The original of this handbill is in the Boston Public Library’s Rare Book collection. It is part of the papers, manuscripts, and diaries of abolitionist and controversial Unitarian clergyman Theodore Parker, who composed it and had it printed and distributed.

At the time he posted it around Boston, Parker was the head of the Boston Vigilance Committee, a group of white and black abolitionists, eventually numbering more than 200, who agitated in various legal and extra-legal ways to frustrate slaveholding. The committee set up a secret network of operators on the Underground Railroad, who transported escaped slaves through the area. The committee also looked for slave-catchers in Boston who had come north to search for fugitive slaves. Parker and his fellow committee members alerted the sympathetic white and black community in the area, and sometimes threatened the slave-catchers and scared them off, and even rushed the jail to free captured slaves.

The committee’s semi-secretive efforts increased in intensity after the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (part of the Compromise of 1850), which specifically required Northern states to remit or return fugitive slaves to their Southern owners. The committee’s collective outrage peaked during the 1851 trial and return to Georgia of escaped slave Thomas Sims (the handbill is from this period), the capture and freeing of fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins in 1851, and the riots during the capture and return under Federal guard of fugitive slave Anthony Burns to Virginia in 1854.

Having or keeping your top eye open simply meant keeping a careful watch, no matter what else you were doing. It most often carried the idea that you had to keep a lookout for threatening intruders, enemies, or competitors.

The phrase appears to be an Americanism. I see written evidence for its use, among both uneducated and educated and among both whites and African Americans, as early as 1828 and as late as 1911. Those who used it probably felt it to be a bit unusual because it often appeared with quotation marks around it, as if they understood it as slang.

Today, we would say something like “keep your eyes peeled” or “keep one eye open” or “sleep with one eye open.” When you lie down to sleep, one eye is uppermost and is therefore your “top eye,” the one with the slightly better vantage point. “Top” probably also connoted “best,” so that your “top eye” was the one that could see farther and clearer.

John S. Skinner, for example, in an 1828 issue of The American Farmer, counseled his readers, “So that as small sands form the mountain, and economy is said to be wealth, perhaps it would be as well to keep our top-eye open a little sharper towards those smaller items of family expenses.” The satirist John S. Robb, in a backwoods story he published in an 1845 issue of The Spirit of the Times, had one of his rustic characters say: “You, Mike, keep your eye skinned for Ingins, ‘cause ef we git deep in a yard here, without a top eye open, the cussed varmints ‘ll pop on us unawars, and be stickin’ some of thur quills in us—nothing’ like havin’ your eye open and insterments ready."

The phrase was a warning to keep your guard up, but also simply to pay close attention to what was happening so that you could forestall a threat as it arose and even shrewdly turn the situation into a favorable opportunity for your own success or profit.

Theodore Parker certainly understood the phrase in this way. In a speech he gave to the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, he said, “I am glad that a ‘top eye’ is open to scrutinize the acts of public men—an eye that never slumbers nor sleeps—an eye that does not spare a friend when he falters more than a foe when he is false; I am glad of that.” And in a letter he wrote in 1854, Parker facetiously chided fellow abolitionist Samuel J. May for having tried to argue that the Bible was a pacifist tract, when there was plenty of evidence to the contrary: “But all this, O father! is a delusion of Satan, who will deceive the very elect if they do not keep a top-eye open and a bright look-out.”

The phrase also had currency among other abolitionists, who used it to describe slaves who carried on with their normal activities, but constantly watched for the moment when they could act by making their escape. The Provincial Freeman in its issue of April 21, 1855, for example, used the phrase:

The cook (a colored man) having his “top eye open,” kept quiet till the steamer had fairly reached New York, then quietly procured a carriage, and apprised the property [that is, a slave onboard] that it was at liberty to assume a more independent air; consequently, it was not unconscious of the value of time; and lo! to the utter amazement of the Mate, it was seen making quick paces in the direction of the carriage.

Abolitionist activist and writer William Still, in his 1872 history, The Underground Rail Road, described the rescue of a slave, Jane Johnson, and her children, using the phrase—“Jane had her ‘top eye open,’ and in that brief space had appealed to the sympathies of a person whom she ventured to trust, saying, ‘I and my children are slaves, and we want liberty!’”

