In Search of John Brown’s Timbucto, Part II

Posted on by

In Part I, inspired by a Washington Post article about archaeologists who are uncovering an early nineteenth-century African American town in Timbuctoo, N.J., I set out to discover how another black community in upstate New York got the name “Timbucto.”

As I explained in that post, being certain about who named the New York “Timbucto” (which is most famous for its association with the famous abolitionist John Brown, who once lived there or near there) is not easy and may be impossible. The extant evidence suggests that Brown and his family members first used the name “Timbucto” in the late 1840s to refer to a small cluster of farms near North Elba that was settled by the families of three free black men. But even if we could settle the question of who named “Timbucto” (or Timbuctoo, N. J., for that matter) it would not settle the related question of why that name was chosen.

That’s the question for this post: Why would the name “Timbuctoo” be attached to these early nineteenth-century African American communities, one founded in the 1820s and the other at the end of the 1840s?

Surely in both cases the name referred to the African city of Timbuctoo or Timbuktu. But that means that to answer the question of “why Timbuctoo” we need to know what Americans between 1820 and 1850 would have known or thought they knew about the African city. What associations would the African Timbuktu have had in the minds of those who named these towns, whoever they were? To answer that question, we would need to paint a picture of the place of the African Timbuktu in the broader landscape of antebellum American culture. We’ll need to explore the print culture, newspapers and books from which people in New Jersey or people like John Brown would have learned about the African city.

A full picture of how Timbuktu was represented in American culture would require a larger research project than I can undertake for this post, though it seems like a do-able project that would be of great interest. It is possible, though, to sketch a preliminary portrait of Americans’ likely impressions of Timbuktu in the decades bounded by the founding of Timbuctoo, New Jersey, and John Brown’s move to the Adirondack mountains. It’s a portrait that includes not just John Brown, but an early Pan-Africanist named John Brown Russwurm, a French explorer named René Caillié, and a famous African Muslim prince who was enslaved, brought to America, and then freed in 1828 after he had been recognized by a white man who had met his father in Africa.

But unfortunately (or interestingly, depending on how you look at it) this fascinating portrait still does not decisively settle the question of why these two Timbuctoo communities got their name.

Continue reading →

In Search of John Brown’s Timbucto, Part I

Posted on by

Recently the Washington Post reported on the ongoing excavation of a nineteenth-century African American settlement called Timbuctoo in New Jersey. This long-buried community, now evident only in the traces of found Mason jars, crumbling bricks, and the memories of the community’s living descendants, was founded in the 1820s “by freed blacks and escaped slaves” who bought the land from Quaker abolitionists.

The story of this Timbuctoo was news to me. But it immediately caught my eye because of my past study of the abolitionist John Brown, whose famous antislavery raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, had its sesquicentennial anniversary last year. Brown’s raid is widely known as one of the events that contributed to the coming of the Civil War. Less widely known is that ten years before Harper’s Ferry, in 1849, Brown moved his family to upstate New York to live near a small free black settlement in Essex County, near Lake Placid.

And coincidentally, this settlement in North Elba, New York, which is also apparently under excavation, was also sometimes referred to as Timbucto.

When reading the Post article I was first struck with the obvious question: how coincidental was the fact that these two free black communities in New Jersey and New York shared their unusual name? Is it possible that Brown knew of Timbuctoo, New Jersey, when he moved to New York in 1849? Or did abolitionists between the 1820s and the 1850s simply refer often enough to Timbuktu–the difficult-to-reach city located in the West African interior–to make that name a familiar and meaningful one to both Brown and the New Jersey settlers?

Those questions raise another big question: why the name Timbuctoo? As the Post article notes, the New Jersey settlement “was probably named after Timbuktu, the town in Mali near the Niger River, although researchers are still trying to find out how and why it got its name.” I can sympathize with these researchers’ difficulty, because while doing research for a scholarly article on John Brown, I briefly spent time trying to figure out “how and why” Brown’s “Timbucto” got its name. Answering those questions was not as easy as I thought it would be. In this post, I’ll talk about the question of how Brown’s Timbucto got its name, and in Part II, I’ll consider the question of why it bore that name.

Continue reading →

Prospectus

Posted on by

From 2004 to 2006, while I was in graduate school, I wrote a blog called Mode for Caleb. Since this blog will be quite different from that one, I want to begin Offprints by being very clear about its purposes and scope.

Unlike Mode for Caleb, Offprints will be a blog exclusively about my scholarly work. And because most of my work time as an academic historian is devoted to writing for print publication and teaching here at Rice, that means Offprints will be updated much less regularly than Mode for Caleb. Offprints is intended solely to serve three purposes.

First, it will provide a place to publish scholarly work that, for one reason or another, is not well suited for formal publication in print. Following Dan Cohen’s lead, I view this blog less as a personal journal than as a publishing platform. Here I hope to publish small reviews of books and articles, as well as original research, ideas, arguments, and pedagogical reflections that I do not presently intend to develop into larger print publications like a journal article or a book. On the theory that “waste not” is good advice for a scholarly life as well as life in general, I intend to use this blog to catch scraps of work that would otherwise simply remain on my computer or in my brain. Because one advantage of this platform is its accessibility, I will also occasionally use it to publish historical work that addresses audiences outside of academia. This is a place to publish work that works better “off print.”

Second, this blog will provide a place to solicit feedback about works that I am preparing for “in print” publication, like the book manuscript that I am currently writing based on my dissertation. Last year I benefited a great deal from several insights in Robert Boice’s book, Professors as Writers. Among them was Boice’s mantra to “write before you are ready.” But related to that advice was Boice’s encouragement to share writing with others before you are ready. Sharing ideas about or snippets of work in progress is a necessary part of a healthy writing life. I’m hoping that by occasionally sharing parts of what I am working on, or writing dilemmas that I am working through, my publications “on print” will get to print faster than they otherwise would.

I have never been persuaded that it is a bad idea for historians to share what they are working on. Putting ideas into the public domain more clearly identifies their origins, which answers the objection that revealing work in progress might risk some kind of intellectual theft. Moreover, to me one of the greatest attractions of academic life has always been the ideal of free and open discussion about ideas, and I believe that blogging technology promises to make this kind of discussion easier than ever before. So here I agree wholeheartedly with one of the rationales that Eric Rauchway gave when starting his group blog, Edge of the American West: “be the academic discourse you want to see in the world.”

Finally, over the last few years I have grown increasingly interested in the field of digital humanities or digital history, one of whose leading lights–Lisa Spiro–is right here at Rice. I’m intrigued by all the things that the folks over at the Center for History and New Media are constantly cooking up. So from time to time, I may post about the implications of digital technology and new media for scholarship. As I try to sort through what it means that some aspects of academic work are moving “off print” and “on line,” it makes sense to do that kind of thinking on a blog.

.

Creative Commons License
Offprints by Caleb McDaniel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.