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.

Good question and one that is often answered a bit too narrowly. The key issue is whether trade routes promoted resource extraction and/or economic development, and if the latter, what sort of development. Of course, the most famous route, with the greatest impact on New World colonies, was the Triangular Trade, which had some variants. In addition, though, there were several versions of a simpler two-way transatlantic trade, from the UK to the northern colonies, from France to Quebec, and from Spain/Portugal to Latin American places. Last, and less known, a transpacific trade took shape in the 17th century, connecting the Philippines with Mexico through the west coast port of Acapulco. So here we have at least half dozen routes to assess in terms of impacts.

The core of the triangular trade, ca. 1600-1800, was the exchange of slaves for materials and goods – African captives brought to eastern Atlantic ports, exchanged for gold or British manufactured products, then transshipped brutally to colonial depots – Charleston, New Orleans, the Caribbean islands, and in smaller numbers, New York, for example. There, captives were again sold, for cash or goods (sugar, tobacco, timber) which returned to a UK starting point (often Liverpool). Yet this sequence was not the only one, particularly in New England, where merchants sent rum and other North American goods to Africa, secured slaves for auction to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and brought liquid sugar (molasses) to American shores for distillation into more rum. Though this sounds tidy, actually, rarely was either triangle completed by one ship in one voyage; each triangle stands more as a mythical model than a description of standard practice. Nonetheless these ventures, plus those made by Spanish and Portuguese slavers extracted over nine million Africans from their home terrains across the 16th through the 19th centuries. That’s quite an impact, creating slave economies from Virginia to Trinidad to Brazil. Another three-sided trade involved slavery indirectly, as when Yankees sent colonial goods to the sugar islands, shipped to Russia to exchange sugar for iron, which returned to New England.

Bilateral trade is simpler to grasp, and yet may depart from our current notions of exchange. The Kingdom of Spain extracted precious metals from Latin America, sending back goods for colonizers, especially through Veracruz, which became Mexico’s principal east coast harbor. By contrast, French trade with Quebec was a constant drain on the monarchy’s funds; often goods sent to sustain some 50,000 settlers cost more than double the value of furs gathered and sold. However, Virginia tobacco sold to Britain at times created high profits, but this single-crop economy proved vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations (Cotton’s southern surge came after the American Revolution.). Clearly trade did not automatically translate into sustained development, though port cities did prosper, not least because they became anchors for coastal shipping within and among colonies. At times, expanding trade could irritate the colonizing state, as when Mexican merchants created a long-distance 16th-18th century trans-Pacific route from Acapulco, trading an estimated 100 tons of silver annually for Chinese silks, cottons, spices, and pottery – resources the Crown thought should be sent to Madrid instead. Overall, my sense is that colonial trade routes deepened exploitation of people and nature appreciably more than they fostered investment and economic development.

On the material culture of Plymouth Colony, including descriptions of housing, furniture, clothing, and family life and relationships, you could look at John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony, or his, Remarkable Providences: Readings on Early American History. Also good is David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, section on “The Exodus of the English Puritans, 1629-41.”

Easily the most influential book about the New England Puritans' religion has been Perry Miller's 1956, Errand into the Wilderness. More recent and well-regarded books include Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self and David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England.

Online, Professor Donna M. Campbell’s valuable web pages on “Puritanism in New England” may help begin to clarify some of the Puritans’ religious beliefs.

Also online, you can find plenty to read and assign in volumes 1 and 2 of A Library of American Literature, edited by Edmund Stedman and Ellen Hutchinson, and compiled and published in 1887, and which is available via Google Books. The editors included diverse short selections from Puritan writers describing their inner and outer lives and their adventures in settling in America.

A newer anthology of Puritan writings, focusing exclusively on religion (and not available on the web), is The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology, edited by Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, published in 1985 by Harvard University Press.

Teaching The Scarlet Letter and also reading historical works from and about the Puritans provides an opportunity to emphasize to students that Hawthorne's work was one of historical fiction, written almost two centuries after the events it imagined. Students can easily understand that the book is fiction because the specific people and events its described did not actually exist. They may need some help, however, in understanding that Hawthorne's Puritan world might differ from the real Puritans' world, or in understanding that Hawthorne's fictional enterprise was deeply imbued with mid-19th-century sensibilities and preoccupations. A 17th-century Puritan would never have written a book like it.

Contemporary Americans often picture the War for Independence as a straightforward struggle between American patriots and the British crown over the political independence of the colonies. The reality is far more complex: the colonists did not represent a homogeneous bloc, and in some senses the conflict resembled a civil war over political sovereignty in the colonies. Like all civil wars, it extracted a toll on the civilian population, many of whom who found themselves displaced and their lives disrupted by the military and political struggle being played out in North America.

Not every inhabitant of the colonies in 1776 supported the Declaration of Independence and the political break from the English crown. It is impossible to know precisely how many supporters the Patriot forces enjoyed (especially when announcing one’s allegiance was a potentially risky move), but modern historians estimate that, at most, the Patriots enjoyed a bare majority of popular support—that is, no more than half the residents of the colonies supported the cause of independence. Between one-sixth and one-fifth of the residents of the colonies remained loyal to the British crown; the remainder of the population did their best to avoid an open declaration of their sympathies, since “fence-sitting” was often the safest political and practical course.

Fully fifteen to twenty percent of the residents of the North American colonies retained their allegiance to the crown during the conflict. These loyalists presented some serious challenges to the Patriot forces mounting the War for Independence, already strained by the demands of fighting the world’s most powerful military with scarce resources and an embryonic government. Loyalists threatened to provide information or material support to British forces, and the stakes involved in the struggle—in the eyes of the Crown, after all, the Patriots advocating treason in their push for independence—led the Patriots to deal with Loyalist elements harshly at points in the struggle. Desperate to deter loyalists from overtly supporting British forces, Patriots imposed loyalty oaths on colonists suspected of British sympathies. Other Loyalists had their land confiscated; by war’s end, the hostilities had forced some 60,000 Loyalists to leave their homes in the thirteen colonies and relocate to England or to other parts of the empire.

The 1994 PBS film Mary Silliman’s War does an excellent job of demonstrating many of the tensions the War for Independence created in local communities, and the ways in which civilians caught between two warring armies attempted to continue their lives against a backdrop of conflict and civil war. The film is based on the true story of Mary Silliman, whose husband Selleck actively prosecuted Loyalists for treason as the state’s attorney for Connecticut. After winning a death sentence for two Fairfield men, their relatives kidnap Selleck and threaten to hang him if the convicted Loyalists ascend to the gallows. In charting Mary’s efforts to secure her husband’s release, the film vividly portrays the often insoluble dilemmas faced by civilians during what remained (until the 1970s) America’s longest war.