Dealings with the Dead, Volume 2 (of 2) — A Closer Reading

Cocked Hats and Queues: The Voice of the Old Sexton

The narrative voice is that of a man who has handled the dead and their effects, and it shows in his eye for material detail. He lingers on the dimensions of a military cocked hat—"terrible"—and compares it to modern bearskin caps, which are "eminently calculated to put the enemy to flight." The humor is dry and self-aware: the hat's bullet hole prompts a reflection on the head's safe distance, not on the battle itself. This voice shifts easily from the sartorial to the biographical, as when he introduces Colonel Barnabas Clarke, a "broad-shouldered, strong-hearted Revolutioner" who wore the largest cocked hat and longest queue "in the known world." The sexton's language is colloquial yet formal, peppered with archaisms like "cotemporary" and references to Louis Quatorze. He addresses the reader directly, promising to "recite" an anecdote, and the pace slows to accommodate these digressions.

Peter Faneuil's Slaves: A Shift from Relic to Record

Midway through the excerpt, the tone and subject shift abruptly. The sexton turns from cocked hats to the slave trade in colonial Boston, citing Peter Faneuil's letters. The language becomes documentary: he quotes a 1738 invoice for fish and alewives, exchanged for "a strait negro lad" aged 12 to 15, who has had smallpox and is of "tractable disposition." The sexton interjects that he has "no doubt" Peter was a "kind, considerate master," but the reader is left to weigh this against the cold commercial language of the letter. The pace changes from leisurely anecdote to a more compressed, evidence-driven style, with dates, sums, and names. The sexton then pivots again to a love affair involving the Jekyll family, reproducing Peter's letters in full. This structural shift—from personal memory to archival reproduction—marks a change in narrative strategy, as the sexton lets the documents speak for themselves.

Slavery in the Province: Moral Weight Beneath the Anecdote

The sexton's treatment of slavery is revealing of his era and his method. He notes that "the clergy were no exception" to the North's somnolence on the subject, and he cites Douglass's Summary for the 1735 population figures: 35,427 whites and 2,600 negroes. The tone is matter-of-fact, but the inclusion of these statistics, alongside the Faneuil letters, gives the narrative a moral weight that the earlier cocked-hat passages lack. The sexton does not editorialize heavily; he presents the evidence and moves on. Yet his choice to include a slave sale from Parson Moorhead's estate—"at his late residence, near Liberty Tree"—creates an ironic juxtaposition. The reader is left to connect the liberty tree with the slave sold beneath it. This section shows the sexton's voice at its most restrained, letting the documents carry the implication.

Readers should attend to the shifts in register between the sexton's personal reminiscences and his archival interludes. The cocked hat and the slave invoice are both relics, but the narrative treats them differently: one with affectionate humor, the other with documentary flatness. This volume rewards attention to how the sexton's voice modulates between the antiquarian and the moralist, and how the pace of the prose—now leisurely, now compressed—shapes the reader's engagement with Boston's buried past.

There’s a particular melancholy in the sexton’s pages, how he lingers over forgotten headstones and the weight of old silences. It reminded me of how Fuseli’s own restless fantasies sometimes feel like conversations with the dead. I found myself thinking of that while rereading The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Volume 3 (of 3) — Background and Themes, where the same shadows seem to flicker, just differently dressed.