Primary Sources in Early America

A Mumper among the Gentle: Tom Bell, Colonial Confidence Man

Author(s): Steven C. Bullock

Source: The William and Mary Quarterly , Apr., 1998, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Apr., 1998), pp. 231-258

Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2674383

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A Mumper among the Gentle:

Tom Bell, Colonial Confidence Man

Steven C. Bullock

S OMETIME in late spring I74I, a man in clerical attire entered a Princeton, New Jersey, tavern. Magistrate John Stockton immediately recognized the Reverend John Rowland, an important figure in the reli-

gious revival then taking place in the region. Stockton hurried over to invite the visiting worthy to his house. To his surprise, the man responded that Stockton was mistaken; his name was not Rowland. Remarking the strong resemblance, the embarrassed Stockton apologized. The visitor, however, had spoken the truth, perhaps the last time he would do so for nearly a week. He was not Rowland, who was on a preaching tour with William Tennent, Jr., a member of the Middle Colonies' most prominent clerical family. Stockton did not realize it, but he had met an even greater celebrity-the famous confidence man Tom Bell.1

Bell's tavern appearance seems to have been a trial run. The next morn- ing, he hastened to a nearby town to introduce himself to a prosperous farm family as the revivalist. The ruse worked. The self-proclaimed Rowland was invited to deliver the Sunday sermon. He lodged with his hosts for the remainder of the week, seemingly preparing his sermon, perhaps even coun- seling and praying with townspeople and family members. Then, going to church on Sunday with the family, he suddenly claimed to have forgotten his sermon and took the family's best horse to retrieve it. The congregation never heard "Hell Fire Rowland." When the family returned home, they dis- covered their guest, their horse, and their valuables gone.2

Steven C. Bullock is associate professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. A ver- sion of this article was given as an E. Jerry Whipple Lecture at Willamette University, October 1997. He thanks Joel J. Brattin, John L. Brooke, Richard L. Bushman, Ann Fabian, Wayne Franklin, Robert A. Gross, Peter Hansen, David Jaffee, Jackson Lears, John Nerone, David Samson, David Waldstreicher, and Daniel E. Williams for helpful comments and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the George A. and Eliza Gardener Howard Foundation for financial support.

1 On the episode discussed here and the subsequent paragraph see, besides the general accounts of Bell noted below, Richard S. Field, "Review of the Trial of the Rev. Wm. Tennent for Perjury, in 1742," Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society, 6 (1853), 30-40; Henry W. Green, "The Trial of the Rev. William Tennent," Princeton Review, 40 (i868), 321-44; and Trenton Historical Society, A History of Trenton, i679-I929, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1929), 2:626-29. For the symbolic importance of Rowland in the New Side-Old Side Presbyterian split see Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, i625-i760 (New York, i988), 170-71, I80-8I, 192-93.

2 Rowland's nickname is noted in Field, "Review of the Trial of the Rev. Wm. Tennent," 35. For a discussion of the real Rowland by a contemporary see Gilbert Tennent, A Funeral

William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Volume LV, Number 2, April i998

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232 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

The elegant deception (for months afterward residents believed the thefts the work of the real Rowland) was only one of Tom Bell's more spec- tacular swindles. Expelled from Harvard in I733, Bell enjoyed a nearly twenty-year career in crime that took him as far south as Barbados and as far north as New Hampshire. The Pennsylvania Gazette reported in I743 that he had been to "every Colony on the Continent, and . . . some Parts of the West-Indies" and that he "knows and talks familiarly of all Person[s] of Note as if they were of his Acquaintance." Newspapers record the use of eighteen names besides Rowland. In the Carolinas alone, Bell posed as Nathaniel More, Robert Middleton, John Campbell, Nathaniel Butler, and Captain Randall from Havana. In Barbados, he was the son of the late William Burnet, former governor of New York and Massachusetts. As these poses indicate, Bell's impostures went beyond acting the part of a minister. His frauds, the Pennsylvania Gazette warned, included "personating different People, forging Bills, Letters of Credit, &c. and frequently pretending Distress."3

Such exploits made Bell not just a common thief but one of the most famous colonial Americans. One hundred stories about Bell appeared in American newspapers from I738 to I755-enormous coverage at a time when British America's few papers concentrated on international news and pub- lished only one issue a week. This fascination continued after his public career ended. A Boston publisher included Bell's name on the title page of a humorous pamphlet in I762, seven years after the last newspaper report of his adventures. Even in I790, an Elizabethtown, New Jersey, magazine reprinted a story on Bell taken from an Irish periodical published eight years before. Although Carl Bridenbaugh's description of Bell as "the most widely known individual in all English America before the advent of the revolution- ary generation" cannot be sustained-George Whitefield's celebrity eclipsed Bell's-few if any native-born Americans outside of politics and religion achieved similar notoriety.4

Sermon, Occasion'd by the Death of the Reverend Mr. John Rowland, Who departed this Life, April

the i2th, I745. Preach'd at Charles-Town, in Chester County, April the i4th, I745 (Philadelphia, 1745), 40-48. Rowland's own account of his career, which omits the Bell incident, is printed ibid., 49-72, as A Narrative of the Revival and Progress of Religion, in the Towns of Hopewell, Amwell, and Maiden-Head, in New-Jersey, and New-Providence in Pennsylvania. In a Letter to the Rev. Mr. Prince, Author of the Christian History. By the Rev. Mr. John Rowland. John Gillies, Memoirs of Rev. George Whitefield, ed. C. E. Stowe (Philadelphia, 1859), 53n, presents a perhaps apocryphal anecdote that portrays people "in a state of insensibility" because of the power of Rowland's preaching. The town where Bell acted as Rowland cannot be located precisely. George H. Ingram, "The Two Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Beginning of Lawrenceville Presbyterian Church," Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society, 12 (1924-1926), 95, suggests that it may have been Hopewell (now Pennington) or Amwell.

3 Penn. Gaz., Feb. IO, 1743. Newspaper reports place Bell in New York City alone during 1738, 1743, 1744, 1746, 1747, and 1749-

4 Bridenbaugh, "'The Famous Infamous Vagrant' Tom Bell," in Bridenbaugh, Early Americans (New York, i98i), 148. A Serious-Comical Dialogue Between the Famous Dr. Seth Hudson, and the Noted Joshua How (Boston, 1762). The title also promises "A Touch on TOM BELL." "Story of THOMAS BELL, a Native of America," The Christian's, Scholars, and Farmer's Magazine (Elizabethtown, N. J.), 2 (1790), 364-65.

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MUMPER AMONG THE GENTLE 233

At first glance, the prospect of wringing truths out of one of the century's most notorious liars seems remote. Bridenbaugh spent years tracking the man, noting "I have pursued him in the colonial newspapers as resolutely as Inspector Javert did Jean Valjean." Bridenbaugh's primary focus, however, was

biographical, an aim suggested by the ways he framed his narratives: in I950, he presented Bell as "a successful Harvard man" with an "amusing career" but, thirty years later, considered him only "a disreputable loser."5 Although Bridenbaugh's extensive research provides a valuable foundation, Bell's career can be seen as more than a good yarn or a moral tale. Like all confidence men (and perhaps all salesmen), Bell sold himself. And, like a good businessman, he shaped his product to his market. In this perspective, Bell appears less a figure of daring originality or deep depravity than one who sensed the gaps and con- tradictions within prevailing cultural ideals and practices.

The stories Bell told and the stories told about him thus illuminate the broader stories his contemporaries told about themselves-and the contexts that gave these narratives their power. Bell's unusual career reveals the struc- tures of work confronted by Americans in more ordinary occupations; more important, his activities provide a vantage point from which to view the elite self-presentations that he counterfeited-and to comprehend their larger purposes. Bell, furthermore, did not simply rehearse some of the central nar- ratives of his culture; he also subverted them. By exploiting their ambigui- ties, his actions challenged their coherence and questioned their power.6

Bell's New Jersey escapade illustrates this process of affirmation and sub- version. Bell used accepted dress, behavior, and language to counterfeit min- isterial status, but his misbehavior called them into question. The real Rowland suffered directly from Bell's ruse: he was (unsuccessfully) prose- cuted for theft. Beyond such immediate mischief, Bell's use of a clergyman's clothes to perpetrate fraud broke the connection among piety, morality, and ministerial garb, rendering it more difficult to trust the sartorial symbolism of a "man of the cloth."

The evidence documenting Bell's career is at once unruly and revealing. Unlike most criminals or confidence men who have attracted scholarly atten- tion, Bell neither wrote nor inspired a lengthy text that lends itself to sus- tained literary analysis. Instead, the primary accounts of his life appear in some fifty separate periodical pieces, more than half of which were reprinted

5 Bridenbaugh, "The Notorious Tom Bell-A Successful Harvard Man," Proceedings of the

Massachusetts Historical Society, 69 (1947-1950), 494-95, and "'Famous Infamous Vagrant' Tom Bell," 121-49, quotation on 139. Bridenbaugh also helped prepare the piece on Bell in Clifford K. Shipton, Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College in the Classes I73I-I735 . . ..

vol. 9 of Sibley's Harvard Graduates (Boston, 1956), 375-86. See also Brooks E. Kleber, "Notorious Tom Bell," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 75 (1951), 4i6-23. Their citations serve as the basis for my work.

6 See Sarah Maza, "Stories in History: Cultural Narratives in Recent Works in European History," American Historical Review, ioi (i996), 1493-1515, and Rhys Isaac, "Stories and Constructions of Identity: Folk Tellings and Diary Inscriptions in Revolutionary Virginia," in Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections

on Personal Identity in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1997), 206-37.