The phrase “keep (or have) your top eye open” had this meaning all during the time it was current, through the first decade of the 20th century.

For about 15 years, from about 1885 to 1900, long after Parker had written his handbill, the phrase briefly developed another meaning before it dropped out of currency altogether. Liberal reformers and spiritual progressives, especially from New England, used it to refer to cultivating a new and higher angle of vision on the world. To keep or have your top eye open meant to look a little deeper into the reasons of things or to look behind the surface of everyday things, to take your eyes off the ground and look into the air, up to heaven, to look there for subtle signs and omens, to be high-minded, to be spiritual rather than materialistic, to be focused on the true and lasting rather than the false, the sensual, and the transitory, on the intuitive rather than the calculating.

Parker’s use of the phrase in 1851 has nothing in it, even implicitly, that connects it to this later meaning. However, the distant origins of the image that this later meaning captures probably lay in Parker’s friend and fellow Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Nature,” written in 1836, where he described an “exaltation” he experienced one day at twilight staring into snow puddles: "Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."

The “top eye” was the “skylight of the soul,” like the oculus at the top of the Pantheon in Rome. It saw, not the waves, but “Him who walks upon the waves,” in the words of ex-Quaker, Temperance worker and suffragist Hannah Whitall Smith. For her, opening one’s top eye was a mystical experience, a religious conversion, a reception of holiness and sanctification into one’s life. In 1883, Smith’s coworker and friend, Frances Elizabeth Willard, the President of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, described Mrs. Smith’s home and family:

There is no fear of the “next thing,” because it is the next and not the last. There is no looking back, after the puerile fashion of Lot’s wife, but, with earnest gaze forward and upward, this family group moves forward, blessing and blessed. “Keep your top eye open,” is the mother’s constant motto for her children.

About the same time, Congregationalist lecturer, Joseph Cook, at one of his weekly prayer meetings at Boston’s Tremont Temple, told his audience:

British advanced thought believes in its frontal eye, but not in its coronal eye. This is a defect of the English mind and of the American. When you reach India, in your tour of the globe, you will find people who believe in their coronal eye; who see God in an intuitive way, as Emerson did. … The Scotch have an eye in the dome of their souls; but they have such an immense front window that they are chiefly occupied in gazing out of it. Rarely, except in periods of mighty religious fervor, do they look aloft through the dome. … In general, Scotchmen, Englishmen, and Americans believe in experience, observation, definition, induction, the scientific method, and nothing else. You notice thus one of the defects of Anglo-Saxon advanced thought, that it sees with its front eye, and not with its top eye.

There were two technological innovations that profoundly changed daily life in the 19th century. They were both “motive powers”: steam and electricity. According to some, the development and application of steam engines and electricity to various tasks such as transportation and the telegraph, affected human life by increasing and multiplying the mechanical power of human or animal strength or the power of simple tools.

Those who lived through these technological changes, felt them to be much more than technological innovations. To them, these technologies seemed to erase the primeval boundaries of human experience, and to usher in a kind of Millennial era, a New Age, in which humankind had definitively broken its chains and was able, as it became proverbial to say, to “annihilate time and space.” Even the most important inventions of the 19th century that were not simply applications of steam or electrical power, such as the recording technologies of the photograph and the phonograph, contributed to this because they made the past available to the present and the present to the future.
The 1850 song, “Uncle Sam’s Farm,” written by Jesse Hutchinson, Jr., of the Hutchinson Family Singers, captured this sense that a unique historical rupture had occurred as a result of scientific and social progress:

Our fathers gave us liberty, but little did they dream
The grand results that pour along this mighty age of steam;
For our mountains, lakes and rivers are all a blaze of fire,
And we send our news by lightning on the telegraphic wires.

Apart from the technological inventions themselves, daily life in the 19th century was profoundly changed by the innovation of reorganizing work as a mechanical process, with humans as part of that process. This meant, in part, dividing up the work involved in manufacturing so that each single workman performed only one stage in the manufacturing process, which was previously broken into sequential parts. Before, individual workers typically guided the entire process of manufacturing from start to finish.

