Acts of deceiving and withholding in immigrant letters: personal identity and self-presentation in personal correspondence.

Those who do analytical work with personal letters soon become aware of the problem of being tempted to take for granted that what is written in them is a true account of the letter-writer's condition, intentions, or general state of mind. It is not only that in the individual case we become suspicious of a particular letter-writer's motives and accounts. It is in a more general sense that we, like the letter-writers themselves, are citizens of the world of interpersonal relationships. We are birth-right citizens of that world, but in a social sense, we are also naturalized citizens, for in order to participate actively in anything but rudimentary interactions with others we have had to learn that much that may be said is unspoken, and that much else is couched in ways that serve a speaker's varying interests. A moment's reflection tells an experienced adult who reads other people's personal letters that there is more going on than appears on the surface of the text, precisely because this is true in our own lives. In this essay, I would like to open up a discussion of what is at once a significant and, by its nature, a profoundly elusive (and, hence, underconceptualized) subject: what is not made explicit, and is hidden or held back, and the untruths that are told, in historical personal correspondence. The larger project is analysis of the strategies of interpersonal relations, by which interactions between family, kin, and friends are maintained and regulated by correspondents in the absence of the opportunity for physical proximity and conversation.

I shall be using examples from my own research in British (English, Scottish, and Irish Protestant) immigrant correspondence of the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. These letters, exchanged between immigrants to Canada and the United States and family, kin, and friends in Britain were--like all immigrant personal correspondence--the transnational lifeline of communications in relationships rendered especially vulnerable by separation. Prior to the advent of steam transportation across the Atlantic, which lessened both the duration of the journey (from a month, or as long frequently as six weeks, to approximately a week to ten days) and the dangers and discomforts involved, these separations were more likely to be permanent. Many immigrants found the thought of offering themselves up to another sea voyage, whether to return to resettle permanently or for a visit, unpleasant, if not terrifying. Permanent separation was even more likely to be the consequence of the immigrants' own material and social aspirations. In contrast to many European international migrants of the age of steam travel and the industrial era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, who often targeted their migrations for brief durations of time to take advantage of both short-term fluctuations in labor markets and cheap, rapid transportation, the immigrants of the earlier period were more likely to be inclined toward permanent resettlement. Influenced by the wide-spread pessimism about Britain's future in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars and by hostility to modernization, these immigrants were venturesome conservatives who often desired to realize an Acadian ideal of rural self-sufficiency in the North American hinterland. Their ranks were not selected from the proletarianized poor, but from middling groups of urban artisans and small farmers, who were able to afford migrations of completed nuclear families, though sometimes in stages across considerable periods of time. Though chain migrations often also included adult siblings and friends, ample numbers of significant others, including most prominently aging parents, remained behind and formed the homeland basis for the cycle of personal correspondence. (1)

The letters of these and other European immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries probably form the largest archive historians possess of the writings of ordinary people of the historical past. Immigrants produced a tidal wave of letters, which alongside the equally voluminous corpus of commercial correspondence were increasingly being commodified into mail, as postal systems throughout Europe expanded into efficient modern bureaucracies to accommodate the ever-increasing flow of domestic and international correspondence. The same ships that carried immigrants to North America, carried the mail sent to them from Europe, and those same ships carrying North American goods on their return, carried the mail the immigrants sent to their homelands. (2) This massive correspondence has been used over the course of many years by historians mostly to provide both social documentation for understanding processes of population movement and resettlement or colorful anecdotes for narratives structured by other types of evidence, such as that derived from censuses or ship passenger registers. But, in recent years, with the assistance of the new cultural history, post-structuralist methodologies associated with discourse theory, feminist criticism, and narratology, and other types of contemporary literary analysis, these letters have begun to be read as texts in the search for understanding of the ways in which language served as the medium for the creation of meanings among those who often had a most tenuous hold on the reading and writing. (3)

The problems associated with this project are enormous, and exist simultaneously on several different levels of analysis. Not all immigrants were participants in this international exchange of personal letters: illiterates; those with completed families; children; and, though varying with group and demographic balances, women, who even when literate were often spoken for in correspondence by husbands, fathers, and brothers, all are under-represented or completely absent from the ranks of archived immigrant letters. But then, too, there are those countless others whose letters simply were never collected and preserved, or remain undiscovered and in private hands today. Nor do we know if the letter-series upon which we base our analysis have been at the some point in the past culled of sensitive and embarrassing letters. Every immigrant letter, therefore, is a specific instance, as Donald Harman Akenson has noted, of a body of writing, the complete dimensions of which can never be known. (4) So much then for attempting to make a precise determination about the representativeness of any particular letter or letter-series. Compounding these knotty artifactual problems is the fact that the overwhelming majority of these letters represent only one end of the cycle of correspondence. It is not only for the sake of a convenient nomenclature that this cycle has come to be known by historians as "the immigrant letter," for the letters of the immigrant represent the large majority of letters, while all but a relative handful of the letters sent to them from their homelands appear to have disappeared over time. This conversation of pens is thus almost always a one-way conversation, in which the voice of the unrepresented interlocutor may at best be heard as an echo speaking through the writer, offering, for example, instruction on what to write or what not to write, or criticism of the content, form, or style of previous letter, to which the writer feels compelled to respond. ("You say you are discontent that I have produced too little information about ..." the writer might state, before proceeding to honor the correspondent's request.)

