Grant, Keith

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University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

Esther Clark Wright and Recent Themes in HistoriographyI FIRST “MET” ESTHER CLARK WRIGHT WHEN SHE WAS A STUDENT atAcadia, and by reading her love letters. During the two years that I worked as anarchival assistant in the Esther Clark Wright Archives, 1995-1996, her voluminouspapers were being sorted on long rows of shelving, and I had occasion to look forclass photos or to read letters from Conrad that, at least in my memory, all beganwith, “My Dear Girl.” We in the archives spoke of “Esther” with the fondness bornof daily acquaintance.However, my topic here is endnotes rather than love notes, and historiographyrather than class photographs. I have been asked to share a few comments on theongoing relevance of Esther Clark Wright’s work from the perspective of mydoctoral research on religious communities in Planter and Loyalist Nova Scotia.I am sure I am not the only researcher who has dog-eared the endnotes section ofWright’s books. Many of us have benefitted from her diligent work in the archives,sliding our fingers down the page with an eye to locating good sources for our ownresearch projects. I suspect that it’s during the research stage of our work that manyof us are grateful for Wright’s books, even if we make use of the archival sourcesfor quite different projects than her own.We are perhaps less likely to ask Wright to help us with the interpretive orhistoriographic aspects of our writing. I did a very selective survey of books onLoyalists, looking for Wright in the notes or index. You will probably not besurprised to know that it was mostly historians of (and from) this region who citedWright, while her books were mostly absent from broader and more recent studies.Nevertheless, I would like to suggest a few ways that aspects of Wright’s workcontinue to resonate with several themes in subsequent historiography. I willorganize my remarks around four themes: Planters, Loyalists, lived religion, andbodies of water.PlantersIt is, of course, widely acknowledged that Wright was instrumental in setting thePlanter Studies initiative in motion, helping to recover the “Pre-Loyalist” settlers assubjects of study in their own right. Her own study, Planters and Pioneers, namesand counts the people of Nova Scotia’s resettled townships – a demographicheadcount that is a perennial help to genealogists.1 I must admit that I am notprimarily a “counter.” However, as I reread Wright’s detailed accounting, I wasstruck afresh by the contingency of the whole project of repopulating Nova Scotiaafter the Acadian deportation. I knew that this was a period of flux and uncertainty– despite government proclamations and later historical narratives of inevitableprogress. But seeing the very small numbers of settlers in each township, andreading Wright’s admission of how difficult it was to get accurate figures becauseso many settlers moved on or returned home or died – this made the contingency ofthis period more tangible for me.1 Esther Clark Wright, Planters and Pioneers (Hantsport, NS: Lancelot Press, 1982).Keith Grant, “Esther Clark Wright and Recent Themes in Historiography,”Acadiensis XLVII, no. 2 (Summer/Autumn 2018): 120-123.02031-09 Wright Forum-Grant_Layout  2018-11-15  10:05 AM  Page 120Esther Clark Wright 121Wright’s books together also offer a birds-eye view of the Planter settlements asa whole, tracing the connections between various New England regions and Maritimetownships as well as the entrepreneurial ventures of particular agents – connectionsthat continue to be explored. Alexandra Montgomery, a PhD student at the Universityof Pennsylvania, for example, has told me how helpful Wright’s work has been as shefills in a more detailed account of the Philadelphia-based settlement schemes.2LoyalistsWright helped us get a better sense of who the Loyalists were. She helped us, inother words, through her combination of social history and genealogy, to see theLoyalists as a diverse group – to get past the stereotype that they were all elite“Tory” officeholders. Her focus was on the experience of “ordinary” Loyalistrefugees. As Barry Moody puts it, “People counted, and were counted, in herwork.”3Although figures like Edward Winslow and Ward Chipman certainly featureprominently in her narrative, she demonstrated that not every Loyalist was aHarvard graduate from a wealthy Massachusetts family. We learn from her carefulwork with census, shipping, and probate data that well over half of New BrunswickLoyalists were originally from New York or New Jersey, rather than Massachusetts,and that there were more carpenters and tradesmen than lawyers among them.4Reading Wright’s work, one can trace several themes or approaches that havebeen taken up more recently in Loyalist studies. Here we could play a historicalversion of “If you liked A, then you’ll love B”:• If you liked Wright’s description of the internal displacement of Loyalistsbehind British lines in New York, you’ll love Ruma Chopra’s UnnaturalRebellion and Judith Van Buskirk’s Generous Enemies.• If you liked Wright’s focus on Loyalists as refugees in New Brunswick and theAtlantic world, you’ll love Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles.• If you liked her account of Loyalists jostling for power and provisions alongthe Saint John River, you’ll love David Bell’s Loyalist Rebellion in NewBrunswick.• And if you liked her detailed demographic work on a particular Loyalistcommunity, you’ll love Christopher Minty’s use of social network analysis tostudy the political affiliations of Loyalists.52 Alexandra Montgomery, “The Land Jobber’s Revolution: Land Speculation in Maine and NovaScotia, 1765-1800” (paper presented at 39th annual meeting of the Society for Historians of theEarly Republic, Philadelphia, 21 July 2017). An article based on this research is in progress.3 Barry Moody, “A View from the Front Steps: Esther Clark Wright and the Making of a MaritimeHistorian,” in Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History,ed. Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 249.4 Esther Clark Wright, The Loyalists of New Brunswick (Fredericton: self-published, 1955), 155, 160.5 Ruma Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); Judith L. Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies:Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania02031-09 Wright Forum-Grant_Layout  2018-11-15  10:05 AM  Page 121Acadiensis122Lived ReligionThere is not much sustained reflection on religion in Wright’s books, but there is herinteresting essay in a volume of conference papers edited by Barry Moody. Entitled“Without Intervention of Prophet, Priest, or King,” Wright asks of religious historythe same kind of question she asked of Loyalist history: what was the experience ofordinary women and men?6Wright observes that many of the region’s churches were simply without clericalleadership for much of the 19th century – either because they were too small tosupport a minister or because the ministers they did have were so frequently engagedin months-long circuits of itinerant preaching.She mined memoirs, diaries, and newspapers for traces of what more recenthistoriography terms the “lived religion” of Maritime Baptists and New Lights. Sherecorded instances of storekeepers providing religious leadership, of earnest familyprayers, of lay people leading weekly meetings, and of a savvy housewife whoseextensive doctrinal knowledge allowed her to challenge the dubious messages ofvisiting preachers.Appearing in a book on Baptist history, Wright’s essay also begs the question ofwhy the history of a religious tradition that puts so much theological emphasis onthe spiritual experience of every member devotes so much attention to a handful ofministers rather than the lived religion of people in the pews – a good question thatremains relevant.7Bodies of WaterReading all of her books in sequence was an experience of “water, watereverywhere.” I was surprised by how much of Wright’s work had to do with bodiesof water. She located the Nova Scotia Planters along the five rivers feeding into theMinas Basin. She wrote books on the Saint John, Miramichi, and Petitcodiac riversas well as on shipbuilding in Saint John and St. Martin’s. I would argue that the bodyof water around which most of her scholarship was organized was the Bay of Fundy.Wright has helped to recover aspects of the lived experience of the region’swaterways: patterns of colonization and settlement, transportation and trading,communication and industry. I find this emphasis very helpful. In my work on NovaScotia, for example, it takes a continual effort to historically imagine places likePress, 2002); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); David G. Bell, Loyalist Rebellion in New Brunswick: ADefining Conflict for Canada’s Political Culture (Halifax: Formac, 2013); Christopher Minty,“Sources for Loyalist Studies,” Borealia: A Group Blog on Early Canadian History, 1 September2015, https://earlycanadianhistory.ca/2015/09/21/sources-for-loyalist-studies/; Christopher F.Minty, “‘Of One Hart and One Mind’: Local Institutions and Allegiance During the AmericanRevolution,’” Early American Studies 15, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 99-132.6 Esther Clark Wright, “Without Intervention of Prophet, Priest, or King,” in Repent and Believe:The Baptist Experience in Maritime Canada, ed. Barry M. Moody (Hantsport, NS: Lancelot Press,1980), 66-74.7 A recent attempt to take this perspective is Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, ChristianChurches and Their Peoples, 1840-1965: A Social History of Religion in Canada (Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 2010).02031-09 Wright Forum-Grant_Layout  2018-11-15  10:05 AM  Page 122Esther Clark Wright 123Canning as close to shipping routes rather than far from the highway, and thereforemore connected to the Atlantic world than I first assumed.Wright’s work is also suggestive of the benefits of organizing historical inquiryaround bodies of water. Now the Bay of Fundy is no Mediterranean Sea, and I’m notprepared to cast Wright in the role of Atlantic Canada’s Fernand Braudel. YetWright’s tendency to place a river or the Bay of Fundy at the centre of her storyinvites us to think about long-term changes. Reflecting on the centrality of the St. John River in its region’s histories, she wrote:A river is something more than a feature of the landscape.Interesting as it may be aesthetically, geographically, geologically,what matters is its relationship to the people who come upon it andwho live beside it. Who they are, where they come from, why theycome, what use they make of the river, what kind of communitiesthey develop, what they do to the river, what it does to them – theseare the considerations that give purpose and vitality to the study ofthe river.8That very river is also at the centre of Jason Hall’s recent work. Hall explores theintertwined environmental, Indigenous, Acadian, and British histories of theWəlastəkw (Wolastoq) River region.9 Focusing on the river has allowed him to, as itwere, portage around the obstacles of periodization, borders, and historicalspecialization.ConclusionWright’s historical scholarship was motivated by a love of place that was never farbeneath the surface of her work. Her book of essays, Blomidon Rose, for example,began with the words “To those of us who live on the hillsides which looknorthwards across the Basin of Minas, Blomidon is a never-ending delight. . . . Welove it . . . because it has had a part in making us what we are.”10 To be sure, thiskind of localism can veer into the sentimental or romantic, but, at its best, Wright’swork demonstrates how digging deep into the history of this region raises themesthat have contemporary relevance around the Atlantic, as well as around the Bay ofFundy.KEITH GRANT8 Esther Clark Wright, The Saint John River (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1949), 6.9 Jason Hall, “River of Three Peoples: An Environmental and Cultural History of the Wəlastəkw /Rivière St. Jean / St. John River, c. 1550 to 1850” (PhD dissertation, University of NewBrunswick, 2015; Jason Hall, “Maliseet Cultivation and Climatic Resilience on the Wəlastəkw/St.John River During the Little Ice Age,” Acadiensis 44, no. 2 (Summer/Autumn 2015): 3-25.10 Esther Clark Wright, Blomidon Rose (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1957), 1-2.02031-09 Wright Forum-Grant_Layout  2018-11-15  10:05 AM  Page 123

Esther Clark Wright and Recent Themes in Historiography

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Esther Clark Wright and Recent Themes in Historiography

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