This change in work was the division or specialization of labor, and this “rationalization” (as it was conceived to be) of the manufacturing process occurred in many industries before and even quite apart from the introduction of new and more powerful machines into the process. This was an essential element of the industrialization that advanced throughout the 19th century. It made possible the mass production of goods, but it also required the tight reorganization of workers into a “workforce” that could be orchestrated in various ways in order to increase manufacturing efficiency. Individuals experienced this reorganization as conflict: From the viewpoint of individual workers, it was felt as bringing good and bad changes to their daily lives.

On the one hand, it threatened the integrity of the family because people were drawn away from home to work in factories and in dense urban areas. It threatened their individual autonomy because they were no longer masters of the work of their hands, but rather more like cogs in a large machine performing a limited set of functions, and not responsible for the whole.

On the other hand, it made it possible for more and more people to enjoy goods that only the wealthy would have been able to afford in earlier times or goods that had never been available to anyone no matter how wealthy. The rationalization of the manufacturing process broadened their experiences through varied work, travel, and education that would have been impossible before.

The charter of the Second Bank of the United States, granted in 1816, expired in 1836 (President Jackson vetoed Congress' effort to recharter the bank), after which banking and the issuing of bank notes was not done by a central bank, but devolved upon thousands of state-chartered banks with minimal federal regulation. State laws were often so lax that almost anyone could issue bank notes.

Nevertheless, the state of Pennsylvania did renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, with Nicholas Biddle as its president, which issued bank notes under the name of the institution, but which was then only a state-chartered bank, even though the old bank's stock holders (except the U.S. government) voted to transfer the assets and liabilities of the old bank to the new one. The directors of the new bank decided not only to reissue the old bank notes, but also not to close the books of the old bank, but to continue them into the life of the new bank (it continued until 1841), which made it quite difficult later to disentangle the affairs of the defunct bank from those of the new one. One of the consequences was that the new Pennsylvania bank honored the notes issued by the old Bank of the United States. Because of that, other banks and individuals could also honor the old notes because the new bank would redeem them.

Reproductions of 1840 bank notes of the Second Bank of the United States, issued in Philadelphia by the state-chartered bank—the "Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania"—have lately been printed as "souvenirs" but are essentially worthless to numismatic collectors.

The original 1816 charter of the Second Bank of the United States limited the circulation of notes by the bank to $35 million, and required that no notes be issued in denominations less than $5. In practice, the bank never had more than $25 million in notes circulating, and most of the time much less, averaging for one period about $15 million.

In October 1836 (the Second Bank of the United States closed its doors in March of that year), its records showed that about $12 million notes were still in circulation, down from $24 million one year earlier (Cattrell, pps. 427, 512), with the average circulation for 1836 reckoned to have been about $21 million. The mixture of bill denominations in this total was not recorded, so it seems impossible to be certain of how many bills this represented.

I have been unable to find anything about an angry slave being responsible for the fire. And what I have found appears to make such a story highly unlikely.

Quebec suffered two major fires in 1845, exactly one month apart.

On the 28th of May, in the late morning of a scorchingly hot day, a fire began at a small tannery owned and overseen by a Mr. Richardson on Arago Street near Saint-Vallière Street in the St.-Roch district. The fire began when a boiler that was used to heat leather dye burst. Church bells in the St.-Roch section began ringing in alarm and a small crowd gathered outside the tannery and started “ill-directed efforts to extinguish the flames,” according to a military officer who happened onto the scene.

The intense heat of the day, combined with a very stiff wind, spread the fire quickly through the streets of St.-Roch, lined with small wooden buildings packed closely together. The district of St.-Roch lies in the lower section of the city between the river and a cliff leading to the upper section of Quebec City. The high wind blew into the heated air above the fire and swirled against the cliff into a shifting vortex that carried sparks in unpredictable directions, seemingly in pursuit of terrified people trying to escape the fire, blocking their escape. The fire was only stopped when the mayor ordered the military to blow up a line of houses as a firebreak to protect the warehouses and commercial district next to the river. In eight hours, the fire of May 28 killed 50 people, destroyed about 3,000 shops and sheds, roughly 1,650 houses, and left many thousands of people homeless. About a third of the city was left in ruin.