But such double-voicing is rare, probably because it required a technical facility with language that eluded many immigrant letter-writers. Such examples of the tenuous grasp on literacy of many of the letter-writers, however, are not as important in complicating the search for meanings in these texts as the limitations imposed by the generic properties of the immigrant letter itself. Most immigrant letter-writers make themselves understood, and work conscientiously at producing a neat, serviceable text. Over the course of time, many improve through practice. But the texts they produce contain such a tremendous internal diversity that they resist easy conceptualization. Because there was so much in their lives that was new, and they believed unimaginable to those at home, and yet so many unanticipated sources of continuity in their emotional needs as well as day-to-day circumstances, immigrants often seem to have felt compelled to discuss a wide range of phenomena, events, and experiences in the same letter--among them, to take the most common subjects, family, friends on both sides of the ocean, health, weather, prices, wages and job markets, land prices, farming methods and crop yields, the conditions of the roads and problems of mobility, religion and church events, reading matter, public schools, and politics. Core ideas are rarely presented and developed. Linkages among themes are difficult to find, except on the most general levels of abstraction--for example, daily life--which often are not very helpful for penetrating surfaces. Affection is freely and often expressed, and fond memories shared. As we shall see, however, outstanding tensions in relationships are only infrequently made explicit, yet may lurk subtly in the background, so that much about the qualities of these seemingly affectionate relationships is difficult to determine. Themes and patterns often emerge only with the opportunity to read a significant number of letters between the same correspondents. But the continuities within letters and commonalties shared by them always seem to remain tentative, and analysis based on specifying continuities and commonalities often risks imposing order on materials that defy it. Under any circumstance, with its diversity and its lack of core purpose beyond the mostly unspoken recognition of the necessity of communicating for the sake of maintaining a bond, the typical immigrant letter defies the effort of some analysts to understand it with reference to grand emplotment schemes based on classical narrative devices, such as the tragedy, comedy, or epic. (5)

What Elizabeth J. MacArthur has said of imagined letters in a study of epistolary fiction is just as relevant for understanding personal correspondence between living subjects. What needs to be narrativized is the relationship the correspondents seek to maintain through correspondence, not their often formless and rambling letters, with their resistance to closure, and their accustomed position in the eternal present. (6) Ultimately the immigrant letter will defy interpretation if, through literary analysis, we elevate the text above its purposes. In seeking to preserve a bond across time and distance, and in using writing as a substitute for the intimate, personal conversation they most desired, immigrant letter-writers were ultimately writing not to produce texts or artifacts, but to serve a psychological need for continuity. Immigration has always put migrants at risk of a radical rupture of the self. Personal identity depends on the assurance that we are indeed the same person, we have always been, and it is served most profoundly through abiding relationships with significant others. (7) Immigration disrupts such relationships.

In the new social history of immigration, ethnicity is conceived as providing this assurance of continuity for migratory peoples, for it is a fictive kinship that provides an alternative genealogy to one's actual family and community history of intimate, face-to-face relations. Ethnicity is what is said to transform potentially uprooted peoples into transplanted ones. But ethnicity is the basis for an identification, not for personal identity. It is true that in the North American context, for well-understood historical and cultural reasons, some groups, such as Italian, Jews, or Poles, have manifested greater formal ethnic organization, than others, such as the English, but these understandings pertain more to group behavior than to the lives of individuals. Except in the case of a narrow cohort of ethnic leadership, for whom ethnicity becomes the basis for an ideology that engages in the construction of ethnic worlds, ethnicity has been only one source for the subject-positioning of immigrants and their children and grandchildren, for whom gender, age cohort, neighborhood, social class, religion, and personal relations have also been important sources of identification. (8)

What we discover in immigrant letters, therefore, is the effort to maintain relationships with particular others who are significant to the immigrants' understanding of themselves. Those with whom they shared the oldest of such relationships held in common with them memories of a distant and particularly meaningful past, of the experience of a place that had once been thought of as home, and of continuous participation in various discourses of daily life that endowed those relationships with the most powerfully charged emotions. Memories may not always have been pleasant ones, nor conversations always amicable, nor home always associated with security, let alone affection, for these memories to have an abiding hold on the consciousness of the immigrant. At some level of their being, these memories were who they felt themselves to be. But the weighty emotional context of this correspondence does not necessarily dictate transparency in immigrant letters. It is this territory between the felt-necessity of having to maintain correspondence with those on whom one depends to confirm personal continuity and the failure to maintain a consistently frank and open stance in one's writing that needs to be explored.

What I will not explore is the ethics of the situation. We need to strain against the temptation toward abstract moralization of the problem of transparency, and go forward with the understanding that while in the best of all worlds, people would always tell the truth and completely disclose everything that is pertinent to being properly understood and evaluated by others, this is not always possible. Nor is it always even desirable, for there are certainly times when lying or being less than forthright are salutary, not simply for ourselves, but for the welfare of others. Nor do I want to engage in the time-consuming enterprise of creating a taxonomy of deceitfulness, though we all know we need to make fine distinctions to guide our language and analysis. I intend to examine the real world of situations and choices made within them that touch on the problem of lying and withholding, and to distinguish, as we shall soon see, between, on the one hand, faithfulness and narrative truth, which most immigrant letter-writers did seek to accomplish, and, on the other hand, absolute honesty and forthrightness, which at times proved to elude many of them.

