Paul Revere’s Iconography

The April 1774 issue of Isaiah Thomas’s Royal American Magazine included this portrait of local politician Samuel Adams engraved by Paul Revere. The full print can be viewed at the American Antiquarian Society website.

Revere wasn’t the most gifted artist in this form, but we have to give him credit for working the iconography. Starting on the left we have Liberty with a Phrygian cap on a staff trampling “Laws to Enslave America.” At top is the figure of Fame blowing a trumpet.

Below Fame is Adams drawn inexpertly but recognizably from the portrait by John Singleton Copley, in an elegant and modern Chippendale frame. At the bottom is the Magna Charta of British rights.

On the right things get really busy. I think the female figure is Britannia, embodiment of traditional British power. She bears the implements of Athena, including a helmet, spear, and shield with the face of Medusa. Britannia has caught a grenadier of His Majesty’s 29th Regiment of Foot (the principal unit involved in the Boston Massacre) as he’s trying to torment a rattlesnake, symbol of America.

The month before, Thomas had published Revere’s companion portrait of John Hancock in the same sort of frame with Fame above. In that image Liberty subdued the rattlesnake-grabbing grenadier with the help of the British lion, and on the left stood a bearded knight in full armor. Honestly I don’t know what he was supposed to be.

Visiting Stone Structures of the Northeast

Earlier this month I posted a couple of times about the milestones in and around Boston, and proposed that someone (else) compile a complete map of them.

In a comment, James Gage reported that his mother, Mary Gage, is at work on a database of milestones all over Massachusetts, and would welcome additions, particularly west of Springfield.

The Gages maintain the Stone Structures website, devoted to all sorts of ways people pile and stand up stone: milestones, gravestones, root cellars, walls, arches, &c. They offer forms for documenting structures, and folks can email them with new reports and questions. The Gages also make their research and photography available through Powwow River Books.

For example, the image above shows the Sherborn town pound, originally built to confine loose animals and preserved as a vestige of the rural past. Another once-common stone building was a root cellar, as the site explains:

Root Cellars have been used since the 18th century to store turnips, carrots, parsnips, cabbage, potatoes, and other crops through the cold winter months. These crops were used for human consumption but more importantly to feed dairy cows, beef cattle, and sheep. The vegetables provided critical vitamins and other nutrition necessary to keep up milk production, fatten cattle, and improve the live birth rate of sheep in the early spring. By the mid-1800’s, root cellars became a means to store crops destined for the markets until mid-winter or later when much higher prices could be commanded. Root cellars became largely obsolete with the introduction of modern refrigeration and switch to feeding livestock with corn and other grains along with silage stored in silos.

James Gage has authored Root Cellars in America, a photographic study of the form.

I was a little wary when I saw that Powwow River Books publishes a couple of titles on “America’s Stonehenge,” the New Hampshire tourist attraction that has all sorts of myths associated with it. For example, in the mid-1900s marine biologist Barry Fell claimed that markings at the site were ancient Eurasian languages, the sort of wild idea that academic archeologists wearily refute.

But Mary Gage’s guides to the site seem more level-headed, arguing that it was used by Native Americans over many centuries until around 1600. Farmers of European descent in the 1700s and 1800s used the stones for practical, prosaic purposes. Only in the early 1900s was it promoted as “Mystery Hill,” a site to visit—perhaps a reflection (like Stone Structures itself) of growing American nostalgia for a rural past vanishing beneath industrialization and mechanized farming techniques.

Who Defected from the Continental Army in 1775?

Continuing British Lt. Col. Stephen Kemble’s diary entries mentioning deserters from the Continental lines during the siege of Boston from yesterday—

9 September: “One of the Virginia Rifle Men (an Irish Man) Deserted from the Enemy this morning by pretending to come out to take a Shot at our Sentries, but when at a proper Distance ran into our Post.”

10 September: “This Evening a French Lad Enlisted in the Rhode Island Troops Deserted to us; he set out from their Advanced Posts on a Run; had two Shot fired at him, but escaped. These frequent Desertions have occasioned the Rebel General to remove the Rifle Men to Cambridge.”

