Star Territory: Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America

By Gordon Fraser

The United States has been a space power since its founding, Gordon Fraser writes. The white stars on its flag reveal the dream of continental elites that the former colonies might constitute a "new constellation" in the firmament of nations. The streets and avenues of its capital city were mapped in reference to celestial observations. And as the nineteenth century unfolded, all efforts to colonize the North American continent depended upon the science of surveying, or mapping with reference to celestial movement. Through its built environment, cultural mythology, and exercise of military power, the United States has always treated the cosmos as a territory available for exploitation.

In Star Territory Fraser explores how from its beginning, agents of the state, including President John Adams, Admiral Charles Henry Davis, and astronomer Maria Mitchell, participated in large-scale efforts to map the nation onto cosmic space. Through almanacs, maps, and star charts, practical information and exceptionalist mythologies were transmitted to the nation's soldiers, scientists, and citizens.

This is, however, only one part of the story Fraser tells. From the country's first Black surveyors, seamen, and publishers to the elected officials of the Cherokee Nation and Hawaiian resistance leaders, other actors established alternative cosmic communities. These Black and indigenous astronomers, prophets, and printers offered ways of understanding the heavens that broke from the work of the U.S. officials for whom the universe was merely measurable and exploitable.

Today, NASA administrators advocate public-private partnerships for the development of space commerce while the military seeks to control strategic regions above the atmosphere. If observers imagine that these developments are the direct offshoots of a mid-twentieth-century space race, Fraser brilliantly demonstrates otherwise. The United States' efforts to exploit the cosmos, as well as the resistance to these efforts, have a history that starts nearly two centuries before the Gemini and Apollo missions of the 1960s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812297904

Book preview

Star Territory

MATERIAL TEXTS

Series Editors

A complete list of books in the series is available

from the publisher.

STAR TERRITORY

Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America

Gordon Fraser

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-5292-7

For

Geoffrey Lee Fraser

and

Carol Freeman Fraser

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. Almanacs in the Astronomical Nation

Chapter 2. The Emancipatory Cosmology of the First Black Press

Chapter 3. Cherokee Astronomy

Chapter 4. The National Almanac in Peace and War

Chapter 5. Hawaiian Cosmography in Print

Epilogue. The Third Space Age

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Sitting before a committee of the House of Representatives, a high-ranking US military officer—a general—speaks of changing battlefield conditions on the frontier. This frontier had once been accessible only to the world powers, but it is increasingly open to all. The once-empty spaces at the extreme edge of US territory are more contested now than ever before.¹ His warning of numerous enemies just beyond the horizon evokes a nineteenth-century discourse of territorial expansion by the United States, a time when fears of British or French imperialism gave way to wars with indigenous nations, with revolutionary nation-states such as Mexico, and with nations in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Yet this general did not give his testimony in the midst of the so-called Indian Wars of the nineteenth century, nor did he deliver it in the midst of the Cold War. The military commander in question, Lt. General William Shelton, was delivering his testimony before Congress in April 2014. And the frontier of which he spoke was the so-called space environment, a region defined by the Department of Defense as beginning at the lower boundary of the Earth’s ionosphere … and extending outward.² Shelton was then the head of Air Force Space Command, a military unit that would in December 2019 be transformed into the sixth branch of the armed forces, the US Space Force. And Shelton’s testimony, like that of the commanders who would follow him, made clear that the United States remains committed to dominance in the increasingly contested frontier of outer space.³

This book begins from the premise that the United States is in the midst of its third space age. Tech magnates make plans to colonize Mars, mine asteroids, or otherwise develop space commerce.⁴ NASA administrators advocate public-private partnerships for space exploration.⁵ And, with the recent creation of the Space Force, the federal government has emphasized its intent to control strategic regions above the atmosphere, to ensure that American security is attended to as the nation’s private pioneers … cultivate the vast new expanses of outer space.⁶ Observers often imagine that these developments are the culmination of the mid-twentieth-century space race, beginning with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 and culminating in the US-crewed missions to the lunar surface, the last of which landed in 1972.⁷ But this book will suggest that US efforts to exploit the cosmos have a much longer history, a history that dates to the founding of the United States itself.

