A quick reminder on historically themed walking tours this holiday weekend!
On the 28th of August, 1768, the Boston Post-Boy published a curious advertisement:
Caesar a Negro Fellow noted in Town by having no Legs, is supposed to be strolling about the Country: If he can be brought to the Printer for One Dollar, besides necessary Expences, it shall be paid.
I've complained about how many authors have painted a distorted picture of Samuel Adams, squeezing a Puritan gentleman politician of the late 1700s into the mold of a radical street organizer of the late 1800s. At least Buckeye Hamburger at the Daily Kos noticed.
On the other hand, the flame-broiled one repeats the "Adams was the most radical" picture, with approval instead of regret:
Among the Founding Fathers, none of whom was a slouch when it came to patriotic passion, Adams was undoubtedly the most radical, uncompromising and inflammatory.I'd score that as one out of three. Adams was indeed loath to compromise on his principles and his conviction that the London ministry and its appointees were up to no good.
In comparison with other contemporaries such as Samuel Adams,…Warren’s style is more personal, bombastic, and emotional. He uses the personal pronoun "I" more frequently and an inordinate number of imperative sentences charging the people to action. . . . A striking contrast to Warren’s style is that of Samuel Adams, whose writings are easily identifiable by his extraordinary number of long sentences and extensive use of the semicolon.Long sentences and semicolons are hardly the hallmark of incendiary prose.
We never can treat good and patriotic rulers with too great reverence. But it is certain that men totally abandoned to wickedness can never merit our regard, be their stations ever so high.Gov. Francis Bernard and Chief Justice/Lt.-Gov. Thomas Hutchinson tried to get a grand jury to indict Warren for libel, but the locals refused.
"If such men are by God appointed, The Devil may be the Lord's anointed."
A TRUE PATRIOT.
But how reliable is the book's information? Espionage is always a murky subject, and years after a war it gets even harder to separate truth from wishful claims. Stories of spying are a great way to burnish a family's or town's patriotic standing. They can explain an ancestor who didn't seem to do much. They can even explain an ancestor who acted like a Loyalist. "Grandpa John? Oh, he only said all those things to maintain his cover. He was in contact with General Washington all along." And if there's no documentation for those family claims—well, that shows how deep under cover Grandpa and Grandma had to be!
In that vein, I don't believe the legend of John Honeyman and the Battle of Trenton (pp. 46-9)—and neither does David H. Fischer. The stories of Alexander Bryan (75), "Old Mom" Rinker (101-2), and Lydia Darragh (102-8) seem to be equally free of contemporaneous documentation. They may be true, they may be fiction, they may be a mix of the two. Allen notes that family lore is the source for most of those tales but tells them anyway, alongside stories with strong contemporaneous documentation. I suspect this actually puts the period spy stories at a disadvantage since they're full of murk, false starts, and loose ends—like real life. The grandmothers' tales, on the other hand, were polished by years of telling and retelling before they were captured on paper. (See this posting for a link to my paper on grandmothers' tales.)
Since I concentrate my research on the start of the Revolution in New England, I know rather little about what went on down in New York, Philadelphia, and other tropical climes. I can't say whether Allen's portrayal of Tallmadge, Darragh, John Andre, Nathan Hale, Hercules Mulligan, and other figures is reasonably accurate. But it makes me nervous when I see the book is mistaken on some Boston details:
As of Monday afternoon, the Old South Meeting-House Association still had slots left on its 2006 "Climb the 1729 Old South Steeple" tour on Friday, 30 June, and Saturday, 1 July, starting at 11:00. The price is $12. The organization's website says:
Climb the tower and get a bird's eye view of downtown crossing. Take advantage of this rare opportunity to see an original piece of colonial Boston that few have seen this close in over 270 years. Led by an Old South staff member, the tour will cover the original weather vane, the belfry, the steeple [&] the 1766 tower clock.For more information and how to reserve a space, look for the event in this listing.
all foren[oon]. in So. Chh. Steeple transcrib’g &c. MSS.Stiles had come to the Boston area from Newport for the Harvard commencement, and of course no travel is complete without research.
Aft. in the Lib’y of venerable Rich’d., Increase, Cott., & now Sam’l Mathers.
Christopher Seider was the young boy killed by Customs employee Ebenezer Richardson after a political demonstration turned violent on 22 Feb 1770, eleven days before the Boston Massacre. Back in this posting, I described what recent research has found about Christopher’s family. This post assembles the evidence about the boy's life in Boston.
In its 26 Feb 1770 report on the shooting, the Boston Evening-Post described Christopher as “a boy about eleven years of age, who lived with Madam Apthorp.” Grizzell Apthorp was a very wealthy widow who owned a mansion on Tremont Street. She was a stalwart of King’s Chapel, the upper-class Anglican church, where we can still see a marble memorial panel honoring her husband. Ordinary widows were called “Widow [Surname]”; rich widows got the “Madam” honorific.
Christopher’s parents didn’t live with Madam Apthorp, however. They lived, according to the same newspaper article, “in Frog Lane, opposite to Liberty Tree.” That street is now called Boylston, and it borders the Common on the south, leading to the Public Garden.
What was Christopher doing in the Apthorp house? Probably working. Bostonians of the late 1700s wouldn’t have called him a “servant,” though. They reserved that term for enslaved workers, whom the tax rolls labeled “servants for life.” All sources agree that the Seider family was poor, so "living with Madam Apthorp" probably meant his parents had sent him there to earn his keep.
Even with his job, it seems likely that Christopher was also getting lessons of some sort. On 13 Apr 1772, Samuel Adams wrote to James Warren of Plymouth about how he would look after a young servant:
I am much obligd for your Care in procurng for me a Boy. I shall be ready to receive him about the middle of next month and shall take the best care of him that shall be in my Power till he is 14 years old, perfecting him in his reading and teaching him to write and cypher if capable of it under my own Tuition for I cannot spare him the time to attend School. Will strictly regard his Morals and at the End of time I will if his parents shall desire it, seek a good place for him to learn such a Trade as he and they shall chuse.
several heroic pieces found in his pocket, particularly Wolfe’s Summit of human glory, give reason to think he had a martial genius and would have made a clever man.I haven’t found any broadside titled “Wolfe’s Summit of human glory,” but this passage implies it was a martial poem about Gen. James Wolfe and the Battle of Quebec. And that was only one of “several heroic pieces” Christopher was carrying around with him when he died.
Prof. Peter Charles Hoffer wrote Past Imperfect as a response to the historiographical scandals of 2002, two of which touched on the Revolutionary period. Hoffer also wrote in response to a division he sees between academic historians and the reading public. But are those two things related?
The first part of Hoffer's book traces broad trends in writing American history over the past century and more. I doubt anyone would argue that, compared to sixty years ago, academic historians now pay more attention to women and less, relatively, to men. More attention to our society's racial and ethnic minorities and less to dominant northern European groups. More attention to the poor and less to the rich. More attention to social movements and less to military movements. More attention to economic trends and less to individual politicians. More attention to history's "losers" and neglected and less to already celebrated heroes. And under today's egalitarian values it would be hard to complain that those changes are a bad thing, though some people try. Most who criticize the trends say simply that they've gone too far.
Be that as it may, the second part of Past Imperfect looks at the four scandals that caught more attention from the public than the average university-press history book—indeed, more than any successful university-press history book. Those controversies are:
The Historic Cambridge Collaborative tells me it will offer free walking tours of the city on the first two Saturdays of July, the 1st and the 8th, rain or shine.
Tours with Revolutionary-era themes include "Tales of Old Cambridge," "Harvard, Cambridge & the American Revolution," "The British Loyalists of Brattle Street," "Harvard Square's Colonial Churches," and, particularly for lactose-tolerant kids, "Have You Milked the Cow Today?" Other tours cover early settlement, literary life in the 1800s, and the architecture of MIT.