23 September: “A Rifle Man came in this Evening, from their Flech under the two Trees, on the Point, says the Minute Men of the Country is called in; supposed with some design, but does not know what; he’s an English Man born in the West of England, near Plymouth.”

24 September: “Nothing extraordinary, but a Deserter from the Rebels came in to General [William] Howe’s whose character appears to be doubtful.”

Out of twelve deserters Kemble described, seven were said to be born in the British Isles and one was “a French Lad.” The British officer described eight either as from Pennsylvania or Virginia or as riflemen, and all the rifle companies were from the Middle Colonies. Those companies, recruited on the frontiers, probably had a larger than average share of recent immigrants to North America. But they were just a small part of the army outside Boston.

The Americans who deserted to the British in those months were disproportionately soldiers far from home. Many had direct ties to the other side of the Atlantic. None was identified by Kemble as a native of New England. (Of course, homesick New Englanders probably deserted in the other direction, heading back to the farms they knew.)

Given those factors, it’s not surprising that the Continental riflemen would defect in larger numbers than troops from the region, but that came as a surprise to their commanders. When the rifle companies started to arrive on the siege lines in the summer of 1775, Gen. George Washington and others were delighted, thinking that they’d be the army’s decisive edge.

Instead, the riflemen turned out to be a disproportionate source of trouble. On top of these desertions, in early September a Pennsylvania company mutinied, and soldiers’ diaries mention lesser infractions. At first the newcomers were exempted from regular duties, which probably caused friction. In mid-September Washington reversed that rule, and at the end of the year stopped designating rifle companies differently from regular infantry.

Less easy to explain was why two of Kemble’s twelve deserters said they were named Johnson. Was that a common name, or a common alias?

Lt. Col. Kemble’s Catalogue of Deserters

I went through Lt. Col. Stephen Kemble’s diary in 1775 for mentions of Continental soldiers deserting to the royal forces. As Gen. Thomas Gage’s Deputy-Adjutant-General, he was in a good position to hear about them all. I found twelve men deserting to the Crown forces.

Here are Kemble’s entries, as published by the New-York Historical Society.

25 July: “A Deserter came in from the Virginia Rifle Men on Winter Hill, says he’s a Virginian born, that he was in a Vessel from Virginia to Salem, Coming out of which place about the 15th. June, She was taken by a King’s Ship, some of the Men Pressed, the rest got on Shore at Marblehead, where he was obliged to enter into the Rebel Service, his backwardness to which was the cause of his being confined; but, being released, he entered into their Artillery, having learnt a little of Gunnery, but finding his Situation more disagreeable every day, and having no liberty of speech, but what was most pleasing to the Rebels way of thinking. He deserted from them on the Night of the 24th. and got off by swimming down the Mystic River to General [William] Howe’s Post [in Charlestown].”

2 August: “On the Night of Tuesday the 1st. a Deserter from the Enemy, a Scotchman, came into General Howe’s.”

17 August: “One Turner, a Rifle Man, taken or Surrendered himself the 14th. suspected of an Intention to Desert the 16th. and Confined in the Provosts Guard.”

22 August: “Last Night a Deserter from the Virginia Rifle Men came in from Roxborough, by name Johnson, an Irish Man.”

2 September: “At 10 o’Clock a Rifle Man came in from them, by Name ———, Servant to Capt. [Michael] Cresap, Captain of the Company, they come from about Fort Pitt and are near 130 strong. He says the Rebels talk of starving us out, but is a Stupid Lad, an Englishman born in Oxfordshire.”

7 September: “A Rebel Artillery Serjeant, by name Johnson, Deserted this Evening from Roxborough, an Irish Man, a smart, sensible fellow.”

8 September: “This morning, very early, another Rifle Man came in, also an Active looking fellow, during the [day] nothing extraordinary; a few shots from our Lines returned by the Rebels. This Evening, about dusk, another Rifle Man came in, a fine fellow, an Irishman, from Kings County, says that General [Charles] Lee is reported to be in Arrest; that a report has been spread that one of their Deserters, a Rifle Man, had been Hanged, which checked the spirit of their People coming over to us.”

TOMORROW: But still the desertions continued.

The Drama of the Lady Shore

This week the Daily Mail reported on the auction of a diary by Thomas Millard, carpenter aboard the British ship Lady (Jane) Shore during a fateful voyage in 1797.