In consequence, excluded are those who appear to be, to the extent it is possible to know with any degree of certainty, either self-interested manipulators or outrageous liars, whose ranks, under any circumstance, do not seem large in the thousands of immigrant letters I have read. Few others have been discovered telling the sort of outrageous whopper that Robert Smyth attempted to put over on his rustic family in County Antrim. An Irish Protestant who settled among kinsmen in Philadelphia in 1837, Smyth fashioned a life that soon resembled an immigrant picaresque, embracing opportunities for sexual adventure, exploration of the metropolis and its diversity of peoples and races, and travel within the interior of the United States. In one noteworthy letter, Smyth explained that he had become "a particular friend" of "Mr. Tiler [Tyler]," the President of the United States, on the strength of his defense of Tyler in an argument in a western town, where he had gone to buy livestock. With the threat from his drover's whip, he had silenced a man "who attempted to vilify the president Mr Tilers character." The news of his heroism in defense of the sovereign, he said, had reached the national capital even before he got back to Philadelphia. Not unexpectedly no other mention of this friendship occurs again in Smyth's correspondence in the two years before his death in 1846. (9) If only because it was likely that such stories would spread doubt about the integrity of the writer, if not contempt, few engaged in telling them.

Equally unrepresentative are such obvious manipulators of others' emotions as Nathan Haley, an Englishman who deserted his wife and young children in 1820, because of the breakdown of his marriage, accumulation of debt, and abuse of alcohol, and immigrated to the United States. He took approximately $600, a large sum, with him to America. His letters are frequently mired in self-pity, and ultimately seek to transfer sympathy for the children he has deserted to himself for the suffering the desertion has caused him, and for the privations of his exile on the American frontier. There is no indication in the five years of his correspondence available to us that Haley sent any money back to England to care for his family. Instead, he asked his parents to see to their needs. Meanwhile, without alluding to his circumstances in any depth, and maintaining silence about his finances, he mined lead and melted it into bars, which he then exchanged for commodities he sold in wholesale trading on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. He appeared to know this business well, and to be making money. The suspicion that he was becoming affluent while refusing to help his family probably made the frequent, cloying sentimentality and heart-on-sleeve emotionalism of his writing hard to bear. Ultimately his brother-in-law appears to have told him so in an angry letter that described the privations that he and Haley's sister Mary were then experiencing. (10) The sacrifice of self-respect alone in such a presentation of self as Haley's would have deterred most immigrants, who took pride in being--or appearing to be--in control of lives they had severely tested in deciding to change their lives so radically. That control, even if illusory, validated the choices they had made. In contrast to the Haleys and Smyths, our examples come from the ranks of those dealing in their letters with ordinary difficulties that create tensions for self-presentation, and doing so in ways that suggested the desire to preserve integrity and credibility through straight forward dealing, even if they had to manipulate the reader by playing with the facts to do so.

Whether implicit or explicit, the negotiation of the epistolary relationship resembles a type of ethical discourse by which, as in conversation, the parties work to achieve a mutually beneficial modus vivendi that serves both of their needs simultaneously, and demonstrates, depending on the individuals and the circumstances, varying degrees of mutual respect. (11) Immigrant letters, like all personal letters, therefore, not only sustained a dialogue between individuals, but were themselves a mutual creation conceived in dialogue. As Janet Gurkin Altman, a student of epistolary fiction has remarked, letters cannot be born "out of a desire to merely express oneself without regard to the eventual reader." Instead, at some level, they must be "the result of a union of writer and reader." (12)

However fixed the outer boundaries of the form of the personal letter, each set of correspondents was faced with ongoing choices in conceiving together the organization and the content of their correspondence. While creating the basis for continuing bonds, these negotiations served specifically to narrow the gap between writers and readers, and to put a seal of faithfulness upon the correspondence. In personal correspondence, writers take a formal and explicit responsibility for what they have written when they sign their name to the letters they have composed. This becomes literally evident when a salutation such as "sincerely yours," or "yours truly" is chosen to precede the signature. But, as in any type of writing, then and now, readers may nonetheless derive their own meanings from texts, no matter who claims ultimate responsibility for them, and so transform them in ways unintended by their author. Yet immigrant letters seldom were open texts, subject to widely diverse interpretations. The possibility of a common reading emerged, because reader and writer not only shared a personal history from before the inception of their correspondence, but because they also had come to share, to one extent or another, common assumptions about the purposes, and hence the content, tone, and rhythms, of their correspondence. Out of this sharing comes a fusing of writer and reader. That is to say, the writer is the first reader of a letter, and reads not only as "I," but also inevitably as "you." (13)

But the space between the two parties can never completely be closed, and the negotiations never cease, though in the press of other needs and obligations, they may be suspended for a time and correspondence might then settle into routine, or even stop. Events such as childbirth, sickness, the death of parents or siblings, or the onset of material hardship due to injury or unemployment, or plans to be reunited, or disputes about the distribution of inherited legacies, or suddenly rekindled conflicts dating from the distant past may all serve to revitalize these negotiations, whether they are explicit or implicit. What remains constant is the commitment to remain in communication. As we have observed, letters are not narratives, but a collaborative process of interpersonal communication that resists the type of closure that helps provide the poetic satisfaction of the narrative form. (14)

To say that the space between writer and reader is never closed is to raise a number of problems that are difficult to conceptualize, but nonetheless cannot be evaded. It is obvious that circumstances will arise in which writers misapprehend what readers desire and readers cannot make sense of the letters their correspondents send them. A process of clarification, however, may ensue that serves to provide correction. But there are more complex circumstances that also need to be addressed in connection with the durability of this gap between writer and reader. To speak in terms of negotiation and of ethical discourse seems to imply openness, honesty, and forthright dealing. Yet it is self-evident that not everything that appears in letters is truthful, and that not everything that may be said is committed to paper.