You can download a guide to the offerings, including when and where each tour begins, from the Cambridge Historical Commission website.
On Thursday, as the New York Times and Hartford Courant and other papers reported, antique map dealer E. Forbes Smiley III pleaded guilty to stealing a very rare map, "an object of cultural heritage," from Beinecke Library at Yale. In court he also admitted to stealing 96 other maps from a total of seven libraries.
I've done research at Beinecke, and back in college I had a part-time job in another Yale library, so I've followed this case with some curiosity. Nonetheless, I was surprised to read that the Assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted it is the older brother of one of my college roommates. (Smiley himself is not a Yalie; he just sounds like he should be, which no doubt helped with his dealings.)
But the carefree days of the past are gone. As the Map Room blog picked up, the Courant has reported on backroom firings at Yale. And since Smiley was arrested in June 2005, I've found several archives have made their security procedures for researchers more strict—an understandable phenomenon I call "the Smiley effect."
Only one archive I've visited before and after the thefts didn't seem to have visibly tighter security: the Boston Public Library Rare Books Department. Ironically, the Times says, "Boston Public Library suffered the biggest loss in terms of numbers. It lost 34 maps to Mr. Smiley, according to an accounting by federal prosecutors." And two of those are in the "unrecoverable" category. But, like a lot of public libraries, the BPL may already be stretching its funding and staff as far as they can go. All the more reason to support our public institutions.
Smiley's cobwebsite continues to offer maps. In fact, it's useful for a bigger view of the exquisite Henry Pelham map of besieged Boston I mentioned yesterday. But who knows where that came from?
Today I resume my ranting on the flaws in A Travel Guide to Colonial Boston, started this date and continued that one. But this is my last posting on this topic. I promise.
You may notice that I’ve not mentioned the author’s name. Having worked in publishing, I’m not sure the author bears full responsibility for the book's problems. This Travel Guide is being sold as part of a series, and the author doesn't hold the copyright. So in the spirit of "work for hire" contracts, I assign all responsibility to Lucent Books.
(Full disclosure: Lucent is an imprint of Thomson-Gale, and I wrote a couple of entries in the Thomson-Gale encyclopedia Americans at War. ["Highly recommended."—Choice] I'd urge everyone to rush out and buy many copies for my sake, except for those darn "work for hire" contracts. So consider buying this $415 four-volume specialized reference work purely for your enjoyment. End of commercial.)
It's easy to suspect that this book was originally supposed to present a pre-Revolutionary perspective, but then was shifted to 1793 without enough time for the author to redo all his research. That would make sense of the title: this Guide to Colonial Boston is actually set in the post-colonial Federal period. A lot of the facts are accurate before the war, but not after:
The large elm on the northwest corner of the Common [in Cambridge] is the very place where George Washington mustered his troops prior to marching into Boston a few days before the Battle of Bunker Hill.The Battle of Bunker Hill was 17 June 1775. Washington arrived in Cambridge on 3 July 1775. He marched his troops into Boston in March 1776. (Furthermore, The “Washington elm” did not stand in the northwest corner of the Common, and Cambridge acknowledges there’s no evidence predating the 1830s that Washington mustered troops under it.)
Here's more about Samuel Adams and how he's been caricatured by some historians (as I've discussed previously here and here). This passage is from John Richard Alden's General Gage in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948). Page 110, if you want to be nosy about it.
In May, 1764, under the inspiration of Samuel Adams, a Boston town meeting—Boston town meetings meant nothing but trouble from that time until firing began at Lexington—boldly set forth the doctrine "no taxation without representation." "If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal representative where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable status of tributary slaves?" Of course, Samuel Adams, having dissipated a rather considerable property inherited from his father, could not suffer very much directly because of taxes levied by Parliament. But the public business had become his private business, and he was contending for a principle. Like most men contending solely for a principle he was distinctly a "trouble-maker."
An attempt made by the general shortly after the dismissal of the legislature to bribe Samuel Adams was not merely a failure—it was a farce. Adams received the offer of pelf, made through one Colonel Fenton, with outraged virtue and lofty indignation.(This statement is based only on a story that Adams's daughter told in 1818, but Alden was happy to accept it for his argument.) So Adams was a "trouble-maker" because he refused bribes and otherwise couldn't be swayed from his guiding principle. A principled proponent of self-government—how troubling!
In May, 1764, with Samuel Adams presiding, a Boston town meeting—Boston town meetings consistently opposed new Crown revenue laws up to the first shots at Lexington—boldly set forth the doctrine "no taxation without representation." "If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal representative where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable status of tributary slaves?" Adams did not promote this doctrine for personal gain since he had little wealth left from his father's estate and had chosen politics instead of private business. He was contending for a principle. Like most people driven by principle, Adams meant trouble for governors who expected bribes and positions to sway ambitious men to their side.I'm not saying that paragraph paints a complete image of Samuel Adams. But it doesn't put me on the side of taxation without representation and bribery.
Some folks are proposing that "Juneteenth," the 19th of June, go onto the calendar of Massachusetts commemorations. The Boston Globe reported on a petition to that effect, and columnist Derrick Jackson wrote about why Americans should remember Juneteenth—though without speaking to the question of an official holiday. Among bloggers, Derek at Third Decade, Chris at LeftCenterLeft, and the Great White Snark offer their opinions.
So of course I must have mine. To start with, it doesn't matter whether governments or businesses can afford a new holiday closing so close to Memorial Day. The national proposal is to observe Juneteenth as a "holiday observance similar to Flag Day," the Globe reports, and nobody gets Flag Day off. Juneteenth is "observed on the third Saturday of the month" in a few states, so nobody's getting that day off, either. This push is about adding an "official" label to the commemoration, and thus giving it some level of official respect.
Juneteenth is pegged to the arrival of the news of emancipation in the region of Galveston, Texas. That was a big deal—in Texas. It makes sense for the Texas government to observe the anniversary (as "Emancipation Day"). But should Juneteenth become the focus of the whole country's remembrance of slavery? What about the day Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation (22 September), the day it took effect (1 January, already a federal holiday), or the day the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified (18 December)? Those dates were more significant for the USA as a whole. Focusing on Juneteenth is a synecdoche, one small piece standing for the whole because people are tickled by the day's quaint name and story.
But what about that story? The popular narrative of Juneteenth is that the enslaved people around Galveston didn't know of emancipation until the U.S. army arrived. Ignorant black people needing rescue by white authorities—is that really the picture of emancipation to emphasize? As Derrick Jackson notes, news of the legal end of slavery had reached Texas, and some enslaved people were freeing themselves already. The problem was recalcitrant slave owners who continued to keep workers in bondage. The U.S. army didn't bring news of the Thirteenth Amendment to the slaves; it brought news to slaveholders that it was going to enforce that amendment.
All that said, what would be the harm of adding Juneteenth to Massachusetts's list of holidays? I fear it might distract us from understanding our own state's history. Not because Juneteenth would come only two days after Bunker Hill Day. But because Massachusetts has its own history of slavery and emancipation that predates the Thirteenth Amendment, and in fact predates that Constitution. A Massachusetts holiday about slavery and its end should include that history.
The movement that ended slavery in Massachusetts started before the Revolution, as the pre-war lobbying of Newton Prince shows. In a period of republican ideology based on the idea of natural liberty, many people came to believe that slavery was untenable. Emancipation was thus directly related to the state struggle for political liberty. While Prince Hall and other blacks continued to petition the legislature, abolitionist lawyers like Theodore Sedgwick looked for test cases to move through the judicial branch. The case of Brom and Mum Bett in 1780 established a county-court precedent based on the new Massachusetts constitution's statement of natural equality. Then the Quock Walker case made that precedent stick statewide. Chief Justice William Cushing told a Superior Court jury in April 1783:
...whatever sentiments have formerly prevailed in this particular or slid in upon us by the example of others, a different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind, and to that natural, innate desire of Liberty, with which Heaven (without regard to color, complexion, or shape of noses—features) has inspired all the human race. And upon this ground our Constitution of Government, by which the people of this Commonwealth have solemnly bound themselves, sets out with declaring that all men are born free and equal—and that every subject is entitled to liberty, and to have it guarded by the laws, as well as life and property—and in short is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves. This being the case, I think the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature...The jury returned a verdict in favor of Walker, declaring that his former owner had been wrong to try to recapture him and had therefore committed assault on a free man.