About 11 o’clock on the night of June 28th, another fire broke out in a shed in back of the house of a notary, M. Texsier, on d'Aiguillon Street, near d'Youville Street in the Saint-Jean Baptiste section of the city, which is located next to the St.-Roch section that had been destroyed the month before. According to the Quebec Mercury at the time, the fire “arose from the emptying of a can of hot ashes on a dunghill.” This strongly suggests that the fire was not deliberately set.

As before, the weather had been hot and dry that day and a gale wind once again blew over the city. Throughout the night of June 28th, the fire spread out and by morning the entire St.-Jean section, another third of the city, along with 1,300 houses, churches, and schools, had been destroyed. During the night, thousands of people who had fled the St.-Roch fire and had settled temporarily in the St.-Jean section again had to flee.

Joseph Légaré’s painting of this fire, a copy of which is now in the Art Gallery of Ontario, depicts “an apocalyptic vision of orange flames and fiery sparks heat[ing] up the black sky in an earthly inferno,” as art historian Anne Newlands says in her book, Canadian Art: From Its Beginnings to 2000. Many of the terrified residents the night of that fire did indeed see something like an apocalypse, a providential pursuit of the city. Newspapers reported that many people saw terrible angels of flame in the sky above the city that night, which skeptics attributed to reflected mirages playing across the layers of heated air. One month later, practically the entire city stayed awake and on edge during the day and night of July 28th, on the possibility that Quebec would be revisited by a third and final fire. But that did not happen.

In all, the two fires destroyed two-thirds of the city, but I have found no evidence that either of the fires was caused by anything other than accidents.

After the War of 1812, the northern, free states' members in the House of Representatives exceeded those from slave states. The slave states reckoned then that Congress could try to outlaw slavery in the South. Their representatives in the House had tried to stave off attempts by that chamber to legislate the abolition of slavery by instituting a "gag rule" which, for years, had blocked abolitionist petitions from reaching the floor of the House, but which had been rescinded in 1844. The South therefore worked out a strategy to ensure that they would not be outnumbered in the Senate. If they maintained a balance in the Senate, they figured, attempts to force the end of slavery on the southern states could be blocked.

To maintain this balance as new territories were admitted into the Union, slave states and free states were admitted, roughly speaking, in pairs: Mississippi and Indiana, Alabama and Illinois, Missouri and Maine, Arkansas and Michigan, and Florida and Iowa. In some cases, the admission of a state was slowed or sped up in order to pair it with another. This practice was the outcome of a strategy that the South considered essentially defensive. The South's primary aim in this was not so much to spread slavery as it was to protect slavery where it already existed. To do that, it had to protect its strength in the Senate, and for that to happen as northern territories were brought into the Union, the South had to find southern territories to balance them. Eventually, this even led some in the South to look for possible ways to annex Cuba and Nicaragua and bring them into the Union as slave states.

Texas and Wisconsin were considered to be a pair. Partly due to objections of northern abolitionists who feared that the admission of Texas by itself would tilt the Senate balance in favor of the South, the Lone Star State's entrance into the Union was delayed until December 29, 1845, and only happened then because of the successful Democratic campaign of 1844 that succeeded in electing James Polk to the White House on a platform that combined a call for admitting Texas into the Union with an expansionist stance on the question of setting the northern territorial claims of Oregon as far as possible. The northern vote was split in that election, between Whig candidate Henry Clay, Liberty Party candidate James Birney, and James Polk (partly because of his party's position on Oregon), giving the election to Polk.

There was a strong effort to bring Wisconsin into the Union in 1846, along with Iowa, but Wisconsin was not admitted until May 29, 1848. Did that make the Senate balanced in the South's favor between the time of the admission of Texas and the admission of Wisconsin? Not really. For one thing, the balance in fact was volatile.

For example, although Iowa had been admitted to the Union as a free state on December 28, 1846, political turmoil in its state legislature, almost evenly divided on party lines, and spiced by accusations of bribery, resulted in the state's inability at first to elect U.S. Senators to send to Congress. In addition, party politics factored into votes, with northern Democrats, for example, sometimes voting with their southern colleagues. Nevertheless, a rough parity existed in the Senate, although the South recognized it as tenuous.