This common sense insight raises an important point in the interpretation of epistolary relations that needs to be made explicit. In a thought-provoking work on the pre-modern European family, which is heavily based on collections of family letters, Steven Ozment has justified his dependence on personal letters to document family dynamics by stating, "Particularly in correspondence between family members, colleagues, friends, and lovers, where clarity and truth have a premium and can be matters of life and death, 'live' personal reactions to people, experiences, and events have been preserved as reliably as can be done in historical sources." (15) Immigrants letters reveal a very different perspective. Precisely because the psychological and practical stakes are highest of all in dealing with such significant others, it may well be the case that the costs of "clarity and truth" are sometimes deemed much too high. At our bests, most of us wish to be honest, but the consequences of being so, both for ourselves and for those dearest to us, often exact anguish and pain. We must, therefore, contemplate the practical difficulties posed by the problem of openness and concealment in the epistolary relationship. We need, too, to understand also the limitations upon letter-writers ability to carry off masquerades that are at odds with forthrightness.

We may begin to examine the telling of untruths by observing that the commitment to maintain correspondence, to preserve a tie, rather than truth telling as such, may be considered the mark of faithfulness between correspondents. There are all sorts of obvious reasons, some of them quite compelling and mitigating, why correspondents might not want to tell the truth to protect the people with whom they correspond, while remaining faithful to the larger purpose of maintaining a relationship. Sickness, unemployment, poverty, marital discord, drunkenness, rebellious children, or abject failure might not only prove variously embarrassing, but also prompt worry and concern in one's readers, so the temptation to engage in the often parodied "I am well and doing well" formulation, or go beyond it to claim accomplishments or security that do not exist was probably great for many immigrant letter-writers. Moreover, they had taken great risks in leaving their homes, and had sometimes been discouraged from emigrating by their families, who warned of disastrous consequences, if old ways and home places were abandoned. In the context of the demography and interpersonal hierarchies of most of nineteenth century European emigration, what transpired was likely to be a conflict between fathers, who might be traditionalists and sensitive about challenges of their authority, and sons who wanted to get out of the country and out from under the parental yoke. We feel the weight of these arguments in letters-series, such as those of George Martin, a carpenter from Kent who came to Upper Canada in 1834, or John McLees, an Irish Protestant artisan who resettled in New York City around 1828, which begin with apologies to fathers, or to both parents, for unspecified transgressions. (16)

The tendency to exaggerate the gains derived from their steadfast resolve to emigrate and underplay the hardships in order to be proven correct in the resolve to emigrate, or alternatively to overplay the hardships to win sympathy and respect, is easily understood under such circumstances, though it is difficult to prove the precise motivation for exaggeration or outright fabrication, let alone the material gains claimed. What we may observe with confidence is that, as Jerome Bruner has observed, narrative truth, which assists in establishing continuity and coherence, is more important for individuals than literal truth when it comes to the ongoing work of constructing personal identities. (17) A good, consistent story, even if not completely or even partially true, may serve a variety of psychologically functional purposes--not to mention its benefits in sparing the feelings of others.

We sense how great a temptation lying and withholding, or simple exaggeration, might be for someone like Robert Bowles, who left Kent for the United States at the age of 30 in 1823, and settled on a small farm not far from Harrison, Ohio, near Cincinnati and close to the Ohio River. Bowles also provides us, however, with an understanding of the perils inherent in doing so. Bowles' trade was making and repairing muskets and guns. He had inherited a property in England, but was not able to maintain it, and certainly was bitter about the problems this had caused him, all of which he attributed to the inequities of the social system in England. From the first letter Bowles wrote to his younger brothers shortly after arriving and taking possession of a farm, he engaged in unrelenting and outspoken defense of everything American and criticism of nearly everything English--climate, taxes, newspapers, church, state, health, fruits, and vegetables. Within the first year after his arrival, he was boasting of his crop yield and the quality and neatness of his fields, and the ease with which both his credit had become established in his neighborhood and he and his wife had been admitted to local social circles. (18) Though in the form--"extracts"--in which we have Bowles's letters it is difficult to know, there seems almost no personal content to the letters, such as inquiries after his brothers' affairs or relation of his own family life. While Bowles certainly wanted to encourage his brothers to come and join him, and this may have been a motive for his almost propagandistic writing, this one dimensional discourse was so pervasive, repetitive and heavy-handed that it ultimately comes to seem defensive, as if he is engaged in an argument with some unseen antagonist. The reader begins to suspect that it is overdetermined by some past conflict, which is unspoken but lurking in the background, and which eventuates from his previous failure. Thus, he may go on as he does as a way of dealing with, indirectly, both abandoning his obligations in England, and his emigration itself rather than as a strategy for family unity. Or, at times, it may be a compensatory substitute, for explicitly venting his anger at having to leave the England he usually reviled. But none of this is ever alluded to directly. We detect it instead in self-justificatory comments such as,