Elected officials, military officers, and nationalists in the United States have long sought to shape the relationship between human beings and the universe. Astronomical language and imagery permeated the political culture of the revolutionary nation and the early republic. The flag of the United States, for instance, has since 1777 featured white stars in a blue field. That year, the revolutionary Congress ordered a flag with stars because it hoped that the thirteen colonies would form a new constellation in the firmament of nations. As stars have accumulated—representing states such as Texas, California, and Hawai‘i, which were seized in the aftermath of armed conflicts—the flag has become an iconographic record of settler-colonial expansion.⁸ But the flag also preserves a particularly astronomical way of understanding the national project. Indeed, the second warship to be built under the constitutional government of the United States would be called the USS Constellation (the first was the United States), and coins minted after the revolution bore the inscription Nova Constellatio, or New Constellation.⁹ The astronomical aspirations of early US nationalists were not merely rhetorical, moreover. Beginning with the administration of George Washington and continuing throughout the nineteenth century, agents of the United States sought to map, measure, predict, and exploit astronomical space as a means of cultivating national prestige, promoting and protecting commerce, and projecting force. In short, many US political leaders sought to make their nation a space power.

Today, the phrase space power is used by theorists of military strategy to describe the constellation of advantages that accrue to nation-states with the technological ability to map, predict, and exploit forces and bodies in space. Applied to the nineteenth century, the phrase is an anachronism, but a useful one. Space power theorists have concluded, in essence, that the ability to understand, measure, and exploit the universe enables states to project influence through demonstrations of scientific prestige, to economically reward other global actors for cooperation, often through shared commercial advantages, and to project force.¹⁰ While contemporary theorists have in mind contemporary technologies—missile defense systems, the Global Positioning System, and so on—the basic tenets of what is now called space power were very much available to nineteenth-century political actors.

By predicting astronomical events years in advance, nation-states in the late eighteenth and in the nineteenth century could demonstrate their scientific sophistication to other empires or nations, as Vice President John Adams (1735–1826) tried to do when he sponsored a publication predicting the appearance of a comet in 1789.¹¹ By printing and making commercially available predictions of the future positions of the moon, planets, and stars, governments could enable merchant ships to navigate more effectively, promoting commerce between their citizens and their trading partners. This was one goal of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, a publication produced by the US Navy beginning in 1852 and annually published through the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond.¹² And by creating detailed maps of the earth based on precise measurements of celestial reference points, nation-states could prepare more effectively for wars of conquest. This was a strategy the US government pursued in the Cherokee Nation in the 1830s, when the War Department sent small, inconspicuous teams of surveyors and astronomers over the mountains of present-day Georgia and North Carolina to prepare the ground for an army of conquest. That army would have been deployed if the Cherokee people resisted the forced relocation that came to be called the Trail of Tears.¹³ Space power, as it is understood today, enables a nation-state to cultivate prestige, promote commerce, and project force. If nineteenth-century agents of the United States lacked for this vocabulary, they did not lack for this insight. Star Territory will suggest, then, that the cosmic aspirations of present-day United States nationalists are not recent developments. Efforts to control and exploit the universe have deep roots in the nineteenth century. From John Adams to military explorer John C. Frémont (1813–1890) to astronomer Maria Mitchell (1818–1889), officials and agents of the United States participated in a large-scale effort to map the new nation onto cosmic space, what Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) referred to as star territory.

