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The true history of a legendary American folk hero
In the 1820s, a fellow named Sam Patch grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, working there (when he wasn't drinking) as a mill hand for one of America's new textile companies. Sam made a name for himself one day by jumping seventy feet into the tumultuous waters below Pawtucket Falls. When in 1827 he repeated the stunt in Paterson, New Jersey, another mill town, an even larger audience gathered to cheer on the daredevil they would call the "Jersey Jumper." Inevitably, he went to Niagara Falls, where in 1829 he jumped not once but twice in front of thousands who had paid for a good view.
The distinguished social historian Paul E. Johnson gives this deceptively simple story all its deserved richness, revealing in its characters and social settings a virtual microcosm of Jacksonian America. He also relates the real jumper to the mythic Sam Patch who turned up as a daring moral hero in the works of Hawthorne and Melville, in London plays and pantomimes, and in the spotlight with Davy Crockett-a Sam Patch who became the namesake of Andrew Jackson's favorite horse.
In his shrewd and powerful analysis, Johnson casts new light on aspects of American society that we may have overlooked or underestimated. This is innovative American history at its best.
- Sales Rank: #17208 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Hill and Wang
- Published on: 2004-06-16
- Released on: 2004-06-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .58" w x 5.50" l, .55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Little is known of daredevil Sam Patch (1800-1829). When he was seven, Patch, his mother and siblings were working in the mills of Pawtucket, R.I. The waterfalls that powered the mills attracted working boys like Sam, who'd compete at jumping from the heights. In his mid-20s, Patch moved to Paterson, N.J., where he worked as a skilled mule spinner. In September 1827, he made his first spectacular jump-right over Paterson's Passaic Falls-which he repeated the following July 4, declaring his motto: "Some things can be done as well as others." After Paterson, Patch jumped from a high cataract in Hoboken harbor, over Niagara Falls and over the Genesee Falls in Rochester, N.Y., where on a second leap, probably intoxicated, he died. Johnson, a history professor at the University of South Carolina, warns readers in his preface that Patch is a "front-porch story"-there isn't much of a story, but some interesting meanders. While Johnson makes a strong case that Patch was thumbing his nose at the capitalists with his Passaic Falls jumps, he admits that after Paterson, Patch was more interested in being a "showman and a celebrity" than in knocking anyone's politics, unless staying drunk can be interpreted as a political statement (which Johnson sometimes implies). In the end, Patch's handful of spectacular jumps just can't carry so much political baggage. Still, readers interested in shifting class dynamics in early Pawtucket, Paterson and Rochester may find some suggestive material here. 12 b&w illus.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“Nudged forward by Paul Johnson's consummate storytelling, the reader plunges headlong into the raging torrents of antebellum America, where manly artisans thrash about with scheming capitalists, incorrigible wastrels with prim reformers. Having taken the leap, the reader will find, as did Sam Patch, that you cannot go back. This is a wonderful, clever book.” ―Mark C. Carnes, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History, Barnard College, Columbia University
“With this little masterpiece, Paul Johnson proves yet again that he is one of the greatest artists currently writing history anywhere. Scholar, stylist, and intellectual daredevil, Johnson brings to life a forlorn and intrepid American hero--and an entire era in our past--while operating at the highest levels of subtlety, wit, and seriousness. Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper contains the kind of genius one expects from fine literature as well as from fine history. It is stunning.” ―Sean Wilentz, Princeton University
“On Friday, November 13, 1829, a cheering crowd watched a drunken factory hand named Sam Patch step bravely off the top of Genesee Falls at Rochester, New York--and vanish into legend. In this compact masterpiece of historical detective work, Paul E. Johnson manages both to bring this unlikely early American hero back to vivid life, and to say a good many fresh and provocative things about Jacksonian America, the industrial revolution and the cult of celebrity.” ―Geoffrey C. Ward, author of A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin D. Roosevelt
From the Inside Flap
"On Friday, November 13, 1829, a cheering crowd watched a drunken factory hand named Sam Patch step bravely off the top of Genesee Falls at Rochester, New York—and vanish into legend. In this compact masterpiece of historical detective work, Paul Johnson manages both to bring this unlikely early American hero back to vivid life, and to say a good many fresh and provocative things about Jacksonian America, the industrial revolution and the cult of celebrity." —Geoffrey C. Ward, author of A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin D. Roosevelt
"With this little masterpiece, Paul Johnson proves yet again that he is one of the greatest artists currently writing history anywhere. Scholar, stylist, and intellectual daredevil, Johnson brings to life a forlorn and intrepid American hero—and an entire era in our past—while operating at the highest levels of subtlety, wit, and seriousness. Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper contains the kind of genius one expects from fine literature as well as from fine history. It is stunning." —Sean Wilentz, Princeton University
"Nudged forward by Paul Johnson's consummate storytelling, the reader plunges headlong into the raging torrents of antebellum America, where manly artisans thrash about with scheming capitalists, incorrigible wastrels with prim reformers. Having taken the leap, the reader will find, as Sam Patch did, that you cannot go back. This is a wonderful, clever book." —Mark C. Carnes, Barnard College, Columbia University
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Jumping into Jacksonian Democracy
By Rob Hardy
If you have never heard of Sam Patch, it is because you are not living in the nineteenth century. Sam Patch was America's first celebrity daredevil, someone who made his fortune and his fame by spectacularly endangering his life, jumping from waterfalls. Paul E. Johnson, in _Sam Patch, The Famous Jumper (Hill and Wang), has not exactly brought Patch back to life. As Johnson explains, people like Patch did not have linear careers that lent their lives to being told as stories; they had episodes, not biographies. Patch only lived thirty years, and jumped professionally only for the last two of those, but he did have a wonderful career, and even some meaning within American history and sociology. Johnson has, though Patch's story, examined some details of Jacksonian America, industrialization, philosophies of art, and aspects of fame from self-endangerment and self-promotion rather than self-improvement and civic involvement. Patch was, after all, a lout and a drunkard, but it must mean something that he achieved such a level of fame that his feats could be cited by Melville, Hawthorne and Poe. Even Andrew Jackson's favorite steed was named Sam Patch.
