Hartford's Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Ron Welburn

Description

Who was Ann Plato? Apart from circumstantial evidence, there's little information about the author of Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry, published in 1841. Plato lived in a milieu of colored Hartford, Connecticut, in the early nineteenth century. Although long believed to have been African American herself, she may also, Ron Welburn argues, have been American Indian, like the father in her poem "The Natives of America." Combining literary criticism, ethnohistory, and social history, Welburn uses Plato as an example of how Indians in the Long Island Sound region adapted and prevailed despite the contemporary rhetoric of Indian disappearance. This study seeks to raise Plato's profile as an author as well as to highlight the dynamics of Indian resistance and isolation that have contributed to her enigmatic status as a literary figure.
Illustrations and Maps
Prologue
Acknowledgments
A Speculative and Factual Chronology for Ann Plato
Introduction

1. Ann Plato: Hartford’s Literary Enigma

2. “The Natives of America” and “To the First of August”: Contrasts in Cultural Investment

3. Missinnuok at the Hartford Space

4. Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle

5. Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality

6. Schooling: Some Speculations; Teaching: Some Records

7. Essays: Publication and Reception of the Book

8. Essays and Lydia Sigourney: The Poetics of Borrowing

9. The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics

10. Four Women as a Cultural Circle

11. The Poetics of a Young Writer

Epilogue: After the Paper Trail

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Ethnic studies
• Indigenous peoples

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 21 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438455785
• Langue: English

