In the first decades of this century, American movements for social reform included a programme, somewhat belated perhaps, for cultural renewal. Disaffected from their society, lamenting a split between the nation's commercial-industrial genius, so visibly institutionalized, and its creative cultural talent, so individual and so isolated, analysts like Van Wyck Brooks undertook to search for what he entitled “ a usable past.” The phrase implied, however, that much or even most of that past, as commonly understood, was unusable: a witness to the split, or, in relation to the literary culture itself, a congeries of intellectual and artistic activity passive in the presence of social change, oblivious to its realities, merely acquiescent in relation to the institutions of a developing modern industrial society. Culture in America, Brooks and his allies felt, had no institutions. Without them the seeds of genius would not germinate, for there was no nurturing process, no method of transmission.

When “ progressive ” literary intellectuals sifted the past for its neglected, potentially alternative, tradition, they rightly did not think to look back to any earlier American dramatist for inspiration, much less to a “ usable ” dramatic tradition. Yet when the whole Progressive attempt to reformulate the social and cultural basis of American life faltered and foundered in the years of the First World War, a modest theatrical venture undertaken just as the wider movements suffered their first setbacks preserved something of Progressive social vision — focussed it, prompted it, and passed it on as a legacy to later artists and to the intellectual community, and to the public.

When Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana was finally published in London in 1702, the anxious historian set a day of thanksgiving to God, “ for His watchful and gracious Providence over that Work, and for the Harvest of so many Prayers, and Cares, and Tears, and Resignations.” From 1693 to 1697, Mather had labored over the seven books of his immense ecclesiastical history of New England. Readers of the Magnalia have often dismissed the work as unwieldy, pedantic, incomprehensible. As one anonymous critic complained in 1818, it is “ a chaotick mass of history, biography, obsolete creeds, witchcraft, and Indian wars, interspersed with bad puns, and numerous quotations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which rise up like so many decayed, hideous stumps to arrest the eye and deform the surface.”

Despite the difficulties presented by the Magnalia, however, American colonial historians have recognized Mather's history as the “ greatest effort in the century to organize the experience of this people.” Cotton Mather was one of the many second- and third-generation ministers who feared that the New England people were declining in piety and descending into moral corruption.

“ Never in all past ages did a prospect so glorious rise to the view of any nation, as that which is disclosed to our own.” So wrote a reviewer in the years following the War of 1812, and he echoed the millennial feelings of his countrymen. Awash in a surge of post-war nationalism, and buffeted by the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, Americans struck out in search of themselves, their culture, and their future. Within a generation, the same reviewer proclaimed, “ fifty or sixty millions of men will have poured themselves over our country, carrying civilization and the arts to the extreme corner.”

This spirit energized people in all sections, and in the Northeast missionary activity grew to significant proportions. Numerous state missionary societies formed, and by 1812 a larger body — the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) — had been organized to carry this spirit across the country and throughout the world. Board organizers had as their vision a world transformed, but one transformed along the lines of an idealized New England community. Religion would guide men's lives, and a spirit of morality would infuse the operations of government. They saw before them the dawning of a new age.

In 1865, when Americans asked, “ What shall be done about the freed Negro? ” few of them realized that the question was a fragment of a larger one, “ What shall be done to define and secure the rights of all Americans? ” For despite its regional variations, slavery had a more coherent legal identity than freedom. There were as many different standards of citizenship as there were state and local laws regulating the ownership of property, personal mobility, the criminal code, family relationships, and court procedures. Travel from one state to another could considerably alter a person's legal standing. Even in the one state there was no unitary concept of citizenship and many Americans knew a kind of freedom which would not serve the freed slave well as a model. Married women were severely restricted in their contractual capacity and hence in their freedom to earn a living or own and dispose of property. In some states they had few custodial rights over their children and in others none. They were limited in their access to judicial remedies by laws and customs which prevented them bringing suit in some instances, restricted their right to testify, prohibited their service on juries, and even “ protected ” them from answering for some crimes for which the law held their husbands responsible. Free Negroes in the ante-bellum North, paupers of all races in all states, and Chinese settlers on the West Coast could all have furnished examples of the way in which discriminatory state legislative classifications deprived them of rights. The states operated a sliding scale of citizenship rights which routinely placed some and potentially could place all Americans at a considerable distance from what Republicans argued in 1866 were the rights of all.

When Liberty Hall, as it came to be called, the ancestral home of the Kenan family, was being restored some years ago in Kenansville (Duplin County), North Carolina, among the many books left in the library was discovered an accounts ledger used by two members of the Chauncey Graham family. The most significant feature of this complex book is the obscurely-entered, first-hand account of a supposed slave insurrection and its consequences. The author is Dr. Stephen Graham, and the uprising that he depicts in Kenansville can be linked to the furor unleashed by the Nat Turner rebellion.

The ledger is approximately fifteen inches long and six inches wide. Its dark binding remains intact; but the front and back, both of which contain longhand notations and arithmetical calculations, are practically illegible now.

Inside, the owner is identified as Chauncey Graham [Jr.]; and the book is said to have been started in January 1800 in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. Dr. Graham recorded his patients' names, the work he did for them (e.g., extracting teeth), and prescriptions he gave them, as well as the ways by which he was paid (e.g., four pounds of butter; one cord of wood; or, less frequently, by cash).