Boston 1775

A House in Beverly and Its Revolutionary Owner

2012-01-28T09:16:00.002-05:00

In Beverly, a developer has offered a 1715 house to anyone who will move it away from its present location, where the firm plans to build a drugstore. The Salem News reported that offer this month, describing the house like this:

Built in 1715, it is one of the last remaining First Period homes from Beverly’s earliest settlement. It was the home of Nathaniel Greenwood, a captain in the militia and a member of the Sons of Liberty, a group of patriots that included John Adams, John Hancock and Paul Revere.

An earlier article described the building’s history in more detail:

The wood-frame house was built by a shoemaker named Nehemiah Wood between 1715 and 1725 and was later owned by Nathaniel Greenwood, an officer in the Boston Regiment. The building was a grocery store in the early 1900s. It was bought by Johnny Appleseed’s in 1947 and became the clothing company’s headquarters.

It’s currently a real-estate office.

As for former owner Nathaniel Greenwood, the articles appear to be combining two men of that name, father and son. The son owned the house and kept an inn there for a while later in the eighteenth century. He was born in 1732, married Priscilla Snelling of Boston in 1766, and moved out of town during the war. Later he returned to Boston, established a sail-making business, and died in 1823.

The older Nathaniel Greenwood was born in 1693 and became a merchant, militia captain, town official, and Old South member. Everyone seemed to know who “Captain Greenwood” was. He died in 1780, having lived his last couple of years with his son in this Beverly house.

Much of the information about the family comes from The Greenwood Family of Norwich, England in America (1934), and I can’t confirm a lot of it. The genealogy says, “Nathaniel Greenwood belonged to the ‘North End Caucus’, the most important political club in the town at the time.” But I don’t see that name in the only surviving records of that group, published in Elbridge Goss’s Life of Col. Paul Revere.

The name of “Capt. Greenwood” is indeed on the long list of men who dined with the Sons of Liberty in August 1769. This was a large event that involved most of the prominent men in Boston. Some of those diners later became Loyalists, others Patriots.

The Greenwood family included men in both political camps. The captain’s son-in-law John Marston was a fairly prominent Whig. Yet the captain’s son Samuel Greenwood (1741-1826) joined the Sandemanian sect, which preached against rebellion, and became a Loyalist. (Interestingly, Samuel’s second wife was another Snelling. The captain had been business partner with their father.)

In the spring of 1774, Nathaniel Greenwood, Sr., signed a complimentary address to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson as he prepared to sail to England. He also signed a protest against actions of the Whig-dominated town meeting. That put the octogenarian captain into the Loyalist camp, at least that year.

When the British military left Boston in 1776, Samuel Greenwood and his family sailed with them. But his brother Nathaniel stayed behind, and the old captain evidently stayed with him. They moved out of Boston, eventually settling in that house in Beverly. So saying that building was home to “a member of the Sons of Liberty” makes a complex picture too simple. But a muddle doesn’t sell buildings.

Intimate Acquaintance

2012-01-27T08:49:00.001-05:00

After Abigail Adams learned the details of Dr. Benjamin Church’s correspondence with the British command, conducted at one point through his mistress, she wrote to her husband in Philadelphia:

What are your thoughts with regard to Dr. Church? Had you much knowledg of him? I think you had no intimate acquaintance with him.

This is the sort of query for which there’s really only one acceptable answer. It’s not, “We worked together for years as political organizers, and everyone kept quiet about his mistresses.” It’s, “I barely knew the man, honey.”

(By the time John Adams received that letter, he’d actually already sent Abigail his thoughts about the “detestible Subject” of Dr. Church, so he got the answer right.)

On Sunday, 5 February, at 2:00 P.M. the Shirley-Eustis House in Roxbury will host a performance of “The Intimate Correspondence of John and Abigail Adams,” based on letters like that one. The press release says:

Today, over 230 years later, we can still listen to their conversations, share in their thoughts and desires, and get to know them as real people, not just as words in a history textbook. During the “Love Letters” presentation, the audience will hear letters that began with John’s and Abigail’s courtship, and continuing through John’s years at the Continental Congress. Enjoy these iconic personalities as they reveal their teasing humor, their pleasure in children and farm, their deepest hopes for the future, and their undying love and respect for each other.

“Love Letters” will be presented by two Adams scholars and living history performers—Patricia Bridgman and Thomas Macy—who have over forty years of living history experience between them.

After the show, there will be a question-and-answer session in character and refreshments. Admission is $10 for the general public, $5 for members of the Shirley-Eustis House Association. Call 617-442-2275 to reserve seats.

Occupy the Royall Estate

2012-01-26T08:27:00.030-05:00

Maj. Andrew McClary of New Hampshire was the highest-ranking American officer killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. After his death on 17 June, the New Hampshire Provincial Congress received an expense account from his estate that included payment “To Horse-keeping six weeks at Colonl. Royall’s.”

That’s one contemporaneous source showing that Col. John Stark’s New Hampshire regiment started using Isaac Royall’s estate in Medford within a short time after arriving at the siege lines outside Boston.

In his Memoir and Official Correspondence of Gen. John Stark, published in 1860, Caleb Stark told this story of how his ancestor had come to use that mansion:

a gentleman named “Royal,” who, on retiring to the city [Boston], had left his lady, with a family of beautiful and accomplished daughters, in possession of his abode. The mansion being conveniently situated for his “head quarters,” Colonel Stark called upon the family, and proposed, if agreeable to them, his occupancy of a few rooms for that purpose; to which Madame Royal most cheerfully assented, being well aware that the presence of an officer of his rank would afford her family and premises the best protection against any possible insult or encroachment

That all sounds mighty chivalric, doesn’t it?

The problem with that story is that Isaac Royall (1719?-1781) was a widower. His “lady” Elizabeth had died in 1770. Their daughters Mary, Elizabeth, and Miriam (the first two shown above, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts) had all married before the war.

Col. Stark probably just invoked military necessity and moved into the house that Isaac Royall had left behind in April. Later in the siege, Gen. Charles Lee and Gen. John Sullivan also slept in the Royall House until Gen. George Washington firmly suggested they should be closer to the front lines. Today it’s maintained by the Medford Historical Society.

Symposium on the Deerfield Raid, 3 March

2012-01-25T08:31:00.005-05:00

On Saturday, 3 March, Historic Deerfield will host a one-day symposium on “Exploring the 1704 Deerfield Raid.” This event will take place from 8:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. at the Deerfield Community Center.

The scheduled speakers are:

John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor of History Emeritus, Yale University.
William M. Fowler, Jr., Northeastern University, Distinguished Professor of History.
Alice Nash, Associate Professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
R. Scott Stephenson, Director of Collections and Interpretation, American Revolution Center.
Kevin Sweeney, Professor of History at Amherst College.
Philip Zea, President of Historic Deerfield.

Demos wrote The Unredeemed Captive. Sweeney cowrote Captors and Captives, which I really liked. Stephenson’s talk is titled “From Deerfield to Deerslayer: Borderlands Conflict and the Origins of the American Rifleman.” I know other speakers and think it’s an impressive lineup.

Participants will receive a copy of a new “1704 Raid Walking Tour,” and can view the Flynt Center’s new exhibit “Furnishing the Frontier: The Material World of the Connecticut River Valley, 1680-1720.” I’d also stop in at the Memorial Hall Museum because I think it’s done a good job of updating its display on the raid, preserving the older form while reflecting modern understandings.

Pre-registration is required to attend the symposium. The registration fee is $75 ($65 for Historic Deerfield members and school teachers, who can also receive P.D.P.’s). Visit the website at top for more information and online registration. Folks can also reserve a space by email or by calling Julie Marcinkiewicz at 413-775-7179.

Anna Lætitia Barbauld: “The awe this day struck into me”

2012-01-24T08:50:00.000-05:00

Anna Lætitia Barbauld (1743-1825) was a writer, teacher, and minister’s wife in England. She moved in circles of religious and political dissenters, and was acquainted with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

This is the last part of Barbauld’s poem “Washing Day,” first published in the Monthly Magazine of December 1797. It’s an evocative slice of life, showing a moment when laundry day meant all the women in a household were busy and little girls weren’t allowed jelly or butter, yet science was about to let people fly:

I well remember, when a child, the awe
This day struck into me; for then the maids,
I scarce knew why, looked cross, and drove me from them;
Nor soft caress could I obtain, nor hope
Usual indulgencies; jelly or creams,
Relique of costly suppers, and set by
For me their petted one; or butter’d toast,
When butter was forbid; or thrilling tale
Of ghost, or witch, or murder — so I went
And shelter’d me beside the parlour fire:
There my dear grandmother, eldest of forms,
Tended the little ones, and watched from harm,
Anxiously fond, tho’ oft her spectacles
With elfin cunning hid, and oft the pins
Drawn from her ravell’d stocking, might have sour’d
One less indulgent. —
At intervals my mother’s voice was heard,
Urging dispatch; briskly the work went on,
All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring,
To fold, and starch, and clap, and iron, and plait.
Then would I sit me down, and ponder much
Why washings were. Sometimes thro’ hollow bowl
Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft
The floating bubbles, little dreaming then
To see, Mongolfier, thy silken ball
Ride buoyant through the clouds — so near approach
The sports of children and the toils of men.
Earth, air, and sky, and ocean, hath its bubbles,
And verse is one of them — this most of all.

Read the whole poem here.

The New Sexual Freedom of the 1700s

2012-01-23T08:32:00.013-05:00

Larry Cebula at Northwest History alerted me to this interesting extract in the Guardian from The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution by Faramerz Dabhoiwala. Although Dabhoiwala focused on life in England, some of the findings would also apply to eighteenth-century America, even New England:

The most obvious change was a surge in pre- and extramarital sex. We can measure this, crudely but unmistakably, in the numbers of children conceived out of wedlock. During the 17th century this figure had been extremely low: in 1650 only about 1% of all births in England were illegitimate. But by 1800, almost 40% of brides came to the altar pregnant, and about a quarter of all first-born children were illegitimate. It was to be a permanent change in behaviour.

Just as striking was the collapse of public punishment, which made this new sexual freedom possible. By 1800, most forms of consensual sex between men and women had come to be treated as private, beyond the reach of the law. This extraordinary reversal of centuries of severity was partly the result of increasing social pressures. The traditional methods of moral policing had evolved in small, slow, rural communities in which conformity was easy to enforce. Things were different in towns, especially in London. . . .

Urban living provided many more opportunities for sexual adventure. It also gave rise to new, professional systems of policing, which prioritised public order. Crime became distinguished from sin. And the fast circulation of news and ideas created a different, freer and more pluralist intellectual environment.

This was crucial to the development of the ideal of sexual freedom. By the later 18th century, for the first time, many serious observers had come to take it for granted that sex was a private matter, that men and women should be free to indulge in it irrespective of marriage, and that sexual pleasure should be celebrated as one of the purposes of life. As well as reinterpreting the Bible, they found support in new ideas about the importance of personal conscience and in the laws of nature, which were regarded as more clearly indicative of God’s will than the inherited dogma of the church and the text of the scriptures. In his 1730 work, Christianity as Old as the Creation, the Oxford don Matthew Tindal ridiculed traditional sexual norms as priestly inventions, no more appropriate to a modern state than the biblical prohibitions against drinking blood or lending money: “Enjoying a woman, or lusting after her, can’t be said, without considering the circumstances, to be either good or evil. That warm desire, which is implanted in human nature, can’t be criminal, when perused after such a manner as tends most to promote the happiness of the parties, and to propagate and preserve the species.” . . .

It’s no accident that all these early celebrations of the new sexual world were voiced by white, upper-class men. In practice, sexual liberty was limited in important ways. The bastardy laws continued to apply to the labouring classes: their morals remained a public matter. The new permissiveness towards “natural” freedoms also led to a sharper definition and abhorrence of supposedly “unnatural” behaviour. . . .

James Boswell’s diary records the tragic story of Jean, the brilliant only daughter of Henry Home, Lord Kames, one of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. In the early 1760s, when she was only 16 or 17 and already married, she embarked on a passionate affair with Boswell, arguing to him that they were doing nothing wrong:

“She was a subtle philosopher. She said, ‘I love my husband as a husband, and you as a lover, each in his own sphere. I perform for him all the duties of a good wife. With you, I give myself up to delicious pleasures. We keep our secret. Nature has so made me that I shall never bear children. No one suffers because of our loves. My conscience does not reproach me, and I am sure that God cannot be offended by them.’”

A decade later, when her husband divorced her over another affair, she declared “that she hoped that God Almighty would not punish her for the only crime she could charge herself with, which was the gratification of those passions which he himself had implanted in her nature.” But her father, the scholar and moral authority, took the conventional view that adultery in a man “may happen occasionally, with little or no alienation of affection”, but in a woman was unpardonable. After his daughter’s divorce, he and Lady Kames exiled her to France and never saw her again.

Dabhoiwala’s The Origins of Sex is being published in the U.S. of A. by Oxford University Press in May.

The End of Gov. Bowdoin’s Dinner Party

2012-01-22T09:01:00.001-05:00

Boston saw its first worthwhile snowstorm of the season this weekend, so I’m pulling out an anecdote that real-estate lawyer Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch (1805-1861) published under the pseudonym “The Gleaner” in the Boston Daily Transcript in 1855. It concerns Gov. James Bowdoin and his mansion on Beacon Hill:

The house [was…] placed back from the street, being approached by a high flight of stone steps. At a dinner party once…a rain occurred, and the weather becoming cold the steps were found to be entirely covered with ice.

Under any circumstances there would have been almost a certainty that life or limb would be put in jeopardy by an attempt to walk down; and the guests had probably done justice to the generous wines of their host,—a circumstance which tended to increase the difficulty. At last they all concluded to sit down on the upper step, and so hitch along from step to step in a perfectly safe, though, it must be confessed, in a somewhat ungraceful manner.

Probably, indeed, there never was an occasion where so many of our first citizens voluntarily took such low seats; or where the dignity of small clothes, silk stockings, and cocked hats was sacrificed to necessity or expediency in a more amusing manner.

Bowdoin was governor in 1785-87 and died in 1790, so this event—or whatever gave rise to the memory—probably occurred in that decade.

Actors Wanted for Tea Party Museum

2012-01-21T09:16:00.003-05:00

The Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum organization is looking for actors for its opening season this summer. And the organization is advertising on Craigslist. The notice says:

The Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum is dedicated to reliving the historic night of the Boston Tea Party. The museum will be a multilayered experience that will feature interactive exhibits, live historical performance, and historical artifacts. The site will also feature three historically accurate colonial ships which our guests will be free to explore.

We are looking to create an ensemble of actors to portray historical characters throughout the experience and to serve as hosts to our guests as they explore the attraction. Each actor will perform multiple roles. Must be comfortable working with and leading large groups of people. Prior performance experience, experience in improvisation, and an interest in history strongly preferred.

The museum invite hopefuls to email for an appointment and “prepare a one-minute monologue that is appropriate for a historical performance.” Auditions begin 13 February, training in early April, and the museum opening on 25 June.

I believe the museum is opening with only one ship at first, or maybe two. According to the museum website, the third is still in the drawing stage. The Boston Tea Party Museum blog shows progress on the building and its exhibits. I’m really not sure why there will be a statue of John Parker, captain of the Lexington militia in 1775, but he does have nice shoes.

Running the Numbers in 1776

2012-01-20T09:07:00.003-05:00

While I was confirming some figures in Charles H. Lesser’s The Sinews of Independence, a Bicentennial book collecting the best records of the size of the Continental Army throughout the Revolutionary War, I spotted a couple of curious trends.

We often think of the first American invasion of British Canada as coming to a spectacular end in the attack on Québec on 31 Dec 1775. Gen. Richard Montgomery was killed; Col. Benedict Arnold wounded; Capt. Daniel Morgan, Capt. Henry Dearborn, and many other men captured. (John Trumbull’s painting of Montgomery’s death above.)