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234 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

(sometimes more than once) in other newspapers. These accounts consist almost entirely of short reports of Bell's latest exploit or calls for his capture. The reports are generally consistent though frustratingly incomplete, only rarely discussing, or even commenting on, the larger implications of Bell's actions. The first lengthy article devoted to Bell appeared only in I782, long after his public career had ended. His own words appear in print only in a signed letter to a New York newspaper in I749. The precise status of this and other reports is open to question. The letter is probably Bell's (the rival newspaper he criticized never questioned its authenticity), but other stories may have mistakenly attributed actions to him, perhaps even because a clever criminal pretended to be the more famous pretender.7

The significance of this material does not rest solely on its factual accu- racy. Colonial Americans not only believed the stories to be true; just as important, they found them intriguing-and this fascination also requires explanation. The different accounts of Bell's career confirm widespread interest in the man. They also focus attention on the cultural issues his exploits raised.

These broader connections can be understood only in the context of the remaking of American authority around the turn of the eighteenth century. Historians have identified a new assertion of political and economic power by American elites in these years, and they increasingly stress the cultural aspects of these changes. Emphasis on refined manners, classical education, and cos- mopolitan culture can no longer be seen simply as expressions of maturity. Eighteenth-century developments once understood primarily as the logical outcome of political, demographic, or economic shifts now seem enmeshed in a dense network of new symbols, attitudes, and behavioral principles.8

Recent examinations of English history in the same period suggest means of sharpening this analysis. Lawrence E. Klein connects the third earl of Shaftesbury's philosophical writings about the "culture of politeness" to

7 "Story of Thomas Bell, a Native of America" 364-65; New-York Evening-Post, Sept. 4,

'749. 8 The literature on these changes, now often subsumed under the rubric of "gentility," is

extensive. Among the most stimulating recent works on the subject are Richard L. Bushman, "American High-Style and Vernacular Cultures," in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984),

345-83, and Bushman, The Refinement ofAmerica: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992); Cary Carson, "The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?" in Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, 1994), 483-697; T. H. Breen, "An Empire of Goods: The

Anglicization of Colonial America, i690-1776," Journal of British Studies, 25 (i986), 467-99, "'Baubles of Britain': The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present, No. ii9 (1988), 73-104, "Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology, and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution," William and Mary

Quarterly, 3d Ser., So (i993), 471-5oi, and "The Meanings of Things: Interpreting the Consumer Economy in the Eighteenth Century," in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993), 249-60; and Greene, "Search for Identity: An Interpretation of the Meaning of Selected Patterns of Social Response in Eighteenth-

Century America," Journal of Social History, 3 (1970), 205-Il.

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MUMPER AMONG THE GENTLE 235

broader questions of power. Shaftesbury's ideals, Klein argues, expressed and helped legitimate the goals of a particular political persuasion, whiggery. Bell's career suggests that the development of politeness in America was political in an even more basic sense, constituting and sustaining elite authority. This process was particularly important, it can be argued, because American elites faced what Jean-Christophe Agnew's discussion of a similar problem in England calls a "crisis of representation." Agnew traces the broader difficulties of assigning values to persons and goods back to eco- nomic changes that began in the Elizabethan era; the crisis, he argues, cli- maxed in the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars and subsided only at the end of the following century.9

Bell's activities point to a more specific problem growing out of the intersection of the worldwide economic and cultural developments noted by Agnew and a particular American situation. Late seventeenth-century colo- nial leaders faced massive political disorder, both fighting among rulers and challenges from the ruled. From Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia and Culpeper's Rebellion in Carolina in the i670s to the American fallout from the Glorious Revolution in the late i68os, almost every colonial regime expe- rienced at least one major uprising. These conflicts, Jack P. Greene and oth- ers have argued, convinced elites of the need to rebuild a sense of unity and common purpose among themselves and to reestablish their authority over others. At the same time, the expansion of market relationships complicated this task, spreading not only people, goods, and wealth but also ideas and information beyond the range of the personal ties that previously had medi- ated power. The analyses of Klein and Agnew suggest that the ideals and practices of gentility that emerged in the generation after the Glorious Revolution can be seen as responses to these political and cultural crises-as means for elites to reclaim authority through reshaped representations of themselves and their social roles.10

9 Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994). On politeness and political thought in Britain see also David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 1993), 29-3i; Nicholas Phillipson, "Politeness and Politics in the Reigns of Anne and the Early Hanoverians," in J.G.A. Pocock, ed., The Varieties

of British Political Thought, i5oo-i8ho (Cambridge, 1993), 211-45, and Pocock, "The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse," in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), 234-37; and Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo- American Thought, i550-i750 (Cambridge, i986), esp. i6o-6i.

10 Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, i988), 69-71, 92-99, 127-30, 147-49, and passim; Greene, "The Growth of Political Stability: An Interpretation of Political Development in the Anglo-American Colonies, i660-1760," in John Parker and Carol Urness, eds., The American Revolution: A Heritage of Change (Minneapolis, 1975), 26-52, reprinted in Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, 1994), 13i-62. Other historians noting these difficulties include Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), 215-92; Breen, "War, Taxes, and Political Brokers: The Ordeal of Massachusetts Bay, i675-i692," and "A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia, i660-1710," in Breen, Puritans and

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236 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Bell's frauds and the stories told about them provide a means of seeing this remaking and its causes in everyday encounters. Bell appropriated the symbols of wealth and political power but did not seek public authority. His clever reworking drew on the weak points in the logic of elite representa- tions-in the process revealing that, like Bell, colonial leaders were attempt- ing to sell themselves through the symbols and practices of gentility.

Bell's polished appearance, quick tongue, and chameleonlike identity also place him in the tradition of the American confidence man. The term itself came into use a full century after Bell became famous. Newspapers instead labeled him a "cheat," an "impostor," or a "sharper." A biography of a contemporary English confidence man describes its subject as a C "mumper,"1 someone who cheats as well as begs. As this range of existing terms suggests, Bell was not the first to assume a new identity to defraud others. Benjamin Franklin's future in-laws were "half ruin'd" by a confi- dence man in the early I720s; early in the following decade, another trickster traveled through Pennsylvania and Massachusetts pretending that his tongue had been cut out by Turks (until a suspicious minister literally choked it out of him).12 Bell, however, is particularly significant. As one of the earliest American criminals to pass himself off as a gentleman-and the first to gain widespread celebrity for such exploits-Bell marks the start of a tradition that scholars have previously seen as beginning with Stephen Burroughs in the late eighteenth century. Just as important, Bell's story makes clear that these two models of character, the gentleman and the confidence man, con- stituted part of the same processes that remade eighteenth-century culture.

Understanding this connection requires following the path of earlier scholars of the confidence man-and moving beyond them. As these stu- dents have shown, study of these men (and, Kathleen De Grave shows, women) illuminates both the conventions they honored and the boundaries they crossed. Gary Lindberg defines the confidence man broadly as any one who seeks to create and manipulate belief in the absence of evidence. Thus

Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New York, i980), 68-8o, I27-47; Thomas L. Purvis, Proprietors, Patronage, and Paper Money: Legislative Politics in New Jersey, i703-i776

(New Brunswick, N.J., i986), 68, 95-96; David W. Jordan, "Political Stability and the Emergence of a Native Elite in Maryland," in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (Chapel Hill, I979), 243-73; and Carole Shammas, "English-Born and Creole Elites in Turn-of-the-Century Virginia," ibid., 274-96. John M. Murrin speaks of a stabilization of regimes and a "growth of oligarchy" in the following period in "Political Development," in Greene and Pole, eds., Colonial British America, 44I-45. Gary J. Kornblith and Murrin, "The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class," in Alfred F. Young, ed., Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb, Ill., I993), 27-79, and Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, i740-i790 (Chapel Hill, I982), discuss the relative success (and even- tual undoing) of this elite attempt to assert authority.

11 For the various descriptions of Bell see Boston Gazette, Nov. 20, I738; Boston Evening-

Post, Dec. IO, I739; and Penn. Gaz., July I2, I744. The Life and Adventures of Mr. Bampfylde- Moore Carew, Commonly Called The King of the Beggars (London, I779), I42, I43, I50, uses "mumper" and "mumping" extensively.

12 Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York, i986), 33.

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MUMPER AMONG THE GENTLE 237

the ambivalent attitudes of Americans about these figures offers a revealing "expression of a culture drawn to acts of faith and gestures of self-creation." Karen Halttunen and Robert A. Gross use historically grounded studies of confidence men to probe post-Revolutionary culture, providing rich analyses of its peculiar emphasis on the dangers of deceit and the need for sincerity.13

Tom Bell's life and celebrity suggest that the confidence man can be seen as more than an indicator of key values and patterns. Bell was also a subversive, someone who undermines the power of a rule by breaking it. Such a perspective draws on the insights of cultural anthropologists seeking to go beyond a "thick description" of the connections that infuse even seem- ingly banal or unrepresentative subjects with meaning. According to these scholars, viewing culture as, in Clifford Geertz's term, a "context" too easily leads to seeing it as essentially static. The Pacific anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argues that simply recording "the contingency of events, the recur- rence of structures" is not enough. He instead suggests a model that high- lights an ongoing "interaction between the cultural order as constituted in the society and as lived by the people." In this view, events and texts often replicate structures and prevailing patterns but they also can place them "at risk" -challenge, undermine, and even contradict them.14

Drawing attention to this interplay between culture and contingency- between (in Sahlins's terms) prescription and performance-this investiga- tion pursues Bell and the values and practices he exploited for his frauds through three widening circles of analysis. It begins with Bell's activities, arguing that his career involved creative manipulation of the available struc- tures of opportunity. Bell, this section suggests, used common ways of doing business to pursue an uncommon craft. The analysis next moves from work to cultural work, the issues that Bell's actions (and the stories about them) raised for his society and its ways of explaining itself. Just as the norms of colonial society and culture shaped Bell's career, they were both revealed and challenged by it. Finally, the article briefly considers Bell's identity. The argument thus does not provide a continuous narrative of a career. Rather, mirroring the scattered and disjointed nature of the evidence, it offers a vari- ety of perspectives that seek to explain why, as the South-Carolina Gazette

13 De Grave, Swindler, Spy, Rebel: The Confidence Woman in Nineteenth-Century America

(Columbia, Mo., I995); William E. Lenz, Fast Talk and Flush Times: The Confidence Man as a Literary Convention (Columbia, Mo., I985); Lindberg, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York, I982), quotation on IO; Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, i830-i870 (New Haven, I982). Gross, "The Confidence Man and the Preacher: The Cultural Politics of Shays's Rebellion," in Gross, ed., In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion (Charlottesville, I993), 297-320, discusses

Burroughs. 14 Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The

Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, I973), I4; Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, I985), xiii, ix. See also Aletta Biersack, "Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and Beyond," in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History: Essays (Berkeley, I989), 72-96, and Sherry B. Ortner, "Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties," in Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton, I994), 372-4II.