   Here [in Ohio] I sit down and bless myself in plenty, and if I am not
   the greatest of my family, I do flatter myself I am the happiest....
   I again repeat that I consider my Emigration as the most fortunate
   step of my whole life, and I assure you no act of mine ever gave such
   complete satisfaction.9

We cannot know the truth of Bowles' situation during his first year in Ohio, and the collection of extracts of his letters goes no further than that one year, so we cannot know much of what comes afterward that might provide clarification. Did he achieve instant success? We do know that Bowles died a reasonably wealthy man, but that was many years later, in 1862. (20) There is certainly some suggestion in his letters that his wife was quite unhappy in her new situation. Invited to go hunting in nearby Indiana, he had to decline, he wrote his brothers, explaining, "... My wife is so timid that my going is completely out of the question." (21) Months later, he might only say of her, very briefly, that she was becoming more comfortable in North America, but qualified this with a cautious, "I think." (22) To this extent, his defensiveness about emigrating may have been a product, too, of hearing persistently his wife's complaints play in his mind, as he wrote his brothers. If, on the other hand, he did experience instant prosperity and social acceptance and, from the moment he arrived, the best of health, as he claimed in letters to his brothers, he was certainly unusual. But suppose Bowles had been successful in inducing his brothers to emigrate and join him, and they found him to have greatly exaggerated, if not simply lied, about his good fortune. Then the game would have been up, and he would have been revealed to be no better at managing his life in North America than he had been in England. It was a situation--and a very common one, to be sure--that lent itself to truth-telling, whatever the precise variety of truth-telling, if only because one might have to bear the embarrassment of being caught in a lie. Most immigrants probably understood, as a practical matter in maintaining their credibility, how vulnerable were exaggerated claims and rank falsehoods to some sort of detection.

One did not need to achieve family reunion to be discovered to be telling untruths or withholding information in one's letters. With so many immigrants coming to North America, and settling amongst one another, and with international postal service constantly improving after the 1830s, gossip became transnationalized. Gossip, or perhaps to put a less judgmental face on it, social intelligence, circulated in the international mails with alarming rapidity. Sly and spiteful conversations on both sides of the Atlantic were informed by what was written in letters. But for this very reason, those who in their letters gossiped, whether more or less maliciously, or simply spoke negatively about other immigrants in their midst soon became sensitive to the possibility that their homeland correspondents, in sharing their letters with others around them, might well set in motion a flow of information that would come back to haunt them. Some of the demand for privacy that we find in immigrant letters was rooted in this fear. It was just such a sensitivity that led Richard Hails, a tailor from Northumberland who settled in Massachusetts in 1842, to caution his brother against circulating his letter in their town. Hails's brother George had asked him for a relation of the circumstances of his emigration and resettlement, because he was himself considering coming to North America. In response, Hails had sent his brother an account that included a relation of those hometown Englishmen residing in Massachusetts who had helped him in his resettlement project and those who had, ungenerously, not done so. Though we have no way of knowing for sure, there is little reason to think the account was anything but truthful, but Hails nonetheless cautioned his brother not to share it with any local people, in fear that the gossip that would result would cause divisions and bad feeling. He wrote:

  I do not wish every one to read my letters and I suppose that it is
  best for you to keep things to yourselfe in respect to your intentions
  and in respect to what I told you of my il[l] usage. I did not tell to
  make truble among friends but only to answer your inquiries, so I hope
  nothing will be said to their friends but forget and forgive ... (23)

Even though he believed himself to have been wronged, Hails's sensitivity to the discord that might result from simply reacting to those wrongs seems at least on the face of it a mark of his decency, perhaps added to which was an element of timidity. But imagine if under the same social and communicative circumstances facilitating the spread of gossip, one really did have something embarrassing and shameful to hide. We may take William Darnley, a carpenter who left Stockport near Manchester for New York City in 1857 in search of work, to be an example. He certainly discovered for himself the full force of such gossip. It was Darnley's declared intention either to return home, or it seems, even more frequently suggested, to send for his wife and five children as soon as he could afford to do so. Yet weeks turned into months, and months into years, and Darnley had made no move to bring this about. Gossip, which was based on the letters of other immigrants from Stockport in the working class British immigrant community in New York City, began circulating in Stockport that Darnley was living with another woman, and had been heard to declare that his family was too expensive to support. For his part, Darnley voiced out-rage in his response to his wife's letters when she confronted him with the gossip circulating about his conduct. He claimed that circumstances beyond his control were responsible for the situation. He wrote that the sharp contraction of business in 1857 that brought the construction industry to a standstill and then the Civil War, which caused a slowdown in building, left him unemployed and underemployed for extended periods. At times, moreover, economic hardship was joined with ill-health to force him for weeks on end to live off the savings that he had been intending to use to send for his wife and children. He continued to send her small sums of money, especially for the children's education and clothing. But, while protesting he was innocent of infidelity and the victim of malicious gossip, Darnley probably did nothing to stem his wife's suspicions about his conduct when increasingly he provided her with fewer and fewer details about his living arrangements. Moreover, though he claimed that he had difficulty writing when he had "no good news to share," his wife must also have grown suspicious when his letters back to Stockport became infrequent. He was still aggressively justifying his behavior in July, 1863, at a time when his family was still not yet united with him and rumors continued to circulate of his liaison with another woman. We are unable to learn what happens next, and possibly therefore the truth of Darnley's situation, for the archived collection of his letters to his wife ends with that letter of July, 1863. (24) But if Darnley was attempting to keep the liaison secret and then, when caught in the midst of it, he lied, he had obviously failed as a consequence of gossip transmitted through the international mails that allowed those in villages across the ocean to attempt to exert a degree of moral control on those who had emigrated. (25)