But the Continental Congress actually ordered more troops north after that battle. In late February 1776, Arnold (now a brigadier general) reported having 1,290 soldiers under his command, of whom 964 were able to fight. The next month, that number had grown to 2,505 men, with 1,719 in shape. The invasion of Canada outlasted the siege of Boston. But it doesn’t have a good narrative shape, with a long, dreary second act.

Meanwhile, Col. Henry Knox was moving his artillery regiment south—and losing men. As of February 1776, he reported having 604 artillerists under his command outside Boston, with 563 ready to fight. As soon as the units left New England, where almost all those troops came from, they evidently began peeling off. In April, Knox could report only 421 men, of whom 358 were listed as available. Through October, he never had more than 500 soldiers assigned to him, and never was able to field even 400.

Lesser’s book, thorough as it is, isn’t a useful source for the strength of American armies in really bad times early in the war: when the invasion of Canada collapsed under the onslaught of smallpox, when the British forces drove Gen. George Washington and Knox out of New York and across New Jersey. In those hectic months, the army couldn’t collect and maintain systematic returns, so no total figures survive.

William Scott’s Wives

2012-01-19T09:22:00.001-05:00

In publishing ladies’ reactions to his poem about his beard, and to the beard itself, shoemaker William Scott seemed to argue that some found it attractive, outrageously unfashionable as it was. So I wondered if Scott ever married.

Fortunately, researcher Annie Haven Thwing found some real-estate transactions involving William Scott, cordwainer (an old term for a shoemaker). Those deeds also state his first wife’s name, which allowed Thwing to single him out from the other men named William Scott (or Scot) in Boston records.

Our William Scott married Nancy or Nanny Coit on 24 Nov 1748, in a ceremony conducted by the Rev. Samuel Cooper (shown here, since I don’t have a picture of anyone else). They deeded some land beside their property on Ann Street in 1750, and bought two houses on North Centre Street later that month.

The Scotts had two children: Nanny born in 1751 and William in 1753. Nanny (Coit) Scott must have died shortly after the birth of that son because William married Ann Thomas on 27 Nov 1755. That second marriage produced a son named Benjamin in 1758.

In 1756 and 1758, William Scott bought more North End land from a Gloucester man with the wonderful name of Nymphas Stacey, Jr.; Stacey’s first wife was a Coit, so those deals were probably within the extended family. Stacey was a also shoemaker. In 1757 William Scott and his new wife deeded land to a blacksmith named Edward Marion.

According to Hannah Mather Crocker, Scott started to wear his beard long in the early 1760s, so there’s no evidence that he attracted a wife after growing it. He may well have still been married to his second wife, Ann, of course. It was unusual for a woman in colonial America to have a long marriage and only one child, but maybe Thwing and I just haven’t found the rest.

On 28 Apr 1774, William Scott announced the death of a son in the Boston News-Letter. Later that same week, he deeded land to Jonathan Williams, one of the town selectmen. He died in that year or the next, according to Crocker, but I didn’t find a record of his death.

So over all I’m left with more questions than answers about the hirsute William Scott.

For Lovers of a Good Beaumarchais

2012-01-18T08:39:00.001-05:00

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is known for two things. First, he coordinated the initially secret French program to supply the nascent U.S. of A. with money and arms early in the Revolutionary War. (Here’s the C.I.A. version of that history.)

At the same time, he was writing The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, two somewhat subversive plays that soon became more famous as the source for Mozart’s adaptation. I recall reading the first in school at some point and liking it, though I haven’t gone back to the whole series.

At Kickstarter, Talia Felix is inviting people to support her project to translate all of Beaumarchais’s plays from the French and release the new English texts into the public domain.

Women Respond to William Scott

2012-01-17T08:44:00.021-05:00

Yesterday I quoted a rather bad poem that Boston shoemaker William Scott sent to the New-Hampshire Gazette in 1764 explaining why he liked to wear his beard unfashionably, outrageously long. And oiled. And “combed and tied together as the gentlemen of that day wore their cravats,” according to Hannah Mather Crocker.

It appears Scott also sent along some responses to his lines, probably from his relatives or customers (he specialized in women’s shoes).

So the newspaper item continued:

Upon which several young Ladies desire you’ll print their Attempts to rival the Bard.

Sophia’s Face is smooth and fair,
On Scott’s is awful Beard of Hair,
She screams and says it shant be there.

Clarissa Peep.

A Woman’s Face in smooth and fair,
On Man’s is plac’d a Beard of Hair,
But Women love to feel it there.

Arabelle Tickle.

The Women now are out of Shoes,
and sorely they complain,
They view Scott’s Face, and gratify
a curious Taste though vain.

Ann Sober.

The Women being out of Shoes,
to Scott they run for more;
They view his Beard, and then return
saying, he’s now Fourscore.

Betty Simper.

Of course, it’s possible that Scott made up those responses to amuse himself. I even wondered if someone else wrote out the whole thing as a joke on him, but the poetry seems too bad for that.

Shoemakers were usually among the poorest of craftsmen, and we hardly ever hear from them. (Ebenezer Mackintosh and George R. T. Hewes are two exceptions.) Scott was unusual in publishing in a newspaper, as well as for having his portrait made by Joseph Badger (who also started out as a craftsman). Of course, Crocker wrote about Scott as one of Boston’s biggest “excentrics,” so he wasn’t bound by social norms.

“A Beard is sweet as any Rose, Because it’s put so near the Nose.”

2012-01-16T08:30:00.007-05:00

Yesterday I quoted Hannah Mather Crocker about a shoemaker named Scott who wore an immensely unfashionable long beard in Boston starting in the 1760s. Crocker didn’t record his first name, but I found the given name William in a contemporaneous source.

In fact, that source is a poem attributed to William Scott himself. The 3 Feb 1764 New Hampshire Gazette, published in Portsmouth by Daniel Fowle, included this unusual item:

Mr. Fowle,
Please to print the following Lines, as they shew the Poetical Genius of Mr. William Scott, a Shoemaker in Boston, wrote with his own Hand.

MEN love Women with Lips quite bare,
Who on their Chins have got no Hair:
Why Beard on Man, should they dispise,
Pray why not comely in their Eyes?
If God sees fit to plant it there,
It must be equal to the Fair.
The Ladies they may well suppose
A Beard is sweet as any Rose,
Because it’s put so near the Nose.
One Reason more why Beard is sweet,
Is it grows close by where we eat.
It must be so as it is plac’d,
All round the Mouth the Seat of Taste;
For who alive presumes to tell
That God offends both Taste and Smell.
Psalms one Hundred and thirty-third,
There you may find that precious Word,
Inspir’d King David has compar’d,
Unim to Ointment on a Beard.
Once Kings and Princes us’d to wear
Not only Part but all their Hair;
At which some gaze and curse and swear.
But if they dispise Things that are made,
They Slight the Maker, may be said.
God’s Works no one will ridicule,
But a conceited wicked Fool.
Seventeen Hundred sixty-three
These Lines were then compos’d by me,
Boston December twenty-third,
I wrote them all down Word for Word,
Which may be soon quite all forgot,
So may the Author William Scott.
These Lines I hope you will excuse,
As I get Bread by making Shoes.

Mr. Scott has his Picture drawn by Mr. [Joseph] Badger, under which is the following Lines, composed by himself.

IF Women’s Chins are made both smooth and Fair,
And on Man’s is fix’t a Beard of Hair,
Pray why the same should they not wear?

The portrait by Badger has not survived.

TOMORROW: Women respond to Scott’s poetic question.

“He wore a long beard which he used to oile and comb…”

2012-01-15T08:58:00.002-05:00

Last Thursday I went to Eileen Hunt Botting’s talk to the North End Historical Society about how Hannah Mather Crocker described Boston’s religious history through the 1820s. I’d ordered a copy of Crocker’s Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston, co-edited by Botting and Sarah L. Houser, but it hadn’t arrived by that morning. (I found it on my front stoop when I came home that night.)

At the talk I chatted with Eileen Botting, whom I’d met before only by email, about how our childhood memories are often our strongest, and how that might have affected Crocker’s storytelling.

I also chatted with Samantha Nelson of the Bostonian Society about a completely different matter: how eighteenth-century British-American fashion required men to be clean-shaven and what that means for eighteenth-century reenactments today.

Thumbing through Crocker’s Reminiscences, I came across a passage that amazingly speaks to both those points:

Till the [year] 1774 or 5 there was a very singular man in Boston by the name of Scott, a shoe maker by trade famous for making ladies’ shoes. He wore a long beard which he used to oile and comb and tye it together as the gentlemen of that day wore their [cravats]. He used to parade about town to show himself. He used to hold himself justified by the example as expressed in the 133 psalm, “How good and precious it is for brethern to dwell together in unity, (ver 2) tis like the precious ointment upon the head that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron’s beard that went down to the skirts of his garments.” This was his wise plea for wearing a foolish troublesome long beard. He was quite an excentric man. Several now living remember him as he was, a terror to many little children. He died 1774 or 5 and many rejoiced to be “Scott free.”

I get the strong feeling that Crocker herself (born in 1752) was among those “many little children” who were scared by Scott the shoemaker.

And as for reenactors who want to wear beards, here’s a precedent for doing so—as long as you’re portraying an “excentric” who wore what people thought was a “foolish troublesome long beard” in a very peculiar way and scared children so much they delighted in his death. In other words, Scott wasn’t just atypical for his time; he was outlandish! But he did exist.

TOMORROW: William Scott the shoemaker in his own words.

Going Back to Sybil Ludington

2012-01-14T08:44:00.008-05:00

Back in June 2006, less than a month after launching Boston 1775, I wrote my first analysis of the story of Sybil Ludington. I posted a complete quote from Willis Fletcher Johnson’s Colonel Henry Ludington: A Memoir (1907) that November.

Back then, I read that book the old-fashioned way: by tracking down a rare printed copy in a library. Today I don’t even have to stand up to read it. (This does not bode well for my cardiovascular fitness.)

I thought Johnson’s book was the earliest source of the Sybil Ludington tale. He didn’t mention any previous source, and neither did any of the twentieth-century books I’d found about her.

This week, the pseudonymous Samuel Wilson kindly alerted me to an earlier appearance of the story: in the second volume of Martha J. Lamb’s History of the City of New York: Its Origin, Rise, and Progress, published in 1880. Google Books digitized that volume in 2010.

While describing the British army raid on a Continental storage depot in Danbury, Connecticut, Lamb wrote on pages 159-60:

The country was aroused far and near. [Gen. David] Wooster and [Gen. Benedict] Arnold were both in New Haven on furloughs, but were quickly speeding by a forced march to the rescue, and [Gen. Gold Selleck] Silliman was on the wing. Late in the evening a flying messenger for aid reached Colonel [Henry] Ludington in Carmel, New York, whose men were at their homes scattered over the distance of many miles; no one being at hand to call them, his daughter Sibyl Ludington, a spirited young girl of sixteen, mounted her horse in the dead of night and performed this service, and by breakfast-time the next morning the whole regiment was on its rapid march to Danbury. But the mischief had been accomplished.

Lamb’s book also has versions of the Ludington family tales of Sybil [to use the usual modern spelling, odd as it is] and her sister Rebecca guarding the homestead, “guns in their hands on the piazza,” and of the family hosting spy Enoch Crosby. Both those tales resurface in Johnson’s book.

This makes the Sybil Ludington legend a little more credible because:

There’s only a 103-year lag between the ride and the earliest known written description of it, instead of 125 years. (Also in 1907, the story appeared in an issue of The Connecticut Magazine.)
Lamb published for a national readership while Johnson published for the Ludington family, an uncritical audience.
Lamb didn’t claim that Sybil’s ride turned out to be important, which fits the contemporaneous record. The Danbury raid was a success for the British army, and there still doesn’t seem to be any record of Col. Ludington’s militia unit getting into the fight.

That said, Lamb clearly relied on stories from the Ludington family; she mentioned no other sources, and lauded the colonel. Lamb didn’t cite documents to support most of her statements.

For example, Lamb wrote about Col. Ludington working closely with Gen. George Washington. The family claimed he was an “aide” to the commander at the Battle of White Plains in 1776. But the Ludington name appears in the commander-in-chief’s papers only three times, all after 1778 and all referring to the man’s house, not the man.

Lamb stated that Gen. William Howe offered a “large reward” for Ludington’s capture or killing. Johnson and later authors specified that the reward was 300 guineas. But no one seems to have provided a source for such a specific statement.

So I’m still skeptical until more solid evidence turns up.

“We should be suspicious of stories.”

2012-01-13T08:39:00.001-05:00

And as long as I’m going all theoretical, I might as well quote economist Tyler Cowen on the danger of storytelling at an event unpronounceably named TEDxMidAtlantic:

I was told to come here and tell you all stories, but what I'd like to do is instead tell you why I'm suspicious of stories, why stories make me nervous. In fact, the more inspired a story makes me feel, very often the more nervous I get. So the best stories are often the trickiest ones. The good and bad things about stories is they're a kind of filter. They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter, it always leaves the same things in. You're always left with the same few stories. . . .

There was a study done, we asked some people to describe their lives. And when asked to describe their lives, what's interesting is how few people said, "mess". It's probably the best answer; I don't mean that in a bad way. "Mess" can be liberating, "mess" can be empowering, "mess" can be a way of drawing upon multiple strengths. But what people wanted to say was, "My life is a journey." 51% wanted to turn his or her life into a story. 11% said, "My life is a battle." Again, that's a kind of story. 8% said, "My life is a novel," 5% "My life is a play." I don't think anyone said, "My life is a reality TV show."

Again, we're imposing order on the mess we observe, and it's taking the same patterns, and when something is in the form of a story, often we remember it when we shouldn't. So how many of you know the story about George Washington and the cherry tree? It's not obvious that's exactly what happened. The story of Paul Revere, it's not obvious that that's exactly the way it happened. So again, we should be suspicious of stories.

We're biologically programmed to respond to them. They contain a lot of information. They have social power. They connect us to other people. So they're like a kind of candy that we're fed when we consume political information, when we read novels. When we read nonfiction books, we're really being fed stories. Nonfiction is, in a sense, the new fiction. The book may happen to say true things, but everything's taking the same form of these stories. . . .

The point of a narrative is to strip it way, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you could present in a sentence or two. So when you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good vs. evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics. Now, some things actually are good vs. evil. We all know this, right? But I think, as a general rule, we're too inclined to tell the good vs. evil story. . . .

Another set of stories that are popular - if you know Oliver Stone movies or Michael Moore movies. You can't make a movie and say, "It was all a big accident." No, it has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together, because a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or complex human institutions which are the product of human action but not of human design. No, a story is about evil people plotting together. So you hear stories about plots, or even stories about good people plotting things together, just like when you're watching movies. This, again, is reason to be suspicious.

As a good rule of thumb, "When I hear a story, when should I be especially suspicious?" If you hear a story and you think, "Wow, that would make a great movie!" That's when the "uh-oh" reaction should pop in a bit more, and you should start thinking more in terms of how the whole thing is maybe a bit of a mess.

Another common story or storyline - the claim that we "have to get tough". You hear this in so many contexts. "We have to get tough with the banks." "We had to get tough with the labor unions." "We need to get tough with some other country, some foreign dictator, someone we're negotiating with." Now, again, the point is not against getting tough. Sometimes we should get tough. That we got tough with the Nazis was a good thing. But this is a story we fall back upon all too readily. When we don't really know why something happened, we blame someone, and we say, "We need to get tough with them!" as if it had never occurred to your predecessor this idea of getting tough. . . .

How many of the stories of the American Revolution we hear take the form of good v. evil, a conspiracy, or finally getting tough? Basically all of them. After all, that’s how the two sides interpreted events for themselves.

I think there are some other archetypal stories in our standard accounts as well. But they all derive from the same assumptions Cowen points to here: that one trend is superior to another, that human intent drives events, and that something happened because someone finally wanted it hard enough. Of course, sometimes those things are true.