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238 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

noted a dozen years after Tom Bell entered the Princeton tavern, his "Character and romantic Life, has made a great Noise in every American Colony."15

Five years after the Rowland episode, the improbably named Captain Dingee met a man in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, who introduced himself as Lloyd. Dingee treated Lloyd "courteously," not only because he claimed to

be a ship owner, but because he "affect[ed] the air and deportment of a gen- tleman." Dingee agreed to take the man to Philadelphia, some twenty-five miles up the Delaware River. There, left by himself at the dock, Lloyd pro- ceeded to help himself to a pair of stockings, two shirts, three handkerchiefs, and a pair of "scarlet breeches." Dingee realized too late that Lloyd had "chang'd from the Gentleman to the Thief," just as he had previously "chang'd his Name from the FAMOUS INFAMOUS TOM BELL."16

Although not as spectacular as the New Jersey incident, the I746 river- side encounter features two elements of particular importance to Tom Bell's career and self-presentation: clothing and crime. Clothes were both the object of many of his thefts and the means by which he projected the per- sona of a gentleman. Dingee's scarlet breeches formed part of a sartorial his- tory that included a silk jacket at Harvard, "several costly Suits of Cloaths, one of black Velvet" in Barbados, and a pair of "black silk Stockings" worn while escaping from a Philadelphia prison.17 This dress (and the deportment that made it seem natural) provided the capital on which Bell built his crim- inal business.

This section considers the way that this occupation operated, the struc- tures and constraints that made his trade, despite its rarity and notoriety, similar to that of other colonial Americans. Bell's I733 expulsion from Harvard forced him to enter the labor market with few of the advantages available to his classmates. He had to make his way in an economy that forced nearly all workers to engage in a variety of tasks and required capital investment for all but the meanest occupations. Bell's skill lay in his mobi- lization of limited resources, turning to advantage knowledge and situations that might otherwise have seemed tangential to the world of work. The dis- cussion closes by comparing Bell with two other eighteenth-century figures with unusual careers who also shaped themselves to circumstances and cir- cumstances to themselves, Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Burroughs.

Bell's Harvard years molded his life, although only partly in the way his parents had expected. As an eldest son, Tom Junior bore the hopes of an upwardly mobile family whose hard-earned wealth included two slaves and some Boston real estate. Boston's Free Latin School prepared young Bell for college, but his sea captain father died suddenly in I729, failing to leave the

15 South-Carolina Gazette (Charleston), July i8, I754. 16 Penn. Gaz., Aug. I4, I746. 17 Boston Evening-Post, Dec. IO, I739; S.-C. Gaz., Sept. I2, I743; Karin Calvert, "The

Function of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America," in Carson et al., eds., Of Consuming

Interests, 252-83.

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MUMPER AMONG THE GENTLE 239

capital necessary to fund the ambition of a Harvard degree for his sixteen- year-old son. Bell's family thus needed to sacrifice to allow his matriculation the following year. Among his classmates were Elisha Hutchinson, a member of the prominent family that included, in addition to the first-generation outsider Anne Hutchinson, the ultimate colonial insider, Governor Thomas Hutchinson, Elisha's older brother. Elisha, the faculty decided, belonged at the head of his class; in this largely social classification of the thirty-four new students, the sea captain's son ranked twenty-first.18

The promise of social advance proved elusive. Bell found himself at odds with the rowdy jostling of student culture. His tongue got him into trouble almost immediately. No sooner had he arrived than he provoked a severe beat- ing from an older student. The faculty declared the latter primarily at fault, but Bell still received a private reprimand for his "Saucy behaviour." He became a loner and a thief, engaging in misdeeds that included purloining pri- vate letters from a study and two bottles of wine from an underclassman. The last straw came in I733, when the faculty found "the strongest suspicion of [Bell's] having stolen a cake of chocolate," a theft compounded by "the most notorious complicated lying." Such misbehavior, along with a "scandalous neglect" of studies, led to Bell's expulsion in February of his junior year.

Bell's misadventures had many precedents. As an oversight committee noted five months before his final theft, Harvard tutors faced "great disor- ders." Faculty sanctions ranked Bell's offense as comparable to the mutilation of a tutor's horse that got some of his classmates expelled the previous year and more serious than placing glass in the bed of an older scholar, an infrac- tion that brought only a suspension for some more socially prominent stu- dents. Bell's offenses, however, were distinctive. Unlike most college pranks, his misdeeds were individual and furtive. He never engaged in (or perhaps simply never was caught at) the common undergraduate vice that attracted his class's three highest-ranking members, "playing at cards and dice."19

The dangers of life beyond Harvard were made clear by a suit brought against him just before his suspension-and his twenty-first birthday. Bell had bought, on credit, a silk jacket and expensive hose from a tailor and then refused to pay. Once again Bell failed to fulfill expectations. Suits for debt were common (colonial courts often seemed to do little more than consider them), but the vast majority went uncontested. As in the chocolate incident, where he justified himself through complicated lying, Bell not only refused to admit his guilt; he also placed faith in his powers of persuasion. Bested in an inferior court, he appealed the case and, in the same month he left Harvard, lost again.20

18 For Bell's early life see Bridenbaugh, "'Famous Infamous Vagrant' Tom Bell." Capt. Tom Bell's will is Will # 5845, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Probate Records, 27:319-22 (Boston Public Library microfilm). For Bell's Harvard career see Shipton, Biographical Sketches,

9:375-76, and Bridenbaugh, "'Famous Infamous Vagrant' Tom Bell," 126-27. 19 Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard University, 2 vols. (Boston, I840), 1:388-94, quota-

tion on 388. For the disciplinary records of Bell and his classmates see Shipton, Biographical Sketches, 9:389, 4I0, 438 (tutor's horse); 393, 4I2, 449 (glass); 386, 393, 4I2, 438, 448 (cards and dice).

20 Bridenbaugh, "'Famous Infamous Vagrant' Tom Bell," 126.

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240 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

These suits-legal and sartorial-foreshadowed Bell's career. In the future, he would repudiate, not the offense that caused the trouble, but the circumstances that led the tailor to prosecute. He would seek fine clothing not through commerce but through theft, avoiding transactions under his own name. The debt case also underlined Bell's precarious economic posi- tion. His family had sold property to pay for an education that provided access to trade, the professions, and political office, and his expulsion came too late for an alternative investment of family resources. The Bells, further- more, lacked a powerful patron. City fathers turned down the mother's I73I application to sell liquor, even though such licenses were increasingly granted to needy widows. Without education, reputation, or the support of family and friends, the twenty-one-year-old Bell thus faced the problems of adult labor in particularly stark terms.21

Bell's next steps probably included at least some school teaching but are obscure until I738, when authorities in Virginia and New York charged him with crimes. In July, having been arrested for posing as Francis Partridge Hutchinson, perhaps to defraud the wealthy Fairfax family, he escaped from a Virginia county jail. Near the end of the year, he was convicted of forging a letter (presumably a letter of credit) from Boston merchant William Bowdoin to New York's Livingston family. A New York City court sen- tenced him to thirty-nine lashes. Although these are Bell's first known brushes with the law, it seems unlikely they were his first criminal acts. The Boston Evening-Post reported the following year that Bell "has been a Fortune hunting for several Years past." In the dozen years that followed, he would also stay in (and often escape from) jails in Barbados, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.22

Even for the man who became America's most famous felon, crime was only a part-time job. The precise extent and location of his other activities are unclear, but a I749 letter to a New York newspaper signed with Bell's name lists five different occupations he had followed-merchant, sailor, sol- dier, surveyor, and schoolteacher. A I755 account added that Bell had also "practiced Physic, [and] pleaded Law." He even seems to have played the role of a New Light minister after the I74i New Jersey incident. A I743 newspaper report placed him in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, "preach- ing and exhorting . . . in the new Way."23 The range of Bell's resume, while

21 Ibid; "Boston Selectmen's Records, 17i6-1736," in A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston . . ., s3th Report (Boston, i885), 208-09. On tavern licenses see David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts

(Chapel Hill, 1995), 99-147. 22 Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg), July 2i, 1738; Boston Gaz., Nov. 20, 1738; Boston

Evening-Post, Sept. s0, 1739. Francis Hutchinson, not of the prominent family, graduated from Harvard in 1736; Sibley, Biographical Sketches, 10:34-35. The Boston Evening-Post, Dec. 10, 1739, prints a letter from a Barbados merchant claiming that Bell had earlier drawn "Bills of Exchange in my Brother Fairfax's Name."

23 Bell's letter is in N.-Y Evening-Post, Sept. 4, 1749. The N.-Y Weekly Post-Boy, Sept. ii, 1746, notes a rumor that Bell had enlisted in a New Jersey company as a soldier. The Boston

Weekly News Letter, Apr. io, 1755, reprints a piece originally published in the Antigua Gazette. On Bell as minister see S.-C. Gaz., Nov. 7, 1743.