Sam was around seven years old when he took up work in a mill; families in the early eighteenth century were being drawn to mill towns since mothers and children could easily get work. He was good at the work, and fiercely independent in the craft of "mule spinner". The independence manifested itself in his jumping as well. He learned the craft of jumping as other boys did, but when he moved to another mill town, his jumping acquired a social and political aspect that endeared him to the populace. He jumped to spite a rising industrialist in Paterson, New Jersey, and then in support of his own class when there was a dispute over how the town should celebrate the Fourth of July, and jumped again during the first labor walkout. People loved the jumps, and newspapers reported them. Patch became a working-class hero. He went on to jump into Niagara Falls twice, and finally in Rochester. On 13 November 1829, he took a plunge into the Genesee Falls, into which he had jumped successfully a week before. He was drunk, and hit the water out of control. It was months before the body was found, but respectable Americans had found a new cause to rail against; one preacher spoke of the "strange and savage curiosity" of the crowds who came to see the jumps, and another told his Sunday school class "... that any of them who had witnessed Patch's last leap would be judged guilty of murder by God."
Sam Patch could have been an emblem against the masses, but it did not work out that way. He became the subject of poetry, comic stories, and stage plays. "What the Sam Patch!" became a common way of swearing. There was a Sam Patch cigar. He has even recently been the subject of a novel. Rochester has welcomed his memory as if it were that of a favorite son, and you can buy souvenirs at Sam's Gift Patch. There are those who insist that any American Dream must be built on hard work, domestic harmony, and sobriety. Johnson's able and well-researched portrait, with its many digressions into aspects of our fledgling democracy, shows a different sort of dream and a new sort of celebrity. Americans, bless their hearts, had from the beginning a delight in one who tweaked the nose of his betters and got fame for lots of wrong reasons.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Character(s) Make America Great
By Marty Howell
Sam Patch was an American original who escaped my attention for forty-eight years. Professor Johnson's study of this mostly forgotten, irreverant showman has piqued this reader's thirst for more of the bold, eccentric and sometimes ambivalent personalities that have shaped this nation in often subtle ways.
Not long after completing the author's chronology of the Patch family's slide from the respectability of the rural New England landholder and the influence of Calvinism, it becomes apparent
that a documented record of just what manner of man Sam Patch really was is not to be had. From the standpoint of social status, Patch was a non-entity, a skilled textile laborer his sole identifying trait; that is, until he made public his hobby.
Just what spurred Patch to leap the Passaic Falls at Paterson,NJ on July 4, 1828, effectively upstarting the elaborate holiday ceremonies planned by one of the city's wealthy and genteel manufacturing elite is uncertain. One effect of the feat was the galvanizing of the local labor force into an awareness of their potential to force reform in mill working conditions. No sooner had Patch had dried himself off when a consortium of mill owners issued an edict altering the daily work schedules of its employees, needlessly disrupting the domestic routines of thousands. Patch then betrays a political motive in answer to management with an encore jump during work hours just one week after the new schedule had taken effect. Patch's exploit was followed by a strike, arbitration and comprimise. The Paterson jumps gave birth to Patch's intriguing motto "Some things can be done as well as others."