“Skills and understandings that are unique to the discipline”

2012-01-12T08:54:00.003-05:00

Last month Abby Reisman spoke at the National Council for Social Studies meeting about her experiments in teaching U.S. history to high school juniors. Craig Thurtell’s report on that talk for the History News Network listed Reisman’s theoretical bases:

One premise of this approach holds that history requires the application of certain cognitive skills and understandings that are unique to the discipline.

A second premise is that these skills are neither natural nor intuitive; on the contrary, to be learned effectively, they require an explicit naming and repetitive use. They must be incorporated into history curricula as an essential component of historical understanding.

Another premise is that when students approach history as an inquiry-based enterprise, they come to grasp that history is not a single story, but a contested one, and they can, once they have mastered the skills, make their own meaning out of the evidence left to us by the past.

With this understanding, the study of history can actually provoke excitement—the late Roy Rosenzweig’s nationwide survey of attitudes toward history classes found that “boring” was the most common word associated with the subject.

I was particularly struck by the assumption that the skills for studying history don’t come naturally. But surely after a certain age (and Piagetian stage) we learn that life is “not a single story, but a contested one.” We learn that the same events appear differently to different people because of incomplete knowledge, competing desires, divergent attitudes, and other factors. Is it actually counterintuitive to apply the same thinking to the past?

Perhaps it is. Perhaps we want our past to be more stable and uncontested than our present. We can tolerate uncertainty in the present because we believe that time will bring enough knowledge to settle the contest of views. The present may be unfolding, we acknowledge, but the past should be bound in a narrative.

That desire for solidity might be particularly strong when it comes to the past that’s shaped our collective identity and is therefore most likely to be taught in our schools. In other words, it’s all very well to admit that the history of Serbo-Croatian mining claims is contested, but many Americans want the history of the U.S. Constitution to be rock-solid.

Another detail:

Reisman emphasized that she often found it necessary to modify the language in documents to make them accessible to struggling readers. She acknowledged that this practice is controversial, with many (this writer included) fearing the damage to the “pastness” and integrity of historical documents. Reisman argued pragmatically that the use of documents, crucial to any interrogation of the past, would be rendered impossible for struggling readers without modification.

I wrestle with the same questions here. I preserve spelling, capitalization, and punctuation from sources I quote. However, for this online format I have to alter the style of emphases and abbreviations. And, as in the first passage quoted in this posting, I sometimes break long paragraphs to make them easier to read on the web. Because when I read stuff on the web, I often have even less patience than I did as a high-school junior.

Botting on Hannah Mather Crocker in the North End, 12 Jan.

2012-01-11T09:07:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow night at 6:00 P.M., the North End Historical Society is hosting Dr. Eileen Botting of the University of Notre Dame, co-editor of Hannah Mather Crocker’s Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston.

Crocker (1752-1829) was a descendant of the famous Mather family, great-granddaughter of Increase and granddaughter of Cotton. She was also a niece of Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, and an eyewitness to the aftermath of the attack on his North End mansion in August 1765.

She inherited the Mather library and published essays on women’s rights, Freemasonry, and other controversial topics. So, naturally, she was labeled a “bluestocking.”

Crocker assembled her local history using those books, public documents, and her own memories, but was never able to get it published. Though known to scholars, the manuscript was never in print until the New England Historic Genealogical Society issued it in a handsome hardcover volume last year.

Botting’s talk and book-signing will take place in Sacred Heart Church Hall at 9 Sun Court Street in the North End. Because there’s limited space, the society asks people to email or call 617-680-3829 to be sure of having a seat reserved.

Training for Eighteenth-Century Cartographers

2012-01-10T08:27:00.001-05:00

The Department of the Geographer, an organization reenacting the cartographic unit of the Continental Army, has announced its fifth annual Cartography, Surveying & Engineering School of Instruction, to be held next month in West Virginia.

The group’s website explains:

At so many of the events we participate in, we are so busy working with the public that we don’t get to conduct training exercises for ourselves. Sessions for the weekend include:
Creating (draughting) maps from survey data
Thomas Hutchins’ study of magnetic needle dip around the world
Colouring maps and plans with period watercolors
Observing the 2012 Transit of Venus
Enhancing living history impressions by studying museum collections
Basics of 18th-century surveying

This is the sort of event I have no interest in attending, but am tickled pink to know that it’s out there.

The next transit of Venus, incidentally, is on 5 June, so make your plans now.

Not That Benedict Arnold’s Widow

2012-01-09T08:42:00.006-05:00

Vital Records of Uxbridge, Massachusetts was published in 1916, collecting records from the town’s churches and small Quaker meetinghouse (shown here, courtesy of Wikipedia).

As Pennsylvania historian John F. Watson reported in 1844, there is indeed a record from that meetinghouse of Benedict Arnold’s widow dying in Uxbridge on 14 Feb 1836. It appears in the genealogical volume on page 356: Sarah Arnold, widow of Benedict, age eighty-three.

However, page 25 of the same book states that a boy named Benedict Arnold was born in that town in 1752 and his wife Sarah in 1754. There’s no record of their marriage, but there are listings for their children Dorcas (1775), William (1777), and Mary (1781). All those births are recorded in a way that indicates the family was Quaker. Page 356 also says that Benedict died in 1802, which left Sarah a widow.

According to the Rhode Island Genealogical Register, Benedict’s will mentioned his wife Sarah and his children William, Dorcas, and Mary. The family is also mentioned in Richard H. Benson’s The Arnold Family of Smithfield, Rhode Island.

So while it’s true that Benedict Arnold’s widow died in Uxbridge, there’s really no doubt that she wasn’t that Benedict Arnold’s widow. The same source that preserves details of her death also records her life with a local Quaker man and their three children.

In fact, there were multiple Benedict Arnolds in southern New England in the late 1700s, many named in memory of a governor of Rhode Island a couple of generations earlier. That causes problems for biographers looking for exploits of the future general’s youth before he became the Benedict Arnold and Americans completely stopped naming their children Benedict Arnold.

The death of the general’s widow was clearly reported in London in 1804. Since she was receiving a pension from the Crown, the British government had a financial incentive to keep track. In 1931 J. G. Taylor published a short book titled Some New Light on the Later Life and Last Resting Place of Benedict Arnold and of His Wife Margaret Shippen, quoting records of the Battersea Church where the couple was buried.

So you might think that the already suspicious claim that Peggy Arnold secretly returned to America and lived for over thirty years in a Massachusetts town where she knew no one would have dissolved a long time ago.

But no, this is the age of the internet! Old claims no longer have to die. Indeed, the fact that Taylor’s 1931 book is still under copyright while Watson’s 1840s books are searchable means that the claim is easier to stumble across than some of the solid evidence.

So now there are webpages, some from reputable organizations like the Penn State University libraries and that new standby Wikipedia, stating that Peggy (Shippen) Arnold died in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. Some even say she did so in 1804, which means the authors had access to the right information but added on a layer of wrong.

Did Benedict Arnold’s Widow Die in Uxbridge?

2012-01-08T08:39:00.013-05:00

In Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, in the Olden Time, published in 1844, John F. Watson wrote:

The wife of Benedict Arnold was a Philadelphian, a Peggy Shippen, and died on the 14th February, 1836, at Uxbridge, Mass., aged 83 [about the same time a sister of Major Andre, aged 81, died in England.] It seems a strange affair, that the wife of such a general should under any circumstances get back to America—to get, too, not to her own home, and with her nearest relatives, in Pennsylvania, but should go to Massachusetts—the same state where her first ancestor, Edward Shippen, first mayor of Philadelphia, had been publicly punished in Boston as a Quaker!

Two years later Watson repeated his statement about Peggy Arnold in Annals and Occurrences of New York City and State, in the Olden Time:

Gen. [Benedict] Arnold died in London, in 1801, unhonoured and unnoticed there; and afterwards his wife returned to the United States, incognito, and died at Uxbridge, Mass. at the age of eighty-three years, on the 14th Feb. 1836.

A similar statement, with the year of her death changed to 1834, appeared in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1897 edition and probably others. It may well have popped up in other reference books.

Obviously, the death of Gen. Arnold’s widow in Massachusetts raises a lot of questions, as Watson acknowledged but didn’t pursue:

If this woman was truly incognito and away from relatives, how could anyone identify her as Benedict Arnold’s widow after she died?
How could this woman die at age 83 in 1836 (i.e., born around 1753) when Pennsylvania records show Peggy Shippen, future wife of the general, was born in 1760?
Most important, why did the September 1804 Gentleman’s Magazine in London report the following among its death notices?

In Bryanstone-street, Portman-square, in her 44th year, Mrs. Margaret Arnold, widow of Brigadier-gen. A. who died June 14, 1801…, and daughter of the late Hon. Edward Shippen, chief justice of the state of Pennsylvania, N. America.

Ah, but perhaps that was how the widow faked her death so that she could escape back to America. Because there’s an undisputed, contemporaneous record of the death of the widow of Benedict Arnold in Uxbridge in 1836.

TOMORROW: Examining the vital records.

Back to the New-York Historical Society

2012-01-07T08:32:00.000-05:00

This fall I noted the opening of the New-York Historical Society’s “Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn” exhibit, and a critique of that exhibit by Prof. Alan Singer. It’s only fair, therefore, to quote the heated rebuttal to Singer, also on History News Network, from chief curator Richard Rabinowitz.

Enflamed by his mission to uncover the exhibition’s “right-wing agenda,” Singer’s method is to locate single sentences within secondary or tertiary level interpretive panels, elevate them arbitrarily to the status of “major themes,” and then dismiss them as platitudinous or even worse, as inaccurate. Then he lays on long lists of humanity’s troubles in the post-revolutionary era to disprove the “themes” he has chosen to attack. Every one of his observations, astonishingly, deliberately misreads the exhibition text, ignoring the ideas presented before and after, and neglecting altogether the evidences presented by the documents in the exhibition.

The first of Singer’s examples comes from the very last line of the very last text panel in the exhibition. He writes,
“The Age of Revolution made us all citizens of the world as well as our own nation, loyal to global ideals as well as local and group bonds.” I only wish this were true. If it were, slavery in the United States might not have continued into the 1860s…
Perhaps we are as stupid as the professor suggests. But I prefer to think, as most historians do (e.g., Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights), that the past two centuries have witnessed the rise of a global humanitarianism, stemming from the intellectual, moral, and religious impulses of the Age of Revolution, as well as political and economic forces.

On this point, Rabinowitz seems to be trying to have it both ways. He later faults Singer for discussing the 1830s slave rebellions in the Caribbean at length, saying they have nothing to do with the exhibit’s “eighteenth-century age of revolutions,” but here he insists that anyone not “stupid” would interpret the exhibit’s concluding sentence as referring not just to the 1700s but to “the past two centuries” since.

At best, the panel’s phrase “made us all citizens…” expresses an ideal that came out of the eighteenth century, not a practice (and not an uncontested ideal, either). So is Singer wrong to point out that, contrary to that statement’s past tense, those revolutions didn’t make all of us citizens?

On the other hand, Rabinowitz seems to be correct in accusing Singer of quoting some statements on the signs out of context:

At the bottom of an interpretive text panel that explores the opportunities offered by British forces in the War of Independence for black Americans to escape slavery, Singer locates a sentence about Washington’s begrudging acceptance of black troops into the Continental Army. Forgetting the opening paragraphs, the professor then astonishingly accuses us of failing to stress that more blacks joined the British than the patriots. He takes no notice of the actual original proclamation by Governor Dunmore of Virginia just inches away from the offending text panel.

Singer’s description of that sentence led me to think that the exhibit might not have mentioned black Loyalists, but clearly it does. (I also posted a correction to Singer’s understanding of the Continental Army policy toward blacks at H.N.N.)

The biggest difference between Rabinowitz and Singer might be in how the two scholars approach the exhibit itself. It’s striking how the curator focuses on the artifacts while the professor focuses on the text panels.

Rabinowitz lists many things that Singer “missed”—i.e., didn’t acknowledge despite the tremendous effort it took to bring them all to one place. He seems almost hurt as he writes, “the professor did not take notice of any of the 300 objects, documents, and images (from 73 repositories in 18 countries) collected for this exhibition.”

But what does a look at the official Stamp Act as a scroll or the ”first genre painting in American art” (showing one American sea captain vomiting into another’s pocket) tell us about revolutions and human rights? Those artifacts don’t speak for themselves, which is why Rabinowitz and his staff wrote the interpretive labels and text panels around them. And if Singer sees omissions or bias in those labels, of course he’d focus his critique on their words.

Thus, Rabinowitz writes that Singer “missed the copy of Notes on Virginia that Jefferson gave to Abbé Morellet to translate into French (and the French translation that came of it).” But Singer actually complains that the exhibit interpreted that object inaccurately:

According to another panel, in Notes on the States [sic] of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson expressed his “fundamental opposition to slavery and his fear of what emancipation would bring.” I think it would be more accurate to say Jefferson expressed his total antipathy towards people of African ancestry. . . .

Singer goes on to quote racist words from Jefferson’s book. Rabinowitz displayed a significant copy of that book, yet the nearby panel describes Jefferson’s “fundamental opposition to slavery” without noting that he never changed his lifestyle fundamentally based on slavery. So which is inaccurate?

At H-Public, Darlene Roth wrote more on the gap between a history professor’s job of teaching and writing and a history curator’s job of creating an exhibit for the public.

Singer refutes the NYHS exhibit point by point and takes 2811 words to do so. If his response were translated into an exhibit format, his words would fill 19 text panels, (granting him a generous 150 words per panel). This would require an exhibit gallery that could accommodate 95 linear feet for the panel displays alone, (giving each panel a 2.5 foot buffer on all edges). Given that the average person reads 40 wpm, this would require that the visitor stand and read for 70 minutes—without counting the time it would take to step from panel to panel or to lay eyes on the first object.

There are similar concerns in television history: the amount of text one can get through in an hour is frustratingly low.

It might be fruitful for critics like Singer to try to write their own interpretive panels for the artifacts in this exhibit, seeing how much (or how little) can fit into the available space. Perhaps they’d do a better job. But they’d certainly come to appreciate the challenges for curators like Rabinowitz.

George Washington Harvests His Hemp

2012-01-06T09:07:00.030-05:00

It’s been about two decades since I first recall someone telling me that George Washington grew hemp for smoking. The only evidence anyone has ever offered to back up this assertion is the sort that appears in Harvey Wasserman’s article “Was Washington a Gay Pot Smoker?” from March 2009:

As for smoking, I know of no significant communication among the Founders extolling their “great weed.”

But in one of his meticulous agricultural journals, dated 1765, Washington regrets being late to separate his male hemp plants from his females. For a master farmer like George, there would be little reason to do this except to make the females ripe for smoking.

The medicinal uses of cannabis were known to the ancient Chinese. Thousands of years later, it’s inconceivable American growers would not indulge in its recreational powers.

Inconceivable to some who can’t imagine life without that recreation, I suppose. But I rarely see eighteenth-century Americans doing something just because the ancient Chinese did it.

Wasserman, a twenty-first century writer, couldn’t think of a reason to separate male from female hemp plants “except to make the females ripe for smoking,” so he projected his knowledge and priorities into the mind of an eighteenth-century planter. But we don’t have to do that.

Here’s cannabis cultivation advice from the entry on cannabis in The Gardeners Dictionary, published by Philip Miller in London in 1759:

In the Choice of the Seed, the heaviest and brightest coloured should be prefered, and particular Care should be had to the Kernel of the Seed, so that some of them should be cracked to see if they have the Germ or future Plant perfect; for in some Places the male Plants are drawn out too soon from the female; i.e. before they have impregnated the female Plants with the Farina; in which Case, though the Seeds produced by these female Plants may seem fair to the Eye, yet they will not grow. . . .