By a misconstruction of our State Constitution, which declares all men by nature free and equal, a number of citizens have been deprived of property formerly acquired under the protection of law.Winthrop also wrote that in 1795 African-Americans "have the same privileges of schooling, as other people"—which they did not, at least in Boston. And that "they can neither elect or be elected to offices of government"—which was indeed the custom, but not the law.
Last Wednesday, 14 June, the anti-marriage political group MassResistance issued a press release claiming that the first-grade son of one of its members had been mobbed on a school playground for political reasons. According to the Lexington Minuteman article:
A press release was issued by MassResistance...alleging J**** P*****, the first-grade son of David and Tonia P*****, was assaulted on the playground at the Estabrook Elementary School on May 17, the two-year anniversary of gay marriage in Massachusetts. . . . Brian Camenker, of MassResistance, alleged J**** P***** was approached during recess, taken to a corner of the play area and assaulted by eight to 10 students.(I'm using the eighteenth-century convention of substituting asterisks for letters in a name in order to preserve a bit of the child's privacy.)
School officials, citing interviews with the children involved, said the fight actually started over where students would sit in the cafeteria and then spilled onto the playground. The student, the 7-year-old son of David P*****, who filed a federal lawsuit in April over the teaching of homosexuality in school, was punched several times during the May 17 fight.Notably, P***** was interviewed by the Globe and didn't quibble with any of the officials' factual statements—not that his son had fought one child instead of "eight to ten," not that the other child has written an apology, not the play date in the last month. So I think Ash's judgment that "Some adults are exploiting these children" is valid. It's a pity that one of those adults seems to be J****'s own parent.
"These were two first-graders having a child squabble on a playground," said Superintendent Paul Ash. "Some adults are exploiting these children for political purposes."
...
According to school officials' investigation, one child hit P*****'s son two to four times during recess, and the boy fell to his knees as about five students watched. A teacher's aide intervened. The child who hit P*****'s son was sent to the assistant principal's office, where he wrote an apology and was denied recess for two days. P*****'s son and the boy have since had a play date, Ash said.
The next day, when the 14th regiment mustered in King-Street at roll-call, a fray happened between two little boys about seven years old, which as usual, gathered a crowd of people; several persons going through the streets were oblig’d, in order to avoid the crowd, to pass near the right wing of the regiment; for which daring intrusion, four persons were successively struck down by a drummer.—The battle of the boys naturally produced a larger one between some of the inhabitants, when a constable interposed, to preserve the peace;—one of the soldiers gave the word to hustle the constable, immediately upon which, his hat and wig were struck off, and he was toss’d about from one to another, though he repeatedly cried, he was a King’s officer in the execution of his duty; some of the inhabitants being near, he called to them for their assistance, and many of them readily went to his assistance; upon which the battle became general, and the constable, and his assistants were much abus’d by the soldiers. Some of the officers of the regiment were present, none of whom offered to interpose, till Col. Dalrymple came into the street, and being told what had happened, he quickly dispers’d the soldiers. . . . It is said one of his Majesty’s Council perceiving the first reforming magistrate in the street when the quarrel began, went to him, and motioned his taking proper measures to quell it; but the reformer only shruged his shoulders, and went off."King-Street" is modern State Street. "Constable" might mean the Constable of the Watch who supervised the town watchmen ("his assistants"?) for that part of the town. But this incident seems to have occurred in the daytime, and watches patrolled at night. The Constable's cry that "he was a King’s officer" implies that he was one of the town's elected Constables, who usually delivered writs, and the "assistants" were simply men who came to help him.
I'm back from a busy and stimulating two days at the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, followed by a brief visit to Historic Deerfield, where I studied the engraved powder horns on display at the Flynt Center of Early New England Life.
At the Dublin Seminar, one of the talks I had the honor of introducing was Raoul N. Smith of Northeastern describing how he's used some common software programs to analyze the diaries of the Rev. Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847). With Word, Excel, and other common programs, Raoul can do in an afternoon what would once have taken many months of graduate student time. For instance, any word-processing program can help a scholar count how many times a diarist uses particular words each year to see if they change over time.
There are some practical obstacles to applying those techniques more widely, but they're hardly insurmountable:
to determine the rate at which the authors/speakers use positive or negative emotion words, self-references, big words, or words that refer to sex, eating, or religion.Those measurements, in turn, are said to offer psychologists better understanding of the writers' mental and emotional states. (I see in this article from Northeastern's alumni magazine that Raoul has also worked on another kind of intersection of psychology and computers.)
Anna Green Winslow arrived in Boston in 1770. She was ten years old and had grown up in Nova Scotia, where her father was the commissary-general, or supplier for the British army. Anna's parents had sent her to Boston, their home town, for advanced schooling that Halifax couldn't yet supply: mostly sewing, dancing, and handwriting, as well as informal lessons in the deportment department. Anna lived with her aunt; attended the Old South Meeting and the religious lecture on Thursday mornings; and developed her social skills in the company of other young ladies.
While she was away from home, Anna wrote a series of decreasingly detailed letters to her mother. (In other words, the letters get shorter and less frequent as time goes on.) It looks to me like she copied those letters into a little bound sheaf of paper, which was transcribed and published by Alice Morse Earle in 1894 as Diary of Anna Green Winslow. Diaries must have been more marketable than collections of letters. That book is still in print today, but the current cover from Applewood Books has completely anachronistic artwork. That's why I'm showing the previous cover, which shows Anna herself.
One of Anna's big concerns was dressing well. Her laments may sound familiar to parents, as in this letter from 30 Nov 1771:
The black Hatt I gratefully receive as your present, but if Captain Jarvise had arrived here with it about the time he sail’d from this place for Cumberland it would have been of more service to me, for I have been oblig’d to borrow. I wore Miss Griswold's Bonnet on my journey to Portsmouth, & my cousin Sallys Hatt ever since I came home, & now I am to leave off my black ribbins tomorrow, & am to put onmy red cloak and black hatt—I hope aunt wont let me wear the black hatt with the red Dominie—for the people will ask me what I have got to sell as I go along street if I do, or, how the folk at New guinie do? Dear mamma, you dont know the fation here—I beg to look like other folk. You dont know what a stir would be made in sudbury street, were I to make my appearance there in my red Dominie & black Hatt.
I took a walk with cousin Sally to see the good folks in Sudbury Street, & found them all well. I had my HEDDUS roll on, aunt Storer says it ought to be made less, Aunt Deming said it ought not to be made at all. It makes my head itch, & ach, & burn like anything Mamma. This famous roll is not made wholly of a red Cow Tail, but is a mixture of that, & horsehair (very course) & a little human hair of the yellow hue, that I supposed was taken out of the back part of an old wig. But D——— made it (our head) all carded together and twisted up. When it first came home, aunt put it on, & my new cap on it, she then took up her apron & mesur’d me, & from the roots of my hair on my forehead to the top of my notions, I mesur’d above an inch longer than I did downwards from the roots of my hair to the end of my chin. Nothing renders a young person more amiable than virtue & modesty without the help of fals hair, red Cow Tail, or D——— (the barber).The most excellent history website Common-Place features an article by Kate Haulman on the hairstyles of the time, with Anna as one of the best sources.
The British and New England armies fought the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June 1775. It was the first pitched battle of the Revolutionary War, and one of the most costly battles for the British army of the entire era. The Massachusetts Historical Society has an excellent online exhibit about the battle. Here are memories of the event from two teenaged boys who were caught up in it on opposite sides.
