Earthly Consumptions: Mineral Cabinet Culture and the Transformation of Class in Antebellum America

Patrick Thomas MorganDuke UniversityEarthly Consumptions: Mineral Cabinet Culture and the Transformation of Class in Antebellum AmericaAs the earth became increasingly legible in the nineteenth century, many Americans... [ view full abstract ]

Patrick Thomas Morgan

Duke University

Earthly Consumptions: Mineral Cabinet Culture and the Transformation of Class in Antebellum America

As the earth became increasingly legible in the nineteenth century, many Americans performed this newfound geologic literacy through a particular technology. Allowing middle class households to differentiate themselves from the geologically illiterate, mineral cabinets regulated their interactions with earth objects, mediating both the desires and the physical possibilities of this consumption.  As art historian Rebecca Bedell asserts, in The Anatomy of Nature, “Joining potted palms and china shepherdesses in many American parlors, these mineral cabinets served not only as objects of adornment but also as signs of social respectability and intellectual engagement” (3).  One American essayist and scientist, though, wanted to harness the popularity of this geologic spectacle to transform the perceptions of working class Americans.  William Maclure was perhaps the most prominent American geologist of the early nineteenth century, and he was also highly cognizant of the divide between consumers and producers; he believed the working class could be duped by the false narratives of the powerful only insofar as they allowed their bodies to be undisciplined.  Thus the mineral cabinet became, I argue, a way to radically realign economic class in the nineteenth century, as it sought to reattach word and substance, sensory perception and mineral.  The consumption of minerals became a way, for Maclure, to enact the American Revolution within the body itself, physically changing its ability to perceive surroundings.  Ingeniously, Maclure took the very symbol of moneyed leisure—the mineral cabinet—and converted it into the opening salvo of a radical transformation of working class agency.