The first Season for pulling the Hemp is usually about the Middle of August, when they begin to pull what they call the Fimble Hemp, which is the male Plants; but it would be much the better Method to defer this a Fortnight or three Weeks longer, until these male Plants have fully shed their Dust, without which, the Seeds will prove abortive, produce nothing if sown the next Year, nor will those concerned in the Oil Mills give any Thing for them, there being only empty Husks, without any Kernels to produce the Oil. These male Plants decay soon after they have shed their Farina.

The second Pulling is a little after Michaelmas [29 September], when the Seeds are ripe: This is usually called Karle Hemp, it is the female Plants, which were left at the Time when the male were pulled.

And here are the relevant passages from Washington’s farm diaries in 1765:

7 [August]. Began to separate the Male from the Female hemp at Do [ditto for the part of his lands he called “Muddy hole”]—rather too late.

9. Abt. 6 Oclock put some Hemp in the Rivr. to Rot.

10. Seperated my Ewes & Rams but I believe it was full late—many of the Ewes having taken Ram.

3. Finish’d Sowing Wheat at the Rivr. Plantn. i.e. in the corn ground. 123 Bushels it took to do it.

15. The English Hemp i.e. the Hemp from the English Seed was pickd at Muddy hole this day & was ripe.

Began to separate Hemp in the neck.

17. Finishd Sowing Wheat in the Corn field, which lyes over the Run at the Mill 27 Bushl.

22. Put some Hemp into the Water about 6 Oclock in the Afternoon—note this Hemp had been pulld the 8th. Instt. & was well dryed, & took it out again the 26th.

4 [September]. Began to Pull the Seed Hemp but it was not sufficiently ripe.

Thus we see Washington ordered the male hemp plants pulled a couple of weeks before the female plants in the month of August—much as described in an agricultural manual published just six years before. The “English Hemp” at Muddy hole was harvested first, the crop “in the neck” later in the month. Crops in Virginia obviously came in earlier than those in Britain.

Washington’s next step was to have the stalks put in water to rot—part of extracting the valuable fibers. As even Wasserman admits, there’s not a word in the planter’s writings to indicate Washington gave any thought to smoking the buds. Nor did The Gardeners Dictionary or other eighteenth-century British farming manuals suggest doing that, no matter what people had discovered in ancient China.

[The thumbnail above shows an image by Daniel Baxter for Whole Health Magazine, featured at The I Spot.]

Washington, Jefferson, and Gingrich on Hemp: One of These Things Doesn’t Belong

2012-01-05T08:34:00.001-05:00

Here’s a specialized dispatch from the campaign trail off Buzzfeed yesterday:

[Newt] Gingrich fielded a number of questions about drug policy, including one from a man who said that many in the Live Free or Die state don't like the federal government's involvement in stopping weed growing operations. "Would Thomas Jefferson or George Washington be arrested for growing marijuana?" the man asked.

Gingrich responded, "I think Jefferson and George Washington would strongly discourage you from growing marijuana, and their tactics to stop you would be more violent than they would be today."

Gingrich, a historian, did not mention that both Washington and Jefferson grew hemp on their plantations.

And would therefore be subject to arrest today because of U.S. anti-marijuana laws—which was the questioner’s point.

One comment on this story noted that Gingrich is now on record as saying that the first and third Presidents “would be more violent” against illicit farmers than today’s. That won’t endear him to the folks who want to believe the Obama administration is oppressive in order to explain why he makes them nervous. All in all, this remark looks like yet another example of how Gingrich’s hunger to claim intellectual authority trumps the value of thinking through what he’s about to say.

Hemp was a vital crop in the eighteenth-century British Empire mostly because its fibers were used in making the ropes that the Royal Navy and merchant fleet needed. Britain imported a lot of raw hemp from Russia, so the imperial and colonial governments encouraged planters to grow it domestically. Washington and Jefferson were among the many planters who responded and encouraged others to do the same.

Hemp was also a local government concern. John Gray served as Boston’s Surveyor of Hemp—a quality inspector—for many years before the Revolution. He was the owner of a large ropewalk in the South End as well as brother of the province’s royal treasurer.

When the Boston Whigs started their non-importation boycott of British goods to protest the Townshend duties in 1769, they specified that people could import as much hemp as they wanted because it was important for local ship-builders and mariners. The ship caught up in the second Boston Tea Party of March 1774 had brought in hemp as well as East India Company tea; locals welcomed the former, tossed out the latter.

But I heartily doubt that the New Hampshire man who asked Gingrich about marijuana had the domestic manufacture of rope in mind. And some of the folks who commented on that item at Buzzfeed repeated myths about Washington’s hemp-farming.

TOMORROW: Washington and his hemp crop.

Making Oneself Notorious

2012-01-04T09:03:00.000-05:00

Last year Steve Sheinkin won the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for children’s nonfiction with The Notorious Benedict Arnold. I missed the awards ceremony, but the Horn Book has just posted Sheinkin’s acceptance speech. Here’s a taste:

I was living in New York City, working as a history textbook writer. Our company was beginning work on a new fifth-grade U.S. history, and we told one another, “This won’t be the typical boring textbook. This time we’re going to make history come alive!” Part of my job was to come up with grabbers—quick, exciting stories that would draw kids into the action of each lesson. So I thought: here’s my big chance to use some of my Arnold material! I’ll work him in early, during the raucous, pre-Revolution tax protest days.

In the conference room at our office, I met with two very experienced editors and pitched a story that I have in my notes like this:
It is a cold, drizzly night in New Haven, Connecticut, in January 1766. Five young sailors hurry down a quiet street. They come to a dark house and begin banging on the front door. A twenty-five-year-old merchant named Benedict Arnold opens the door. The men start talking, all at once. Arnold appears to be growing angry. “What!” he cries. “He’s still in town?”

Moments later, Arnold is striding down the street, the young sailors falling in behind him. Arnold comes to Beecher’s Tavern, kicks in the door, enters, and takes a quick look around. There, sitting alone at a table, is the man he is looking for. The man jumps up and stumbles toward the back door, but Arnold pounces on him, drags him outside, ties him to a post, rips off his shirt, and begins whipping him. The sailors shout “Huzzah!” as each stroke cracks across the man’s back, wet now with blood and rain.

Who is Benedict Arnold? And why is he whipping this man? You will read that story next.
There was a long silence at the table. A very long silence. I explained that the man being whipped was a sailor who’d informed on Arnold for not paying British import duties. It was a perfect lead-in to the Stamp Act, Sam Adams, tax protests, the whole thing.

The editors were not convinced. Actually, they seemed to be in a small amount of physical pain.

“Benedict Arnold makes me…nervous,” one told me.

“Me, too,” said the other.

I thought, That’s the whole point! He made Congress nervous. He made George Washington nervous. He was America’s original loose-cannon action hero, a sort of brooding, cursing Bruce Willis character, two centuries before Hollywood. What I didn’t realize at the time was that for textbooks, this is not necessarily a good thing.

Eventually Sheinkin found a more welcoming format for his research. (The link offers a video as well.)

Government Finance of Health Care, 18th-Century Style

2012-01-03T08:26:00.001-05:00

Today Boston 1775 welcomes Dr. Sam Forman as a guest blogger. He is the author of the new book Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty. This is only the third full biography of Warren, a central figure in the beginning of the Revolutionary War, and the first in decades. Sam is also an expert in health management, and in this essay looks at that side of Warren’s work.

My new biography of Dr. Joseph Warren is the rousing story of one involved citizen who made a big impact in troubled times. Once famous and broadly admired, he is now barely remembered as the Patriot who sent Paul Revere on that legendary ride, and as the hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he was killed in action.

A sidelight to Warren’s tale is interesting relative to a current controversy. Some conservative Republicans and modern Tea Partyers are calling for the repeal of President Obama’s health care financial reforms. They appear to argue that our Revolutionary-Era leaders never countenanced government involvement in health care finance. Such originalist assertions are Libertarian staples on which calls for reductions and elimination of such programs are based.

The notion that American Founders were not involved in government finance of health care is not borne out by the experience of Boston Patriots. Some, like Joseph Warren, were heavily involved in such programs. Politicians on all sides of the modern controversy do not seem to realize this.

All shades on the political spectrum of Warren’s day judged finance of health care of vulnerable populations as a fitting role for government, even as Whigs opposed taxation without representation within the British Empire. The issue was not whether this was an appropriate role of government, but who should hold the government contract and provide the services.

Dr. Joseph Warren held that Massachusetts province contract to provide health care to needy and elderly residents served by the almshouse and workhouse public institutions from 1769 into 1772. Physician services to people served by these institutions was on a fee-for-service basis to the designated physician, payable one or more times yearly, by a committee of Boston overseers. Designation of the physician and his reimbursement were handled separately from the staffing and administration of the almshouse and workhouse.

Dr. Benjamin Church served prior to Warren. Making his clinical rounds on October 20th at the workhouse at the outset of the 1768 British army occupation of Boston, Dr. Church was refused entry at point of bayonet. As a large crowd gathered, only the intercession of Sheriff Stephen Greanleaf gained Church access to his patient and avoided a riot.

This episode and Church’s clinical services to the poor doubtless reinforced his cache as a popular Whig, and may have helped to immunize him against suspicions of disloyalty for years.

Joseph Warren succeeded Benjamin Church as the province-designated physician to provide charity care from about May 1769 through April 1772. Appointments are recorded in the minutes of the Governor’s Council, whose originals are at the Massachusetts Archives. Government reimbursement and charity care patient volume for 1770/71 come from surviving Governor’s Council records and a Town of Boston tabulation approved by a committee headed by John Hancock.

Government reimbursed fee-for-service care for the indigent constituted about 42% of Warren’s practice, based on volume. As a portion of total revenue, estimates range from 64 to 68% for the three years Warren held the post.

Estimates of Government Reimbursed Care by Dr. Joseph Warren to Massachusetts Almshouse Poor as a Portion of His Medical Practice, May 1769 through April 1772

In 1772 Dr. Samuel Danforth, a Loyalist, displaced Joseph Warren. The new appointment may have had political overtones during a period of Whig quiescence and Tory resurgence. Despite his suspect politics, Dr. Danforth later practiced medicine in Boston and went on to become a founder of the Massachusetts Medical Society.

The closest modern equivalent to Massachusetts Province’s provision of health services to the almshouse and workhouse poor, would be a state Medicaid plan or Medicare, if it had a recipient means test.

Dr. Joseph Warren is a favorite Revolutionary figure among modern Republicans, and was idolized by their favorite American president of modern times, Ronald Reagan. The notion that fighting American founder Dr. Warren—very probably an organizer of the historical Boston Tea Party—aggressively pursued governmental finance of health care for the needy, is an important observation for modern observers of all persuasions. The extent of Warren’s provision of government reimbursed care during 1769-1772, and the widespread support that such government involvement enjoyed in Massachusetts by both Patriots and Tories in the Revolutionary era, are noteworthy. They constitute a humanitarian legacy predating the creation of the United States and its Constitution.

Nevertheless, I would not venture to assert that the compelling history of the American Revolutionary era confers originalist clout to any particular modern agenda regarding health care. To do so would be to commit the sin of presentism, the transgression of asserting a modern agenda in the guise of past events.

Thanks, Sam! For more on the care of the poor in colonial Boston, see the published town records The Eighteenth-Century Records of the Boston Overseers of the Poor, edited by Eric Nellis and Ann Decker Cecere and published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Visit Sam’s website for more on Joseph Warren and his compatriots, with weekly updates of primary-source documents.

Sam will speak on Dr. Warren, the early Revolutionary era, and his new biography at the Brookline Booksmith tonight at 7:00 P.M.; at Newtonville Books on Wednesday, 11 January, at 7:00 P.M.; and at Old South Meeting House on Thursday, 19 January, at noon (admission $6, free to Old South members).

“I was neither whig nor tory but a Printer.”

2012-01-02T09:06:00.002-05:00

Benjamin Towne of the Pennsylvania Evening Post was one of Philadelphia’s most enthusiastic Whig printers from 1775 to late 1777, when the British army seized the city. He was then one of Philadelphia’s most enthusiastic royalist printers. When the Continental authorities returned in the middle of 1778, Towne didn’t flee like the other printers.

That left him with the only printing press in Philadelphia, so he had a monopoly on government business for a while. In fact, the state government paid Towne to reproduce its long list of people who had treacherously cooperated with the British military, including himself. He also got the job of printing some proclamations of the Continental Congress.

In October 1778 the Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon, a delegate from New Jersey (shown here), found Towne at a bookstore. This is how Isaiah Thomas described their meeting in his History of Printing in America:

After some conversation, Towne requested the doctor to furnish him with intelligence and essays for the Evening Post, as he formerly had done. The doctor refused, and told him that it would be very improper for a member of congress to hold intercourse with a man who was proscribed by law; but he added, “if you make your peace with the country first, I will then assist you.”

“How shall I do it, doctor?”

“Why,” answered the doctor, “write and publish a piece acknowledging your fault, professing repentance, and asking forgiveness.”

“But what shall I say?”

The doctor gave some hints; upon which Towne said, “Doctor, you write cxpeditiously and to the purpose; I will thank you to write something forme, and I will publish it.”

“Will you? then I will do it,” replied the doctor. The doctor applied to [the bookseller] for paper and ink, and immediately wrote, “The humble Confession, Recantation and Apology of Benjamin Towne,” etc. It was an excellent production, and humorously ironical; but Towne refused to comply with his promise to publish, because the doctor would not allow him to omit some sentences in it.

Witherspoon’s essay somehow made it into print nonetheless. Written in Towne’s voice, it started by acknowledging that he had printed under the protection of both the American and British governments, and went on to claim that he had printed lies for the latter.

The facts being thus stated, (I will presume to say altogether fully and fairly) I proceed to observe, that I am not only proscribed by the President and supreme executive Council of Pennsylvania, but that several other Persons are for reprobating my paper, and allege that instead of being suffered to print, I ought to be hanged as a Traitor to my Country. On this account I have thought proper to publish the following humble confession, declaration, recantation, and apology, hoping that it will assuage the wrath of my enemies, and in some degree restore me to the favor and indulgence of the Public. In the first place then, I desire it may be observed, that I never was, nor ever pretended to be a man of character, repute or dignity. . . .

I do hereby declare and confess, that when I printed for Congress, and on the side of Liberty, it was not by any means from principle, or a desire that the cause of Liberty should prevail, but purely and simply from the love of gain. I could have made nothing but tar and feathers by printing against them as things then stood. I make this candid acknowledgment not only as a penitent to obtain pardon, but to show that there was more consistency in my conduct than my enemies are willing to allow. They are pleased to charge me with hypocrisy in pretending to be a Whig when I was none. This charge is false; I was neither whig nor tory but a Printer.

Towne toughed it out in Philadelphia for the rest of the war, but he had trouble finding subscribers for his Evening Post and printed sporadically. In 1783 he tried something novel: printing a new issue of the paper every day. The result was America’s first daily newspaper, but Towne couldn’t keep up the pace past 26 Oct 1784. He went back to job printing and died nine years later, still in Philadelphia.

“A New-year Song, as heretofore!”

2012-01-01T09:26:00.045-05:00

After Gen. Sir William Howe took Philadelphia in the fall of 1777, printer Benjamin Towne remained in the city and continued to print the Pennsylvania Evening Post. But he did have to adjust some of his attitudes of the previous year, as his apprentices’ verse for the New Year of 1778 displays:

New Year’s Verses,
Addressed to the KIND CUSTOMERS
of the
PENNSYLVANIA EVENING POST,
By the PRINTER’s LADS who carry about the same.
THURSDAY, January 1, 1778.

