents mastery over the American landscape itself.
Persistent tales of catfish that grow to extraordinary lengths and exhibit primal viciousness have a long history in American folklore. Stories of fish in the Ohio River that were able to pull human beings into the watery blackness never to be seen again circulated in the late colonial era. Perhaps the earliest tale of these river monsters comes from French explorers Marquette and Jolliet, who claimed that in 1673 a giant creature slammed into one of their canoes near what is today Peoria, Illinois. The explorers later insisted that the incident had occurred after local Native Americans warned them of a demon that lived beneath local waters that would “drag them into the abyss.” In 1780 a Moravian missionary who had come to minister to new settlements along the Ohio River reported a giant catfish that dragged fishermen to their deaths. Into the twentieth century, such stories continued to exert a powerful hold on the imagination. A rural legend from Caseyville, Kentucky, tells of the remains of a human baby found in the gullet of one of the river monsters.44
Belief in frontier monsters drew on European folklore and the tendency for frontier communities to produce legendary materials out of the shadowy forests and lakes that surrounded them. But in late colonial America, the question of monsters became a matter of national pride. A debate raged in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world over the theory of “American degeneracy.” According to some European natural scientists, including the influential French thinker Buffon, the climatic conditions in the New World produced animals and human beings markedly inferior to their European counterparts. While Buffon did not extend this theory to European settlers themselves (though he came close), he certainly believed native peoples to be a degenerate race.45
The theory of the degeneracy of America can be read as cultural propaganda masquerading as scientific theory. Colonial thinkers, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, responded with cultural propaganda of their own, arguing that, in fact, the American continent had produced gigantic, powerful, and brutal creatures unlike anything anyone had seen on the continent of Europe. The American wilderness, they asserted, had produced monsters. And American monsters had to be bigger than anyone else’s.
This discussion had the effect of reopening the debate over the meaning of Cotton Mather’s “giant’s bones” in Claverack, New York, while also setting off a wave of fossil collection that made the American mastodon a matter for significant public discussion. The collecting of fossils in Kentucky’s “Big Bone Lick” and near Niagara Falls, New York, became a passion among amateur paleontologists. During the American Revolution, the bones of the “Incognitum” (the mastodon or woolly mammoth) became what historian of science Paul Semonin has called “an emblem of national honor.”46
Even George Washington, in one of the most difficult periods of the Revolutionary War, took time out to go fossil hunting. In 1780 Washington established the headquarters of the Continental Army near West Point, New York, as he contemplated an attack on the British stronghold at New York City. A snowfall in December gave him the opportunity to travel to a nearby farm where another “giant tooth” had been discovered. Washington, according to an aide-de- camp who joined him on the outing, claimed that, at Mount Vernon, he had similar specimens collected from the Ohio River Valley.47
Thomas Jefferson’s 1781 draft of Notes on the State of Virginia, a natural history survey of his home state, discussed the fossils of the mastodon in detail. Jefferson sought to refute the claims of European scientists who suggested that the bones belonged to either an elephant or a hippopotamus. “The skeleton of the mammoth,” he wrote, “bespeaks an animal of six times the cubic volume of the elephant.” The creature was not only the largest that had ever shaken the American continent with its lumbering stride but, Jefferson insisted, “the largest of all terrestrial beings.”48
Some American thinkers saw the fossil finds as further proof of the biblical account of Noahic giants rather than simply an emblem of national superiority. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale University from 1778 to 1795, at first refused to accept the contention that gigantic teeth unearthed in America belonged to a creature anything like a mastodon. Stiles instead embraced what he called the “Doctrine of Monsters,” the belief that anomalies like gigantic fossils proved that the biblical world of wonders existed on the American landscape. Writing about Washington’s visit to view fossils in New York, Stiles admitted that most natural scientists “take these bones to belong to Quadrupeds.” He insisted, to the contrary, that they belonged to giant humans, “like the bones and teeth at Claverack” that had fascinated Mather. Stiles, a major intellectual celebrity in the early American republic, shows that Mather still had plenty of disciples for this view, bringing together as it did the biblical history and the history of the new nation.49