Disgusted with the expansion of slavery into Texas, Thoreau predicted a US nation-state that would one day extend its instrumental treatment of the natural and human landscape to the solar system itself, and eventually to the entire universe. For the US state, Thoreau suggested, the cosmos would only ever serve as more waste land in the West, suitable for economic exploitation and colonization. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), he writes, I know that there are many stars, I know that they are far enough off, bright enough, steady enough in their orbits,—but what are they all worth? They are more waste land in the West,—star territory,—to be made slave States, perchance, if we colonize them.¹⁴ In the 1840s, the danger was remote that other planets or star systems would become, in a literal sense, slave States. Unlike in the twenty-first-century United States, the US government in the nineteenth century could not send human crews or robotic devices to explore the moon, or Mars, or the remoter reaches of the solar system. But Thoreau recognized the solar system and the universe as a vast ecology. He imagined plants growing not only on the surface of the earth but on all the planets.¹⁵ He was fascinated by the possibility that Venus—seen in the morning and the evening by human beings over the course of millennia—was "another world, a whole ecosystem hidden from those on earth by a thick layer of clouds.¹⁶ But Thoreau also understood how agents of the US government treated the universe: the land, the oceans, and even cosmic space. To the roving eye of the US military astronomer or commercial surveyor, who relied on celestial observations to navigate, to divide land into parcels of property, or to make military maps, star territory was akin to waste land in the West"—at once empty and exploitable.

Of course, like many nineteenth-century critics of empire, Thoreau was implicated in the very projects he critiqued. He was not merely a naturalist and an essayist but also a commercial land surveyor. Evidence suggests, in fact, that he was a better-than-average surveyor, sought after by property owners and one municipality for his ability to produce precise, sophisticated maps of land parcels.¹⁷ In 1851, for instance, Thoreau completed the complex measurements outlined in a surveying and navigation textbook popular at the West Point military academy to determine the precise position of true north from his Concord, Massachusetts, home. Thoreau’s observation of the apparent movement of Polaris, or the North Star, enabled him to include these measurements in both his commercial surveys and his more speculative maps of the land around him.¹⁸ Like many of the thinkers considered in the pages to follow, Thoreau recognized that the tools of astronomy and measurement were instrumental to the projection of space power and to its unsettlement. He admired and raised money for the radical abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859), who conducted phony surveys of the Kansas Territory to spy on proslavery militants and conducted genuine surveys of the territory to defend the land claims of the indigenous people who lived there.¹⁹ Many nineteenth-century dissenters against an emerging regime of US space power nonetheless saw in the tools of astronomy, land surveying, and navigation a means of producing alternatives to that regime.

And it is to these dissenters that this book will turn for insight. From the first black publishers in the United States to writers and editors in the Cherokee Nation to the last reigning monarch of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, political actors across the nineteenth century imagined and communicated other ways of understanding and relating to the universe. The Cherokee poet Tso-le-oh-woh would caution against a hubristic relation to the cosmos, against dreaming that control of cosmic space would enable the projection of absolute power.²⁰ The Cherokee newspaper editor Elias Boudinot (1802–1839), meanwhile, would frequently reprint articles speculating about life on other planets and musing on the ethics of living in a universe inhabited by conscious, nonhuman beings.²¹ Black newspaper editors Samuel Cornish (1795–1858) and John Russwurm (1799–1851) considered the meaning of human freedom in a universe that was not just spatially but temporally vast. What might slavery and freedom mean when considered on the almost incomprehensible timescales of the universe itself?²² And Lili‘uokalani (1838–1917)—the constitutional monarch of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and the Ali‘i ‘Ai Moku, or highest-ranking hereditary elite—privately published an account of the creation and development of the universe, giving this printed book as a gift to at least one university, to the Library of Congress, to a scholarly society, and to numerous friends and allies.²³ Throughout the nineteenth century, political actors from within and beyond the United States imagined ways of understanding and relating to the universe that were not merely instrumental, not merely a means of projecting space power.