TOWNE’s Evening Post!---Good Masters pray,
Permit your Postboy still to pay
His annual Tribute at your Door,
A New-year Song, as heretofore!
Too long—I own it with remorse,
I labor’d, like a jaded Horse,
To fetch and carry loaded Squibs,
Bouncing Crackers, artful Fibs,
While CONGO’s Harness gall’d my Ribs!
Then Safety, Peace, and Freedom fled,
And Truth was fain to hide her Head;
But now, from those vile Shackles free,
Which fetter’d you as well as me,
I’ll tell the Truth, and gladly fly
To contradict each daring Lie;
Throw in my little Mite to bring
Each Wanderer back to bless the KING!
For then, to crown the rising Year,
Sweet smiling Peace shall soon appear,
With Joy and Plenty in the Rear.
This Hope we all may cherish now,
For thus has JOVE commission’d HOWE.

LATE a Council of GODS, by the Mandate of Jove
Was call’d on OLYMPUS to meet;
The THUNDERER spoke—and the MUSE from above
Descended his Speech to repeat.
Ye know, all ye Powers that attend on my Throne,
Your Will to my Pleasure must bow;
I will that those Gifts which you prize as your own,
Shall now be bestow’d on my HOWE.
Astraa, who long since had quitted the Earth,
Presented her Balance and Sword,
A Soul that does honor to Titles and Birth,
Imperial Juno conferr’d;
Fierce Mars gave his Chariot, gay Hermes his Wand.
Alcides his Club and his Bow,
Sweet Peace with her Olive Branch graced his Hand,
And Pallas did Wisdom bestow.
Thus adorn’d with Endowments and Armour divine,
The Hero by JOVE was address’d;
This Balance and Sword to thy Hands we consign,
Let Justice preside in thy Breast.
But temper’d with Mercy let Justice appear,
Majestic, yet mild and serene;
And still in the Heat of your martial Career,
Let the Prospect of Peace close the Scene.
Though Discord your generous Zeal to oppose,
Shall nourish Sedition and Hate,
Till your Friends feel the Horrors of War with your Foes;
Yet Success is ensur’d you by Fate.
Sweet Peace shall revive from the Horrors of War,
Her Empire again be restor’d,
Affection and Duty shall cover each Scar,
And HOWE by the World be ador’d.

Towne’s verse for the previous new year had wished the best for the Continental Congress, Gen. George Washington, and the Continental troops. But in December 1777 the Congress was in York, Washington and his army in Valley Forge. So Towne’s verse referred to the Congress as “Congo’s Harness.”

But then Howe pulled out of Philadelphia, and in July 1778 the Congress returned.

TOMORROW: Benjamin Towne makes his choice.

“Hail now the joyful day!”

2011-12-31T08:55:00.048-05:00

It’s a Boston 1775 tradition each New Year’s season to quote one of the verses that printers’ apprentices carried around and distributed at that time of year, soliciting tips.

This year’s verse comes from the shop of the Pennsylvania Evening Post, which Benjamin Towne (c. 1740-1793) launched in January 1775—a most newsworthy year, as it turned out. Philadelphia was the largest and most dynamic city in British North America, so Towne had a lot of competition. His strategy was to publish three times a week instead of just once or twice, and to support the radical Whigs.

The year of 1776 brought for American Whigs the best of times (British forces leaving Boston and Charleston, the Congress declaring independence, new state governments being established) and the worst of times (British forces coming back to New York, driving the Continental troops through New Jersey, and threatening Philadelphia). But the American victory at Trenton took some of the pressure off, so the newspaper boys could feel optimistic.

This is what they came up with for New Year’s 1777.

New-Year’s Verses
Addressed to the CUSTOMERS of
The PENNSYLVANIA EVENING POST,
By the PRINTER’s LADS who carry it.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 1, 1777.

Hail! O America!
Hail now the joyful day!
Exalt your voice,
Shout, George is King no more,
Over this western shore;
Let him his loss deplore,
While we rejoice.

You know, I think this is written to the tune of “God Save the King.” Kind of ironic.

The Latin tag in the next verse was translated as “He who transplanted us hither will support us” by a helpful footnote on the broadside.

Now in thy banner set,
Transtulet sustinet;
God is our King,
Who does in mercy deign,
Over us for to reign,
And our just rights maintain,
His praises sing.

O may he deign to bless,
The great and each Congress,
Of this our land,
With wisdom from on high,
And unanimity,
To save our liberty,
Nobly to stand.

And on the virt’ous head,
Abundant blessings shed,
Of Washington;
Give him to know thy will,
Fill him with martial skill,
His station to fill,
’Till glory’s won.

And may our Gen’rals all,
Officers great and small,
Be Heaven’s care:
Within the hostile field,
Guard them with thine own shield,
While they the sword do wield,
In this great war.

O may our men be spar’d,
If not for death prepar’d;
Lord hear our cry,
Let us behold thy face,
And taste of thy rich grace,
While we this earth do trace,
Before we die.

And to thee th’ Lord of host,
Father, Son and Holy Ghost,
We’ll give all praise,
And ever magnify,
Honor and glorify,
To all eternity,
And never cease.

Of course, in September 1777 the British army whupped the Americans at Brandywine and occupied Philadelphia for that winter.

TOMORROW: What did that mean for Benjamin Towne?

“Heroic pieces found in his pocket”

2011-12-30T09:15:00.002-05:00

One of my doorways into eighteenth-century history was Christopher Seider, the young boy fatally shot in a riot in Boston on 22 Feb 1770.

After Christopher’s death, the Boston Evening-Post reported the event in unusual detail and concluded:

…all the friends of Liberty may have an opportunity of paying their last respects to the remains of this little hero and first martyr to the noble cause, whose manly spirit (after the accident happened) appeared in his discreet answers to his Doctor, his thanks to the clergyman who prayed with him, and the firmness of mind he showed when he first saw his parents, and while he underwent the great distress of bodily pain, and with which he met the king of terrors. These things, together with 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.

For years I hunted for “Wolfe’s Summit of human glory.” Given the context, it was almost certainly a publication about Gen. James Wolfe (shown above), killed during the British conquest of Québec City in 1759. But none of the many poems and articles written about the man included the phrase “summit of human glory.”

I checked Readex’s Archive of Americana database in many ways; it’s based on microtext collections of what was supposed to be basically every newspaper published in colonial America, and every “imprint”—i.e., book, broadside, pamphlet, handbill, lottery ticket, &c. The latter part is often called the “digital Evans” after the American Bibliography catalogue of all that material by Charles Evans and his successors. But even within that vase amount of scanned stuff, there was no “summit of human glory.”

Evans and his team didn’t find every broadside, however. Some entered archives, or came to light, after the last volume of that series in 1959. But many items printed in colonial America simply didn’t survive.

This fall I tried my keyphrase on a catalogue I know well—that of the Massachusetts Historical Society. And up popped a broadside with this title:

Major-General James Wolfe, who reach’d the summit of human glory, September 13th, 1759: with a particular account of that gloriously dangerous work, the taking the city of Quebec, the capital of the French settlements in North-America.

So of course I asked to look at that.

This broadside is a 17" by 24" sheet with four columns of tiny type around a 9" x 12" engraving of Wolfe surrounded by clouds, a booming cannon, and a frame decorated with leaves, swords, and banners. There’s no indication of who published it or for how much, but a broadside of this size was expensive. The copy at the M.H.S. is stamped and perhaps painted in blue and red—an embellishment that cost extra.

The text is a detailed, sometimes technical, description of the taking of Quebec, written by Vice Admiral Charles Saunders and Gen. George Townshend, who took over after Wolfe’s death. Not the sort of thing one would expect a ten-year-old to be carrying around, even with the big colored picture.

But that’s what was reportedly in Christopher Seider’s pocket on the day he died, along with other “heroic pieces.” That’s one of my favorite discoveries of the past year.

Once Again with the Presidential Oath

2011-12-29T08:58:00.010-05:00

In an attempt to argue that George Washington added the phrase “So help me God” to his presidential oath in 1789, David Barton wrote at Wallbuilders about the fact that some states included that phrase as part of their oaths for office-holders at the time. In particular:

At that time, New York law required that “the usual mode of administering oaths” be followed (i.e., “So help me God”) and that the person taking the oath place his hand upon the Gospels and then kiss the Gospels at the conclusion of the oath.33 (Like the other states, these provisions remained the legal standard long after the inauguration.34)

The quoted phrase “the usual mode of administering oaths” comes from the first work cited in Barton’s first footnote, the Laws of the State of New-York. (The second work is a 1788 manual for New York justices of the peace. The following footnote points to an 1836 equivalent, based on 1821 law; it has nothing to do with the swearing-in of a federal official thirty years before that law, and seems to have been included just to make the presentation appear more weighty.)

As Ray Soller noted at American Creation, the 1778 law that Barton cites on “the usual mode” is actually about dispensing with that mode for people with conscientious objections to it. So the “usual mode” was not a legal requirement after April.

For the full context, on 5 Mar 1778, the New York state legislature passed laws to govern the swearing-in of state officials; that’s chapter 7, though chapter 3 had already included an oath. Those oaths mention God twice, the second time in closing those oaths with “So help me God.”

However, by 27 March, the legislature had to acknowledge that Quakers don’t swear (chapter 16 and later). And on 1 April it agreed to “dispense with the usual mode” of having all men kiss the Bible because, chapter 25 stated, “many of the inhabitants” had objected.

Those revisions to the 5 March law don’t specify that New York office-holders could decline to say “So help me God.” Barton might argue that that means that provision of the law remained in effect. But the clear pattern is that the legislature moved away from requiring the “usual mode.” There were just too many religious beliefs to demand the same ritual from every office-holder.

Furthermore, whatever New York laws said, they did not govern the swearing-in of a federal official like President Washington. The presidential oath is specified in the Constitution, just as these New York laws stated the oaths for New York officials, word for word. The New York laws included “So help me God”; the Constitution does not. Barton doesn’t see that difference as significant; Soller does, as do I. Washington was, of course, involved in the creation of the Constitution and valued it highly.

Detailed contemporaneous descriptions of Washington’s first inaugural describe him kissing a Bible supplied at the last minute by the local Freemasons and reciting the Constitutional oath as written—without “So help me God.” One might think the use of that Bible would be enough to satisfy Barton’s argument that early American society was infused with religious belief. Claiming that Washington added words that no one heard only weakens that position, turning it into a statement of faith rather than fact.

New Voices from the Arnold Expedition Brought to Light

2011-12-28T09:17:00.002-05:00

Yesterday’s quotations from diaries of the American attack on Québec in late 1775 came from Voices from a Wilderness Expedition: The Journals and Men of Benedict Arnold’s Expedition to Quebec in 1775, a new book on Col. Benedict Arnold’s advance from Massachusetts through the Maine wilderness to Canada by Stephen Darley.

This book is not a narrative history of Arnold’s expedition, like Thomas A. Desjardin’s Through a Howling Wilderness or Arthur S. Lefkowitz’s Benedict Arnold’s Army. Rather, it’s a study of the diaries that survive from that expedition, and as such a necessary supplement to the third edition of Kenneth Roberts’s March to Quebec.

Darley self-published through AuthorHouse to make his research available. Voices from a Wilderness Expedition contains the first published transcriptions of several first-person accounts of the campaign, as well as research on the full careers of several notable officers, including Col. Roger Enos, Capt. William Goodrich, and Capt. Scott, first name usually left blank.

Darley found three of those first-person accounts in the University of Glasgow Library, catalogued as “Durben Journal.” He argues that the main document is a copy of Capt. Henry Dearborn’s original diary before it was expanded and edited into the version we know (now housed at the Boston Public Library), and hypothesizes about how that collection got to Glasgow.

The volume contains a transcription of the version of Dr. Isaac Senter’s journal at the Rhode Island Historical Society, which differs significantly from the published version, and first full appearances of journals by Pvt. Samuel Barney and Pvt. Moses Kimball.

As Darley notes, the Arnold expedition must have been one of the most minutely documented of the period, with thirty journals and detailed memoirs surviving and more known to have existed but lost. That might reflect how many of its participants came from New England, with its emphasis on literacy. But it also suggests that men understood they were trying something important that deserved to be recorded for their families and friends. Pvt. Barney, for example, bought his blank book (“for nine Coppers”) just a few days after agreeing to go on the expedition.

The prose in Voices from a Wilderness Expedition is somewhat old-fashioned, but that’s not inappropriate for discussions of document provenance and authenticity. This is not supposed to be an entertaining adventure tale. But it should be a necessary resource for anyone researching Arnold’s campaign.

I bought the book in ePub form through Barnes & Noble, partly for the convenience and partly to test that format. I’ve looked at the file now on three devices, including a Simple Touch Nook, an iPad, and my desktop computer. There are some oddities of typography and formatting, and I can’t tell whether those appear in the print edition or surfaced during the transition to ePub format; for self-publishing authors, multiple electronic formats are just one more thing to worry about.

Unfortunately, in all three formats I can’t read Appendix II, which consists of tables listing all the men on Arnold’s expedition. Evidently they were formatted for the printed page as images of a spreadsheet rather than as text, and the images don’t get any bigger on my screens. I don’t know if other electronic formats will work the same way, but if you’re interested in the complete record I recommend a print version.

“We was asked who would scale the walls.”

2011-12-27T21:08:00.001-05:00

Here are two views of the action outside the city of Québec 236 years ago. The first comes from the journal of an officer identified on the manuscript as Captain Durben (Dearborn?):

26th [Dec 1775]. A return was made of the men in Coloniel [Benedict] Arnold’s Detachment who were willing to storm the town; there were only three in my company consisting of sixty three, who dissented from it.

27th. Afternoon all the troops assembled at the place of rendezvous in very high spirits, and were ready to march to the attack, when an order came from the General [Richard Montgomery] to send them back to their quarters—because he thought the night too clear and calm for the attack—though the day had been windy with snow.

Here’s Pvt. Samuel Barney’s record of the same two days in Canada:

Tuesday, December the 26th. This morning arose some better. We was asked who would scale the walls. There was (17)? Turned out.

Wednesday, December the 27th. This morning arose well and it snowed, and we had orders to go into Quebec, and all paraded, but it cleared up and we did not go.

Both those quotations appear in print for the first time in a new book called Voices from a Wilderness Expedition, by Stephen Darley. More about that book tomorrow.

(Image above of Québec on a mild day in 1768 courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

Pvt. Daniel Granger of the Continental Army

2011-12-26T08:30:00.033-05:00

Daniel Granger was born in Andover, Massachusetts, on 2 March 1762. That made him thirteen and a half when he joined the Continental Army as a temporary substitute for his older brother, who had fallen ill and wanted to go home. It was the winter of 1775-76, and Daniel served nearly three months until his brother returned.

Here was one of Daniel’s experiences as a young soldier:

I was not detailed to go on Sentury until about ten or eleven Oclock at Night, and it so happened that I was placed the lowest down on the [Lechmere] Point, by a larg Oak stump the most awfully cold, bleak place, no watch-box to stand in; and by orders, our Guns were loaded. Here I had to stand two hours, and tramp round the old stump to Keep me from freesing, and no other Sentinal in sight of me.

And about eleven or twelve oclock the Sentinal that was placed above me, heard the Ice trickle down from the Rocks as the Tide fell off, which frightened him, I heard him hale, at the Top of his voice, “who comes there” twice I beleave, and then fired off his Gun and ran off, I could hear the Drum beating at the guardhouse to turn out the Guard, I cocked my Gun, looked and lissaned, but could see nor hear anything but the trickling of the Ice on the Shore, I was determined not to run, nor to fire, until I should see or hear some thing to fire at.

and soon I saw two Men coming, and as they approached, I haled, who comes there, one answered “grand rounds” I then said grand rounds, advance & give me the countersign, they advanced, and when at a proper distance, I charged baonnet ordered them to stand, & give the Countersign. one answered, “Baltimore” which was the Word given to all the Senturies for that night I answered the word is right, and shouldered my Gun.

They talked with me some time, asked me, if I heard the Sentury fire? I told them that I heard him hale, and fire, & his tramp on the Snow when he ran, but that I saw nothing, & was determined not to fire nor run until I did, they said, “I was a brave fellow” and asked my age, & on being told it, expressed astonishment, that I should be there so young.