Martin Hunter was a seventeen-year-old lieutenant in the 52nd Regiment of the British army. Eventually he became a general and governor of New Brunswick. His memories of Bunker Hill are oddly concerned with trivia:
It was very extraordinary, but that morning, the 17th of June, the 52nd had received an entire new set of arms, and were trying them at marks, when they received orders to march immediately to Charlestown Ferry, with one day’s provisions. I may add that, singularly enough, not a firelock had missed fire. . . .
Charlestown was set on fire by the frigate, and before the action began the whole town was burning. In the steeple of the church several people were seen, while the body of the church was in one entire blaze; and as they could not get out, they were seen from Boston to fall with the steeple. . . .
Lord Rawdon, now Earl of Moira, was lieutenant in the 5th Regiment; he received a shot through a cat-skin cap that he wore that day, and desired me to observe how narrowly he had escaped being shot through the head. He, with many other officers, asked me to go and look for a surgeon for Major Williams; but though a very young soldier, I had sense enough to know that I was much safer close under the works than I could be at a few yards from it, as the enemy could not depress their arms sufficiently to do any execution to those that were close under, and to have gone to the rear to look for a surgeon would have been almost certain death; indeed, the Major was not a very great favourite, as he had obliged me to sell a pony that I had bought for seven and sixpence.
Not finding my mother at Mr. Grout’s on my return, and not knowing where she was, I let the horse go, saddle and all, to find the way home the best way it could, and down I went toward the battle to find the company I belonged to, then about two miles off. As I passed through Cambridge common I saw a number of wounded who had been brought from the field of conflict. Everywhere the greatest terror and confusion seemed to prevail, and as I ran along the road leading to Bunker Hill it was filled with chairs and wagons, bearing the wounded and dead, while groups of men were employed in assisting others, not badly injured, to walk. Never having beheld such a sight before, I felt very much frightened, and would have given the world if I had not enlisted as a soldier; I could positively feel my hair stand on end. Just as I came near the place a negro man, wounded in the back of his neck, passed me and, his collar being open and he not having anything on except his shirt and trousers, I saw the wound quite plainly and the blood running down his back. I asked him if it hurt much as he did not seem to mind it; he said no, that he was only going to get a plaster put on it, and meant to return. You cannot conceive what encouragement this immediately gave me; I began to feel brave and like a soldier from that moment, and fear never troubled me afterward during the whole war.
As good luck would have it I found the company I belonged to stationed on the road in sight of the battle, with two field-pieces, it having been joined to the regiment commanded by Colonel John Patterson from Stockbridge (afterward the 12th Massachusetts Bay Regiment). Captain Bliss, who had given me permission the day before to go a distance of more than twenty miles, was astonished to see me, and asked how I had returned so soon. I thought I might as well appear brave as not and make myself to be thought so by others, so I told him that, having heard cannon firing early in the morning, I considered it my duty to be with my fellow-soldiers; that I had run all the way back for that purpose, and intended to go into the battle to find them—which I certainly would have done, as big a coward as I was on setting out to join my companions. The cause of my fears then was, I presume, being alone, for I cannot say that I ever felt so afterward. I was much caressed by my captain and the company, who regarded me as a brave little fellow.
As my father lived near the ferry [in Boston] my brothers were at this point and, the river being only half a mile wide, saw the whole battle. The wounded were brought over in the boats belonging to the men-of-war, and they were obliged to bail the blood out of them like water, while those very boats carried back fresh troops who stood ready to reinforce those engaged. My brother told me that the wives, or women, of the British soldiers were at the ferry encouraging them, saying: "D—— the Yankee rebels, my brave British boys; give it to them!" He observed likewise that the soldiers looked as pale as death when they got into the boats, for they could plainly see their brother redcoats mowed down like grass by the Yankees, the whole scene being directly before their eyes. The Americans were all chiefly marksmen, and loading their guns each with a ball and five buck-shot, reserved their fire until the English troops had advanced within pistol range. I was told the enemy fell like grass when mowed, and while they were filling up their ranks to advance again the Yankees gave them the second fire with the same effect, two or three dropping at the discharge or every gun.
Today I take off for the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, a conference in oh-so-historic Deerfield, Massachusetts. This year's theme, New England diaries, has brought out an exceptionally large number of papers, so the presentations run from Friday night to Sunday morning with nary a break. I'm introducing speakers on Saturday morning at an hour when I normally avoid human contact, both for my sake and that of the humans. So we'll see how that goes.
Since a blog named "Boston 1775" shouldn't miss the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, I'm posting an early entry for Saturday.
In the meantime, I invite fans of New England history to peruse the volumes of Dublin Seminar papers on various topics. Each collection has in-depth material on daily life in the region. I'm particularly fond of The Worlds of Children, from the 2002 conference, since it includes my report on drawings of Pope Night in Boston in 1767. (See part of the better-known but less detailed woodcut of that raucous holiday here.)
Rhea Becker's blog offers a tour guide's perspective on Old North Church, along with a nice image from an early-20th-century postcard of the landmark.
Ironically, for a church that's now so associated with the Patriot side of the Revolution, in 1775 Old North—known as "Christ Church"—was Anglican and therefore leaned Loyalist. Paul Revere arranged for a signal to be sent from its steeple to Charlestown not because it was his family church but because that was the tallest tower in the North End. Shortly after the two lanterns appeared in the steeple, British military authorities came to take them down.
In another irony, the anonymous rider who got the message that British troops were moving across the Charles (going "by sea," in the rhyming phrase of H. W. Longfellow) didn't carry that warning very far west. He was most likely stopped by British mounted officers as he headed from Charlestown to Cambridge.
Revere, taking it upon himself to carry the same message a while later, spotted trouble ahead and veered off the Cambridge road northwest toward Medford. He thus got through as far as Lexington before other officers captured him. All of which shows that the British military authorities were well aware of the danger posed by a Patriot alarm system, and tried hard to stifle it. They just didn't succeed.
Yesterday the Boston Globe ran a review of Infamous Scribblers, by Fox News host Eric Burns, headlined "An objective and colorful look at Colonial news bias." Obviously reviewer Matthew Price had not read my grumpy comments about Burns's mistaken caricature of Samuel Adams. Which will only make me more grumpy.
Price says, quoting Burns as he goes:
Adams was a loose cannon: In 1765, he incited a rabble, "all of them jacked up on ninety-proof Sam Adams prose," to ransack the house of Thomas Hutchinson, an important Crown official.I'm certain that Burns's book offers no example of that "ninety-proof Sam Adams prose" from before the Hutchinson house attack on 26 Aug 1765. That's because, as the Google Book page images from The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume 1, show, there's only one piece of political prose attributed to Samuel Adams before that date, and it was the standard product of a town committee. The only way such documents count as "ninety-proof" is that they could be soporific.
If Adams was a man bent on destruction, it is curious that he was so critical of the politically-arousing Stamp Act attack on the home of royal governor Thomas Hutchinson, which he called an action of "a truly mobbish Nature."Apparently the term "Objective" is now going the way of "Fair" and "Balanced."
In May, the Boston Globe ran a story about Boston’s earthquake risk, with a map showing the areas that face the greatest danger. The color thumbnail image in this post shows a detail from that map with the contrasts turned up: the pink parts of the land are more vulnerable to quakes, the cream parts more stable.
The Globe’s map of relatively safe areas makes a rather close match to a map of Boston and its neighbors in 1775. The grayscale thumbnail image is a detail from one such map, now for sale at Historic Urban Plans.
The Boston of the Revolution (at center, and marked "Downtown" in the new map) is relatively safe from quake danger, along with Dorchester Heights, central Charlestown, and several harbor islands and former islands—i.e., all the dry ground of the 1700s. But much of today’s city was built on landfill in the 1800s: the Back Bay, what we now call the South End, Logan Airport, and land connecting some islands to the mainland. (Modern Boston also includes several parts that were separate towns in the 1700s: Dorchester, Charlestown, Roxbury, &c.)