Long before the Gemini and Apollo missions, and long before the creation of the Global Positioning System, or GPS, agents of the United States government sought to map and measure the universe as a means of controlling strategic territory in North Ameri ca and around the world.²⁴ But others in the nineteenth century imagined very different ways of understanding and relating to the cosmos. These dissenting astronomers, scholars, poets, prophets, and printers built far-flung networks through which they could communicate their own accounts of the universe. Recalling their dissent, Star Territory will suggest, is more urgent now than ever. As agents of the United States government embark on the work of a third space age, promoting the commerce of private pioneers and defending that commerce through the projection of force, we would do well to recall that there are different ways of understanding, interacting with, and inhabiting the universe.²⁵

Printing the Universe

The primary technology of space power during the nineteenth-century American space age was the printed text: the almanac, the map, the star chart. If the mid-twentieth-century space race has come to be associated with images of Saturn V rockets, orbiting satellites, and television’s futurist aesthetics in The Jetsons (1962–1963) and Star Trek (1966–1969), our recent age has been enabled by similarly visible but more quotidian technologies: the GPS-enabled smartphone, which relies on a network of US military satellites and radio observatories; the commercial rockets of companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin; and the robotic rovers that have explored the surfaces of the moon and Mars.²⁶ But the relationship between the individual, the state, and the cosmos was mediated in the nineteenth century by the printed text far more than by any other technology.²⁷ National power depended on the ability of nationals to navigate across oceans, to map territory, and to tell the time. All of these tasks depended, in turn, on the use of printed texts. Clocks and chronometers were set in accordance to printed predictions about sunrise and sunset. Ocean navigators relied on ephemerides, or printed predictions about the future positions of the moon, planets, and stars, in order to chart a path across what one US Navy officer called the pathless sea.²⁸ And rural people, particularly in the early part of the century, got much of their scientific education from commercial almanacs, which were miscellanies of astronomical information, jokes, histories, medicine recipes, and weather predictions.²⁹

Of course, other technologies were important. In the nineteenth century, scientists and inventors made breakthroughs in the development of telescopes and photography, for instance. Over the course of the century, the number of telescopic observatories worldwide would rise from about three dozen to more than two hundred, according to one estimate.³⁰ And the development of photography would enable scientists and members of the public to study in greater detail the surface of the earth’s moon. The first daguerreotype of the moon was taken from an observatory in New York in 1840, and other, similar images would soon follow.³¹ Despite this, the printed text would remain throughout the century the most important means by which large numbers of people would understand the universe: its current organization, its past, its future, its usefulness to the projection of national power, or its meaning independent of human desires. The findings of telescopic observatories were disseminated through print. Even the first photographs of astronomical bodies made their way to government officials, to other scientists, and to the public through printed books and periodicals.³² The story told in these pages, then, will follow printed texts. From the eighteenth-century commercial almanac to the first black newspaper to the official Cherokee Almanac to the Hawaiian creation chant, Star Territory will trace how print enabled nineteenth-century people to make sense of the universe in radically divergent ways.

The story will begin, then, with a popular printed text: the almanac. Chapter i will examine the ubiquity of the almanac in the late eighteenth-century United States. In a world of limited access to print, almanacs often provided the only publication consistently available to rural and urban readers, to black sailors, white settlers, Cherokee farmers, and numerous others. As a consequence of this ubiquity, almanacs presented an opportunity to early US nationalists. Agents of the weak, emergent US state attempted to rationalize almanac production. Government surveyor Andrew Ellicott (1754–1820) tried to convince officials to publish a state-sponsored almanac, even while he sought to establish a meridian by which all US mapmakers might make calculations. These efforts failed.³³ Almanacs remained commercial. Even more importantly, commercial almanacs provided readers with a means of communing with the universe. Readers kept diaries in their almanacs, recording the deaths of family members or contesting official histories.³⁴ Almanacs enabled a kind of shared experience of the universe—one that was plural, disaggregated, and often personal, but seldom nationalist.