Such gossip might thus be seen as an incentive for truth-telling, or at least for avoiding behaviors that were likely to get one caught, if only in virtual, postal space, in flagrante delicto. But, more likely, the circumstances in which a Bowles or a Darnley might be trapped in a lie, also lent themselves to a strategy of silence. By its nature, silence is a particularly complex problem for the conceptualization of the negotiations that comprise immigrant epistolarity. One need not lie, but simply refuse to address certain matters, while at the same time maintaining the commitment to correspond and to write about everything else, including much that pleased one's unknowing correspondent. In understanding silence, just as should be the case in understanding lies, we need to approach it not as something we must overcome, as if it were the task of historians of the immigrant letter to fill in the blanks. Admittedly, of course it is difficult to escape the voyeuristic temptation to imagine whether, for example, William Darnley was lying or telling the truth about his life in New York City, for Darnley unmasked is a better story than Darnley indeterminate. The assumption in seeking to fill in these blank spots, however, is that the contemporary analyst is omniscient, and knows what belongs in the letter. If text is not there, then it should be there--a way of thinking that leads to a guessing game that is a plausible, but ultimately limited analytical strategy. It is more availing of insight not to overcome silence by filling in the blank spaces, but rather to explain how it is that intentional, strategic silence, where we might be fortunate enough to find traces of it, may have been integrated into the negotiations that comprise epistolarity. We must seek to understand silence, as Altman has rightly understood it in such circumstances, as in itself--and paradoxically--a type of communication. (26) Silence of this sort in letters was a powerful tool that simultaneously preserved one's ethical position--for silence, after all, is not the same as dishonesty--while protecting oneself against the full force of self-disclosure, and often protecting one's reader against the painful understanding that all was not well with the writer. Silence might allow, for example, an emigrant son or daughter greater power in dealing with parents, who tried to exert their moral control through correspondence. Not only did the distance and cycle of exchange of letters ipso facto allow relationships that had been parental monologues before emigration to be equalized, but, through silence, the emigrant child had greater power to shape the agenda of correspondence, while continuing to display familial loyalty and respect for parents. One could, for example, temporarily delay answering a letter until one had something positive to report, a tactic confessed to his parents on several occasions by Titus Crawshaw, an emigrant cloth finisher from Huddersfield who settled in Philadelphia in 1853. Crawshaw revealed in his letters a suspicion that his father had a low opinion of him. No doubt relatedly, he also revealed at times a low opinion of himself, saying on one occasion when he confessed to having too little money to send any home to help his elderly parents, "I ought to be able to help you having nothing but myself to keep, but you see I am no good either to you or to anyone else. I am a blank on the face of the earth." There was, however, a limit to his exercise of masochism. Because giving bad reports about his resettlement in the United States simply confirmed this sort of judgment and might lead to his father's censure, Crawshaw sometimes shrank from writing them, and simply failed to write home to England. It was probably to avoid moral control and censure as well that Crawshaw, like numerous other immigrants, gave little warning that he was courting with the intention of marrying, and appeared to announce suddenly in a letter he had been married. True to character, however, he made himself pay a bit psychologically for his method of eventual disclosure and for his very existence, as a somewhat less than successful journeyman. In commenting on the "likeness" of his bride that he enclosed with the letter in which he spoke of her, he said, "You will see she is not a regular beauty, but she is as good looking as me. I agreed with her because I thought we should agree and live midling comfortable together." (27)