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MUMPER AMONG THE GENTLE 24I

extreme, is not as unusual as it may look. Colonial American men and women commonly turned their hands to a variety of tasks. Even while building a printing business that enabled him to retire at age forty-two, Benjamin Franklin held salaried posts as assembly clerk and city postmaster. Paul Revere not only engraved prints and crafted fine silver but also cleaned teeth.24

Bell's travels made him more distinctive. Most Americans, even promi- nent ones, kept close to home. The meeting of the Continental Congress marked the first time John Adams traveled outside New England and only the second time Thomas Jefferson left Virginia.25 Apart from governing and seafaring, work-related travel in eighteenth-century America generally involved peddling, preaching, or thieving. Rural peddlers were already com- mon by the time Bell hit the road. Dr. Alexander Hamilton, traveling from Maryland to Maine in I744, met one on Long Island in July the day that Franklin's newspaper reported Bell's arrest in Philadelphia. Just a short time later, Hamilton found his genteel "portmanteau" being mistaken "for a pack" by another peddler in Walpole, Massachusetts.26 John Stockton, fooled by Bell in the Princeton tavern, was again duped by two peddlers in I757. The men, carrying "Packs of Linen and some other dry Goods," were caught passing counterfeit Pennsylvania ten-shilling notes. When magistrate Stockton allowed them to go to Trenton to seek an alibi (leaving their goods as security), they never returned.27

God, not Mammon, prompted the most visible examples of mobility. John Rowland's I739 ordination by the revivalist New Brunswick Presbytery

24 Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Lemay and Zall, 84-85; Aubrey C. Land, "Economic Base and Social Structure: The Northern Chesapeake in the Eighteenth Century," in Stanley N. Katz, ed., Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, 2d ed. (Boston, 1976), 345-59; W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, I724-I775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1945), 197-2i6; Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, i780-i860 (Ithaca, i990), iio and passim; Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries

of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, i630-i850 (Chapel Hill, 1994), i98-99, 247-58; John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, i607-I789: With Supplementary Bibliography (Chapel Hill, i99i), 93-94, 99, 105, 206, 295, 310, 312, 314, 3i8, 325-26. For women's work see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "Martha Ballard and Her Girls: Women's Work in Eighteenth-Century Maine," in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill, i988), 70-105.

25 Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, vol. i of Jeffierson and His Time (Boston, 1948), 98-ioi, 20i. On mobility see Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York, i986), and Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling ofAmerica on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, i986). For studies suggesting that the i8th-century poor moved often, but not very far, see Douglas Lamar Jones, "The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," J. Soc. Hist., 8 (Spring 1975), 28-54, and "Poverty and Vagabondage: The Process of Survival in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 133 (i979), 243-54.

26 Bridenbaugh, ed., Gentleman's Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, I744 (Pittsburgh, i992; orig. pub. 1948), 95, 104 (see also i6o). Dr. Hamilton provides a vivid picture of the difficulties of traveling in the 1740s. Penn. Gaz., July 12, 1744. On later peddlers see David Jaffee, "Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760-i860," Journal ofAmerican History, 78 (i99i), 511-35.

27 Penn. Gaz., Aug. II, 1757, quoted in Kenneth Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York, 1955), 92.

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242 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

had been, not to a specific church, but "to the ministry of the Word in gen- eral." Within a year, Rowland was preaching with the "grand itinerant" George Whitefield, one of the few contemporaries who could match Bell's travels. Accounts of Whitefield's journeys often appeared in newspapers alongside reports about Bell. Although the minister passionately courted the publicity that the thief shunned, their movements resulted from broadly similar purposes. Like peddlers, both continually sought new markets where demand for their product (whether gentility or the gospel) was greatest and where novelty heightened the dramatic effects of their presentations.28

Desire for easy pickings also impelled the itinerancy of professional felons. Although most eighteenth-century property thefts involved irregular crimes of opportunity rather than of systematic activity, persistent law- breakers needed to keep moving to stay ahead of the law. Some of the more successful pretended to the same kind of genteel knowledge as Bell. Counterfeiter Joseph-Bill Packer traveled from Boston to North Carolina making and passing false bills while posing as a doctor who specialized in "curing cancers." One of his associates called himself "Doctor Dunston."29

Bell shared not only varied activities and continued mobility with such criminals but also school teaching. Historians point to the many metallur- gists and doctors who engaged in crime and counterfeiting; they fail to note the number of teachers who appear in these accounts. Like Bell, Packer spent a stint at a Virginia school. Counterfeiter Joseph Wilson was captured while running a school. Elizabeth Castle, a confidence woman who (like Bell) trav- eled through Philadelphia in the mid-I74os, pretended to be a "Doctoress" and a "School-Mistress."30 Such activities suggest not only the many oppor- tunities available for educational employment but also the marginal nature of positions contracted for a few months at a time and for low wages.

Teaching provided a starting place for upwardly mobile men as well as a haven for strolling criminals. More than one-third of Bell's Harvard class-

28 Ingram, "History of the Presbytery of New Brunswick," J. Presbyterian Hist. Soc., 6

(1911-1912), 333-34, 346; Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York, i986), i89. For studies of Whitefield that stress his desire for publicity see Frank Lambert, "Pedlar in Divinity": George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, i737-i770 (Princeton, 1994): Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the

Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich., i99i); and Timothy D. Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, N. C., 1994)

29 Packer, "A Journal of the Life and Travels of Joseph-Bill Packer" (Albany, 1773), in Daniel E. Williams, ed., Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives (Madison, 1993), 207-i6; Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial New York (New York, 1953), 77. See also Scott, Counterfeiting in ColonialAmerica (New York, 1957), 179-8i (Dunston) and passim. The best study of criminals in colonial America is Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins ofAmerican Popular Culture, i674-i860 (New York, 1993), 117-42. See also Douglas Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, i69i-i776 (Ithaca, 1976).

30 Packer, "Journal of the Life and Travels," 213; Maryland Gazette, Dec. 13, 1749

(Wilson); Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial Pennsylvania, 55 (Castle). Scott's extensive studies of counterfeiting, which include Counterfeiting in Colonial America and Counterfeiting in Colonial New York, provide the fullest discussions of that subject. See also John L. Brooke, The Refiner's Fire: The Making ofMormon Cosmology, i644-i844 (New York, 1994), 105-28.

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mates kept school, most in the years immediately after college.31 Teaching was attractive to both privileged young men on the verge of lucrative careers and criminals fearful of capture alike, in large part because it postponed the problem of capital. Schoolteachers could board with local families rather than establish their own households (perhaps providing insight into the ways of the relatively well-to-do that would have been useful for confidence men), whereas security beyond the vagaries of casual labor required capital. The nature of this stake could vary, ranging from land for agriculture to craft skills for artisans and financial aid among the most wealthy. Bell possessed none of these, and he refused to act within the networks of family and friends that other young men such as Franklin called on when they left their home base.32

Lacking these resources, Bell took full advantage of other, less obvious, assets, what might be called the cultural capital he assembled at Boston Latin School and Harvard. Bell's frauds gained credibility first from understanding and exhibiting the social skills, attitudes, and cultural practices of gentility. Such tangible signs as knowing how to wear a silk jacket and such intangi- bles as displaying what Captain Dingee called "the Air and Deportment of a Gentleman" served as the foundation for Bell's lies.33 Furthermore, although Bell was clearly not a model student, he would have acquired some learning in Greek, Latin, the Bible, and philosophy, topics that helped establish elite standing. A North Carolina gentleman cheated by Bell judged him "a pretty good Scholar."34

Bell's broad knowledge of people and events proved more directly use- ful. Grammar school and college offered close contact with people whose names would have been known outside the region and whose own connec- tions and information would have been similarly wide. Although the accounts of Bell's methods are not full, some of his crimes suggest the use of such personal knowledge. In a society where gentlemen knew more than most people about the outside world, Bell exploited the uneven diffusion of knowledge to refer to incidents that people in other colonies might only have heard of and to provide details that might be checked to certify his cre- dentials. Bell probably used information about the illness of Colonel Thomas Hutchinson, the father of his classmate Elisha, to sustain his claim

31 Calculated from biographies in Shipton, Biographical Sketches, vol. 9. On teaching see James Axtell, The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New Haven, 1974), i87-94, 2ii-i2. Bell's classmates may actually have taught less than the average Harvard class; Axtell suggests that about 40% of all colonial Harvard graduates taught school after graduation (i87-88, 212-13 n. i8). See also the post-Harvard experiences of Robert Treat Paine and John Adams in Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, i700-i865 (New York, i989), 85-87.

32 On artisanal skill as capital see Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia

Artisans and the Politics of Class, i720-i830 (New York, 1993), 5-6. Franklin wrote, "He that hath a Trade hath an Estate"; "Poor Richard Improved, 1758," in Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 1959- ), 7:342 (hereafter cited as Franklin Papers). The aphorism first appeared in Poor Richard (1742), ibid., 2:333.

33 Penn. Gaz., Aug. 14, 1746. 34 Va. Gaz., Oct. 31, 1745.

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244 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

to the Hutchinson name in I738. Knowledge of a new locality could further the illusion. Bell's perceptive choice of a gullible New Jersey family almost certainly relied on earlier conversations with the Reverend John Guild, one- time minister of a neighborhood parish and Bell's Harvard classmate. Perhaps unwittingly, Bell returned the favor. Guild's candidacy for the new pulpit had been blocked by Rowland supporters until Bell's activities dis- credited the rival candidate and allowed Guild's ordination.35

The ways in which Bell worked within and beyond provincial American contexts can be seen more fully by moving from the common experiences of criminals and other workers to the uncommon lives of two other eighteenth- century men, Burroughs and Franklin. The Memoirs of the New Englander Burroughs, who began his activities as a confidence man in the I78os, makes no reference to Tom Bell, but Burroughs's experiences reveal substantial similarities to his predecessor. Burroughs also had a checkered college career that ended in expulsion. Besides working as a soldier and a sailor, he imper- sonated a minister and taught in a variety of schools, sometimes under a dif- ferent name. Both men seem to have ended their lives as teachers. They also shared a pool of cultural capital, premising their frauds on the behavioral and cultural attributes of gentlemen.36

Burroughs differed from Bell in two important ways. First, Burroughs was an active counterfeiter who spent long periods of time in jail-a result of the growing resort to imprisonment in post-Revolutionary New England. Bell, who never seems to have engaged in coining money, was often incarcer- ated, but he seems to have spent little time in jail, either because he escaped (as Burroughs often did) or was released. More important, Burroughs took his legitimate activities more seriously. Unlike Bell, who simply exploited clerical garb for short-term gain, Burroughs sought to fulfill the duties of a minister and teacher. Accordingly, he disingenuously claimed he was not an impostor, because, unlike someone who "puts on feigned appearances, in order to enrich or aggrandize himself, to the damage of others," he sought only to make a living.37

Burroughs's professed belief in labor as a means to stability and perhaps success drew on the older language of station and office. His activities and his accounts of himself also suggest the shifting meaning of "career," a word that by the early nineteenth century described a person's progress through life, particularly through work. Bell paid little attention to filling an office,

35 Shipton, Biographical Sketches, 8:120-o2 (Burnet), 9:419; Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), II. On colonial elites and their control of information see Brown, Knowledge Is Power, i6-41. On the movement of information see Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, i675 to i740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York, i986).