Most of the areas that glow pink on the modern quake-danger map were underwater at high tide back in 1775. Only one narrow strip of land then connected Boston to the mainland. That's why the settlers of 1630 chose the area as their base, and why the British army could hold off a much larger provincial force for eleven months in 1775-76—a peninsula is easy to defend. Now Boston's old “Neck” has thickened like a wrestler’s so we can easily commute into the expanded city. But one day the original confines of the town may still offer the best refuge.
Today I return to fussing about A Travel Guide to Colonial Boston, the schoolbook with so many misleading statements about Boston in the eighteenth century. (See part 1 for fuss over one page.) The idea behind this book is a clever one that the publisher, Lucent Books, has used before: a modern-style travel guide to a significant site in history. In this case, the book establishes its temporal base in 1793, allowing the text to discuss the “recent” events of the Revolution and daily life in the early U.S. of A.
Speaking to modern readers requires some understandable compromises. For instance, there’s a page about Paul Revere’s house. In 1793 that was an undistinguished building owned by a man of middling importance. Visitors would have been more eager to see Gov. John Hancock’s handsome stone mansion on Beacon Hill. But the Hancock house was pulled down in 1863, and the only replica is in Ticonderoga, New York—a nice town, but not the same. Revere’s house, on the other hand, survives in Boston's North End and welcomes school groups.
But even within the conceit of a travel guide, the book presents misleading information and missed opportunities. Page 42 offers a sidebar on “Elegant Dining.” But upper-class restaurants weren’t part of American culture for another few decades. If you were rich enough to afford a fancy dinner, you ordered your servants to cook one. The publisher’s art staff chose to decorate this page with a modern picture of a lobster. One reason they couldn’t find any period pictures of lobsters is that no one considered them an elegant food until the 1840s. They are, after all, giant bugs that feed on sludge. That sidebar is an example of projecting our modern lifestyle—what today's travel guides discuss—onto the past.
More importantly, the book misses what travelers of 1793 would really need to know about New England: traveling from one town to another on a Sunday was illegal unless you had a very good reason, such as a medical emergency. You didn’t have to spend the Christian Sabbath day in worship, but you couldn’t work or travel instead. That rule tripped up Thomas Jefferson and James Madison when they visited in 1791, and Lafayette when he visited in 1824. Even some locals chafed at this restriction. The fourth Josiah Quincy told a story about deacons gathering in Andover to block the roads of a Sunday. A man rode past them, saying, “I assure you that my mother is lying dead in Boston.” After getting beyond reach, he added, “for the last twenty years!”
This Travel Guide discusses the Puritans who founded Boston, but misses those Sabbath rules and other ways in which Puritan traditions still governed the town in 1793. An example of how wrong this can be appears on pages 80 and 82:
For highbrow guests, the city’s theaters offer Shakespeare and the classical music of Europe’s great composers. . . . One of the more brutal blood sports favored by a large segment of Boston’s population is cockfighting.What else do we learn in school about Puritans, people? That they wanted to suppress theater and blood sports in Jacobean England. Puritans settled Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire to create a society without theaters or cockfighting (or bearbaiting, also mentioned on page 80). In the mid-1700s Boston’s selectmen were still keeping Punch & Judy puppeteers out of town.
I spent most of Monday at the "Outside the Textbook" conference on public history, sponsored by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. It was a very pleasant, if occasionally inaudible, day. Gretchen Adams of the Paul Revere House said extraordinarily nice things about a teacher's workshop I led there in 2002. Wendy Lement of Theatre Espresso shared some of her plans for an educational drama about the Boston Massacre, "Uprising on King Street." And I enjoyed meeting and hearing from many other people who are researching, writing, and presenting Massachusetts history of periods other than the Revolution.
Graciously postponing lunch, Charles Swift gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of his City Record and Boston News-Letter blog, one inspiration for finally getting this one off the ground. Charles's entry for Monday discusses the original name for the area of Boston renamed "Mount Vernon" and "Louisburg Square" by real-estate developers after the Revolution. In the pre-war period it was called "Mount Whoredom" because of the high concentration of prostitutes working in that somewhat-out-of-the-way area to the west of the Common.
Interestingly, the "Whoredom" name appears most often in documents and on maps created by British army officers, such as the map of Boston by Lt Thomas Page that Charles's blog highlights. Other examples:
Lt Frederick Mackenzie, diary, 25 Apr 1775: "Our Regiment Encamped his morning on Fort Hill; The 4th Regiment on Mount Whoredom, and the Marines on the Common."The British officers clearly savored the irony of the puritanical town having a red-light district. And perhaps some savored the district as well.
Lt John Barker, diary, 26 Apr 1775: “the 1st upon Whoredom Hill.”
Gen. Percy, letter to his clergyman uncle: "Camp on Mount Whoredom, Augt. 12. 1775. . . . A strange Place Dear Dr. to write from to a Clergyman—Yet so it is, My Tent is upon the highest Summit of it.”
Four thousand chosen men who were held in readiness, were to ford have embarked at the mouth of Cambridge River in two divisions; The first under the command of Brig. Genl. Sullivan, the second under Brig. Genl. Greene, the whole to have been commanded by Major General Putnam. The first division was to land at the Powder House and gain possession of Bacon Hill and Mount Horam.Less than two weeks before, when Greene, Putnam, Sullivan, and Gen. Horatio Gates had drawn up this plan for Washington, they had used the label "Mount Whoredom." So the generalissimo knew what the hill's real name was.
On 24 August 1775, the Essex Gazette newspaper, which had relocated from Salem to Cambridge to be closer to the American troops besieging the British military in Boston, reported:
We are informed that the negroes in Boston were lately summoned to meet in Faneuil Hall, for the purpose of choosing out of their body a certain number to be employed in cleaning the streets,—in which meeting Joshua Loring, Esq., presided as moderator. The well-known Caesar Merriam opposed the measure, for which he was committed to prison, and confined until the streets are all cleaned.
In the Boston Globe, Charlie Savage reports on historians' dumbfounded response to the Bush-Cheney administration's misuse of the Federalist Papers to justify unfettered executive-branch power. To whit:
And indeed it does. Particularly striking is the fact that Alexander Hamilton wrote Federalist 69, not James Madison, who was more wary of a strong executive branch and a strong federal government (when he wasn't in charge of them). Even a man called a "monarchist" in the 1790s would fear the position pushed for the last five years by Cheney's former counsel, now chief of staff, David S. Addington.Yet scholars from across the political spectrum question the historical cases Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have made. In an effort to find backing for their view of presidential power, these scholars argue, the administration has quoted selectively, taken passages out of context, and simply ignored what many constitutional scholars say is the Federalist Paper that most squarely addresses the president's wartime powers: Federalist 69.
Richard Epstein, a conservative law professor at the University of Chicago who embraces originalism, said Federalist 69 shows that the administration's legal theory is "just wrong" and called its failure to acknowledge the paper "scandalous."
"How can you not talk about Federalist 69?" he said. "All you have to do is go on Google and put in 'Federalist Papers' and 'commander in chief' and it pops up."
A Travel Guide to Colonial Boston, published by the Lucent Books imprint of the Thomson-Gale Company, is ridiculously full of errors. It’s shot through worse than a British officer walking slowly up Bunker Hill. A few quotations will show what I mean.
In fact, only twelve colonies participated in the First Continental Congress in 1774. Georgia didn’t send a delegate. (Neither did Nova Scotia, which had had Stamp Act protests, or other British colonies in North America—but that’s another story, which we Americans don't dwell on.) Declaring independence was not the objective of that Congress, but a measure adopted after more than a year and a half of developments and debate.
In 1774 representatives of all colonies hurried to Philadelphia to form the Continental Congress with the objective of declaring independence from England.