More challenges to the dream of a rationalized, state-ordered cosmos came in the form of two publishing projects organized by black community leaders in New York, Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All. Chapter 2 will explore how, by the 1820s, editors and writers such as Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm created a momentary, geographically dispersed print network that linked places like New York, New Orleans, and rural North Carolina. Black people, enslaved or nominally free, were able to read (and hear read aloud) accounts of the origin, future, and present organization of the universe. Across thirty-seven total sites of distribution, black readers encountered a description of the cosmos. They found, moreover, that the natural and political laws of the universe could only be understood as operating across vast timescales. Across such timescales, moreover, these laws might bend toward emancipation and justice, or at the very least augur the inevitable dissolution of US power.

At the same time, officials in the new Cherokee Nation—a constitutional state—passed laws mandating the distribution of printed information about the cosmos, and they encouraged Cherokee children to attend missionary schools in order to learn astronomy and surveying.³⁵ Chapter 3 will explore Cherokee efforts to measure cosmic space. But it will also examine how these efforts emerged alongside the distribution of other, more traditional ways of understanding a living universe, a place in which the stars themselves were intelligent beings who sometimes visited the earth.³⁶ Facing the encroachment of white settlers who depended on legalistic, mathematical measurements of space to justify land theft, Cherokee elected leaders responded by transmitting to their constituents mathematical information about the stars and far older accounts of a living, fully inhabited cosmos.

Yet efforts by US officials to more fully instrumentalize the universe continued unabated, and by 1852 the federal government had established an official almanac, an official meridian, and the beginnings of a system for standardizing time and cartography. Chapter 4 explores how a small office of the US Navy, established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and coordinating with civilian astronomers throughout the United States, rationalized geopolitical and cosmic space. The tool they created—the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac—was an unassuming publication. To the untrained observer, it was merely a collection of tables of numbers. But this book represented the most sophisticated set of predictions about the future organization of cosmic space yet made, and it functioned as a kind of astronomical armament for the US Navy and an aid to commercial navigators. Throughout the Civil War, this text would be treated as a weapon: dispatched to far-flung military stations on a moment’s notice, seized from enemy warships and catalogued, and used to plan military operations. During the war and afterward, it would also become a tool of commerce, available to commercial ship owners seeking to navigate more effectively from port to port.³⁷

The American Ephemeris became increasingly important over the century, eventually becoming the global standard for navigation. It shaped how people throughout the world understood their relationship to time and to cosmic space. But other ways of knowing and inhabiting the universe persisted. Chapter 5 explores one such alternative. Following the overthrow of the legal government of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i in 1893, the constitutional monarch of the kingdom traveled to Washington, DC, to lobby against the annexation of the Hawaiian archipelago by the United States. During her time there, she completed and published her translation of the Kumulipo, a sacred chant recounting the creation of the universe. In published form, it was a kind of counteralmanac. Instead of predicting the future, it recounted the past. Instead of treating the universe as an instrument of power, it described the universe as a living, embodied set of relations. But, like the American Ephemeris, it was dispatched to agents of a national government (in this case, the Kingdom of Hawai‘i government) and to libraries and scholarly societies. Today, it remains an important document for members of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.³⁸

Star Territory suggests that the deep origins of the US state’s cosmic instru-mentalism, from geospatial navigation to the weaponization of space itself, can be found in the nineteenth century. It suggests that efforts to rationalize space have flattened difference, erased alternative epistemologies, and enabled agents of the US government to regard the cosmos as an exploitable resource, a place for private pioneers to accumulate wealth and for nation-states to project force. But Star Territory also suggests that there are other histories that might point our way to a more complex relationship to the cosmos, one that recognizes the universe not as exploitable waste land in the West but as a vast and complex system of which human beings are only a small part.