The cynical critic questions the depth and genuineness of Patch's social altruism based upon his lack of education, predilection to alcohol, and the complete absence of any concern, stated or implied, other than self-promotion during the remainder of his career. In fact, Patch, at the age of twenty-seven, having worked in the mills for twenty years, resigned his vocation permanently upon departing Paterson shortly after the second jump. After a brief exploit from atop a ship's mast in Hoboken,NJ, Patch emigrated to Niagara Falls for bigger game.
Now an avowed professional jumper, backed by resort developers and sporting gentlemen, Patch thrilled crowds of commoners and elicited enmity from the Whig sophisticates and press. After a few successful performances, the venue shifted to Rochester,NY and Genesee Falls where class distinctions and responses to such behavior were at a premium. After an initial jump, a plan was hatched to erect a platform some forty feet above the millrace which paralleled the falls, raising his leap to an uprecedented one hundred-thirty feet. Unfortunately for our hero, he met his ultimate fate that day in 1829 when, unable to contain his passion for the bottle, he endeavored to jump while in a well-lubricated state, lost his form early in the air, hit the water on his side, and disappeared for four months before his body was hauled from under the ice of the Genesee River some seven miles downstream.
On reconsideration, it is perhaps the case that Patch had an angle along reformist lines. Though unsophisticated in its method, the very inanity of Patch's nonconformist act served as a slap in the face to the righteous, overbred conceit of the upper classes and their proclivity for circumscribing the limits of self-determination for those less fortunate. In appropriating a mere mill-boy's pastime Patch defied the ruling gentry and diletantes of morality to prevent his freedom of expression. Although his jumps lacked the ingenuity, utility or permanence of the engineering marvels which buoyed the emerging industrial revolution, they gave notice that democracy entitles a man to make his mark after his own fashion and, notwithstanding limited means, proof that "Some things can be done as well as others."
Despite the absence of source material Professor Johnson has done a comendable job of resurrecting Patch's story from the confines of legend. Johnson's tedious labor is evidenced by his notes--drawn almost entirely from periodical literature.
While it is not possible to forge an intimate acquaintance with Sam Patch, Johnson has provided the detailed social, political and religious mileau needed to understand his role in history.
Johnson is also to be credited for the modesty of his prose, which makes this book smooth and entertaining.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent biography and social history
By Bomojaz
This is a biography of Sam Patch, the famous jumper from high places into swirling chasms. Yet it's more than a biography; it's also a social history of the times (1820s) and the places where Sam made his daring leaps (Paterson, NJ, Niagara Falls, and Rochester, NY). Sam's early life was spent working in the cotton mills of first, Pawtucket, RI, and then Paterson, NJ. He learned the "art" (Sam's word, and an important one in defining how Patch saw himself) of jumping while a boy performing daredevil stunts in the Blackstone River of Pawtucket. Later, in Paterson, he leaped into the Passaic Falls more as a "rebel-victim" - Timothy Crane had erected a bridge across the falls, which was considered a social good; but when he bought land adjacent to the falls that was popular as a recreational retreat for the working people of Paterson and turned it into a private park for the wealthy, Crane became a villain to the many factory workers of Paterson. Sam timed a number of his jumps there to coincide with events designed to honor Crane, to humiliate him or at least take away some of his thunder. In these instances, Sam Patch was a jumper for Democracy.
After Paterson, Sam leaped off the mast of a sloop anchored off Hoboken, NJ into the Hudson River, which was reported widely in the press, and Sam became a celebrity. Now his leaps would be for fame and fortune. He jumped twice at Niagara Falls to great success, and then went to Rochester to leap the Genesee Falls. His leap was successful, but a second jump on a cold November day proved to be his undoing; his body wasn't found until the following spring.
Then of course, Sam Patch the legend took off. The real Sam Patch was a drunkard and millworker, raised in poverty, who discovered he had a talent for surviving high leaps into dangerous waters, and decided that exploiting this talent brought a big improvement to his otherwise futile existence. (It's the classic American story: think of all the ballplayers, actors, singers, etc. who saw even the worst of times in their chosen endeavors as better than "going back" to the mines, or the mills, or the empty windswept towns on the bleak prairie.) But for the decade or two after his death Sam was transformed into a gentleman's son who overcame timidity and learned to face danger and be "a man." Then, of course, even this made-up image of Sam disappeared from the scene - until 1945 when folklorist Richard Dorson rediscovered him and grouped him with such legendary characters as Davy Crocket and Mike Fink.
Johnson does a superb job in rescuing Patch from the annals of folklore and presenting him as a real historical figure. This is not an easy task since very little in the historical record is known about Sam, and much of that is contradictory. He devotes much space to what life in the cotton mills was like, how Niagara Falls was perceived in the American imagination at the time, and what the young and bustling cities of Paterson and Rochester were going through when Sam visited them. Johnson is an interesting writer - detailed and learned, but not dry and scholarly. It's a fascinating book. Highly recommended.
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