Boston did not send representatives; Massachusetts did. The province’s representatives were the Adams cousins plus Thomas Cushing and Robert Treat Paine. In the later Congress that declared independence, Elbridge Gerry replaced Cushing. Paul Revere never represented his province, state, or town as a legislator. His only link to the First Continental Congress was that in Sept 1774 he carried messages to Philadelphia and back.
John Adams, his cousin Samuel Adams, and Paul Revere represented Boston.
Gage wasn’t trying to stymie the Continental Congress in Philadelphia; he was responding to the Provincial Congress in Massachusetts. He didn’t order his troops to march to Lexington; that town was simply on the way to Concord. Concord’s center was seventeen miles from Boston, not twenty. (And for the copy editor, there must be either a “to” in front of “march” or no “to” in front of “destroy” to keep the items in that series parallel.)
On April 18, 1775, to counter this act of rebellion, English general Thomas Gage ordered his troops to cross the Charles River, march the remainder of the twenty miles from Boston to the nearby towns of Concord and Lexington, and to destroy hidden caches of ammunition.
Dawes didn’t speak to any local militia during his ride; he went straight to John Hancock and Samuel Adams in Lexington. Revere did spread the word to his militia contacts. But neither of them told officers to send their men “to Concord and Lexington” since they couldn’t say for sure where the British column was headed.
Paul Revere and William Dawes, who got wind of the action, rode throughout the countryside urging the local militia—also known as minutemen because each was ready for war at a minute’s notice—to hurry to Concord and Lexington with loaded muskets.
Newman hung the lanterns before Revere set out from Boston, not at the same time.
At the same time, Robert Newman climbed the steeple at the North Church and suspended two lanterns.
Very few people knew what the two lanterns meant; Revere had arranged that signal specifically for his contacts in Charlestown. The British troops (they weren’t just English) didn’t head up river but crossed the Charles and then marched away from it.
For all who knew this secret code, it warned that the English were advancing up the Charles River.
Gage wasn’t on this expedition himself. The North Bridge in Concord was only fifteen years old. Three companies of British regulars were holding that bridge when the militiamen marched down toward it, trying to cross back into town—not the other way around. And no one at the time referred to British soldiers as “musketeers.”
The minutemen drew the battleline at Concord Bridge. As General Gage and his troops approached the old bridge and ordered the minutemen to stand aside, the militia took aim at the English line of musketeers.
Strong evidence says that at Concord some outnumbered British soldiers fired first on the advancing militia. The Travel Guide author apparently confused that moment with what happened at Lexington, where no one knows who fired first. (In fact, the book never mentions the shooting at Lexington at all, though Americans at the time made more of it.) As for the numbers, the provincials suffered only 50 dead or dying of wounds, with 39 otherwise wounded and 5 missing. The number 272 is the total of British casualties, including 65 killed, 180 wounded, and 24 missing, so those “English” lost only 89 men.
No one knows who fired first, but by the end of the day, 93 patriots lay dead or badly wounded. The English lost 272 men. The War of Independence was on.
From inside the town? No, sieges begin from the outside. The provincial militia companies besieged Boston, trapping the British army.
Raging against the audacious actions of the minutemen, Gage began a siege of Boston.
Right after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the British army encamped on Bunker Hill (the whole prominence was usually called by that name until the early 1800s, when historians started a spitting contest over the name “Breed’s Hill”—but that’s another story). Provincials didn’t try to occupy Charlestown for another two months, until June 16. Technically, Boston was still not a “city,” but a town.
Thousands of minutemen hurried to Boston and occupied Breed and Bunker Hills in Charles Town, immediately across the channel at the north end of the city.
This makes it sound like the Battle of Bunker Hill was entirely an exchange of artillery. The Americans’ cannons were close to negligible, and they inflicted most of the damage with muskets. The exact British casualty figures are documented: 226 dead, 828 wounded. The American figures are more approximate: about 150 dead and 300 wounded.
On June 17, 1775, both armies began an artillery bombardment that killed 230 English and wounded 800. Minuteman losses were half what the English suffered.
Gage’s army won this battle, chased the provincials off the hill, and kept control of Bunker Hill and all of the Charlestown peninsula until March 1776, when Gage’s successor ordered his forces to evacuate.
Badly mauled, Gage’s army broke off the battle and pulled back to the Boston Common where they stayed for the duration of the year.
This blog seems to have developed a small following among local knitters, so I looked for some handwork stories to share. This installment also has more than its share of unabashed gossip.
At the start of the Revolution in 1775, newborn Mary Palmer’s family was near the top of Patriot society. Her paternal grandfather was one of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s leaders: Braintree manufacturer and militia general Joseph Palmer. For a time her father, Joseph Pearse Palmer, was commissary for the provincial troops. After the war, however, the family fell on hard times. They blamed John Hancock for collecting debts when they had sunk all their cash into Continental scrip and a salt-making enterprise, but it’s clear that psychological depression was also involved. Mary later wrote, “my beloved father’s spirits sank, he seemed totally discouraged.”
Her maternal grandparents let Joseph P. Palmer farm some of their land in Framingham for half the crops. Mary recalled how she and her sisters adjusted from town life to farm life in the 1780s:
We learned to spin, borrowing wheels of our good-natured neighbors, who seemed pleased to teach the city ladies their craft. We learned, while we lived there, to spin flax, on a little foot wheel, and wool, tow and cotton, on a large wheel. . . . a plump rosy faced girl whose name was Zerniah Price…taught us how to card wool, cotton and tow, and how to hatchel flax, some of which we raised upon the farm; and my mother would change work with Zerniah’s mother and other women, knitting and sewing for them while they would weave cotton and flax into cloth which we would get dressed into fustian at the mill.
All this time my dairy and spinning wheels were busily attended...by myself, with the assistance of one and at times two girls. Our sheep furnished wool, and we raised flax. I spun all the thread I used for years, whitening some, and coloring some, and some keeping flax color. I hired a girl to spin that I wanted wove, and the tow also, with which we made cloth for sheets and common table linen.Later Mary convinced Royall to buy her a loom for her women to weave on. She also sent some blankets “to have them fulled at the mill and dressed,” but “the clothier…fulled it so much” that she was “sadly disappointed.” The system back in Framingham seemed to work better.
Years ago, Colonial Williamsburg called dibs on the phone number 800-HISTORY and the URL history.org—with the clear implication that it's the wellspring of America's history. That attitude resurfaces in its current marketing and interpretation campaign as “Revolutionary City,” which is all very well except that Williamsburg was never a major city and not, after mid-1765, at the forefront of the Revolution.
Of course, for centuries Boston writers have tried to overlook the fact that Williamsburg was ahead of everyplace else in North America as the site of the first serious public objections to the Stamp Act. And Williamsburg was where Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other notable burgesses convened for the Virginia legislature.
Such friendly (or not so friendly) rivalry between Virginia and Massachusetts is at least two centuries old. I—growing up, living in, and studying Boston—think of it as having the best claim to be “Revolutionary City,” even if it was still legally a town until the 1800s. Yet my mother, who was born in greater Philadelphia, thinks there’s a better claimant than either Williamsburg or Boston. Very odd.
In any event, the Colonial Williamsburg magazine and website now features Dennis Montgomery’s article about the Battle of Lexington and Concord. (Quibbles: The British did not succeed in “digging up a brass cannon at the [Concord] gaol"; that was one place they found iron cannon. The Lt. Mackenzie quoted near the end of the article was named Frederick, not Robert. Otherwise a very good account.) The web page also comes with a description and images of the famous 1775 engravings of the Battle of Lexington and Concord by Ralph Earle and Amos Doolittle.
This week the Stamford Advocate ran a story, since picked up by the AP and other newspapers, about discussions in Greenwich, Connecticut, on whether to return a large mural titled "The Life and Times of General Israel Putnam of Connecticut," by James Daugherty, to a public school now that both painting and building have been refurbished. It will be interesting to see if this story gets any traction, or any spin.