I find conflicting details of that trip on the web, but all sources agree on the basics. The main cargo was a shipload of women: one source says sixty-six and another implies there were close to a hundred. Those women had been convicted of crimes in Britain and sentenced to exile in the new penal colony of New South Wales. There were also some male captives, including prisoners from Britain’s ongoing war with France.

Soldiers and marines were guarding those prisoners. However, as the Annual Register told its readers in 1798:

The Lady Shore had on board, besides convicts, eighty soldiers of the New South Wales corps, amongst whom were German, French, and condemned criminals, reprieved on condition of serving, during life, at Botany-Bay.

In other words, the guards weren’t any more happy to be there than the convicts being transported.

On 1 August, the Lady Shore was “four days sail from Rio de Janeiro.” Millard wrote in his diary:

We ware Alarm’d by the firing of Musketts on the deck and to my Great Surpris the Capt falling down the steeridge ladder which woke me out of my Sleep.

Some of the guards and French prisoners had revolted in the name of the republic. In taking over the ship they had chopped off the head of the chief mate and shot Capt. James Willcocks, who soon died.

One detailed account of this mutiny came from young purser John Black’s version, published in 1798. Millard recorded another side of Black, writing that he had tried to commit suicide rather than surrender. Another version of events is in chapter 18 of J. G. Semple Lisle’s memoir; that book has a lot to say about how the author tried to warn his superiors that there would be a mutiny.

Two of the French prisoners had been pilot and helmsman on their own warship, so they quickly steered for the South American territories of France’s ally, Spain. To stave off a countermutiny, on 14 August the ship’s new commanders put the British officers and a handful of soldiers and convicts still loyal to the Crown, along with their wives and children, into a longboat. Those twenty-nine people received food and navigation equipment, and were close enough to shore to land the next afternoon. But Millard the carpenter was too useful to go free.

The Lady Shore sailed into Montevideo, Uruguay, by the end of the month. At first the Spanish authorities locked them all up as mutineers, but the French ambassador argued that his countrymen had captured the ship according to the rules of war. Most of the women went to work for the local gentry. As for the carpenter, the Daily Mail says:

Millard was allowed out to work for a shipwright during the day but returned to prison at night.

He was more fortunate than most; in the summer of 1799 he was allowed to sail in the Liberty to America, where he settled in New Jersey, took a wife and raised two children.

The 320-page journal was auctioned after being put up for sale by Millard’s American descendants.

Gavin Pascoe at South Sea Miscellany writes:

If there was any piratical event crying out for dramatisation in fiction or film it’s this one…

Seriously, this story has female convicts! In tropical locations! With violence! Why isn’t it already on cable?

Viewing Washington’s Letter to the Touro Synagogue

In 1790, President George Washington wrote a letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, which was an early expression of the federal government’s commitment to religious neutrality. The text of that letter appears back here.

Two upcoming events pertain to that letter. First, on 13 June, Ted Widmer, head of the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, will speak about “A Test Case for America: Washington, Longfellow and the Jewish Community at Newport” at the First Parish Church in Cambridge. The touchstones of this talk will be Washington’s letter and Henry W. Longfellow’s poem on the Jewish cemetery at Newport.

Widmer speaks as part of the Cambridge Forum series of lectures and talks. His lecture is free, co-sponsored by the Friends of the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters in Cambridge, The Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, and fellow organizations. It is scheduled to begin at 7:00.

Second, starting on 4 July Washington’s original letter will be the center of an exhibit called “To Bigotry No Sanction” at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. Paul Berger at the Jewish Daily Forward reported the background of this display:

As the Forward reported in a series of articles and editorials last year, Washington’s letter spent decades on display in the Klutznick Museum at B’nai B’rith International’s flagship headquarters in Washington. In 2002, when financial pressures forced B’nai B’rith to relocate to smaller offices, the majority of its collection, including the letter, was put into storage. Many scholars did not know where the letter was until the Forward revealed it to be housed in an art storage facility in suburban Maryland.

Several institutions, including the NMAJH and the Library of Congress, have tried for years to pry the letter away. But B’nai B’rith claimed that its hands were tied by the letter’s legal owner, the Morris Morgenstern Foundation, which would not allow the letter to be moved.