36 Burroughs, Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs of New Hampshire (1798), ed. Philip F. Gura (Boston, i988). For insightful discussions of Burroughs see Gross, "Confidence

Man and the Preacher," 297-320; Cohen, Pillars of Salt, 155-62; and Daniel E. Williams, "In Defense of Self: Author and Authority in the Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs," Early American Literature, 25 (i990), 96-i22.

37 Burroughs, Memoirs ofStephen Burroughs, 67.

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much less to advancing in it. His career suggests instead the term's earlier, less teleological, meanings-a racecourse or rapid movement. "This Fellow has had a large Swing over this Continent, as well as in some of the West- India Islands, for these several Years," noted a New York newspaper editor in I748, predicting Bell's probable end, "the Swing his Merits deserve."38

Nineteenth-century mythology connected the new meaning of career most directly to another figure, Benjamin Franklin. Second only to the Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper Franklin helped establish, his Pennsylvania Gazette printed more stories about Bell than any other American periodical. Such intense coverage reflected public curiosity, but the interest may also have been personal. Franklin and Bell had similar back- grounds. Both were Boston Latin students from families outside the city elite. Both left family and other possible patrons to engage the world by themselves, relying on book learning and self-presentation. As others have noted, Franklin's rise depended in large part on the confidence man's canny ability to manage his self-presentation, impressing the Pennsylvania governor soon after his arrival, chatting up New Jersey gentlemen while printing their paper money, and borrowing a rare book from an assembly member to improve his chances for patronage.39

Franklin also cultivated internal morality as well as a public face. He later noted that he not only "took care . . . to avoid all Appearances of the Contrary" but "to be in Reality Industrious and frugal." Outward images required manipulation, yet they ultimately needed to be backed by inner character. This ideal, vigorously pursued through careful self-examination and epitomized in Franklin's "Project of arriving at moral Perfection," grew even more important in the years after the Revolution, when character increasingly denoted the sum of a person's moral qualities. Bell, by contrast, exemplifies an earlier meaning of character-a literary genre that delineates a recognizable type through details and idiosyncrasies. Unlike the printer and philosopher of virtue Franklin (who saw type as a means of making perma- nent impressions that could convey instruction), Bell sought only a distinc- tive mark that could create the illusion of reality.40

Bell's representations may even have fooled Franklin himself. In I739, the printer met a former "school-master" who claimed "to understand Latin

38 N.-Y Weekly Post-Boy, Sept. II, 1749. 39 For Franklin as confidence man see Lindberg, Confidence Man in American Literature,

73-89, and Richard Boyd Hauck, A Cheerful Nihilism: Confidence and "The Absurd" in American Humorous Fiction (Bloomington, Ind., 1971).

40 Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Lemay and Zall, 54, 66. My argument does not deny Franklin's role playing, a characteristic discussed most tellingly in Ormond Seavey, Becoming Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and the Life (University Park, Pa., i988). Mitchell Robert Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality (Cambridge, i984), makes a powerful argument for a deeper consistency at the core of Franklin's identity. For the genre of the "character" see J. W. Smeed, The Theophrastan

"Character"' The History of a Literary Genre (Oxford, i985). I would like to thank Prof. Blakey Vermeule for help on this issue. See also Nian-Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, i790-i990 (Philadelphia, 1994), 4-8.

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246 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

and Greek," gaps in Franklin's education that he labored to overcome by teaching himself Latin. The young visitor took advantage of Franklin's hos- pitality to make off with some of his clothing, including a "fine . . . ruffled" shirt and a handkerchief "mark'd with an F in red Silk." The identity of the man, whom Franklin knew as the Irishman William Lloyd, is unknown, but the similarity to the later Captain Dingee incident (both con men used the name Lloyd and stole clothes when their host's back was turned) suggests that the theft may mark the only recorded meeting between two of the most famous colonial Americans.41

Sometime in I739, a man claiming to be Gilbert Burnet, son of the late governor of New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, arrived in Barbados. Named after his eminent grandfather, a key figure in England's Glorious Revolution and Hanoverian Succession, the visitor moved among the upper echelons of Barbadian society. He persuaded local worthies to lend him ?250 and ingratiated himself with the Jewish Lopez family, whose head "made very much of" him-until the visitor was caught stealing at a family wedding. The father beat the guest and took him before a magistrate. Professing shock at the affront, Burnet sued Lopez for ten thousand pounds. The incident sparked anti-Jewish outrage. Local merchants petitioned the president of the council about the conduct of "the Jews towards the Christians," citing especially "their daring Insolence to . . . a Gentleman of a distinguished Family." A crowd took more direct action; it destroyed the Speightstown, Barbados, synagogue and drove the Jews out of town.42

Soon afterward, even Burnet's most ardent defenders changed their minds. The visitor surreptitiously attempted to catch a boat to Jamaica and, when these plans were thwarted, went into hiding. A week's search located a disguised Burnet lurking outside the town. Replies to inquiries sent to the mainland identified him as the Bostonian Tom Bell.43 According to a for- mer supporter, who now pronounced him "the greatest Villain that was ever born," Bell finally confessed his identity but not his guilt, arguing that "he [had] done no Harm." The court disagreed. He was sentenced to be whipped, placed in the stocks, and branded on both cheeks with the letter R (for "Rogue"). Unfortunately for his later victims, a new governor remitted the branding.

Reported in the mainland press from Williamsburg, Virginia, to Boston, the episode points to yet another side of Bell's activities-some-

41 Penn. Gaz., Feb. 22, 1739. The Dingee incident appears ibid., Aug. 14, 1746. For another Lloyd, perhaps a separate individual or a combination of the person or persons mentioned in other stories, see ibid., July 8, 1742. This Lloyd, then going by the name of Ebenezer Wilson, also was a schoolteacher, preacher, and thief.

42 Accounts of the case discussed here and in the subsequent paragraph appear in Boston Evening-Post, Sept. Io, Dec. Io, '739; Penn. Gaz., Sept. 27, 1739, Apr. i0, I740; Va. Gaz., Nov. i6, '739; Boston Weekly News-Letter, Mar. 13, 1740; and N.-Y Gaz., Mar. 31, 1740. The Penn. Gaz., Feb. IO, I743, gives the name "Thomas" Burnet. See also David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, I997), 275-76.

43 Boston Evening-Post, Dec. I0, I739.

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thing deeper than the difficulty of getting a livelihood or the inconvenience created by the theft of money or scarlet breeches. The stories told by and about Bell also performed cultural work-raising charged issues and helping people think about and through them. Bell's activities and the reports about them drew on some of the period's most compelling cultural narratives, the stories that people told to explain themselves and their society. The Barbados incident drew on two of these. First, by claiming a distinguished lineage, Bell adopted the role of the gentleman, a status that required a polished self- presentation combining learning and self-control. A second closely related theme was compassion, the gentleman's sympathetic concern for the less for- tunate. The gracious new governor played the part in Barbados, probably releasing Bell as part of a general amnesty celebrating his arrival. Later, the impostor himself assayed the role.

Linking power and status to morality, these narratives helped ground the attempts of early eighteenth-century elites to reconfigure their claims to authority in the wake of late seventeenth-century crises. Bell raised awkward questions about this project. His plausible misrepresentations undermined elite claims by suggesting that the presumed links between power and self- presentation were neither as obvious nor as unquestionable as they wanted themselves and others to think. Polite behavior could be counterfeited, com- passion misplaced. Such reinterpretations undercut claims to authority by feeding into another issue of increasing concern to mid-eighteenth-century Americans, hypocrisy. Struggling to hide his identity, Bell could hardly have found appealing the widespread belief that fine outward professions often hid a foul inward reality. Yet colonial leaders, seeking to regain authority by presenting themselves differently, could also find at least some applications of this idea similarly uncongenial. If fine clothes did not make the man-or, more important, reveal him-then their attempts to justify their leadership through display might be only another confidence game. In I723, James Franklin's New-England Courant posed the dangers in stark terms. People who too often observe hollow religious pretensions, the author warned, sometimes "conclude, that Religion itself is nothing but a cunningly devised Fable, a Trick of State, Invented to keep Mankind in awe."44

The troubles stirred up by Bell show the dangers of a similar conclusion about social authority. In Barbados, the community rallied to expel a group of cultural outsiders. In New Jersey, the Rowland incident turned angry vil- lagers, who still believed the real minister responsible, against him and his supporters. When his accusers failed to prove Rowland's guilt because of tes- timony that he had been preaching in another colony that day, they indicted the witnesses themselves-including the Reverend William Tennent. Most of the cases were eventually dismissed, but a local church leader was not so lucky. He was convicted and sentenced to public shaming for "wilful and corrupt perjury."45

44 New-England Courant, Jan. I4, I723. 45 The best discussions of the trials are Field, "Review of the Trial of the Rev. Wm.