Already some folks at FreeRepublic.com are fulminating about "political correctness," that conveniently selective and short-sighted complaint. Not noted by those champions of telling children all about our nation's history in the same way we supposedly always have are these points:
General Putnam ordered his men to retreat and save themselves as best they could. He also retreated on his horse at full speed, pursued closely by the British horse. He made down a flight of stone steps, the top of which were about sixty rods (I should think) from the meetinghouse. He did not ride down more than fifteen or twenty of them (there being, I think, about one hundred of them in the whole). He then dismounted and led down the horse as fast as possible. I was at the bottom of the steps as soon as he was. He then mounted his horse, told me to make my escape to a swamp not far off, and he rode off.That's from John Dann's collection of notable pension applications called The Revolution Remembered, a fine book.
Joshua Simonds was a Lexington farmer who, though he didn’t actually blow himself up to kill British soldiers on 19 April 1775, told people in later years that he'd been prepared to.
At dawn on that day, the British column marched into Lexington from the east. There were about seventy militiamen drawn up in lines on the Green. Between the British column and the provincial lines stood Lexington’s meeting-house, the town’s only public building of substantial size. The locals therefore also used it as the town schoolhouse and, in April 1775, the town gunpowder repository.
Simonds was in the meeting-house as the troops arrived. We know that because in the wake of the battle a pro-Crown newspaper suggested that someone had fired from that building at the regular troops, and the Rev. William Gordon sought to refute that idea in his “ACCOUNT of the Commencement of Hostilities between Great Britain and America, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay” published in the 7 June 1775 Pennsylvania Gazette. Gordon insisted there were very few men in the meeting-house:
And who do you imagine they were? One Joshua Simonds, who happened to be getting powder there as the troops arrived; besides whom I believe there were not two, if so much as one, for by reason of the position of the meeting house, none would have remained in it thro’ choice, but fools and madmen.Indeed, being in the meeting-house was dangerous—but it was even more dangerous to try to leave. In 1824, John Munroe of Lexington, age 77, gave the town minister, Elias Phinney, a deposition that said:
Caleb Harrington was shot down on attempting to leave the meeting-house, where he and some others had gone, before the British soldiers came up, for the purpose of removing a quantity of powder that was stored there.Joseph Comee was wounded while trying to leave with Harrington. A fourth man, unnamed, hid up in the meeting-house gallery.
I was in charge of the town's stock of ammunition on the eventful morning. The magazine was the upper gallery of the meeting-house, and in the discharge of my duties I was there filling the powder-horns of my comrades when the regulars came into the town.That account echoes the deposition of 72-year-old Ebenezer Munroe on 2 April 1825:
My associate glancing out saw the situation, and said, "We are all surrounded!" He then hid in the opposite gallery.
I then determined to blow up the house and go with it rather than fall into the hands of the enemy. I cocked my gun already loaded, placed the muzzle upon the open cask of powder, and waited for their course to determine their fate and mine as well.
When the British came up in front of the meeting-house, Joshua Simonds was in the upper gallery, an open cask of powder standing near him, and he afterward told me, that he cocked his gun and placed the muzzle of it close to the cask of powder, and determined to “touch it off,” in case the troops had come into the gallery.At that moment, according to the Simonds family account, Lt.-Col. Francis Smith arrived on the Green below and called the British troops back into line. The soldiers who had entered the meeting-house left, and the column marched on to Concord.
Every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.There was no "terrorist campaign" at Lexington, obviously. Simonds didn't plan his attack, and it's not certain that he would have gone through with it. But he did see military forces arriving in territory that he viewed as his own.
It's well worth reading Jeremy A. Stern's reply to a publicity editorial (i.e., he's got a book out, and now finds something to say in an op-ed piece) by Fox news reader Eric Burns on History News Network. Burns or a research assistant had written:Samuel Adams of the Boston Gazette,...takes a back seat to everyone, including Jayson Blair, in terms of ethics. So desperate was Adams for the colonies to become independent from the Crown---either legislatively or militarily, whatever it took---that he wrote stories about British soldiers in Boston molesting women in the streets. It never happened. He wrote stories about British soldiers in Boston assaulting men on the streets. It never happened. He wrote stories that urged violence against British officials charged with collecting taxes, then summoned his henchmen to the Gazette's offices after closing hours and plotted the violence for them. Hang taxman Andrew Oliver in effigy, he told them. Trash his office. Destroy his home. Threaten him with physical harm if he did not resign. His minions did precisely as told.
As Stern points out, Adams was not the proprietor of the Boston Gazette, did not summon minions to an office there, and did not by any documented account issue orders for violence. He did express regret and disapproval about violent demonstrations while arguing that they were a foreseeable consequence of Crown policies. Adams almost certainly did not write the news stories about British soldiers in Boston that Burns refers to. And as for how Burns feels sure those events "never happened," it's unclear. Especially to me, since I spent Friday afternoon reading reports from Boston town watchmen about their confrontations with British military officers, much like those described in the newspapers of the time.
Then, a few days later, Sam Adams wrote an article describing such reprehensible actions without either regret or acknowledgment that he had been their primary cause.
Burns comes from a long line of conservative writers caricaturing Samuel Adams as a troublemaker, apparently because they fear the idea of revolutionary change. Likewise, Harlow G. Unger's biography of John Hancock uses Adams as a foil to present Hancock as a sober, business-minded moderate. (As a businessman Hancock converted a large fortune into a small one, and he played to crowds more than Adams did.) William H. Hallahan's The Day the American Revolution Began, among many shameful errors of facts, goes so far as to say that Adams broke into the governor's house to obtain embarrassing letters. (Those letters were leaked to the American Whigs by sympathetic London officials.)
I wonder whom today's conservatives would prefer to imagine as principal organizer of the early Revolutionary movement. Perhaps an upper-class man who earned a master's degree, tried business, and then sought public office. Who lived relatively simply on his salary and refused bribes. Who was devout, espoused traditional religious values, recruited young activists through church organizations, and yet learned to work with people of some different faiths. Who didn't seek audience adulation or lead street protests, but worked hard in committees, wrote newspaper essays, moderated public meetings, and drafted legislation. Who spoke against disorder and what he saw as public immorality. Who worried about the national government becoming too strong but came around to support the U.S. Constitution because small manufacturers urged its ratification. Who retired from long service in public office without a fortune to sustain him in his last years.
In other words, today's conservatives might prefer Samuel Adams. The real Samuel Adams.
ADDENDUM: More on the distorted portrait of Samuel Adams we've inherited here and here.
Charles Swift of the City Record and Boston News-Letter blog is offering his first walking tour of Beacon Hill this week: Wednesday, 7 June, 6:00-7:30. As you can see from that blog, Swift has a deep knowledge of the city's architectural history over the centuries.
Gary Gregory at Lessons on Liberty offers costumed tours along the Freedom Trail on weekends. He's been doing that for a few years now, and has impressed me with his commitment to sharing unvarnished Revolutionary history.
Last night the History Channel unveiled its new series The Revolution with an episode titled "Boston, Bloody Boston," as I noted earlier. I'm hard to please when it comes to TV history. But it's simply impossible to summarize the decade or more of political strife in less than an hour (with time out for John Hancock Insurance commercials), so I watched with a charitable eye.
I can excuse how the show's writers fell for some common myths, such as the Sons of Liberty or Continental Congress as secret organizations, or John Adams's "courageous" choice to represent the soldiers accused of murder in the Boston Massacre. I can overlook the mash-up of visual material, so most of the "period" engravings shown actually date from the 1800s and a broadside on Lexington and Concord was used to depict the reaction to the Boston Massacre. And of course we have to expect low-budget reenactments that make a dozen men in slow motion represent hundreds, and a wooded lot in summer stand in for both the streets of Boston in winter and the farmland of Concord in spring. But three misstatements stood out for me.
