A Word In Edgewise: Fires Within and Without

I’ve recently come across two highly engrossing books, histories of eras that shaped today’s America, each highlighting problems that concern us today. I recommend reading both, though not necessarily together, if you’ve any intention to remain optimistic about the future.

One is Russell Shorto’s “Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America,” which follows — but is not specifically a sequel to — his revelatory 2004 “The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America.” Shorto is currently director of the New Amsterdam Project at the New York Historical and senior scholar at the New Netherland Institute.

The other is Joyce E. Chaplin’s “The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution.”She, like Shorto, is a prolific writer of historical material, one of her previous books being “Benjamin Franklin: The First Scientific American.” Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University.

Both authors are blessed with the ability to place a drop of detail on a literary glass slide and place it under a scope to allow the reader (yes, I’m mixing metaphors) to see the big picture revealed through the ocular. Both cover close, though not identical, time periods, Shorto harking back to the beheading of England’s King James I and the friendship of his younger son James, who, following Oliver Cromwell’s entr’acte of homeland turmoil, ships orders said friend, Richard Nicolls, across the Atlantic to wrest Nieuw Amsterdam from the Dutch. The brothers Stuart realize that the Dutch, through their formidable and ferocious East India Company, have been making far too much money for comfort, and the rising Atlantic port under colony leader Peter Stuyvesant has also become too wealthy. They decide they’d best go excise it from the Dutch purse to fatten the British portfolio.

It’s now Tuesday, August 26, 1644; Nicolls and his ship sit waiting along what is today the Long Island coast, at what will be dubbed the Verrazanno narrows, keeping an eye out for the ships of his dispersed convoy to appear. We know the outcome (our Big Apple), but Shorto makes the hows and whys compelling.

Chaplin focuses on young Ben Franklin. It’s 1723, he’s just skipped out on his apprenticeship with brother James in his Boston printing shop, and is headed for Philadelphia. A bright youngster of 17, already well-read and a tinkerer, Franklin’s story opens some years after Nicolls and Co. have secured New York for the British, but folks are still in the grips of colder cold, what will be known as the Little Ice Age, which chilled from roughly from 1300-1850, and struggle to keep warm over the lengthy winter months.

Shorto is not focused on warmth as a topic (nor was his book intended to be a treatise on the subject), though he does note that in the 17th century, the Hudson River would routinely freeze over in winter. Implicit to the problems of both eras, and central to the cultural conflicts discussed by Shorto and Chaplin, are the vast and non-negotiable differences between the Indigenous peoples and the newcomers’ relationships to fire, to land “owning,” and to Nature in the broadest sense. Shorto stresses that the Indigenous peoples of the 17th and 18th centuries, discussed now as relics of the past, are still here, the past still vivid in their memories.

While moderns joke that Manhattan was bought cheap for $24 worth of trinkets, both Shorto and Chaplin remind that no one was “selling” anything to anyone, much less land. Indigenous peoples felt part of the land itself, of Nature, while tokens of various importance were customarily given at important meetings without ever intending land transfer. For this volume, Shorto interviewed Chief Vincent Mann, elected and hereditary leader of the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lenape Nation — one of several groups of Lenape people — talking with him and his wife, Michaeline Picaro Mann, for several hours.

“We’re still here,” noted Picaro Mann, “only thirty miles away from where we were all those years ago … We’re still digging out from the rubble of what happened four hundred years ago.”

Chaplin makes Franklin’s stoves (there were five models) a central focus of her narrative, using the breadth of Franklin’s concerns and his attempts to find a solution to the 18th century’s climate problems and to demonstrate that they’re still a long way from being solved. Where the Little Ice Age’s crippling cold plagued the nations increasing population (as opposed to our own overheating dilemma) heat — or “fire,” — if you will, threatened theirs.

Unlike the Indigenous population’s solution to cold — warmer, tighter clothing to create inner-space warmth, devising sharper needles to enable creating these tighter-fitting outfits, tilling the land in warmer weather, hunting animal protein in the winter, using fire less extensively and restricting use to more social and political occasions — proto-Americans aimed to live snugly, within not merely their garments, but each family ensconced in its own, separately-heated dwelling. One didn’t have to be what a later age calls “woke” to realize that not only was this system not working, but that even by 1740, accessible firewood was no longer “just outside the door.”

Chaplin’s genius is in picking for her focus the one man known well for his intelligence and keen observation both in his own day and (mostly) in ours, but a man who added to thinking by experimenting, note taking, printing and mailing; all the needed elements for production and dissemination in one package. Franklin could experiment, measure, write up, print and distribute news of his wares. One pamphlet alerted to a possible 8-month winter and its consequences: “WOOD, our common Fewel, which within these 100 years might be had at every Man’s Door, must now be fetch’d near 100 Miles to some Towns, and makes a very considerable Article in the Expence of Families.”

As we do today, Franklin hoped for a uni-cure for a hydra-headed problem. And as always, solutions begot further headaches. Coal instead of wood? You’ll need a source to be mined in a new industry; charcoal? Made from burning wood, and further, processing iron is itself a fuel-intensive project, and so on, ad infinitum. The last two models of Franklin’s stoves only burned coal. Have you seen the 19th-century photos of breaker-boys? And what does continuing population growth mean for the allocation of natural resources?

Franklin thought of “fire” as more than the tip of a struck match or the cheery blaze in your fireplace sucking most of the heat up your chimney, warming overfed bellies in front while freezing the behinds. He considered the fire within, as well, whose fuel, food, must also be sourced and made available to the consumer. How does that energy — manpower — factor into the final product? Many solutions were beyond his times; how many are within ours? How many, if found and put into practice, will be used humanely and for the benefit of all?