And early the next Morning an Officer came into the guard house & enquired for the Sentury that stood down the lowest on the Point in the Night at the time of the alarm, & soon found me, and took me into the Officers Room and I recollect the Captain’s name was Clough, he took me by the hand and sat me down on his Knees, praised me a good deal for my courage and said many pleasing things to me which made me rather Proud.

The countersign “Baltimore” lets us pinpoint this event as happening on 26 December 1775. My favorite detail is how Capt. Jeremiah Clough of New Hampshire sat the boy on his knee to praise him. That’s how young Pvt. Granger was.

Daniel Granger evidently started to write down his recollections at the age of eighty and finished in 1848. A copy of the manuscript was transcribed and published in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review in 1930.

Freedom’s First Finale

2011-12-25T09:10:00.001-05:00

In the imaginary Revolutionary Massachusetts that Seamus Heffernan depicts in the Freedom comic, the boys trade stories about a masked hero called the Liberty Eagle. The first issue even comes with copies of an underground broadside showing the Liberty Eagle conquering King George. The story offers glimpses of a mysterious feathered figure. All of which brings up the all-important final question of my interview:

B75: Who would win in a fight, Batman or the Liberty Eagle?

SH: Man, I’ve been agonizing over this question… but as much as I hate to say it, I think Batman would probably win. While the Liberty Eagle has mysterious and superhuman strength and speed, Batman has technological gadgets that would boggle the LE’s colonial mind. He would certainly give Batman a run for his money, though, most likely leaving him cut and bruised to near death by the end of the fight. It is a truly a battle I would love to witness.

B75: Indeed. Plus, even in the eighteenth century, Batman has allies.

(This panel comes from Detective Comics Annual, #7 [1994], script by Chuck Dixon and art principally by Enrique Alcatena.)

Thanks for the conversation, Seamus! And a happy holiday season to all!

Publishing Freedom: “The printed page is paramount.”

2011-12-24T09:02:00.004-05:00

Here’s the fourth installment of my interview with Seamus Heffernan, whose new comic Freedom promises an epic look at a Revolutionary America that never was.

B75: I didn’t expect Freedom to be so BIG. For $7.00, one gets 64 oversized (8" x 12") pages of story, plus extra illustrations. Was that the format you initially imagined? Did you ever plan to publish it all on the web?

SH: Actually, I had originally planned to publish it as a broadsheet sized “newspaper”. It was going to be 11"x17" and folded up, with some kind of card-stock folio-cover to keep it in. It turned out to be difficult to find a printer who could do that cost-effectively, and it turned out to not be the best format for stores either.

On abandoning that format, I tried to settle on something close to it, but also closer to the traditional comic-book format. I went to the rare book room in the Boston Public Library to see if there were any smaller pamphlets or broadsheets printed at during the colonial period and tried to line my project up with those dimensions. The 8"x12" did the best job of letting the dense line work breathe while not being too cumbersome. I’m sure there will be many vendors out there who will disagree with me on that.

I never planned to publish it on the web, and perhaps I am a fool for doing so, but I’m doing my best to make this project reminiscent of the revolutionary era, so the printed page is paramount.

B75: Freedom is one of the (I believe) second-to-last set of Xeric Foundation grantees. For folks outside the comics world, what does that mean?

SH: The Xeric Grant is a charitable grant set up by one of the creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Peter Laird. It is a grant to help aspiring comics artists start their career as self-publishers by funding the printing and promotion of a creator’s work. Your work has to be finished (in other words, they won’t give you a stipend to live off of while you work on your book full-time), and it has to be approved by six jury members. I was very fortunate in that they liked Freedom No. 1 so much they gave me twice the money I had asked for!

Sadly, the Xeric is closing its doors to funding self-publishers as the comics market has changed dramatically. With the advent of web comics and Kickstarter (now considered one of the largest independent comics publishers because of how many projects gets funded through them), I think they felt that their grant was no longer suited to today’s trends in publishing. The final Xeric Grant deadline is May 2012, so if you have a project you want funding for…better wrap it up!

B75: When I showed Freedom to the Boston Comics Roundtable, one detail that caught a lot of people’s eyes was your style for emphasized lettering—not just bigger, bold letters but serif as well. What other ways are you working to give Freedom an eighteenth-century feel?

SH: Like I said above, I tried to print the book in a format that would evoke an eighteenth-century publication. I’ve always felt that lettering does as much as art style to develop the flavor of a story. Its importance is often overlooked in modern comics (especially with the rise of digital lettering, which I kind of regard as a carnal sin), so I made certain to use typefaces that would have been prevalent during my story’s period. I studied a lot on how typesetting was done in those days, and tried to design text pages to match how pamphlets, flyers, broadsheets and books would have been laid out.

The cover is also meant to reflect the period, as will all the covers to come on future issues. Each cover will be a faux historical oil painting, mostly in the Enlightenment or Romantic traditions. I also do my best to write in the over-wrought, floral style of the day, even when just doing acknowledgements or section breaks.

TOMORROW: The question that must be asked.

Telling the Story of Freedom

2011-12-23T08:38:00.015-05:00

My interview with Seamus Heffernan, creator of the new Revolutionary-era comic Freedom, turns to his storytelling.

B75: Freedom starts with a farmboy named Adam Farr heading into Boston to become apprentice to a merchant, It seems to a coming-of-age story. Why did that feel like the right way to approach this topic?

SH: When it comes down to it, Freedom is essentially the coming-of-age story of a nation (though perhaps not the one that readers assume it will be). I wanted the main protagonist’s situation to mirror the situation of the colonies as a whole. Like the recently defeated revolutionaries, his independence is snatched from him the moment he reaches it. And I’m pretty sure every one of us remembers what it was like as a teenager, yearning for the moment when you can throw off your parents’ yoke and strike off on your own.

I feel like if the reader can identify with the character’s situation, and the character’s situation is a metaphor or representation of the larger scene, the reader has a wider experience with which he can engage the story. Also, the contract between the Farrs and the merchant regarding Adam’s apprenticeship becomes a fairly important plot point later on, but I won’t divulge those details.

B75: You mentioned that you began Freedom “when we were hot and heavy into the war on terror” in 2005. Clearly that environment shaped some of the scenes in the first issue—for example, as the Farr brothers go through a military checkpoint at the gate of Boston. Do you want readers to draw direct parallels, or to look at all the situations in new ways?

Both, actually. During my research I was struck by all of the parallels of our founders’ struggle to rid themselves of the British military and that of people in the Middle East struggling against their own enemy, which happened to be us. Regardless of the reasons why, nobody likes it when an army lands on your shores and starts pushing you and your countrymen around. And when that force is overwhelmingly more powerful, you often rely on tactics your enemies decry as craven, dishonorable, even immoral.

I think it’s important for us to remember that we came from a stock of folk whose “betters” reviled them as traitors and terrorists. It’s also important to remember that in many cases, our founders acted as such, out of necessity. So I’d like for my readers to draw parallels so that they can look at all the situations in new ways.

B75: The end of issue No. 1 promises the next story will be about an enslaved girl from Georgia named Minerva. Obviously, since this is a parallel-world version of the Revolution, the war doesn’t have to stop after four more years in 1783. How many plot threads do you have planned out, and how long do you want Freedom to be?

That question is still a little loose in my mind, but I can say that it’s going to be very long. I have a huge, complex epic with many, many plot threads laid out in general, but I honestly have no idea how long it will take to complete. I’m shooting for 3 “books” containing 5-6 chapters, each chapter being a full issue like Freedom No. 1. My greatest wish is to be able to put out one a year, but the style I’ve chosen and the demands of my commercial art career seem likely to hinder that dream.

But regardless, I’m more excited about this project than any other I’ve ever undertaken, and have resigned myself to the notion of it being my life’s work. So this day or the next, it will be done, and it should be a really fun ride along the way.

TOMORROW: The technical side of publishing a Revolutionary comic.

Seamus Heffernan on “Drawing a convincing Revolutionary-Era Boston”

2011-12-22T08:27:00.019-05:00

This continues my interview with Seamus Heffernan, the artist and writer behind the new comic Freedom, set in a Boston that’s still under British rule in 1779.

B75: What were your biggest challenges in researching that setting? Your biggest thrills?

SH: Visually, if you’re doing a WWII comic you have more photo-reference than you could ever need. Drawing a convincing Revolutionary-Era Boston requires relying on drawings, etchings, paintings, written descriptions from the period and Rev War reenactment photos. I am constantly cross-referencing material to make sure I’m getting my depiction as correct as possible, but the process is time-consuming and challenging.

I’m a little OCD when it comes to getting the setting to be historically accurate in the face of what is essentially a fantastical, fictional story. At one point I redrew all of the grenadiers in the checkpoint scene when I realized I had left out an important element of their uniform.

I’m sure I’m still missing a million things, but eventually you have to let some things go. And I’m more of an artist than a writer, so developing compelling dialogue in the vernacular of the day, particularly in the realm of slang, was more challenging than any line I put down on paper.

The most thrilling part is when story moments seem to leap out perfectly from history and land exactly where they need to for my fictional version to work. For example, I needed a redcoat captain who was sympathetic to the Americans in the checkpoint scene. I realized the best candidate would be someone who was an American himself. Perhaps a famous one who had left the colonial ranks to go spy on the British and (in my alternate history) enlists with the British and rises to the rank of Captain. Hence, Nathaniel Hale escaped his historical fate and shows up in the nick of time to save Adam Farr from his execution. I have many more examples like that but can’t say too much without giving away some spoilers.

B75: You started this project from the Pacific Northwest, but recently moved to Boston. Do we measure up to what you imagined?

SH: I’m actually a born and raised east-coaster! I went to high school in Newburyport, which is probably where the real seed for this whole project was planted. I was of course terribly bored with all the colonial charm of this area when I was a teenager, but you grow up and realize how much power there is in history, and how cool it is to be around it.

I’m back in Newburyport now, living here after stealing my wife from the west coast. We’re about to have our first kid together, so I guess you can say I’ve come full circle. And so far, being back here has measured up beyond what I had hoped. I’ve gone to Rev War reenactments, walked the “Freedom Trail” for days, gone to talks of yours and other historians, and can just walk downtown if I need to get a first-hand look at what colonial cities might have looked like. Beyond that, I feel just being around these old cobblestones and warped brick walls has lent gravity, legitimacy and interest to my work.

TOMORROW: Telling the story of Adam Farr.

Seamus Heffernan’s Freedom: The Inspiration

2011-12-21T08:31:00.004-05:00

Freedom is a new Revolutionary-era comic from writer-artist Seamus Heffernan.

I’m looking at page 6 of the first issue, and I recognize the center of Boston right away. The spires of the Town House (now the Old State House) and the First Meetinghouse of the Rev. Dr. Charles Chauncy look much as they do in Henry Pelham and Paul Revere’s famous engravings of the Boston Massacre.

But this full-page picture is captioned “The Colony of Massachusetts / June 2nd, 1779.” And the royal emblems are still up on the State House, though they’re looking poorly.

As its webpage explains, Freedom is set in “Massachusetts two years after the Americans lost the Revolutionary War.”

So this fictional Boston is still under British army rule, and Patriots hang in effigy instead of Tories. But there’s an underground insurgency. And a teenager named Adam Farr is caught in the middle.

For the next few days I’m running my interview with comics creator Seamus Heffernan about Freedom.

B75: How did you decide to tell a comics story set in Revolutionary Boston? Any particular inspirations?

SH: The idea to do a comic set during the Revolutionary War first popped up during a critique in an art class at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. The class was focused on the ideas of myth, heroes and monsters.

During the “heroes” segment of the class I started thinking about our own country’s heroes, the often mythical way their stories are relayed, and our then current situation on the world stage (this was back in 2005 when we were hot and heavy into the war on terror). I made a huge, romantic (and in hindsight, quite awful) painting called “The Boston Tea Party (The Martyrdom of Samuel Adams)” in which Sam Adams was depicted carrying out a suicide bombing on the East India Company ship while a gathering of founding fathers looked on from the docks; full of sadness, honor and pride.

It was meant to be an over-the-top fictional retelling of an actual event, but when I presented the work to the class, at least two-thirds of the students were unimpressed and confused as to why I had just made a boring historical painting. I believe some even thought I had just copied some Romantic-era painter. They all thought my depiction was ACTUALLY what happened.

[Click on the image for a larger look at this mythological history painting.]

I realized then just how close history and mythology were, and became fascinated with the idea of using the history of the American Revolution to try and explore that boundary. So while wrapping up art school I did a couple short stories playing with the idea of a fictional American Revolution while I let the big ideas soak in and form the foundation of what would eventually become Freedom.

TOMORROW: Researching a history that never quite happened.

Washington at the Commander Hotel in Cambridge

2011-12-20T08:48:00.055-05:00

The Commander Hotel in Cambridge opened in 1927 during the Colonial Revival. Located near the site of the “Washington Elm,” the hotel was named in honor of George Washington, the commander-in-chief. Some of its architectural details are modeled on Mount Vernon.

A couple of decades later, Frank A. K. Boland was the hotel’s owner. He had once been an attorney representing the American Hotel Association. (He had been disbarred in 1909 for bribing a court clerk and reinstated in 1912; that seems have to have been a normal way of doing business in New York then.)

I haven’t found out exactly when, but at some point a visitor told Boland that a bronze reproduction of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s statue of Washington was available in Somerville. The T. F. McGann & Sons Company was offering it for sale, advertising in School Executive and School Management and Institution. Obviously, the firm thought that it would be appropriate for a school.

Boland went to see the statue. It had turned black from standing out in a storage yard since 1932. The McGann company had made it for Manchester, Connecticut, but “financial disagreement resulted in final cancellation of the order.” Perhaps the Depression had also been part of the problem.

Boland bought the statue and mounted it on the Commander Hotel’s lawn on “a stately base of rough finish granite.” With its base, it stands 6'10" tall and weighs 1,034 pounds. Every so often it gets to wear a Bruins, Celtics, Red Sox, or Patriots jersey during a championship run.

In 1949 Boland started a campaign to commemorate the Washington Elm, which had fallen twenty-six years before. Artist Leonard Craske was already at work on a bas-relief showing Washington reviewing troops under a tree, much like Washington Elm images going back over a century. But by that point historians had turned against the elm legend. The final text on Craske’s monument says nothing about the tree:

General George Washington, having taken command of the Army of the United Colonies at Cambridge, inspects the troops near this spot on the fourth day of July 1775.

Undaunted, Boland planned an unveiling on 3 July 1950, the traditional day of the Washington Elm ceremony. At noon on 2 May he led a committee of Cambridge notables to meet with President Harry Truman and invite him to the unveiling. The Truman Library shows the President’s schedule for that day. Corbis offers a photograph of the committee giving the President a relic of the fallen elm. Boland is the man looking happily at the camera.

The young man at left who looks like an office intern was Rep. John F. Kennedy, who had arranged the meeting. Truman didn’t come, but Kennedy was one of the main speakers at the ceremony that July.

(Photograph above by Wally Gobetz, available via Flickr through a Creative Commons license. Thanks to Ed Guleserian, current owner of what’s now the Sheraton Commander Hotel, for a copy of Boland’s press release about the statue.)

The Wreck of the Industry, 1764

2011-12-19T08:25:00.001-05:00

The Museum of Underwater Archeology website offers an interesting virtual exhibit on the wrecked British sloop Industry. The introduction explains:

In 1763, the Treaty of Paris brought the Seven Years War to an end. As part of the peace negotiations, Spain’s territory of La Florida was ceded to Britain. After almost two centuries of Spanish rule, all of Spain’s troops, military supplies, and citizens living in Florida were transported to Havana, Cuba, and the colony was re-populated by British troops from the Royal Army headquarters in New York. Four sloops were sent from New York to St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the present-day U.S., loaded with much-needed supplies for Florida’s new inhabitants.

