A Joshua King Ingalls update

Last week, a colleague provided me with copies of Josiah Warren’s articles “To the Friends of the Social System,” which appeared in the Western Tiller, and that put me back into bibliographic mode, since the Warren/equitable commerce bibliography has been hovering somewhere just short of publishable for a long time now—and those essays filled a major hole in my research. I should be able to say more about the content of those articles, and the status of the bibliography, later in the week. But diving back into the Warren project naturally also means reopening my on again, off again work on Joshua King Ingalls, whose work appeared in many of the same periodicals.

Indeed, Ingalls has been in the back of my mind a lot lately. The “black and red feminism” project, which received a warm reception at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair (where I sold enough copies of the pilot pamphlet to pay for a little bit of research travel) and at the SCRAP reuse-craft fair I tabled this last weekend, is going to take me back into the 19th century American women’s press, where I’ve found work by Ingalls in the past. And a previously scarce Ingalls title, Periodical Business Crises, has recently appeared online. He was a long-lived, prolific contributor to a wide range of radical publications, so the chances of finding “new” material is always there, provided you look carefully and far-and-wide. We know, in fact, that there is at least one periodical that he published, The Landmark, which is out there somewhere, but pretty well unaccounted for in any detail in existing histories.

It turns out that there was also another periodical, The Journal of Progress, which Ingalls helped to edit, and to which he contributed the following articles:

  • Joshua King Ingalls, “The Power of Right,” The Journal of Progress, I, 2 (May 7, 1853), 20-21.
  • Joshua King Ingalls, “Indestructibility of Right,” The Journal of Progress, I, 3 (May 14 1853), 36-37.
  • Joshua King Ingalls, “Capital and Labor,” The Journal of Progress, I, 6 (June 4, 1853), 85-86.
  • Joshua King Ingalls, “Capital and Labor,” The Journal of Progress, I, 7 (June 11, 1853), 100-101.
  • Joshua King Ingalls, “Man and Property, their Rights and Relations,” The Journal of Progress, I, 9 (June 25, 1853), 132-133.
  • Joshua King Ingalls, “Man and His Rights,” The Journal of Progress, I, 10 (July 2, 1853), 145-147.
  • Joshua King Ingalls, “Property and Its Rights,” The Journal of Progress, I, 11 (July 9, 1853), 1-3.
  • Joshua King Ingalls, “Relations, Existing and Natural, between Man and Property,” I, 11 (July 9, 1853), 3-5.

If some of the titles look familiar, it’s because the last four articles are partially (and in some places substantially) rewritten versions of the essays on rights that appeared in The Spirit of the Age. I’ll have a better idea over the next couple of days just what the nature of the revisions was. In the meantime, here’s a fairly substantial update to the J. K. Ingalls bibliography.

About Shawn P. Wilbur 2707 Articles
Independent scholar, translator and archivist.