Tennent," 30-40, quotation on 36, and Green, "Trial of the Rev. William Tennent," 32I-44.

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248 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Bell's relative success in avoiding a similar fate depended first on his ability to fulfill expectations about the appearance and behavior of a promi- nent person. Although fine clothing expressed this status most clearly, Bell also relied on other advantages. A Boston jailer described him by noting his "handsom Set of Teeth" and "pleasant Countenance" as well as by recalling that "his Discourse is polite, and he is of a spritely Look and Gesture." A Portsmouth, New Hampshire, man similarly cited Bell's "good Elocution." He "appears like a Gentleman," declared a New York correspondent.46

Such descriptions suggest that Bell had mastered the complex grammar of gentility, manipulating goods, gestures, and attitudes literally to embody refinement. As the people who readily accepted Bell's representations recog- nized, such mastery was uncommon. "Narrow notions, ignorance of the world, and low extraction," complained Doctor Hamilton, were common among "our aggrandized upstarts in these infant countrys of America." Hamilton's extended examination of American refinement in I744 found few who met his standards. A New York doctor, James McGraw, Hamilton noted with disgust, would drink to a person's health and then bow to them "sometimes for the space of a minute or two, till the person complimented either observed him of his own accord or was hunched into attention by his next neighbour." McGraw also practiced "an affected way of curtsieing instead of bowing when he entered a room."47

Bell seems to have exhibited none of the awkward gestures and lapses of taste that made Hamilton so uncomfortable with McGraw. The confidence man had internalized genteel standards, learning not only the basic ideals but also the less often articulated details that, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggests, provide the most accurate measure of class background because they are seldom acquired by formal education. Gentility stressed transcend- ing affectation. The aesthetic of politeness, a term originally meaning pol- ished, privileged seemingly effortless grace, not strenuous exertion. Rather than a carefully ceremonious curtsey, Hamilton expected an elegant gesture that, in the words of a I763 almanac, "moves with easy, tho' with measur'd Pace, / And shews no Part of Study but the Grace."48

Bell's genteel air validated his specific claims, but his acts undercut the values gentility sought to represent. Coming from the Latin gens (family) and thus referring to particular blood lines, the term originally denoted high

46 Boston Weekly Post-Boy, Aug. 22, 1743; Boston Evening-Post, Dec. 12, I743; N. - Y Evening- Post, Mar. 25, 1745.

47 Bridenbaugh, ed., Gentleman's Progress, 83, i86. On the ideal of gentility see Bushman, "American High-Style and Vernacular Cultures," 345-83, and Refinement ofAmerica.

48 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice

(Cambridge, Mass., i984; orig. pub. 1979), i-id. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York, i986), 478, notes Baldassare Castiglione's related idea of sprezzatura, the ability to perform difficult actions with seeming effortlessness. Franklin significantly entitled his "Society for Virtue," a proposed association of moral men attempting to enlighten the world, "the Society of the Free and Easy," rather than a name expressing strenuous activity; Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Lemay and Zall, 77-78; Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 93; "Politeness," Poor Richard Improved, . .. 1763 (Philadelphia, [I762]), Sept.

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birth. Eighteenth-century ideals of gentility, seeking both to incorporate new kinds of wealth into elite circles and to justify the rule of this expanded elite, increasingly emphasized moral qualities that imparted refinement to behav- ior-a major element in the shift that Norbert Elias has called "the civilizing process." This inner quality was expressed most clearly in outward behavior, which could be counterfeited more easily than official titles or family con- nections. In a period when increased travel and communication required rapid judgments about whom to trust and respect, this difficulty spurred a continuing discussion of the attributes of "true" gentility.49

Historians have also begun to probe the rise of gentility. In the wake of recent challenges to the concept of "civilization" itself, "civility" now seems less a simple description of advance out of barbarism than a particular devel- opment that requires explanation. Scholars such as Richard Bushman, Cary Carson, and T. H. Breen have noted the lineage of these values in European aristocratic circles and courtesy books. They have explored American emula- tion of British practices and the corresponding physical reshaping of interi- ors and exteriors as well as examined the development of a consumer market for fine goods that conveyed status.50

Bell's encounters point to another, relatively neglected, aspect of these developments-the attempt to remake the character of human relationships. This goal involved not simply aping aristocrats or seeking status through consumption but efforts to build a society around peaceful social interaction rather than aggression and arbitrary power, a society that could welcome even strangers like Hamilton (or Bell) on relatively equal terms-if they ful- filled polite expectations. Bell's experiences show two important sides of this new view of society. In each, he fulfilled the letter but not the spirit of these new cultural imperatives.

Gentility first helped build solidarity and trust among elites that had been bitterly divided by English revolutions and colonial rebellions. The ideals of politeness provided standards that linked gentlemen across county and colony lines in a time of expanding population and commerce. Gentility repudiated the "passionate . . . harsh and tyrannical treatment" that James Franklin meted out to his sibling Benjamin. The younger Franklin expected "more Indulgence" from "a Brother," a familial standard of concern that he would later expand, through his involvement in Freemasonry, to gentlemen around the world.51 Bell seems to have met these expectations. Although he aggressively sought money and goods, none of the accounts of his activities suggests a resort to violence or harsh words. According to a I755 newspaper

49 "Gentle," "genteel," OED; Elias, The History of Manners, vol. I: The Civilizing Process (I939), trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, I979); vol. 2: The Court Society (i969), trans. Jephcott (Oxford, I983).

50 Bushman, "American High-Style and Vernacular Cultures," 345-83, and Refinement of America; Carson, "Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America," 483-697; Breen, "'Baubles of Britain,"' 73-I04. See note 8 above for a fuller list of relevant works.

51 Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Lemay and Zall, I5, i6, and n.; Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840 (Chapel Hill, i996), 50-82.

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250 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

report, he claimed that he "never swore a prophane Oath."52 Bell thus exhib- ited a major component of what Max Weber called the "spirit of capitalism," the ability to defer gratification in hopes of later reward. A comic piece pub- lished in Boston in I762 recognized this quality: "The famous TOM BELL," a character relates, "once told me that he never was drunk in his Life." In the common eighteenth-century locution, Bell was never "disguised in liquor"- because he was so anxious to disguise himself. But Bell used this self-control to take advantage of others, undermining the trust that, Thomas L. Haskell argues, provided an essential precondition for an emerging market society- and, it could be added, for a stable political order based on limited govern- ment and civil society. Bell's activities thus undermined one of the main supports of the social order promoted by gentlemen-the clarity about intentions and morality supposedly revealed by polite behavior.53

Bell's exploits also subverted gentility's other key purpose, expressing and legitimizing moral authority over common people and outsiders. Physical and verbal signs pointed to politeness, but they were not its essence, for the ideal also possessed a strong moral dimension. As the biography of an eighteenth-century English confidence man, one Mister Bampfylde-Moore Carew, noted, gentlemen and ladies have only "the mercer [merchant] and taylor" to distinguish them from common beggars if their claims are defined solely by "their equipage." Among the truly genteel, polished presentation assured honorable morality, and careful manners legitimized gentlemanly authority. Not surprisingly, Franklin's master, Samuel Keimer, was not only "an odd Fish . . . slovenly to extreme dirtiness, [and] enthusiastic in some Points of Religion" but also, in Franklin's description, untrustworthy-"a little Knavish withal." Bell played on this presumed link between cultural presentations and moral character to take advantage of a Chester County, Pennsylvania, man who believed that Bell could be trusted because he acted "like a Gentleman."54

Bell used this connection for his own advantage, a subversion of intent seen in the parallels between his impostures and his financial swindles. Besides taking goods, Bell forged financial instruments to steal representa- tions of value. The bills of exchange (roughly the eighteenth-century equiva- lent of traveler's checks) and letters of credit (similar to bank checks or store credit) that he counterfeited in his earliest frauds offered signs of value that could be used beyond local and personal connections. Bell's financial activi- ties warned against the dangers of such paper representations of wealth; his

52 Boston Weekly News-Letter, Apr. Io, I755. 53 Serious-Comical Dialogue, 20; Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian

Sensibility," 2 pts., in Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, I992), I07-60; Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-I905), trans. Talcott Parsons (London, I930). On gentility as a response to mobility see Carson, "Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America," 522-49.

54 Life and Adventures of Mr. Bampftlde-Moore Carew, I38; Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Lemay and Zall, 45; Boston Weekly News-Letter, Mar. IO, I743. For a provocative theoretical dis- cussion of the authority of polished self-presentation see James C. Scott, Domination and the

Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, i990).

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impostures raised similarly inconvenient questions about the physical repre- sentation of authority. Like financial instruments, the ideal of gentility pro- vided widely accepted signs of high status and personal authority. Polite bows, polished conversation, and proper clothing all vouched for the gentle- man when an extensive check of social and commercial credit was impossi- ble. Bell's activities subverted this expectation, warning colonial gentlemen and others that such performances could not be taken at face value.55

Bell's undermining of the gentleman's cultural stock-in-trade can be seen in another crucial issue in his story, compassion-a key term in yet another of his encounters. On a July morning in I743, a gentleman "without either Coat or Wastecoat" entered a New York tavern. After eating breakfast, he requested pen and paper, saying that he needed to write to some of the city's most prominent men about his loss of ?6oo at sea, a substantial sum even for the professed son of a wealthy man in eastern Long Island. He was "well acquainted" with these worthies, he claimed, but could not visit with- out "Cloaths to appear in." The customers' suspicions grew. Finally they confronted him. Wasn't he the famous impostor Tom Bell? The stranger denied the charge. He had never heard the name but, he added, "whoever Tom Bell was, he was a Man that deserved Compassion." Soon afterward the stranger picked up his hat and silently left by the back door.56 Bell repeated the theme six years later, arguing to New York newspaper readers in I749 "that I appear to the Gentry and Clergy, as an object of pity, and subject of prayer." Newspaper items about Bell suggest that this expectation of sympa- thy was not simply a delusion. The South-Carolina Gazette warned in I743 that not only did Bell "impose upon the Compassionate," but "he is remark- ably successful in exciting Compassion in the Ladies." Although other accounts differ, the Gazette writer suggests that sympathetic Barbadian women saved Bell from the pillory.57

The repeated (and unexpected) use of the term suggests its larger impor- tance-and the dangers that Bell posed to elite self-definitions. The genteel face of power was not only carefully controlled but also compassionate. Bell himself contrasted the better gentlemen, marked by prayerful compassion, with his "implacable and ungenerous Enemies," who "authoritatively and arbitrar[il]y commanded" a newspaper editor to print "malicious, cowardly, Reflections and Accusations."58 A I732 correspondent to Franklin's newspa- per suggested a similar division in discussing Philadelphia's slippery winter streets. Unlike either the "thoughtless and indifferent" or the "malicious and

55 For the theatricality of i8th-century elite activities see E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York, i99i). Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, also notes the significance of gen- try culture in establishing power. For the technical details of i8th-century exchange see John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600-1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, I978), and Baxter, House of Hancock, II-38.