South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun's speech in the Senate on February 19, 1847, described the situation in which the South perceived itself at the time:

Sir, already we are in a minority—I use the word 'we' for brevity sake—already we are in a minority in the other House, in the electoral college, and, I may say, in every department of this government, except at present, in the Senate of the United States—there, for the present, we have an equality. Of the twenty-eight States, fourteen are non-slaveholding and fourteen are slaveholding, counting Delaware, which is doubtful, as one of the non-slaveholding States. But this equality of strength exists only in the Senate. … We, Mr. President, have at present, only one position in the government, by which we may make any resistance to this aggressive policy which has been declared against the South; or any other, that the non-slaveholding States may choose to take. And this equality in this body is of the most transient character. Already, Iowa is a State; but, owing to some domestic calamity, is not yet represented in this body. When she appears here, there will be an addition of two Senators to the Representatives here, of the non-slaveholding States. Already, Wisconsin has passed the initiatory stage, and will be here at next session. This will add two more, making a clear majority of four in this body on the side of the non-slaveholding States, who will thus be enable to sway every branch of this government at their will and pleasure. But, sir, if this aggressive policy be followed—if the determination of the non-slaveholding States is to be adhered to hereafter, and we are to be entirely excluded from the territories which we already possess, or may possess—if this is to be the fixed policy of the government, I ask what will be our situation hereafter?

Calhoun was reacting here to the introduction of the "Wilmot Proviso," an attempt by northern anti-slavery congressmen to ban slavery in all territories that would enter U.S. possession in the future. Far from seeing itself at this point as capable of taking advantage of its senatorial strength, the South—as is clear from Calhoun's speech—saw itself as barely able to hold its defenses against an aggressive North intent on outlawing slavery everywhere. In his speech, Calhoun calculated that if all the territories were thenceforth brought into the Union as free states, the slave states would be outnumbered in the Senate by two to one.

The Wilmot Proviso was defeated in the Senate—that was as close as one could say that the South was able to "take advantage of" its strength there—but the battle over it served to turn opposing political forces further into sectional differences, North versus South, free state versus slave state. By doing this, it also helped to redefine the politics of the time away from party affiliation and loyalty to sectional affiliation. Both the Whigs and the Democrats underwent fragmentation and inner realignments during this period.

When California was admitted on September 9, 1850, its formal admission came only five days after the passage of the bills that formed the Compromise of 1850. As part of the Compromise, California came in as a single free state, rather than divided into two parts, one free and one slave, but Utah and New Mexico territories were organized to allow popular votes in the territories to decide later whether slavery would be permitted. In point of fact, the admission of California did not immediately change the balance of anti- vs. pro-slavery votes in the Senate because California, although a free state, sent one anti-slavery senator and one pro-slavery senator to Washington.

When Americans started to move westward after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, many found the Mexican government happy to have them in Texas (they were called "Texians" there), alongside the Tejanos (Texans of Mexican or Latin-American descent). Because settlements were few and far between, the Mexican government needed settlers to protect the area from the Apaches and the Comanches, and the central government, centered far to the south in Mexico City, therefore encouraged the formation of regional militias.

Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1821, and the Mexican Constitution of 1824 established the newly independent country as a Federal Republic. In 1833, after years of political volatility and coups, however, Mexico emerged as a centralized dictatorship under the control of General and President Antonio López de Santa Anna. As a result, several Mexican states rebelled against the reversal of federalism, including Coahuila y Tejas (the area that would become Texas), and formed their own regional governments. At a convention called in 1833 by dissidents to the central government, Stephen F. Austin was chosen as the representative of the self-declared "new" state of "Texas."

By this time, Anglo settlers in Texas outnumbered Tejanos by more than 5 to 1. Mexico was convinced that the United States coveted Texas. In 1827, President John Quincy Adams had offered to buy the region for a million dollars, and in 1829, President Andrew Jackson had increased the offer to $5 million. Mexico had rejected both offers.

By this time, the central government was dissatisfied that the Anglos refused to assimilate into Mexican culture. They resisted the legal requirement to support the Catholic Church, refused to learn Spanish, and refused to emancipate their slaves (Mexico had outlawed slavery in 1829). In 1830, the central government prohibited further immigration from the U.S. into Texas.