Adult children attempting to wrest psychological control of their lives from their anxious and disapproving parents, were hardly the only correspondents who might utilize silence. Out of pride, or embarrassment, or the desire not to spread anxiety, those who seemed on the surface well-established in their mature years might do the same. Hattie Reid, an immigrant from Ipswich who lived in New York City in the 1870s and 1880s with a husband and eight children, provides an excellent, sad example. Only in retrospect, if one read Reid's letters in reverse chronological order, would it appear to the reader that Reid had dropped hints for sometime in her correspondence with her sister that she was learning especially painful lessons about life. But so guarded were her comments, and so easily taken for general observations about the human condition, that one certainly might be forgiven for seeing no autobiographical commentary in them. Thus, she writes approvingly of the resolve of someone who, her sister had informed her, recently had signed a total abstinence pledge, "I hope he will stick to his pledge of total abstinence as there is nothing like it, no safeguard without it. If the tempting cup is indulged in at all any one is liable to fall victim at any time. There is no safty in so called temperance." The contemporary reader is likely as not to say merely that Mrs. Reid has strong opinions about alcohol consumption, and to leave it at that. (28) Or, when she writes, perhaps of a niece, "I am glad Alice has not married so young. It spoils all their enjoyment and makes old women of them before their time," we might briefly reflect on those eight children of her's and the difficulties of raising a large family. But we might as easily turn from that reflection, because there is no indication anywhere in her letters that she might be speaking on this matter from the perspective of her own bitter experience. (29) That is until we read her letter of 5 July 1881, which appears in the letter-series just after the two letters which contain these quoted passages. Now she begins her letter with an extraordinary confession about her approximately two decade-long marriage: "I am in great trouble. My life has been one long series of misfortunes since I have been a wife. I hid them from you as well as I could, knowing that it would only make you miserable without benefitting me; but now the climax has come and I have left him for ever." (30) She went on to describe years of a hellish existence with a violent, abusive husband, whose episodes of binge drinking required police intervention and frequent incarceration. The most recent of these episodes had lasted for weeks, and ultimately had been written up in the newspapers. It was perhaps the prospect of that publicity finding its way back to England as gossip that forced Hattie Reid to finally break her silence and to admit to these immense, tragic difficulties. (31)

Neither falsehood nor silence is evidence of faithlessness so much as of the points of danger and sensitivity in relationships and thus, too, in sustaining personal identities, which are ultimately dependent for most people on the continuity of primary relationships. In fact, even if not as frequently in dramatic circumstances as the Darnley and Reid families experienced, many epistolary relationships found correspondents misleading one another through falsehood and silence. Meanwhile, even in such tense and constrained circumstances, the parties continued for years to negotiate their correspondence, and to write, read, and exchange letters, leaving out only what was too painful or at least inconvenient to address truthfully or at all, and hoping they would be able to carry off their often well-intentioned masquerade for one more letter.

Department of History

Buffalo, NY 14260

ENDNOTES

1. Rowland Tappan Berthoff, British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790-1850 (Cambridge, 1953); Charlotte Erickson, ed., Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth Century America (Coral Gables, 1972), and idem, Leaving England: Essays on British Immigration in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1994); Wilbur S. Shepperson, British Immigration: Projects and Opinions in the Early Victorian Period (Minneapolis, 1957), and idem, Emigration and Disenchantment: Portraits of Englishmen Repatriated from the United States (Norman, 1965); William E. Van Vugt, Britain to America: Mid-Nineteenth Century Immigrants to the United States (Urbana, 1999); Norman Macdonald, Canada, Immigration and Colonization, 1841-1903 (Hamilton, 1968); Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock, The Making of A Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto, 1998); Bruce S. Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach (Montreal, 1988); Basil Greenhill and Ann Gifford, Traveling by Sea in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1974).

2. Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Princeton, 1948), and idem, Carrying British Mail Overseas (New York, 1984); Richard J. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, 1995); Alvin F. Harlow, Old Post Bags: The Story of Sending a Letter in Ancient and Modern Times (New York, 1928); Wayne E. Fuller, The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life (Chicago, 1972).

3. Stephen Fender, Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature (Cambridge, 1992); Orm Overland, "Learning to Read Immigrant Letters: Reflections toward a Textual Theory," in Norwegian-American Essays, 1996 (Oslo, 1996): 207-25; David Fitzpatrick, ed., Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca, 1994): 19-25; David A. Gerber, "Epistolary Ethics: Personal Correspondence and the Culture of Emigration in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of American Ethnic History 19 (December, 2000): 3-23.

4. Donald Harman Akenson, "Reading the Texts of Rural Immigrants: Letters from the Irish in Australia, New Zealand, and North America," Canadian Papers in Rural History VII (1990): 387.

5. A perspective advanced with intelligence and energy in Kathleen Anne DeHaan, "He Looks Like a Yankee in His New Suit." Immigrant Rhetoric: Dutch Immigrant Letters as Forums for Shifting Immigrant Identities (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1998), based principally on the theory of narrative inspired by Kenneth Burke.

6. Elizabeth MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form (Princeton, 1990): 3-9, 31-2.

7. Anthony Cohen, Self-Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity (London: Routledge, 1994); Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, 1987), and idem, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, 1990); Kenneth S. Gergen and Mary Gergen, "Narrative and the Self as Relationship," in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed., Leonard Berkowitz (New York, 1988); Rom Harre, The Singular Self: An Introduction to the Psychology of Personhood (London, 1998).

8. Philip Gleason, "Identifying Identity: A Semantic History," in Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America, ed., idem (Baltimore, 1992): 123-49; Victor R. Greene, American Immigrant Leaders, 1800-1910: Marginality and Identity (Baltimore, 1987); David A. Gerber, "Ethnic Identification and the Project of Individual Identity: The Life of Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald (1768-1840) of Little Cumbrae Island, Scotland and Auriesville, New York," Immigrants and Minorities 17 (July, 1998): 1-22.

9. Robert Smith to Parents. Philadelphia, August 14, 1844; Robert and William Smyth Letters, 1832-1848, 10/D. 1828, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. There are seventeen letters from Robert Smyth (who eventually changed the spelling of his name to the more Americanized "Smith") in the collection written to his parents and/or siblings between his emigration in 1837 and 1845.

