This post is from a blog called Conversant, formerly published by the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum.
When the itinerant peddler, poet, and preacher Jonathan Plummer died in 1819, he left behind a will that requested his executor to distribute several hundred copies “of the Occurrences of my life printed from the manuscript which I may leave at my disease.”[1] Unfortunately for this Newburyport eccentric, however, the money he had amassed through selling combs, thimbles, fish, and his own poetry, among other items, was given to his estranged family, leaving information about the contents of this supposed manuscript about his life reserved for speculation. During a month of research at the Phillips Library, I sought to reconstruct the life of Jonathan Plummer through the printed ephemera he left behind—from broadsides and annotations in account books to the one remaining copy of his late-1790s Sketch of the History of the Life and Adventures of Jonathan Plummer, jun. (Written by Himself). Through doing this research, I came to recognize a historically specific instance of desiring to write one’s life into book form for posthumous consumption.
Plummer, I learned while researching at the Phillips Library, was very interested in how he was to be remembered. In an earlier version of his will—printed as a 1793 broadside attached to an ode about the death of several Newburyport residents—Plummer specified how he wanted people to mourn his passing.
"To the inhabitants of Newburyport," 1793.
“Should my Father, or any, or either of my brothers have the hypocrisy to follow me in mourning,” he writes, “I desire my Executor to endeavour to prevent their so doing.” Wishing to have his father and brothers barred from the funeral, Plummer specifies that if his “Mammy and my old sister outlive me, I desire them to walk next to my Coffin dressed in decent customary mourning.”
"To the inhabitants of Newburyport," 1793.
Plummer had built a small career around writing about the tragic deaths of others. These broadsides would often include an alarmist title followed by a hymn or ode about the events and then a prose section where he would sermonize further. Titles such as “Deaths of Three Persons Who Killed Themselves,” as one 1807 broadside announces, and “GREAT AND DREADFUL FIRE AT NEWBURYPORT. FIRE, FIRE, FIRE,” as another 1811 broadside exclaims, suggest Plummer’s interest in making money from the sufferings and deaths of others. Additionally, this career centered on moralizing from such disasters. After an 1808 hurricane hit Newburyport that left many dead, Plummer through a broadside exclaims: “THESE ALL DIED IN FAITH.” Such magnanimous assertions of righteousness were few and far between in the broadsides I read. Indeed, in these printed memorials of the dead he would often ascribe moral failings to the deceased. For example, he explains in an 1813 broadside that all the destruction from the War of 1812 is because “The King of Kings” “has discovered that there are many liars, adulterers, & treacherous people in the country, who are not valiant for the truth, and who know not him.”
But Plummer had not always been so forthcoming with putting his controversial thoughts into print. Near the beginning of his curious career as an itinerant peddler and poet, he wrote a congratulatory ode to the equally eccentric “Lord” Timothy Dexter immediately below a flirtatious “Declaration of War” broadside that he composed “TO the fair Ladies of New-Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode-Island, Connecticut and Vermont.”
Great and Mortal Sickness! by Jonathan Plummer, 1813.
Writing to women he had supposedly been mislead into loving, Plummer records a dialogue between himself and “an aged friend of mine” who, after reading the title to Plummer’s broadside, inquired: “what kind of arms you’re a-going to make use of in this war?” “I shall not mention all,” Plummer explains, “but among the rest a—But avast, avast my pen in the name of Aeolus and of Neptune avast.” In this curious moment, Plummer brings attention to the significance of print, its lasting and revelatory qualities. “Bless me Ladies!” he exclaims; “I was within a cables length of merciless rocks which would have stove my ship in ten thousand pieces—To speak more intelligibly, I will be soundly lashed with a horse-whip if I was not a going, Sampson like, by pening [sic] a dialogue to inform you where my strength lies; to reveal a secret of the utmost importance: But thanks to fortune, to accident or to whatever else I owe my safety, I have again plenty of sea room and sense enough I hope to avoid furnishing you with an inventory of my arms.”
Great and Mortal Sickness! by Jonathan Plummer, 1813.
If you were beginning to imagine an image of Jonathan Plummer as a slightly unusual figure, you would not be incorrect. With access to the means of print publication, he made for himself the figure of contradiction, putting things in print that would demarcate him as overly zealous religiously while at other times recognizing the personal impropriety of print—it’s manner of unintended exposure. So through trying to locate the figure of Jonathan Plummer in the print culture that remains of his life, I am faced with the exciting project to piece together the remnants of broadside sheets from a poet, preacher, and peddler whose life manuscript, if still around, remains buried, far from the lasting significance of print.
Ben Bascom is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches early and nineteenth-century American literature and culture and his research turns a queer studies lens into the early national period. His dissertation, entitled “Feeling Singular: Masculinity and Desire in the Early Republic,” examines memoirs and life narratives that highlight the contentions and failures of belonging in the early republic. His work has been published in Early American Literature and Papers on Language & Literature. The subject of the above blog post comes from his research at the Phillips Library on Chapter Two of his dissertation: “Jonathan Plummer’s Perambulations: Norms and Normativity in the Early Republic.”
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