3. Bostonians had to house British soldiers in their homes in 1774-75, and soldiers ransacked homes on their way to Concord looking for arms. The only British soldiers housed in private homes before the war were officers renting rooms from willing hosts. Boston's dispute over quartering was whether the town had to provide barracks space in publicly-owned buildings in the middle of town, or could insist on housing the soldiers in an island fort. As for the British column on its way to Concord, they were too scrupulous and too much in a hurry to enter people's homes. Soldiers did enter homes on their way back to Boston, both to protect their column from ambush and to loot. But the notion of colonists forced to host soldiers who search for privately-owned weapons is an NRA myth.
2. Two of the British soldiers accused of murder in the Boston Massacre were punished with "life imprisonment." Multi-year sentences weren't yet part of the British-American penal code. The two soldiers convicted of manslaughter were sentenced to hang, then in a legal ritual plead "benefit of clergy," allowing them to escape the death penalty and instead be branded F (for felon) on the base of one thumb.
1. Samuel Adams—who's Samuel Adams? This episode covered the ten years between the Stamp Act and the Battle of Lexington and Concord. It covered the resistance to taxes, Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, growth of a Patriot correspondence network, and Continental Congress. It focused on Boston. And yet the single most important political organizer in that town, a man involved in each and every one of those events, was never highlighted. That's like doing a documentary on the rise of the Hollywood studio system without mentioning Louis B. Mayer.
In the charged atmosphere of pre-Revolutionary Boston, even football got caught in political disputes.
In 1768-69, Boston’s Whigs sent a series of anonymous dispatches to newspapers in other colonies, describing (with some exaggeration but mostly a lot of complaint) the town’s sufferings after four army regiments had arrived at the request of the royal governor. In the 13 January 1769 letter, the Whigs turned their attention to football:
At a C——l [Council meeting] last Thursday G.B. [Gov. Francis Bernard] exhibited another specimen of the inexpressible littleness of his mind, and the fullness of its enmity against the people: It seems that some boys were the other evening playing at foot ball near the province house [the governor’s official residence] when either by accident or design; they threw down one of the centry boxes at the gate; this rude and mischievous behaviour of children, the G——r has represented to the C——l as a serious and important matter, upon which he required their advice or concurrence, in giving orders to the King’s Attorney to prosecute them for the same, which we are told has been done; and we doubt not an account of this little rude boyish trick, will be transmitted to Administration [in London] with such glosses and comments, as may have a tendency to impress them with the heinousness of the offence; and as another proof of the necessity of regular troops, to keep the inhabitants in order.
Did the confrontation on King Street on the night of 5 March 1770 really add up to a "massacre"? The Boston town meeting commissioned a report on the incident titled A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, and that name stuck. But many people today, learning that the British soldiers killed only five people, find "massacre" too extreme a term.
I think it's useful to consider the scale of the town at that time. As I laid out in a previous post, Boston contained only about 15,500 inhabitants in 1765. The five people shot by grenadiers therefore represented one out of every 3,100 local residents.
As a comparison, on 19 April 1995, a small group of far-right American terrorists blew up a government building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. According to my 1995 Rand McNally road atlas, Oklahoma City then had a population of 444,700. That means the equivalent of one out of every 2,647 city residents was killed in that bombing. The shooting on King Street wasn't quite as bad, but was at about the same scale.
Thinking back to the local and national response to the Oklahoma City bombing can thus give us some sense of how Bostonians reacted to the shootings in 1770. The term "massacre" was undoubtedly inflammatory, but in March 1770 most Bostonians were feeling inflamed.
Another likely reason Boston's political leaders chose "massacre" is that Whigs in Britain had used that term to refer to the shootings at St. George's Fields in London on 10 May 1768. Soldiers had then killed six to eleven people (according to different sources) during a riot supporting John Wilkes's attempt to take his seat in Parliament. In 1770 Boston's Whigs saw themselves in common cause with British reformers, and felt that they had suffered their own "massacre" to parallel the killings in London.
On Sunday, 4 June, the History Channel starts its new series The Revolution [that would be the American Revolution, naturally] with an episode titled "Boston, Bloody Boston." The network's description:
The opening episode dramatizes the controversies and conflicts leading to war, including the Stamp Act riots, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and Lexington and Concord. The key players of the Revolution emerge, including Samuel Adams, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Thomas Hutchinson, as well as England's King George III and British General Thomas Gage.That's Sunday at 10:00, right after The Sopranos. Talk about bloody. Which reminds me...
Hither let me call the gay companion; here let him drop a farewell tear upon that body which so late he saw vigorous and warm with social mirth; hither let me lead the tender mother to weep over her beloved son: come widowed mourner, here satiate thy grief; behold thy murdered husband gasping on the ground, and to complete the pompous show of wretchedness, bring in each hand thy infant children to bewail their father's fate. Take heed, ye orphan babes, lest, whilst your streaming eyes are fixed upon the ghastly corpse, your feet glide on the stones bespattered with your father's brains.Yadda yadda yadda.
In February, I gave a paper on "grandmothers' tales" about Revolutionary heroes at the University of Connecticut. (See this earlier posting for download instructions if you're inclined.) Since state resources seemed to be paying for my hotel room (and a nice room it turned out to be), I decided I should include a Connecticut example. I was also hoping to find a few more examples of good stories from the Revolution that also had good historical documentation.
So I dug into the story of Sybil Ludington. I'd first heard about her from a publishing colleague who's a Ludington by birth, but Sybil's story has now been told in many a website, children's book, and episode of Liberty's Kids. She was the sixteen-year-old eldest child of Henry Ludington, a militia colonel in Dutchess County, New York. On 26 April 1777, British troops raided the Connecticut town of Danbury, destroying supplies for the Continental Army and some houses. An exhausted rider carried word of the British landing to Col. Ludington. Sybil volunteered to ride on through the stormy night to summon his militiamen from their farms. She thus allowed them and her father to participate in a counterattack the next day.
As I noted in my paper, this story has a pleasing structure: an individual protagonist, clear goal and obstacles, and success. For the purposes of inspiring children, it featured a young person—and a young woman at that. But was that how events actually unfolded in 1777, or the shape into which storytellers had (wittingly or unwittingly) massaged those events in subsequent years?
So I looked for the earliest version of Sybil Ludington's tale. All paths seemed to lead back to a single book: Colonel Henry Ludington: A Memoir, written by Willis Fletcher Johnson and published in 1907. There aren't a lot of copies of that book around, and as I searched for one I kept seeing red flags. The biography was published by two of Col. Ludington's grandchildren, not an independent press. Although Johnson wrote other histories, he did so as a writer for hire, not an independent researcher. (He also wrote several political biographies.) And of course it's not a good sign when the earliest published source for a story dates from 125 years after the event.
Last week I tracked down a copy of that book at the New-York Historical Society (a copy donated by one of the Ludingtons who published it). Johnson's introduction states:
The most copious and important data have been secured from the manuscript collections of two of Henry Ludington’s descendants, Mr. Lewis S. Patrick, of Marinette, Wisconsin, who has devoted much time and painstaking labor to the work of searching for and securing authentic information of his distinguished ancestor, and Mr. Charles Henry Ludington, of New York, who has received many valuable papers and original documents and records from a descendant of Sibyl Ludington Ogden, Henry Ludington’s first-born child.So for a moment things were looking up: Sybil or her children left "valuable papers and original documents and records." Did they include a first- or second-hand account of her ride in 1777? Yet Johnson's information on Sybil also had big holes: he didn't have solid evidence about the first name of her husband, referring to him as Edward, Edmund, or Henry Osgood. Johnson also consistently spelled her name as "Sibyl," apparently relying on a page from the family Bible, while most authors today use "Sybil." Her gravestone says "Sibbell," and gives her husband's name as "Edmond."