56 Penn. Gaz., June 23, July I4, I743.

57 N.-Y Evening-Post, Sept. 4, I749; S.-C. Gaz., Sept. I2, I743. Compare Penn. Gaz., June i6, I743. For earlier reports see Boston Weekly News-Letter, Mar. I3, 1740, and N-Y Gaz., Mar.

3I, I740. 58 N-Y Evening-Post, Sept. 4, I749.

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252 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

ill-natured," the "humane, kind, compassionate, benevolent Class" thought- fully prevented slips by spreading ashes on the sidewalk. Franklin's own patron, Andrew Hamilton, was similarly eulogized: "as a Judge . . . he was compassionate in his Nature, and very slow to punish." He was, the author noted, "the Poor Man's Friend."59

This renunciation of vengeance and cruelty formed a linchpin for another eighteenth-century civilizing process, the attempt to tame the exer- cise of power. Human ability to sympathize with one another first justified limited government. People were not perpetually at war with each other, as Thomas Hobbes suggested, but actually possessed an innate sense of fellow feeling, of benevolence, that united them and made Hobbesian absolutism unnecessary. Sympathy also helped justify the power of American elites. In the decades after i690, leaders increasingly rested their claims on consent, public service, and the repudiation of physical coercion and arbitrary power. As the Reverend William Smith, Franklin's choice to head the new College of Philadelphia, told its first graduating class in I757, "authority" that was "lasting" depended on more than "superior Talents" and "inflexible Integrity"; it also required "unconfined Benevolence." These new attitudes about power spread slowly and unevenly (at first virtually bypassing race relations and only partially affecting gender relations), but they marked the start of a new vision of authority later expressed in Revolutionary republi- canism and humanitarian reforms.60

In I736, Franklin published a story about a Bermuda sea monster whose upper "Body was in the Shape and about the Bigness of a Boy of I2 Years old with long Hair." The deformed and the prodigious had previously been a key sign of imminent judgment or apocalypse, and townspeople pursued the creature. When they were about to strike it, however, "the human likeness surpris'd them into Compassion, and they had not the Power to do it." Bell's appeal to compassion was perceptive, encouraging people to see the

59 Penn. Gaz., Jan. II, I732, Aug. 6, I74I; the latter is reprinted in Labaree et al., eds., Franklin Papers, 2:328.

60 Penn. Gaz., Aug. II, 1757. Humanitarianism has been traced more fully in the post- Revolutionary period. See Halttunen, "Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in

Anglo-American Culture," AHR, I00 (I995), 303-34; Elizabeth B. Clark, "'The Sacred Rights of the Weak': Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,"

JAH, 82 (I995), 463-93; and Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation ofAmerican Culture, 1776-1865 (New York, I989), 50-70. For discussions of the earlier period see Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness; Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill, I98I), I93 n. i09, 247-60, and "Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism,"

Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (I976), I95-2I8; and Haskell, "Capitalism." Michel Foucault considers humanitarianism as a new means of asserting power in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, I977; orig. pub. 1975). For the debates about paternalism in the slave south and elsewhere see Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, i996), 322-24, 462-63 nn. 8-9. For perceptive discussions of justifications of power in colonial

and Revolutionary America see Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York, i988), and Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, I992).

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human likeness, not the criminal monster. Bell thus turned elites' attempts to justify their power into a claim on their protection, a strategy that seems to have been at least partly successful. Whipped and nearly branded in the I730S, the increasingly notorious con man seems to have escaped physical punishment in succeeding decades.61

Bell's continued transgressions also revealed sympathy's dangers. As his less generous enemies pointed out, compassion could be misplaced-an argu- ment that played into a third set of stories that went beyond gentility and compassion, that of the outwardly respectable but inwardly vile hypocrite. Once again, Bell raised the issue himself. "Prosecutions Imprisonments, Censures, and Reproaches, &c," he argued in I749, work only on "incorrigi- ble Slaves and Offenders," not on "persons of Education, Penetration and of tractable and ingenious Natures." Rather than making "sincere Converts," such tactics produced "multitudes of Hypocrites."62 Of course, stories about Bell's deceptions pointed to the problem even more directly. The parallels between Bell's implied lessons and the explicit moralizing of New Light min- isters such as Whitefield and Rowland are striking. Both suggested that sur- face image was not enough, that social convention and outer display did not necessarily reveal inner truth. Bell's activities as a New Light preacher were thus deeply ironic, placing an impostor in the position of warning against impostures.

Bell's deceptions also played a part in a rethinking of the concept. Religious arguments previously had singled out primarily those who believed themselves saved but were not-those whom a theologian called "self- deceivers." Such a category not only reaffirmed God's sovereign freedom to save whom he chose but also provided a means of attacking religious oppo- nents whose sincerity could not be plausibly questioned. John Rowland made the theme a central one. According to Gilbert Tennent (whose brother had led the ill-fated preaching tour that provided Bell his opening), Rowland possessed a special "Talent of convincing the Secure."63

61 Penn. Gaz., Apr. 29, 1736; David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days ofJudgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York, I989), 7I, 77, ii6. For ways in which rulers' attempts to solidify their power can be used by the ruled see Edward P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York, I978).

62 N.-E Evening-Post, Sept. 4, I749. 63 Thomas Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened &Applied (London, i66o), I2I;

John Flavel, The Touchstone of Sincerity: or, The Signs of Grace and Symptoms of Hypocrisy (i679), (Boston, I73I), 27; Tennent, Funeral Sermon, Occasion'd by the Death of the Reverend Mr. John Rowland, 40-4I; Leonard J. Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-Examination of Colonial Presbyterianism (Philadelphia, i949), 58-60. Jonathan Edwards used the concept of hypocrisy to distinguish his stance from both radical New Lights and liberal Arminians who fooled themselves through (respectively) false experience and false deeds; Edwards, Religious Affections (I746), ed. John E. Smith (New Haven, I959), I73. See also Ava Chamberlain, "Self- Deception as a Theological Problem in Jonathan Edwards's 'Treatise Concerning Religious Affections,"' Church History, 63 (I994), 54I-56, and William Breitenbach, "Religious Affections and Religious Affectations: Antinomianism and Hypocrisy in the Writings of Edwards and Franklin," in Barbara B. Oberg and Stout, eds., Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture (New York, I993), I5-i6n. I thank Profs. Chamberlain and Mark Valeri for helpful discussions of the religious meanings of hypocrisy.

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254 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Bell, however, was a deliberate deceiver, not an inadvertent imposter. Perhaps encouraged by the widespread interest in his activities as well as an emerging view of human nature as less deeply conflicted and more easily knowable, warnings about intentional hypocrisy grew dramatically in the years after Bell began his deceptions. By the end of the eighteenth century, fears about dissimulation suffused American culture, seen in both endless charges of political conspiracies and a vogue for novels about the seduction of innocent women who sympathized well but not wisely.64

Both Bell's activities and the increasing fears about deception they helped feed were intimately intertwined with the rise of the newspaper, the medium that spread reports about Bell beyond the people who encountered him. These "public prints" conveyed information that was literally disem- bodied, abstracted from the teller and increasingly seen as operating in a broader public sphere beyond local ties and interests. This abstraction is visi- ble in reports about Bell. Whether printed for the first time or merely clipped from other papers, newspaper accounts spread news of Bell's activi- ties but did little to explain them.65

The dimensions of the difficulties created by knowledge that was at once broader and thinner can be seen in the problems contemporaries had label- ing Bell. Newspapers characterized him most often as "famous." Even before he returned from Barbados, they called him "a famous impostor."66 Soon he became known everywhere as "the noted," "the famous," "the very famous Mr. Thomas Bell."67 Yet some writers distrusted the term. A I743 Portsmouth, New Hampshire, correspondent called him "the famous, or rather infamous Tom Bell." Others labeled him "famous and notorious," even "the famous infamous."68 This tension between fame and infamy reveals the limitations of eighteenth-century categories. The thief was not famous in the highest classical sense of possessing great virtues or performing great deeds. Rather, he was, in modern terms, a celebrity, someone known because of the mass media, so much so that a New York article reprinted in Philadelphia in I752, several years after the last warnings about Bell's crimes, could refer to a deceiver as "almost a second Tom Bell," and Daniel Dulany in I755, ten years before he himself gained fame writing against the Stamp

64 On the reshaping of views of human psychology see James Hoopes, Consciousness in New England: From Puritanism and Ideas to Psychoanalysis and Semiotic (Baltimore, i989), I-64. On late i8th-century fears of deception see Gross, "Confidence Man and the Preacher"; Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," WMQ, 3d Ser., 39 (I982), 40I-4I; Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York, i986); and Larzer Ziff, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States (New Haven, I99I), 54-82.

65 Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740 (New York, I994). See also Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., i990).