Extrait

Hartford’s Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production and book design, Laurie D. Searl
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Welburn, Ron, 1944–
Hartford’s Ann Plato and the native borders of identity / Ron Welburn.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5577-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5578-5 (ebook)
1. Plato, Ann—Criticism and interpretation. 2. African American women authors. 3. African American women educators. 4. Hartford (Conn.)—Intellectual life. I. Title. PS2593.P347Z93 2015 818'.309—dc23 2014017459
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Missinnuok of Towns and Cities
Contents
Figures and Maps
Prologue
Acknowledgments
A Speculative and Factual Chronology for Ann Plato
Introduction
1. Ann Plato: Hartford’s Literary Enigma
2. “The Natives of America” and “To the First of August”: Contrasts in Cultural Investment
3. Missinnuok at the Hartford Space
4. Long Island Sound Platos and Their Circle
5. Coordinates of a Social and Religious Personality
6. Schooling: Some Speculations; Teaching: Some Records
7. Essays : Publication and Reception of the Book
8. Essays and Lydia Sigourney: The Poetics of Borrowing
9. The Literary Personality of the Essay Topics
10. Four Women as a Cultural Circle
11. The Poetics of a Young Writer
Epilogue: After the Paper Trail
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Figures and Maps
Figures
F IGURE 1.1. Enumeration for Miss Plato. Iowa Federal Census, City of Decorah, Winneshiek County, 1870.
F IGURE 5.1. Colored [Talcott Street] Congregational Church. Connecticut Historical Society.
F IGURE 5.2. Rev. Amos G. Beman, Congregational minister, and Rev. George A. Spywood, bishop at African Methodist Episcopal Zion, Hartford.
F IGURE 6.1. Amounts dispensed to Talcott Street Congregational Church treasurers for the South African School during Ann Plato’s tenure as its teacher. Seth Terry, Seth Terry’s Book of Estates Agencies Trusts , account books, 1825–1857, Connecticut Historical Society.
F IGURE 6.2. Ann Plato’s first invitation to Thomas Robbins, inspector for the Hartford Schools Society, early May 1846. Thomas Robbins School Papers Collection. Connecticut Historical Society.
F IGURE 6.3. Ann Plato’s subsequent invitation to Thomas Robbins, 12 May 1846. Thomas Robbins School Papers Collection. Connecticut Historical Society.
Maps
M AP 3.1. Long Island Sound, Missinnuok Territory, circa 1840. Map created by Ron Welburn, with assistance from Academic Computing, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Office of Information Technology.
M AP 3.2. Approximate Traditional Network of Trails to Saukiaug (Hartford). Apportioned from Hayden L. Griswold, Map of the State of Connecticut Showing Indian Trails Villages and Sachemdoms , made for the Connecticut Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Inc. Information compiled by Mathias Spiess.
M AP 5.1. Hartford Street Plan, 1838. Adapted from Gardners Hartford City Directory , 1838, Connecticut Historical Society.
Prologue
Ann Plato’s poem “The Natives of America,” in her 1841 book Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry , instigated this project. I read it as uniquely personal and familial, because its voice and manner challenged me to construct this profile of her enigmatic identity as linked to the Algonquian peoples of Long Island Sound in the antebellum period rather than replicate what gives her modest celebrity in African American literary history. Doing this meant taking the responsibility of an epistemological risk: situating Ann Plato as a member of a Native enclave in Hartford, Connecticut’s colored community. Her writing as the surface of her social and religious experience reflects some of the accommodations Native people there found they had to make in order to navigate Christian salvation and traditional values and to weigh assimilation against cultural identity resistance. Their survival took place in this confusing circumstance where Colored America offered community as a safety net. The urban Indian experience in the Northeast has barely been explored, and Essays seems the device to use to begin unpacking this ethnohistory enough to introduce the fact that Native peoples of Long Island Sound continued through the nineteenth century, when they were assumed to have disappeared, into the present.
Following and interpreting a cluster of social and documentary sources about Plato and her community and signs in her writing supported my idea that approaching her identity as a Native or of Native descent from eastern Long Island, New York, would be most logical and fruitful. Doing so brings into play details no more circumstantial or unsuccessful than those that assume her to be strictly an African American woman. For those who are now willing to acknowledge her Native background, how is that to be verified? Is her ascribed identity as a black woman simply rationalized on community association? The opaque character of early nineteenth-century documents that may confirm her cultural identity and her origins are not forthcoming, if they exist at all. What seems like Natives today conducting rescue raids into African American history to reclaim people for their ancestry is disruptive to African Americans’ community building, history, and pride, disturbing the foundations of black identity. In some instances, parties may agree on sharing a biracial identity. Still, public proclamations of biracialism (and triracialism) or “mixed race” stand to be contradicted by the private self.
We know her name—Ann Plato—by which we have some assurance of her footprint for posterity during a period just shy of a decade, 1840 to 1847. Religion, education, perseverance, and teaching are her pillars of grace. She was a remarkable young woman, an adolescent prodigy, yet she will always be a mystery in an unparalleled era of United States society and in political and literary history. Thinking about her legacy through any one of several interlinking designs peculiar to tribal people in Long Island Sound helped this attempt to construct her image and reconstruct Hartford’s urban American Indian community; it helps to appreciate what she wrote about as well as from what topics she chose to refrain. I hypothesize these intangibles and uncertainties as keys toward unraveling Ann Plato and her Hartford colored community.
Essays is a young writer’s venture, containing nominally unacknowledged borrowings and interpolations, yet it has flashes of spiritual insight, it demonstrates an attention to craft, and it conveys an unwavering Christian faith, all manifestations of an English education attained just how we have yet to learn. Who knows but that a now-unveiled contemporary reviewer of her book who called her “a thinker” may enhance her stature? Despite Essays ’ shortcomings, it was Plato’s ceremony under mentorship and religious inspiration. She was, by contemporary accounts, a commendable teacher and an enigma as an author. Although today she remains elusive, we can learn more about her if we know how to look.
Acknowledgments
To undertake a project of this kind would be impossible without the assistance of others. I am particularly grateful to the University of Massachusetts Amherst for awarding me a faculty research grant, which eased my travels and access to printers and relevant computer software in various stages of this project. To the following libraries, historical societies, archives, churches, and their staffs I owe thanks for their time, unstinting assistance, and the access to records they allowed me: The W.E.B. DuBois Library, University of Massachusetts (especially reference librarians James Kelly and Melinda McIntosh); Amherst College’s Frost Library’s Special Collections; Archives and Special Collections at Mt. Holyoke College; the Nielsen Library, Smith College; the Trinity College Watkinson Library; the Beinecke Library, Yale University; Mel Smith and others at the Connecticut State Library; James Campbell, Librarian Emeritus, New Haven County Historical Society; the Hartford History Center, Hartford Public Library, especially Martha Rea-Nelson; the Woolworth Library, Palmer House, Stonington, Connecticut; the Mystic Seaport Library; the Noyes Library and the Lyme Historical Society, Old Lyme; the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts; the Silvio Conte National Archives Center, Pittsfield, Massachusetts; the genealogy center of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, Amherst; the Old Saybrook Historical Society; the Connecticut town records offices in East Haddam, Montville, Lyme, Salem, and Wethersfield; the Connecticut Department of Public Health; the Office of Human Rights, U.S. Department of Human Services; the Town Hall of Charlestown, Rhode