Remembering the First American Space Age

Scholars in the humanities have over the course of the past several decades developed a vocabulary for describing those forms of scientific inquiry—ways of seeking to know the universe—that contrast with the State science of governments, universities, and scholarly societies.³⁹ Such alternative modes of inquiry have gone by a number of names: counter science, minor science, nomad science, and even fugitive science. The philosophers and cultural historians devoted to developing this terminology have been interested not only in understanding how scientific practices emerged outside of official contexts but in understanding the ways those practices produced new possibilities for understanding human beings and the cosmos. How might we reconsider the emergence of race, for instance, if we understood the work of those black writers who, with varying degrees of formal scientific training, contested scientific racism in the nineteenth century?⁴⁰ For many scholars, the examination of science’s counter-discourses has enabled a reexamination of the past, a clarification of how the scientific revolution depended on the knowledge production of indigenous peoples, women, and the enslaved.⁴¹ Moreover, studying such nomad science has enabled cultural historians and philosophers to reveal that scientific inquiry is shaped by social, political, and economic conditions. Science has never been neutral.⁴²

In the fields of American studies and American literary studies, moreover, a new cohort of scholars has been concerned with fundamental questions about the history of science as it has come down through particular scientific disciplines. Collectively, they have reconfigured how Americanists—those who study American literature and culture—understand nineteenth-century scientists. Sari Altschuler, for instance, has read nineteenth-century medicine as a site of imaginative experimentation, a field within which many physicians insisted on the epistemological value of classics and poetry even as others advocated an increasingly narrow empiricism.⁴³ Britt Rusert, meanwhile, has shown how nineteenth-century black writers, medical doctors, astronomers, and naturalists—fugitive scientists, to use her language—challenged the emerging consensus on the science of race, which would calcify into a pernicious common sense by the early twentieth century.⁴⁴ Jared Hickman has theorized the emergence of a nineteenth-century metacosmography among black and indigenous thinkers, a mode of theorizing in which material and ideal, theory and practice, science and religion can no longer be distinguished.⁴⁵ And Kyla Schuller and Xine Yao have shown, finally, how the mid-nineteenth-century ideal of sympathy remained relevant to late nineteenth-century scientific inquiry.⁴⁶

While this book will build on the insights of such scholarship, it is nonetheless interested in a narrower set of concerns. Throughout the nineteenth century, agents of the United States sought to use the discoveries of astronomical science to project national power: representationally, commercially, and militarily. Their interest was not in the abstract discoveries of astronomers, per se, but in how such discoveries could be used. This attitude should be familiar. The twentieth-century space race was an effort not merely to make scientific discoveries but to make such discoveries useful to major powers. In November 1962, President John Kennedy (1917–1963) confronted a frustrated NASA administrator, James Webb (1906–1992), with the stark (if now obvious) assertion that the whole point of the lunar program was to demonstrate the superiority of the United States. Why are we spending seven million dollars on getting fresh water from saltwater, when we’re spending seven billion dollars to find out about space? Kennedy asked. Obviously, you wouldn’t put it on that priority except for the defense implications.⁴⁷ Kennedy emphasized to Webb that landing Americans on the moon would show the Soviet Union that, by God, we passed them.⁴⁸ In the 1960s, performances of scientific prestige had become a key element in the projection of national power.

But such demonstrations were also salient a century earlier. President John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) had hoped to answer the discoveries of European observatories with light for light, similarly demonstrating the scientific prestige of the United States.⁴⁹ In 1842, Adams was pleased that the United States had converted its military Depot of Charts and Instruments into a national observatory, called the United States Naval Observatory. And in 1870, twenty-two years after Adams’s death, the Naval Observatory installed under its dome the largest telescope in the world.⁵⁰ Four years later, a British military astronomer regarded his encounter with this telescope as startling. Expecting to see a Washington Infant, he described himself and his colleagues as nearly fainting with astonishment when confronted by this massive symbol of American space power.⁵¹

Moreover, nineteenth-century astronomical discoveries made from the United States—and often organized and paid for by the War Department—were instrumental not merely to the accumulation of national prestige but to the projection of force. Officials in the first presidential administration considered creating a national almanac, which would have assisted land surveyors and ocean navigators.⁵² By the time of the Civil War, such a national almanac had been funded and published. It was dispatched to naval stations and warships, often in batches of one hundred at a time, and it enabled military officers to coordinate their movements across the vast sweep of the Confederate coastline and inland river