Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper

Sam Patch is the protagonist of Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper, with the structure of the book closely following the circuit of his famous waterfall jumps. A contemporary of Patch’s described him as “slight, but well made […] and of a temperament as indicated by his dark countenance, rather inclining to melancholy and too fond of drink” (122). He is characterized by his insistence that waterfall jumping is an art and his posthumous legacy as a strawman for Whigs and everyman for Democrats.

Although men like Timothy Crane and Colonel William Leete Stone attributed Patch’s jumps to suicidal depression or reckless stupidity, Patch repeatedly insisted that his jumps were intended to prove that “some things can be done as well as others” (66). In an interview after his first public leap at Passaic Falls, Patch told a reporter that leaping waterfalls “is nothing more than an art which I have knowledge of and courage to perform” (55) and which he had “practiced from my youth” (18). Patch wore the “parade uniform of the Paterson Association of Spinners” when he jumped (55). This suggests that Patch explicitly compares the art of waterfall jumping to his job as a boss spinner.

As a boss spinner, Patch “was the master of a machine that his employers did not fully understand […] and he demanded respect from lowlier workers and from the owners themselves” (54). Patch believed that waterfall jumping, like spinning, was “a truly traditional art, one that required knowledge and years of practice” (55). Although Patch clearly saw himself as an artist, Whig writers and politicians evoked his name as a stand-in for uneducated rustics. Democrat writers and politicians used him as an everyman in their attempts to bring in new voters from the working class.

Mayo Greenleaf Patch, known by his middle name Greenleaf, was the father of Sam Patch. He is depicted as a “treacherous” and “calculated” man who manipulated the people around him in order to secure his financial position. He is characterized by his turbulent financial history and shrewd manipulation of the patriarchy into which he was born. Johnson uses Greenleaf Patch’s story as an example of the type of economic change that brought many 19th-century Americans “out of the family economy and into the labor market” (18).

Throughout his life, Greenleaf Patch went from poverty to landed wealth and back. Johnson’s description of Greenleaf’s life highlights this financial turbulence. In a world where “property was inherited and where kinfolk were essential social and economic assets” (8), Greenleaf “entered adulthood alone and without visible resources” (8). As a result of his family’s poverty, Greenleaf left home for Reading, Massachusetts, where he met and married Abigail McIntire. Johnson describes his relationship with Abigail as a “calculated” maneuver to take advantage of “the McIntires and their land” (8).

Regardless of his feelings, their marriage did enrich Greenleaf: The couple received a home and workshop on Abigail’s father’s land as a wedding present, immediately endowing him “with family connections and economic independence” (10). Johnson’s review of historical documents shows that Reading residents considered Greenleaf “a trusted neighbor who ran an orderly house” (12). After his father-in-law’s death, Greenleaf alienated himself from the McIntire family and ultimately lost his home and business. As a result of Greenleaf’s “bad luck and moral failings” (12), his wife and children, including Sam Patch, were forced to travel the mill towns of Paterson to find work.

Timothy Crane was a builder and sawmill owner who built a private park on the north bank of Passaic Falls in Paterson, New Jersey in 1827, when Sam Patch was also active in Paterson. Although Crane’s supporters considered him “an enterprising, successful man” (47), his management of the park, known as the Forest Garden, “aroused the sustained fury of his neighbors” (48). Crane was determined to improve Passaic Falls with, in his words, “very great embellishments, from the hand of ART” (43). In Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper, Crane is also characterized by his opposition to the working class in general and Sam Patch in particular.

Johnson argues that Crane saw Forest Garden as an improvement project. Although Crane acknowledged that “nature has done more for this spot of earth, than perhaps any other of its size, to render it beautiful and interesting to the visitor,” he nevertheless sought to “embellish” it with the amenities of modern culture, such as “gravel walkways [and] imported bushes and trees” (43). Crane’s dedication to these “improvements” reflects his belief that human-built structures improve natural landscapes. The Forest Garden “catered to respectable women and their male escorts, and it pointedly excluded the working-class men” who made up most of Paterson (51). Therefore, it was almost immediately unpopular with locals.

Johnson frames Patch’s first famous jump in Paterson as a deliberate attempt to “spoil” the opening of Crane’s new, tolled bridge to the Forest Garden. Johnson identifies the conflict between Paterson residents like Patch and industrialists like Crane as part of “the contest over recreational space in industrializing America” (50). Timothy Crane’s Forest Garden reflects the 19th-century desire to conquer and tame nature and the working classes at the same time.

Colonel William Leete Stone was a newspaper owner and editor who visited Niagara Falls to observe the scenery and write about Sam Patch in 1829. Stone is described as “a country boy who had made good in New York City” (79) and dedicated his life to “sensibility and taste” (80). In Niagara, Crane sought out a sublime experience in nature while simultaneously dismissing Patch as an uneducated rustic. Like Timothy Crane, Stone is characterized by his devotion to aesthetics and taste and by his opposition to Patch and the rowdier residents of the Niagara area.

Stone belonged to the wealthy upper classes of the New York City elite. In the 19th century, this was a social group in which “aesthetic taste […] was deemed the principal sign of one’s inner worth” (80). In the 1820s, Stone and his circle “began to cultivate an appreciation of natural beauty” as a response to increasing industrialization (80). Stone was one of many wealthy people who traveled to Niagara in the years after the construction of the Erie Canal in order to “live for a few days or weeks in perfect beauty—an experience that gave them profound and authentic pleasure” (80). Johnson argues that Crane sought out an experience in Niagara “that he had learned to call sublime” (82). His use of the word “learned” suggests that Crane was intentionally trying to shape an aesthetic identity. This identity was shaped in opposition to men like Sam Patch, who he associated with the Jacksonian Democrats who “were upending the founders’ republic and replacing it with a noisy, plebian democracy” (92). In Niagara, Crane wrote a mocking celebration of Sam Patch in the character of Hiram Doolittle Jr., an uneducated Yankee stereotype. Johnson frames Crane’s aesthetic identity as the antithesis of Patch’s physicality.