At the same time, the Tejanos felt betrayed by Santa Anna's consolidation of political power. They had long felt alienated by the government in Mexico City and by the circles of power further south.

By mid-1835, "Texas Committees" in the U.S. sent money to Texas and recruited volunteers to help Texians resist the central government. Not long afterwards, Stephen Austin called for Texan independence.

Mexican soldiers assaulted the Texian garrison at Gonzales with the goal of forcing the settlers there to return a cannon they were given for self-defense. The Texians raised a flag picturing the outline of a cannon and the words "Come and Get It." The Mexicans were forced to retreat.

In November, at San Felipe de Austin, Texans formed a provisional government, the "Consultation," that expressed allegiance to the annulled Mexican Constitution of 1824. The Consultation authorized the creation of a new Texas regular army force (apart from the volunteers who were by then headed by Stephen Austin) commanded by Sam Houston.

In December 1835, Jim Bowie and his volunteer troops defeated the forces of Santa Anna's brother-in-law, General Martin Perfect de Cos, after a siege of the Alamo Mission at Béxar (modern San Antonio, Texas). The Texians released De Cos and his 1,000 men and paroled them. Afterwards, the Texians encamped at the Alamo and fortified it, although a confused chain of command among the various Texan military commanders shortly stripped the Alamo of most of its provisions and all but 100 or so defenders.

General Santa Anna left Mexico City at the end of November 1835, with a force of 6,000 soldiers to put down the revolt in Texas. Shortly thereafter, the Mexican Congress, encouraged by Santa Anna, declared that all "foreigners" captured fighting against the government should be regarded as "pirates" and summarily executed. By February 23, Santa Anna reached San Antonio and occupied the town, beginning a siege of the Alamo, then under the joint command of Jim Bowie and William B. Travis. Davy Crockett was among the Anglo defenders.

Meanwhile, Texans met 175 miles to the east, at Washington-on-the-Brazos, and on March 2 signed a Declaration of Independence from Mexico, declaring a new Republic of Texas. On March 4, Sam Houston was appointed commander of Texas forces, and he set out to raise and train an army in east Texas, in advance of Santa Anna's route.

The Alamo's defenders, still no more than about 200 men (but including a band of 25 Tejanos led by Juan Seguín) were determined to block Santa Anna from proceeding to east Texas to confront Houston and his men while they were building in strength. They pledged to defend the Alamo to the death.

Santa Anna occupied San Antonio and, with 1,500 soldiers, laid siege to the Alamo, trading intermittent cannon fire for about a week. The defenders refused to surrender. Santa Anna's forces overran them on March 6, 1836, in an early morning attack, under orders not to take prisoners. The defenders gradually fell back and collected around the chapel, where non-combatants (women, children, and slaves) were gathered.

The Mexicans reached the chapel and captured it. They released the non-combatants, but all defenders (including 8 Tejanos) died, either in the battle or, according to some accounts, by execution after surrender.

On March 19, 1836, 90 miles to the southeast, at the Battle of Coleto, forces under General José de Urrea defeated the Texian garrison stationed nearby at the Presidio La Bahia at Goliad. Eight days later, the Mexicans massacred the Texan garrison of more than 350 they had taken as prisoner, including its commander, James Fannin.

Santa Anna was branded throughout Texas as bloodthirsty, and as a result, Houston's forces grew with outraged volunteers. Sam Houston and his newly formed army proceeded into east Texas, closely pursued by Santa Anna, whose divided forces clashed several times with Texans.

At San Jacinto, 250 miles east of the Alamo, the Texan forces turned on Santa Anna's overconfident army in a surprise attack during siesta time. The Mexican army was defeated in 20 minutes. Seven Texans were wounded and up to 300 Mexicans died.

In the confusion, Santa Anna attempted to escape by donning the uniform of a corporal and hiding in a marsh, but the Texans noticed that the "corporal" was wearing silk underwear and figured out his identity. Under a tree nearby, Houston and Santa Anna negotiated a treaty giving Texas its independence and Santa Anna was released.