The Forward’s website catalogues its reporting and editorials on the matter that resulted in the July display.

Looking at Lexington in 1775

I’m abashed that I’m only now calling attention to Mary Babson Fuhrer’s article “The Revolutionary Worlds of Lexington and Concord Compared” in the March 2012 New England Quarterly. Its jumping-off point is Robert Gross’s The Minutemen and Their World, a highly respected study of Concord published in 1976.

Fuhrer writes:

Gross’s study, grounded as it is in local evidence, has withstood the test of time with few revisions. However, Concord had a partner in rebellion on 19 April. As the oft-repeated phrase “Lexington and Concord” suggests, the two towns have been fused in popular memory, and so the findings of The Minutemen and Their World have generally been taken to apply to Lexington as well.

But Lexington was no Concord. Unlike those in their neighboring town, the citizens of Lexington did not drag their feet on the way to revolution but made the most of every opportunity to assert and defend the hard-won inheritance of their ancestors. Moreover, Lexington was not rent by factions and troubled by the local animosities that so disturbed the peace in Concord. Supported by a community that had longed challenged British authority and fomented rebellion, the militia on Lexington’s common stood in, and for, unity.

Surprisingly long overdue, an analysis of Lexington’s social, demographic, political, religious, and ideological characteristics as against Concord’s sheds light on the communities’ radically different responses to imperial crisis, whereas identifying their commonalities reveals the shared motivations that prompted the inhabitants of both towns, when finally pressed, to take up arms against the forces of their king.

This article is available for downloading as a P.D.F. file. What’s more, Fuhrer and Gross discuss their findings and interpretations in a podcast discussion with William Fowler.

(The photo above, courtesy of Bill Coughlin and the Historical Marker Database, shows Lexington’s recreated colonial belfry.)

Gen. Gage Slept Here

As part of the London government’s program to punish Boston for the Tea Party, Gen. Thomas Gage used his prerogative as new governor in the spring of 1774 to move the Massachusetts General Court to Salem.

The legislature protested, but it was protesting everything those days. The body met in Salem for less than two weeks, from 7 to 17 June. As soon as Gage heard that the lower house was voting to send delegates to the First Continental Congress, he declared the session adjourned.

Samuel Adams as Clerk had arranged to have the chamber locked, so Secretary Thomas Flucker had to read the governor’s proclamation to the closed doors until the legislators had finished their business. (There’s a little more intrigue to that story.)

Gage remained in Salem through the nearly the end of August. Last month, Boston 1775 reader P. J. Curran asked me where exactly he lived during that time. I did some digging, and found that the governor borrowed a mansion built in Danvers around 1754 for Robert “King” Hooper (1709-1790). That Loyalist merchant dominated the trade in Essex County’s fishing catch. His Danvers estate became known as “the Lindens.”

The good news is that the Lindens house has largely been preserved. The bad news, at least for folks touring Massachusetts, is that it was preserved by being dismantled and reassembled on Kalorama Road in Washington, D.C., in 1935. Here’s a Washington Post article about the house, and here’s a Library of Congress collection of photographs taken shortly before the move. In addition, one room’s paneling went to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

Samuel Bowen Brings Soy to America

Blogger’s new behind-the-scenes design shows me the number of hits on each Boston 1775 posting, and the most viewed of last month by far was “Benjamin Franklin Discovers Tofu for America.” Its numbers are edging up to 1,000 views, far ahead of the next most popular.

Unfortunately, that posting contained an error. I repeated the Franklin tercentenary website’s claim that Benjamin Franklin’s 1770 letter to John Bartram was the first record of someone supplying soy beans to America. After all, Franklin invented everything else in colonial America, right?

Bill Shurtleff of the Soy Info Center alerted me in a comment that another man had brought soy beans to America five years before. So this posting is about that forgotten pioneer, Samuel Bowen of Georgia.

Theodore Hymowitz and J.R. Harlan described in this paper how in 1758 Bowen embarked from London on the large East India Company ship Pitt. He transfered to a smaller ship, the Success, which dared to visit two Chinese ports besides Canton. The interpreter and supercargo on the Success, an old East India hand named James Flint, ended up in Chinese jails for three years.