66 Boston Evening-Post, Dec. 10, I739. 67 For a few examples see Boston Weekly Post-Boy, Nov. I4, Dec. 26, I743, Mar. I9, I744. 68 Boston Weekly Post-Boy, Aug. 22, I743. N.-Y Weekly Post-Boy, Apr. I4, I746 (reprinted,

Pennsylvania Journal or Weekly Advertiser [Philadelphia], Apr. I7, I746; Va. Gaz., May I5, I746). N.-Y Weekly Post-Boy, Aug. 28, I749 (reprinted, Penn. Gaz., Aug. 3I, I749).

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Act, could similarly describe a "rascal" who "imposed upon almost as many people as Tom Bell."69

In I743, the South-Carolina Gazette reprinted a story from Philadelphia about "young Mr Livingston, Son of Robert Livingston of Albany," yet another gentlemen whose "proper Name" was soon discovered to be Tom Bell. "He imposed the Name of Livingston on one Mathers of Chester," the report noted, "and this Bell appearing like a Gentleman, persuaded Mathers to let him have two Horses and a Man to bring him up here." A week later, the paper presented the same lesson in moral terms. "Honesty, Plain-dealing, and Simplicity of Manners," it complained, "are laid aside for Good-Breeding, Politeness and Complaisance: Which, interpreted by Actions, mean little else but Dissimulation, Flattery, and Deceit." "Sincerity," the author argued, "is generally profess'd, but scarcely found."70 Within a few decades, Revolutionary radicals employed such elite self-criticism (reinforced by such stories as Bell's) against social leaders such as the Livingstons. "Men affect to know and feel so much more than they do, and to be so much more sancti- fied than they are, that great abatements must be made from their presenta- tions," Connecticut's Abraham Bishop told an audience celebrating the defeat of John Adams: "'Surely every man walketh in a vain show."'71

After vigorously asserting his innocence in a long letter to a New York newspaper in September I749, Bell ended his crimes and settled down in Hanover County, Virginia, as a schoolteacher. In I752, bearing letters of rec- ommendation from local leaders, he traveled to Williamsburg under his own name to solicit subscriptions for his memoirs. The volume would be "useful to others," he argued, warning them about "those Snares and Temptations, by which I have been often entangled." It would also (recognizing the need for capital) "lay a Foundation for my future Livelihood" by helping him "acquire a Subsistance suitable to my Genius and Education." He would not accept advance payment, however, beyond an optional piece of eight. Bell continued to promise publication until the last certain account of him in the West Indies in early I755. A I782 Irish magazine author found Bell at Edenton, North Carolina, where he sought pupils by arguing "he was . . . more able to steer youth clear of the rocks and shoals of immorality, than those who had been careful to avoid them."72

69 Penn. Gaz., Oct. I2, 1752; Dulany to ?, Dec. 9, I755, "Maryland Gossip in I755," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 3 (I879), I45. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York, 1992; orig. pub. i96i), esp. 45-74, suggests an important conceptual distinction between fame and celebrity, but Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, traces a more complex history that makes a simple dichotomy difficult.

70 S.-C. Gaz., Apr. I8, 25, I743. 71 Abraham Bishop, Oration Delivered in Wallingford, On the rith of March I8oI (New

Haven, i8oi), V.

72 Bell's letter, N.-Y Evening-Post, Sept. 4, I749; Va. Gaz., Aug. I4, I752; "Story of Thomas Bell, a Native of America," 365. According to the heading, this story came "from an Irish Publication, in I782," 364. Bell's advertisements follow increasingly popular pedagogical theory about the significance of experience. See Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The

American Revolution against PatriarchalAuthority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge, I982).

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256 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Bell's new narrative of repentance and reform added to his repertoire of stories about himself-self-definitions that confuse the issue of how Bell should be identified. Even his self-proclaimed change of heart raises ques- tions. The evidence for this newfound rectitude came in precisely the sorts of materials that Bell had previously forged so well, his own word and letters from gentlemen who could not easily be contacted. And his later activities, from collecting subscriptions for memoirs that never got written to advertis- ing his school, continued to exploit his impostures to gain money.

Bell's "going straight" thus turns out to be almost as difficult to read- as full of twists and turns-as his previous stories, tales that Bell kept on telling. He continued to boast of his experience and abilities. In I743, he had told Philadelphia's mayor that "he was well acquainted with Books, skill'd in Law and Divinity, and believ'd no one could tell him any Thing he was not acquainted with before."73 The I755 Antigua article introduced the new claim that he had impersonated a physician. Once again, Bell's ability to manipulate expectations seems to have been successful. According to the New York editor who provoked Bell's I749 letter to a rival paper, his boasting attracted many admirers. He would have been hanged long ago, the editor argued, without the people "who flock round him in every Place, grinning Applause to his redundant Chattering, and thereby supporting him in his unparallel'd Impudence."74 Like his repeated attempts to excuse his crimes or to protest his innocence, Bell's continuing boasts of his deeds undercut his new claims to repentance. The I755 article suggests the seemingly reformed con man still wished to preserve a measure of purity by arguing that he "never took Advantage of, or debauched, Virgin Innocence" and "never stole a Horse."75 Such claims (challenged even by the reporter) suggested that his misdeeds had been limited, perhaps even easily forgivable, an argument that he had used also in I749: "with a little Indulgence, less Assistance, a favourable Censure, and a generous Pardon, I may be easily reclaim'd."76

Establishing Tom Bell's identity-locating a "true self" beneath his fine clothing and fine words-is more difficult than it first appears. Bell drew on identities established by others. Indeed, his impostures merely placed him in the role that he had prepared for and could have expected after attending Harvard. Bell became even more theatrical when he was unmasked, boasting or loudly repenting as the situation required. But he was not limited to the ready-made roles of a hegemonic culture. A I762 pamphlet noted that Bell was so self-controlled that "No Law can bind" him. As contemporaries noted, Bell was an "extraordinary man," who, if he did not create his roles out of whole cloth, at least put them together in a new way.77

73 Boston Weekly News-Letter, Mar. IO, I743. 74 N.-Y Weekly Post-Boy, Sept. II, I749. See a similar report about Bell in Charleston (S.-C.

Gaz., Feb. I8, I744/5), where "a great Concourse of People daily flock[ed] to see him" in the workhouse.

75 Boston Weekly News-Letter, Apr. IO, I755. 76 N.-Y Evening-Post, Sept. 4, I749. 77 S.-C. Gaz., July i8, I754; N.-Y Weekly Post-Boy, Sept. II, I749; Serious-Comical Dialogue, i9.

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MUMPER AMONG THE GENTLE 257

Bell seems to have been an accomplished actor, able to shape his persona to suit the people around him yet keep part of himself distinct from their expectations. Eighteenth-century Americans recognized this theatrical qual- ity; in the words of the last known newspaper comment about him, Bell was a "universal comedian."78 The image of humans as actors has a long and tan- gled lineage. But Bell's career points to the real reason for the theater, the audience. If people author their own lives, others authorize those actions, accepting or rejecting them, at times approving the familiar, at times applauding the new and different. Bell made his living gauging the reaction of his customers; in playing to the crowd, his goal was not self-expression or artistic integrity but the fruits of successful performance. The metaphor of acting also focuses attention on the interchanges among institutions, players, and patrons. Each possesses different experiences, structures, and stories, yet all work together to create a performance. Bell invented his extraordinary career within the limitations formed by his audience (American elites and the people they hoped to dominate) and by his theater (the expanding net- works of communication and trade that had already forced colonial leaders to present themselves differently).

Bell's relationship with print culture suggests the complexities of these interconnections. Printed materials helped support his activities; the seal with arms of the Burnet family that he carried in Barbados was copied from a map published in Boston (Figure I). But Bell's career was also limited, perhaps even ended, by newspaper reports that made him a celebrity in an endeavor that required him to remain unrecognized. In turn, such stories also allowed others to experience these performances apart from their local consequences, a separation from the physical privation of theft and the psychological indignity of being bamboozled that eventually allowed the confidence man to become a romantic hero. Nearly a century later, a New Jersey judge could pronounce the newspaper accounts of Bell "really amusing." This intricate intertwining of the particular decisions of an individual, the spread of a communication medium, and the development of a literary genre warns against seeing individ- uals, events, texts, and contexts as completely separate entities.79

A popular eighteenth-century term for Bell's activities, "mumping," hints at some of the same insights about theatricality. A mumper begs and also, the Oxford English Dictionary notes, plays the parasite. As a mumper (and a mummer) among gentlefolk, Bell was both actor and parasite, repre- senting and challenging the eighteenth-century elite's ideas of themselves and the society they sought to dominate. To return to a commercial metaphor, Bell both bought into-and sold out-the elites' own confidence

78 Boston Weekly News-Letter, Apr. IO, I755. 79 Boston Evening-Post, Dec. IO, 1739 (map); Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters, 275,

mistakenly suggests that Bell's seal was "the Great Seal of Massachusetts" and that he had it with him when he arrived in Barbados. Field, "Review of the Trial of the Rev. Wm. Tennent," 32 (judge). One of the merits of Erving Goffman's classic, but underexploited, work is its insis- tence on seeing not just players but also setting and audience as part of a dramaturgic situation;

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N. Y., I959), esp. I2-I4.

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258 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

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FIGURE I

Burnet Family Coat-of-Arms. Detail from William Burgis, Boston in New England (Boston, 1728). This map, dedicated to Governor William Burnet, features his family's arms, an emblem of their high status. In Barbados, Tom Bell ordered a seal with this image, presumably using it to secure his letters and to certify his identity as 'Gilbert Burnet. Photograph courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum.

game, their attempt to reconfigure their image and their authority through new stories about themselves. When Bell told some North Carolina gentle- men in 1745 that he would 'make free with their names," he may have meant something more than that he might assume their particular identity: his activities also undermined the larger structures that gave these names their power.80

80 Mum, mump, OED; VaL GL, Oct 31, 1745.

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