10. Nathan Haley to Parents et al., Liverpool, July 3, 1820, Baltimore, September 20, 1820, Cincinnati, January 16, 1821, St. Louis, April 12, 1821, Washington County, Missouri, March 1, 1823, Jefferson County, Missouri, May 20, 1823, Cincinnati, December 9, 1823, Wheeling, September 10, 1825, in Invisible Immigrants, ed. Erickson, 412-20. Erickson provides some biographical information on Haley, ibid, 411-12.

11. Michael A. Forrester, Psychology of Language: A Critical Introduction (London, 1996), 78-81, 95-114; Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Ithaca, 1993): 9-33. These remarks should not be taken to imply that either conversation or letter-writing are necessarily democratic, for both forms of discourse may show evidences of the marking of differentials in influence, authority, or power. While social class is shared in immigrant correspondents, age, parental status, and gender, variously, are and are not frequent sources marking the need for expressions of deference.

12. Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to A Form (Columbus, 1982): 88 (quote), 117, 138-39.

13. Forrester, Psychology of Language, 182-83; Louise Weatherbee Phelps, "Audience and Authorship: The Disappearing Boundary," A Sense of Audience in Written Communications, Gesa Kirsch and Duane H. Roen, eds., v.5, Written Communication Annual (Newbury Park, 1990): 159-76; Susan Kissell, "Writer Anxiety vs. The Need for Community in Botts Family Letters," Women's Personal Narratives: Essays in Criticism and Pedagogy, Lenore Hoffman and Margo Culler, eds. (New York, 1985): 48-53.

14. Elizabeth MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in The Epistolary Form, (Princeton, 1990).

15. Steven Ozment, Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe (Cambridge, 2000): 105-06. Ozment's analysis of family letters largely proceeds on the assumption that his correspondents are indeed truthful with one another, and have no hidden agendas that led to withholding or deception.

16. George Martin to Parents, Coburg, Upper Canada, September 30, 1834, George Martine Letter, Seven Oaks Public Library, Seven Oaks, Kent, United Kingdom; John McLees to Brother, New York, August 28, 1828, John and Catherine McLees Letters, D. 904, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

17. Bruner, Acts of Meaning, 111-15.

18. Robert Bowles, Extracts of Letters from America 1823, Book the Third, Written by Robert Bowles to His Brothers John and Richard, vol. 538, Ohio Historical Society. These "extracts" appear to be whole letters that were either recopied from the originals, or were first drafts of the letters he eventually sent to his brothers.

19. Robert Bowles to Brothers, Harrison, Ohio, April 20, 1823, Ohio Historical Society.

20. Robert Bowles, Will, November 20, 1856, Book 17, p. 265 (1862), Probate Court, Hamilton County, Ohio. Bowles left a farm of 295 acres and livestock to his two sons, $5000 to his daughter, and $1000 and a $500 annuity to his second wife.

21. Robert Bowles to Brothers, Harrison, Ohio, August 3, 1823, Ohio Historical Society.

22. Robert Bowles to Brothers, Harrison, Ohio, October 11, 1823, Ohio Historical Society.

23. R. and A. Hails to George, Lincoln, Massachusetts, July 31, 1849, Invisible Immigrants, ed., Erickson, 318, and on Hails, ibid, 307-09.

24. William Darnley to Wife, Liverpool England, June 3, 1857, New York City, October 25, 1857, March 16, April 13, May 17, July 20, November 11, 1858, May 23, 1859, March 18, April 24, July 17, September 4, 1860, February 18, April 9, 1861, May 21, 1862, and July 4, 1863, which contains a long, bitter summary of the reverses of fortune he had encountered in Canada and the United States and an angry response to the rumors that he was living with another woman; Darnley Family Letters, 1843-1884, New York Public Library.

25. Scholars who have recognized this assertion of moral control via the transatlantic mails are: Ewa Morawska, "Labor Migration of the Poles in the Atlantic World Economy, 1880-1914," Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:2 (1989): 237-70; R.A. Schermerhorn, These Our People: Minorities in American Culture (Boston, 1949): 369-70; Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (Ithaca, 1993): 51, but neither they nor anyone else has examined it at length.

26. Altman, Epistolarity, p.207; Blake Poland and Ann Pederson, "Reading Between the Lines: Interpreting Silences in Qualitative Research," Qualitative Inquiry 4 (June, 1998): 293-312.

27. Titus Crawshaw to Father, Crescentville, Pennsylvania, August 11, 1860, September 18, 1861, Philadelphia, December 9, 1862, Hespeler, Canada, July 31, 1863, Germantown, Pennsylvania, July 19, 1863, September 19, 1864 (quote), June 18, 1866 (quote), in Invisible Immigrants, ed., Erickson, 347, 348, 353, 354-57, 358-59, and on Crawshaw, 329-32.

28. Hattie Reid to Sister, Brooklyn, New York, March 28, 1882, in Invisible Immigrants, ed. Erickson, 480.

29. Hattie Reid to Sister, Brooklyn, New York, March 28, 1882, in Invisible Immigrants, ed., Erickson, 480.

30. Hattie Reid to Sister, n.p., July 5, 1882, in Invisible Immigrants, ed., Erickson, 481-82.

31. I have not been able to locate any newspaper references to the incidents Reid described in her letter to her sister.

By David A. Gerber

University at Buffalo (SUNY)