Stiles would eventually reject this idea after a long correspondence with Jefferson. Nevertheless, his doctrine of monsters received new life in a popular account of the Kentucky territory that portrayed the fossil finds at Big Bone Lick as uncovering the remains of a true American horror. John Filson’s 1793 The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky, popular both in the United States and in France, portrayed the mastodon as “the tyrant of the forest, perhaps the devourer of man.”50
Filson’s strange travelogue used gothic imagery to recreate the frontier landscape as land of Native American graves, unquiet spirits, and the bones of monstrous creatures. He imagined the herbivorous mastodon as a raging carnivore and suggested that native peoples had to form a large political confederation in order to stamp out the creature that would otherwise have brought about “the extinction of the whole race of animals from the system of nature.” Filson had extrapolated from the mastodon fossil finds a secret and terrifying history of the American continent in which Lovecraftian beings had once been a terror to humans.51
Filson not only regenerated the doctrine of monsters, he produced the first series of stories about Daniel Boone. Boone was an actual historical character, a Native American fighter and land surveyor who gobbled up vast tracts of land on the Kentucky frontier in the late eighteenth century. Filson, who had accompanied Boone on an expedition through the Cumberland Gap in search of settlement sites, transformed him into America’s first frontier hero, a subduer of nature on a wild and brutal frontier.52
Filson’s mythic language contained a brutal reality about early American history. Boone, and men like him, did spill out through the Appalachians in the late eighteenth century, killing and dispersing native peoples. In national mythology, Boone became an archetypal symbol for American masters of the frontier, winning out over a brutal nature that had once been the home of “the tyrant of the forests.” Like the noodlers that are their latter-day progeny, early American settlers set out to become masters of the savage beasts of the frontier.
As the nineteenth century approached, many Americans exerted a different kind of mastery. The enslavement of Africans had been part of the American experiment from the very beginning as the Virginia colony introduced the slave system as a replacement for the limited duration of white indentured servanthood. Justifications of slavery on the basis of the inferiority of the African race became increasingly common as the eighteenth century progressed.
Slavery became interwoven with the prosperous economic systems of the southern states. Proslavery apologists increasingly turned to the image of the monster to make their case. Even Thomas Jefferson, known for his anxiety over slavery and his condemnation of the international slave trade, still argued in Notes on the State of Virginia for the inferiority of Africans. Jefferson never definitively asserted that this represented a true biological inferiority, leaving open
the possibility that African people had been “made distinct by time and circumstances.” He certainly assented to the belief that African people “are inferior to whites in the endowments of body and mind.”53
Racism became a new doctrine of monsters in America. Although basing most of his suppositions about African American inferiority on skin color (an aesthetic argument that assumed the superior beauty of white and even of the “tawny” skin of native peoples over the African), Jefferson also borrowed the monster tales of the exploration of Africa. Dismissing Buffon’s notions of American degeneracy, he freely borrowed the French writer’s discussion of giant African apes mating with African women. In one especially startling passage, he suggested that even African people recognized the superiority of the “flowing hair” and “more elegant symmetry of form” of the whites. He then compared this to the way the “Oran-ootan” showed its preference “for black women over those of their own species.” Paul Semonin comments that Jefferson in this passage “equated the alleged ardor of black males for white women with aberrant sexual behavior in the animal world.”54
Race and slavery became productive of all kinds of monster tales. Terrifying creatures emerged out of the terrifying realities of the slave trade, forced immigrations taking place over several centuries. America would be unable to live with the creature it created, and the enslaved found themselves in the maw of a monster.
Ghosts of the Trade
The Atlantic slave trade became the engine that drove the first global economy, the triangular trade that brought enormous wealth to the European powers and fueled colonization and settlement in the New World. The trade in slaves had its beginnings in the late fifteenth century, as early Portuguese explorers, hunting for gold, formed treaties with coastal African merchants to trade metals, guns, and gunpowder for slaves from the African interior. This process disrupted state building in West Africa, setting off round after round of slaving wars between African ethnic groups. As Portuguese and Spanish power waned, Holland, and eventually England, seized control of the trade.55