Bowen later stated that he was also imprisoned in China for years and transported around the interior of the country. He reappeared in London in late 1763. The next year, Bowen was in Georgia. In 1765 he married Jane Spencer, daughter of the Collector of Customs at Savannah. He bought land east of that port and slaves to work it. Bowen called his slave-labor plantation “Greenwich,” perhaps reflecting his background as an English sailor.

Even before setting up his own farm, Bowen asked the colony’s Surveyor-General, Henry Yonge, to plant some “pease or vetch” he had brought from China. In December 1766 letter to London, Yonge wrote that these new seeds

did yield three crops: and had the frost kept off one week longer, I should have had a fourth crop, which is a very extraordinary increase, and must, if attended to and be of great utility and advantage to this and his Majesty’s other southern American provinces.

Yonge therefore gets credit for “planting America’s first soy beans.”

The next year Bowen reported in more detail on the seeds and how Chinese people used them: to “prepare an excellent kind of vermicelli”; “for salad, and also boiled like greens, or stewed in soup”; as sprouts; as “an excellent antiscorbutic”; and as “most excellent fodder for your cattle.” He doesn’t appear to have described tofu.

Bowen made a trip back to London in 1766, receiving a gold medal from the Society of Arts, Manufacturers, and Commerce; an audience with the Earl of Dartmouth; and 200 guineas from George III. The next year the British government granted him a patent for his “new invented method of preparing and making sago, vermicelli and soy from plants growing in America, to be equal in goodness to those made in the East lndies.”

Bowen sent “six bottles of Soy and six pounds of powdered Sago” to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, which noted the goods in January 1769 and made Bowen a member in April. Franklin had, of course, co-founded that organization and kept in touch. It’s therefore possible that he heard about soy from America before he sent his own samples to Bartram. When Franklin investigated soy seeds in 1770, he definitely talked with James Flint, who remained friendly with Bowen; the Georgian named a son after Flint and welcomed him to the Greenwich plantation in 1775.

Bowen was back in London again on 30 Dec 1777 when he died. His widow Jane ended up hosting some officers from the fleet of Adm. Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector, comte d’Estaing, in 1779. According to this article by Edward Pinkowski, she oversaw the burial of Gen. Casimir Pulaski “between her mansion and the river.” Jane Bowen died in 1782, leaving her four children 26 slaves, 17 cows and oxen, and many items involved in the production of sago powder.

Crowd-sourcing Mr. Bentham and Mr. Madison

Yesterday I used the word “crowd-sourcing,” which seems to be a growing buzzword in digital humanities—especially when funding for traditional, in-house transcription projects is in jeopardy.

One example related to the eighteenth century is Transcribe Bentham, centered at the University College London. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the only utilitarian philosopher whose taxidermied body I’ve seen, left thousands of pages of handwritten drafts, notes, and other material. This digital initiative invited anyone to sign up and translate that material into digital texts. The “About Us” page introduces the process:

Access the Transcription Desk, where you can create a user account which will give you transcribing privileges. You can then select a manuscript to view and transcribe, save your work, and return to view your own contributions. You can interact with other users by creating a social profile and by sharing ideas in the discussion forum. There is a quickstart guide to using the tool and detailed guidelines on how to transcribe the manuscripts. You can contact us for general advice, help with a specific problem or for further information.

Currently there are over 1,600 registered transcribers. Given that the project says elsewhere that the collective has completed 3,300 manuscripts, that doesn’t suggest high productivity from every registrant. But of course the project just needs enough.

Here in North America, Montpelier recently announced ConText’s crowd-sourcing project to create an extensive commentary on James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention. That site says:

The Notes of Debates in ConText addresses a real need in our constitutional scholarship. There is currently no systematic, accessible commentary on the Notes that explains the details and context of each decision made at the convention, while also describing the subsequent (and ongoing) debates over constitutional meaning that have stemmed from those decisions. With this site, we are providing the most up-to-date analysis of the Framers’ debates by some of the country’s leading academic voices.

This project too offers registered users a chance to add their own comments. Discussions about the meaning and current importance of the convention’s decisions could conceivably get heated.