One of these ships, the Industry, captained by Daniel Lawrence, never reached her destination. Falling victim to the notorious shifting sands off St. Augustine’s harbor, she struck a sandbar and was lost on May 6, 1764. She had been loaded with artillery, ammunition, and tools that had been intended for the newly established British garrisons in Florida. . . .

The shipwreck was discovered in 1997 by archaeologists from Southern Oceans Archaeological Research, Inc. (SOAR), after conducting extensive archival research and a magnetometer survey. Excavations were conducted between 1998 and 2000 first by SOAR and subsequently by the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program (LAMP), the research arm of the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Museum. A variety of artifacts reflecting the Industry’s cargo of munitions and tools were uncovered and recorded, including eight cast-iron cannon, an iron swivel gun, crates of iron shot, three iron mooring anchors, several millstones, and boxes of tools such as axes, shovel blades, knives, trowels, files, and handsaws. Many of these finds, including one of the cannons, were recovered, conserved, and are currently on display at the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Museum.

There’s a broken link to the museum website, but I think this is where it should go. The photo above comes from the Texas A. & M. University Conservation Research Laboratory; it shows a swivel gun from that wreck before treatment.

As reported in a Jacksonville Times article that the M.U.A. site links to, two other cannon were taken from that site without authorization in the spring of 1999.

The M.U.A. highlights a lot of other underwater finds as well.

Jesse Harding Pomeroy’s Tea Party Poem

2011-12-18T08:46:00.001-05:00

This poem “A Boston Brew of Tea Sir!” was written by Jesse Harding Pomeroy (1859-1932) and published in The Mentor on 25 Mar 1916. Pomeroy, born in Charlestown, was quite familiar with the patriotic mythology of his home state, and was echoing it back in an old-fashioned style.

Of ’seventy-three the tale we sing,
That famous brew whose taste did sting:
The deed on winter’s night was done, Sir.
A noble pot to make our brew
From Boston port the waves to strew.
And Johnny Bull
Did drink his full,
For relish to his taste, Sir!

The monarch proud of England’s shore,
Thought tax on tea was pence in store:
But soon his tone was changed, Sir.
For Yankees bold will pay no tax,
Where principles are found too lax:
King George did taste
And made a face,
That never yet was straight, Sir!

Not all the strength of English might,
Nor coming years in fame so bright,
Could wash his mouth of tea, Sir.
It shook his nerve as never yet,
Into his pate new ideas let:
J. B. may strive
On pence to thrive:—
We served his, piping hot, Sir!

From small beginnings much may come:—
Across the years we view their sum.
Our stamps were not for George, Sir.
Our gallant sires undaunted were,
In fight for Freedom sweet and pure.
For Johnny Bull,
Could pull no wool,
Across the Yankee’s eyes, Sir!

Their noble fame to us e’er brings
A trust and hope wroth more than kings;
A quenchless flame to guard, Sir.
In courage tried our Temples rear,
With mem’ries true to shield from fear,
Fail we do not,
(Nor rights forgot)
To twist the Lion’s tail, sir!

That brand of tea should now be named,
For spicey flavor justly famed:—
The Hub’s exclusive brew, Sir.
Pekoe, Hyson, Bohea, Oolong,
May find some praise in other song.
But for its vim,
And snap so grim,
Gundpower be its name, Sir!

As poetry, it’s nothing special. What makes this verse unusual is that Pomeroy was serving a life sentence for a murder he’d committed at age fourteen.

In an autobiographical account published around the time of his trial, Pomeroy wrote of reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. As his alibi for killing another child, James told a long, detailed story that included walking past the Granary Burying Ground and seeing what he thought was Franklin’s grave. The court convicted him anyway, and authors who researched his case think he was responsible for two other murders as well.

The governor of Massachusetts refused to sign a death warrant for such a young murderer, and eventually Pomeroy’s sentence was changed to life in prison—in solitary confinement. In 1916, when he wrote this poem, he had been serving that sentence for forty years. His signature in The Mentor, the prison magazine, was “Grandpa,” reflecting his relative age.

The following year, the state allowed Pomeroy to mingle with other prisoners. In 1929, he was transferred to a mental hospital, where he died.

The poem was transcribed by Jarett Kobek (scroll down this page to 2002).

Was Nathanael Greene at the Boston Tea Party?

2011-12-17T08:58:00.054-05:00

Yesterday the Text Message blog from the U.S. National Archives stated:

There were over one hundred participants in the destruction of the tea, and one of them was Nathanael Greene, George Washington’s most trusted general. Their military partnership is documented in the Letters from Major General Nathanael Greene, 1776-1785 and in Letters of Nathanael Greene, with Various Papers Relating to the Quartermaster’s Department, 1778-1780. It was not easy to connect Greene directly to the campaign because his name is commonly misspelled as “Nathaniel.” It is rude not to give proper credit where credit is due, and that is why he is being recognized in this post as a contributor to one of the most famous American protests.

It’s true that the name “Nathaniel Green” appeared on the list of men involved in destroying the tea in Traits of the Tea Party, the earliest published list of participants.

But the later book Tea Leaves identifies that man as someone who dined with Boston’s Sons of Liberty in August 1769. That Nathaniel Greene (as he usually spelled his name) shows up in Boston’s town records identified as a merchant; he gave his bond for tax collector Abraham Savage for a few years. In the town’s newspapers Greene advertised such goods as wine, sugar, and “A Quantity of Norwich Stone Ware,…viz. Juggs, Pickle Potts, Muggs, &c.” He signed some of the Boston merchant community’s protests against various Crown acts.

In 1786, Nathaniel Greene ran against the incumbent register of deeds for Suffolk County on a platform of having been “ruined” in trade and left with “a numerous family of young children to maintain.” (Seriously, that was the argument for electing him.) It was a hard-fought race, but in October, the same month that Boston newspapers were reprinting eulogies about Gen. Greene, they also ran this notice:

Nathaniel Greene,
PRESENTS his compliments to the respectable inhabitants of the County of Suffolk, and informs them, that he has opened his Office for the REGISTRY of DEEDS, at the House formerly occupied by Messrs. Brimmers, near the sign of the Lamb;—where constant attendance will be given.

On 31 Jan 1791 the Boston Gazette reported that Greene had died, still in office. He was only fifty-two. At the time of the Tea Party he had been thirty-five, with several children at home.

There was another Nathaniel Greene active in Boston around the same time, a sea-captain who died in early 1773. Meanwhile, there were multiple Nathaniel Greenes in Rhode Island, not just the future general. So we have to be careful not to ascribe too much activity to any one man.

The Mysteries of Thompson Maxwell

2011-12-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

It’s clearly documented that Thompson Maxwell (1742-1831) spent time in the colonial army at the end of the French and Indian War, in the Continental Army, and in the U.S. Army during the War of 1812. Born in Massachusetts and living in New Hampshire when the Revolution began, he moved out to Michigan before his death.

In the early nineteenth century, Maxwell began telling people that he was also a participant in the Boston Tea Party. I’ve puzzled over his descriptions of the event for years; in some ways they don’t make sense, but in other ways he appears to have had inside knowledge.

According to James Miller, a general in the War of 1812, Lt. John Allanson took down Maxwell’s description of his career in 1818. About the Tea Party his story was:

In ’73 I went with my team to Boston with a load of stores for the poor of the town, which at that time was shut up. I had loaded at John Hancock’s warehouse & was about to leave town, when Mr. Hancock requested me to drive my team up into his yard, and ordered his servants to take care of it, & requested me to be on Long Wharf at two o’clock, P.M., & informed me what was to be done. I went accordingly, joined the band under one Captain Hewes; we mounted the Ships, & made Tea in a trice. This done I took my team & went home, as an honest man should.

Maxwell thus appears to have named George Robert Twelves Hewes as a prominent participant over a decade before the book A Retrospect of the Tea Party made him a celebrity. Yet he also referred to “Long Wharf at two o’clock, P.M.,” which was neither the place nor the time of the Tea Party.

In 1821 or so, Maxwell told a relative named Benjamin Gleason this:

In 1773, December 16, was in Boston, when the tea was thrown overboard. Seventy-three spirited citizen volunteers, in the costume of Indians, in defiance of Royal authority, accomplished this daring exploit. John Hancock was then a merchant. My team was loaded at his store near Faneuil Hall, for Amherst, N.H., and put up to meet in consultation at his house at 2 o’clock P.M. The business was soon planned and executed. The patriots triumphed.

That account is more circumspect about what Maxwell actually did in the Tea Party. He used the passive voice and the plural instead of claiming directly that he was involved. But it’s much the same story, and liars’ stories don’t usually get worse over the years.

Finally, sometime in 1830 or 1831 the Rev. E. H. Pilcher (1810-1887) met Maxwell out in Michigan. He didn’t take down Maxwell’s story in the man’s own words, and he consulted George Bancroft’s history before writing about Maxwell in 1873, so it’s possible that the standard narrative colored what he recalled. Pilcher wrote:

He was looked upon in the neighborhood with a good deal of veneration, from the fact that he was a revolutionary, and from the further fact that he was one of the forty or fifty men selected by John Hancock to dress in Indian costume and to throw the tea overboard in Boston harbor, in 1773. . . .

The people, encouraged by Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other prominent men, were resolute in their purpose that the tea should not be landed. One ship owner by the name of Retch, had promised that he would take his tea back to England, but he dallied along for some days, and finally said he could not get a clearance for his ship. On the last day of grace, the people were assembled to the number of about seven thousand, not knowing exactly what to do; and the excited assembly continued together till after dark. This was on Thursday, the 16th day of December, 1773, just one hundred years ago.

John Hancock had organized a body of men, who in the disguise of Indians were to board the ships and destroy the tea. The matter was understood between him and Samuel Adams, probably. There is no public record of the fact that this thing was arranged by Mr. Hancock, for it was a profound secret; but Major Maxwell stated that it was so, and that he was one of the men selected by Mr. Hancock for that purpose.

As Pilcher noted, no other source says that Hancock was so involved in organizing the Tea Party, or any other street actions for that matter. As a prominent merchant, Hancock had lots of reasons to keep a low profile on illegal activities and a high profile at the Old South Meeting-house, away from the docks. Why on earth would he ask a teamster who happened to show up that day from New Hampshire to participate in a top-secret operation?

Yet again, this account includes details that ring true: the behavior of shipowner Francis Rotch, apparently remembered as “Retch,” and the massive meeting. But how would Maxwell know about that meeting “till after dark” if he was at Long Wharf at two o’clock? It seems most likely to me that Thompson Maxwell was in Boston on 16 Dec 1773 but was a spectator who picked up some inside gossip, not a participant in destroying the tea.

The accounts quoted above were published in the Essex Institute Historical Collections, the New England Historic and Genealogical Register, and the Pioneer Collections of Michigan. Pilcher wrote a similar profile of Maxwell in his 1878 book Protestantism in Michigan.

(Thumbnail photo above of a New Hampshire historic marker from Marc Nozell via Flickr under a Creative Commons attribution license.)

The Boston Tea Party’s Mysterious “E.N.”

2011-12-15T08:27:00.002-05:00

In 1814, Josiah Bartlett wrote in An Historical Sketch of Charlestown:

E. N. a respectable citizen of this town, lately deceased at the age of 78, has repeatedly mentioned to the writer, that he was among the Indians, who destroyed the tea at Boston in 1774.

That’s one of the earliest examples of a Boston-area man identified in print as having helped to destroy the tea on 16 Dec 1773—more than forty years before.

And even so, Bartlett waited until the man was dead and identified him only by his initials.

Except that a couple of footnotes later, Bartlett named the late Eliphalet Newell as one of the town’s Revolutionary War officers. The two men helped to found Charlestown’s first lodge of Freemasons in 1783, and worked together as directors of the Charlestown Lottery. The Independent Chronicle newspaper for 15 July 1813 confirms that Eliphalet Newell had recently died at Charlestown.

So it’s mighty clear which “E. N.” Bartlett was writing about. Most likely a lot of people in Charlestown knew as well, but they were still keeping the secret among themselves.

Bartlett said that Newell died at the age of seventy-eight, meaning he was born about 1735. The baptismal records of Charlestown’s first meetinghouse confirm that. Curiously, the newspapers of 1813 state that Newell died at age seventy-one. Usually aged veterans of the Revolution added a few years.

“‘Owning’ the Tea Party has been a political act”

2011-12-14T09:13:00.004-05:00

In the Boston Review, Alfred F. Young, author of The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, examines the long history of interpreting the the destruction of the tea in Boston harbor through political lenses.

At Boston’s centennial observance of the event in 1873, Robert Winthrop, former congressman and longtime president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, condemned the Tea Party “as a mere act of violence.” He went so far as to suggest that the founders had no part in it: “We know not exactly…whether any of the patriot leaders of the day had a hand in the act.” And in 1876, amidst a new wave of labor agitation at the centennial of American Independence, he called for a renewal of “the spirit of subordination and obedience to law.” The same year at a celebration marking the last-minute rescue of Old South Meeting House from the wrecking ball, Winthrop shed no tears over the near loss of the building famed as the place where the Tea Party action began.

But [Wendell] Phillips, by 1876 a labor radical, proposed that it be preserved as a “Mechanics Exchange,” referring to the name artisans had taken for themselves in the Revolutionary era. “It was the mechanics of Boston that threw the tea into the dock,” he proclaimed, and “held up the hands of Sam Adams,” sending him to Philadelphia and the Continental Congress. “The men that carried us through the Revolution were the mechanics of Boston,” he said. Phillips’s interpretation of the relationship of Samuel Adams to the mechanics ran counter to the view held by conservatives at the time of the Revolution and since then by historians of varied persuasions. Phillips defied the notion that the Revolution belonged exclusively to the founders, while working people did as they were told.

Young counters that notion of top-down steering by running the numbers on public participation in the tea protests:

With so many threats aroused, resistance to the Tea Act in Boston was broader and more furious than to any previous British measure. The relatively small number of men boarding the three tea ships—[Benjamin] Carp estimates a hundred to 150—can be misleading. Their action was preceded by three massive meetings of the “body of the people” on November 29 and 30 and December 14–16, 1773, at which the leaders dropped the property and age requirements for voting in official town meetings.

The results were unprecedented. Boston had a total population of about 16,000 (of whom roughly 600 were African Americans, all but a handful enslaved). In 1773 there were between 2,500 and 3,000 men 21 or older, the legal age. The property requirement, while relatively small, kept large numbers from voting. In the years before the Revolution, the highest turnout at town meetings was for the spring election of delegates to the Massachusetts Assembly, which, on average, attracted about 500 voters. Faneuil Hall, the site of official meetings and then less than half the size of the present building, was “capable of holding 1200 or 1300 men,” Samuel Adams wrote.

But meetings called for the body of the people could be held only in the largest building in town, Old South Meeting House, men jamming the pews, aisles, vestibules, and balconies. Adams wrote privately of an attendance of “5000, some say 6000 men” and of “at least 5000,” while one conservative guessed 2,500. The final meetings were swelled by country people from five surrounding towns, crowds overflowing into the streets. The meetings at Old South were thus five to ten times larger than the biggest official town meetings.

And the protests and destruction in Boston were only one part of a continent-wide movement, with major political action in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York. The sheer scale of the American opposition to the tea tax undercuts any thought that the Boston event was orchestrated by a small group of Boston merchants or politicians for their own interests.

Young’s essay also has interesting things to say about Benjamin L. Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots and Barbara L. Smith’s The Freedoms We Lost. More about those books here and here, respectively.

Henry Sargent’s Tea Party and the Boston Tea Party

2011-12-13T08:56:00.024-05:00

I invited Charles Bahne, author of The Complete Guide to Boston’s Freedom Trail, to write a guest-blogger essay for Boston 1775 on the origin of the term “Boston Tea Party.” An expert in many eras of Boston history, Charlie had noted how that term appeared in print shortly after a notable cultural moment.

The destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor on December 17, 1773, is one of American history’s most famous events. As Boston 1775 has documented already, the earliest known use of the phrase “Boston Tea Party” to describe that event occurred more than 50 years later, in 1826. Just two years before this, however, the term “Tea Party” appeared in conjunction with Boston, albeit in an entirely different context. Is it possible that this earlier usage influenced the 1826 coinage?

For obvious political reasons, tea as a beverage lost favor in America after 1773. But as time elapsed, tea again become fashionable, particularly for the upper class. By the early 1820s, consumption of tea had become the focus of elegant social gatherings.

Shown here is a portrayal of one such gathering: Henry Sargent’s painting The Tea Party, completed and first exhibited in Boston in the spring of 1824.

Sargent’s earlier canvas, The Dinner Party (1821), had been a commercial success when it was first exhibited, so Boston gallery owner David L. Brown commissioned a companion picture from Sargent. The Columbian Centinel of May 1, 1824, included a notice that The Tea Party was displayed in “Mr. Brown’s Rooms” at 2 Cornhill Square, from 9 o’clock in the morning until dark; admittance was 25 cents. (Cornhill Square was an alley opposite the present 226 Washington Street, on part of the site now occupied by the skyscraper at 1 Boston Place.)

In The Magazine Antiques for May 1982, Jane C. Nylander offers evidence that both The Dinner Party and The Tea Party depict rooms in Henry Sargent’s own rowhouse mansion, located at 10 Franklin Place in Boston. This was part of Charles Bulfinch’s famous Tontine Crescent, on modern-day Franklin Street near Arch Street.

The large Tea Party canvas, more than five feet high by four feet wide, gives us a window into the lives of Boston’s social elite. In the two parlors, women and men are seated, standing and lounging. The furnishings are of the highest taste and fashion, as described in contemporary writings by Thomas Sheraton, George Hepplewhite, and others, featuring items imported from France and Italy. Barely visible in a side room, an African-American waiter stands ready to dispense tea, coffee, and cakes from his tray. As Nylander points out, the painting’s great appeal was precisely due to the vicarious thrill of “an intimate glimpse of a private world of luxury” to those who couldn’t afford such opulence.

While I can offer no proof, it seems likely that this work by a prominent Boston artist helped establish a verbal connection between the phrases “Boston” and “tea party” in the mid 1820s. How ironic, then, that today’s highly-politicized term “Boston Tea Party” may have been originally popularized by a portrayal of the social life of Boston’s 1%!

Interestingly, both Henry Sargent’s house and David Brown’s art gallery were scarcely more than a block away from the Old South Meeting House, where Bostonians had gathered just before the tea was thrown into the harbor.

The Tea Party and The Dinner Party were exhibited in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other cities over the course of two decades. Nearly a century after they were painted, the artist’s family gave them to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where they are now on display in Gallery 121 of the new Art of the Americas wing. There you too can get a glimpse into the lifestyles of the rich and famous of the early 19th century.

Thanks, Charlie! Click back here for Charles Bahne’s study of exactly what tea was thrown into Boston harbor and how much it cost.

“If they will Quarel about such a trifling thing”

2011-12-12T08:43:00.002-05:00

Jeremy Dibbell at PhiloBiblos passed on word of a new blog about the writing of women in the Revolutionary period and early republic, designed around the book In the Words of Women, by Louise V. North, Janet M. Wedge, and Landa M. Freeman.

Last week the blog featured an entry from the journal of Jemima Condict, twenty-year-old daughter of a New Jersey farmer, on 1 Oct 1774:

It seams we have troublesome times a Coming for there is a great Disturbance a Broad in the earth & they say it is tea that caused it. So then if they will Quarel about such a trifling thing as that What must we expect But war & I think or at least fear it will be so.

From the Women’s Project of New Jersey, here are images of pages from this diary. An edition was published in 1930.

Miss Condict’s journal provides a fine segué into yet another Boston Tea Party Week here at Boston 1775!

TOMORROW: The artistic inspiration for the name “Boston Tea Party”?

“Ideological distortions in the exhibit”

2011-12-11T09:33:00.003-05:00

Last month I noted the New-York Historical Society’s exhibit “Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn”. History News Network has just published Alan Singer’s harsh critique of that exhibit and particularly how it presents the dominant American attitudes toward human rights in the early republic.

According to Singer’s quotes from the exhibit signage, “Revolution!” presents a generally Whiggish, sometimes triumphalist, and occasionally unreal overview of the changes produced by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions in the late 1700s:

A major theme of the exhibit is that “The Age of Revolution made us all citizens of the world as well as our own nation, loyal to global ideals as well as local and group bonds.” I only wish this were true. If it were, slavery in the United States might not have continued into the 1860s; European imperialists might not have sub-divided and colonized Africa and Asia in the nineteenth century; the United States and other countries might not have virtually exterminated their indigenous populations; . . .

A second theme was that “Remaking law rather than remaking society has been the nation’s strongest instrument of change for more than two centuries.” I think this represents a fundamental misunderstanding about the relationship between law and society. Laws are generally a reflection of a society rather than instruments for change. The American legal system has frequently codified social injustice. Fugitive slave laws, black codes, Jim Crow segregation laws, and numerous Supreme Court decisions, the most infamous being Dred Scott and Plessy, supported the enforcement of slavery and racism. The “strongest instrument of change” has been social movements to extend liberty and democracy that forced changes in the law. . . .

The exhibit maintains that “gradually during and after the Revolution, and particularly in the Bill of Rights, rights were defined as ‘universal.’” Actually, the Bill of Rights, which placed limits on the ability of Congress to interfere with religious practice, speech, assembly, and the press, placed no similar or restrictions on state governments. Hence the legality of slavery, which is unmentioned in the Constitution, remained up to the individual states. . . .

The exhibit concludes with the statement about what the modern world owes to the Age of Revolution. It claims the Age of Revolution “created several ‘new normals.’” They included the contentions that “slavery was fundamentally inhuman and had to be abolished”; “Nations should have the right to govern themselves”; and “Even the poor and weak should be treated with dignity.” But of course, these were not “normals” for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are still not “normals” in much of the world today.

Singer goes on to highlight how the exhibit minimizes Thomas Jefferson’s racism, maintenance of slavery in practice even as he deplored it in theory, and fear of the Haitian revolution. But he misses how George Washington changed his policy on black soldiers in the first year of the Revolutionary War. (I left a comment on that one issue.)

Singer’s critique reflects a distrust among some historians of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and its namesake founders.

The ideological distortions in the exhibit are consistent with political direction being imposed by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman,…who control the board of directors of the New York Historical Society. They are major right-wing players in the war over what should be taught as history. Richard Gilder is a founding member, and former chair, of the board of trustees of the Manhattan Institute. Lewis Lehrman is a trustee of the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Heritage Foundation.

There’s no question that Gilder and Lehrman have made a lot of money in corporate finance and are conservative political activists. Lehrman even ran for governor of New York in 1982. There’s also no question that they’ve put a lot of their money into historical initiatives, including museum exhibits, teacher workshops, book prizes, and document collections. At times one or the other man has been explicit about wishing to promote conservative interpretations of American history.

Gilder and Lehrman didn’t necessarily have their thumbs on the scale of this exhibit. The idea of the American Revolution inspiring ideas of universal rights isn’t just a conservative one; it’s fairly mainstream in American thought because it’s so flattering to us as a nation. A willingness to overlook exceptions to our fine ideals is also fairly common among us humans. That said, folks really shouldn’t mount an exhibit titled “Revolution!” if they’re frightened of “remaking society.”

Visiting American Nations

2011-12-10T08:48:00.000-05:00

Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America reads like a cross between Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of North America (1981), and David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed (1989) and related books.

Like Garreau, Woodard divides all of the U.S. of A., Canada, and northern Mexico along cultural and economic lines rather than the borders of states and traditional regions. Like Fischer, Woodard sees the roots of these differences in the first European settlements of each area, and the values those settlers carried to new regions.

Thus in this model the Tidewater, settled by English aristocrats in the early 1600s, is significantly different from the larger Deep South, first settled by Englishmen from the Caribbean several decades later. Woodard laid out his basic ideas and how he developed them in a podcast conversation with Marshall Poe.

After The Nine Nations of North America, I’ve joked that I came out of two nations: Midwestern and Academic. Even though I’ve never been formally part of either tribe, they’ve largely defined my values.

Under Woodard’s model, however, there’s no single Midwest. He splits that part of the country into extensions of Yankeedom (settled by New Englanders), the Midlands (spread west from Philadelphia), and Greater Appalachia (folks from the Revolutionary-era backcountry). And the part of California where I was born is in El Norte, its culture shaped by Spanish settlers seeking autonomy from Mexico City.

One of the smallest nations geographically on Woodard’s map is New Netherland—basically the part of North America that the Dutch colonized before the English took over. However, since that area includes New York City, its population and influence are much bigger than its physical footprint.

American Nations presents the Revolution first as “A Common Struggle” that first pulled disparate, competing regions together and then as “Six Wars of Liberation” in six different regions. Yankeedom was basically independent after March 1776 while New Netherland was pulled back into the British Empire until 1783.

Woodard overstates his case at times. In his introduction he writes:

New Netherland also nurtured two Dutch innovations considered subversive by most other European states at the time: a profound tolerance for diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry. Forced on other nations at the Constitutional Convention, these ideals have been passed down to us as the Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights wasn’t a product of the Constitutional Convention; it was a pushback against the new federal government which that meeting proposed.

So let’s read Woodard’s statement to refer not to the convention itself but to the overall ratifying process. In a later chapter, Woodard writes of the Constitution:

New Netherlanders refused to vote on it at all until Congress agreed to add thirteen amendments modeled on the civil liberties enumerated in the Articles of Capitulation on the Reduction of New Netherland. . . . The vote in New York State was a cliffhanger, prompting New Netherlanders to threaten to secede and join the new union on their own if delegates from the Yankee interior counties did not ratify the new constitution.

Together these statements appear to present New Netherland as both standing firm against ratification and demanding it. This analysis also glosses over the many other sources for the Constitution’s first ten amendments, including the British Bill of Rights passed by Parliament in 1689. The Pennsylvania minority that had opposed ratification in 1788 proposed amendments guaranteeing individual rights. The Massachusetts convention reached compromise by proposing similar amendments, and other states followed that course.

In fact, by the time New York ratified the Constitution, nine other states had already done so, meaning that it had legal force. Of course, the nation needed to include New York as a large, central state. But I don’t see how New Netherland “forced” individual rights onto the rest of the U.S.

What’s more, two of the three Federalist Papers authors who argued to approve the Constitution as originally written were from New York. Woodard makes a point of calling Alexander Hamilton “Barbados-born,” suggesting he brought foreign values to New Netherland rather than fitting right in. And the book doesn’t even mention John Jay, whose mother was from an old Dutch family.

Though I think that at times like those American Nations’s thesis is stretched too far, it definitely provokes new thinking about North America and its past.

The Constitution, the Post Office, and the Future

2011-12-09T08:28:00.011-05:00

Article One, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution says that “Congress shall have power…To establish Post Offices and post Roads.” In fact, the Continental Congress had taken on that power and responsibility even before declaring independence from Britain, appointing Benjamin Franklin to be postmaster general back in July 1775. (He’d held a similar position under royal rule in the 1750s, administering the system at times from London.)

There’s no question, therefore, that the U.S. of A.’s Founders viewed the transmission of letters and packages as an essential part of the national government even though there were also private carriers. Joseph M. Adelman starts at that point in his Publick Occurrences essays about the long history the U.S. Postal Service.

Until forty years ago, the postmaster general was still part of the President’s Cabinet. In that year, Congress enacted a new law that spun off the service as a quasi-independent organization, meant to work like a profit-seeking business and insulated from politics.

Except, of course, that it’s not. If the Postal Service were truly a business, then it wouldn’t have to deliver first-class mail to almost anyplace in the country for the same small price—the requirement of universal service. Furthermore, the agency’s finances are still under Congress’s control. At the Redtape Chronicles, Bob Sullivan ran the math on the results:

Right now, the Postal Service is being forced to pre-pay health benefits for the next 75 years during a 10-year stretch. In the past four years, those prepayments have totaled $21 billion. The agency's deficit during that time is about $20 billion. Remove these crazy pre-payments — a requirement that no other government agency endures and no private industry would even consider — and the Postal Service would be in the black. . . . the Postal Service starts its year in a hole designed to hide a portion of the federal deficit.

Those costs are also linked to two more of the U.S. of A.’s biggest economic challenges: the Bush-Cheney recession and the rise in health costs.

Of course, everyone recognizes that the volume of first-class mail is dropping tremendously because of the internet. Even if the economy hadn’t taken the worst hit since the Great Depression in 2008, the deficit were smaller, and our health-care system weren’t weighed down by unnecessary costs, the Postal Service’s business model would still be outdated.

But the constitutional principle behind that agency still stands. In fact, our modern economy and way of life depend on speedy, reliable, and widespread communication more than ever. So what is the federal government’s responsibility?

Our judicial and political systems have already concluded that our freedom of the press isn’t limited by the fact we no longer use eighteenth-century printing technology. The First Amendment applies to mimeograph machines and offset printers, radio and television, the internet, and so on. Similarly, people who read the Second Amendment broadly argue that the “arms” it refers to include modern firearms. The U.S. Navy has expanded beyond copper-plated wooden ships.

By the same logic, the clause of the Constitution quoted above empowers Congress to establish the service and infrastructure for Americans to exchange messages in the modern fashion—electronically and digitally. By analogy to the Postal Service, that service should reach nearly everyone and come at a minimal cost. In fact, the U.S. government was in on the ground floor of that service, developing the early internet within the Defense Department.

In recent years those systems and services have been established and expanded mostly by private businesses, often but not always regulated by state and local governments as utilities. But there were also private delivery services in 1775 and 1787, and the Founders didn’t think those were enough.

[Image above courtesy of Northampton, New Hampshire.]

A Chance to Be on TV (kind of)

2011-12-08T08:21:00.001-05:00

C-SPAN is recording William M. Fowler’s talk about his new book, An American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783, at the Social Law Library tonight. The event runs from 5:00 to 7:00 P.M., and organizers ask people to arrive promptly so as not to disrupt the recording. But hey, if you want to be a blurry shoulder crossing in front of a camera halfway through the event, here’s your chance.

Bill Fowler is also host of this New England Quarterly podcast from last summer discussing Richard Brown’s article “‘Tried, Convicted, and Condemned, in Almost Every Bar-room and Barber’s Shop’: Anti-Irish Prejudice in the Trial of Dominic Daley and James Halligan, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1806.”

Prof. Brown is a very interesting historian of early America who organized one of the first history conferences I attended. This paper grew from the same research that led to The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, written with Prof. Irene Quenzler Brown, and he’s doing other research on the criminal justice system. Even on a topic that obviously means a lot to him, Dick Brown is somewhat dry as a speaker, thoughtful rather than effusive, so to liven up this recording there’s also…

Michael Dukakis!

The former governor, now a professor of government at Northeastern, comes into the conversation because he issued a proclamation acknowledging the injustices of the Daley and Halligan trial, modeled on a similar proclamation about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Tell me he doesn’t sound loose, casual, and still very smart about government.

An interesting aspect of the discussion, not fully explored, is that Brown concluded that anti-Irish sentiment was not a factor in Daley and Halligan’s conviction, though their defense counsel raised that issue. The prosecuting attorney, James Sullivan, was only one generation removed from Ireland himself, and Massachusetts would elect him governor the next two years. Other Irishmen were acquitted in similar trials at the same time. On the other hand, the rules of the court in 1806 were not what any of us would consider fair today.

The Final Blow to the Liberty Bell

2011-12-07T09:22:00.019-05:00

All in all I’m inclined to believe E. J. Rauch’s 1911 recollection of helping to crack the Liberty Bell in 1835. The story he told the New York Times didn’t present him as more than one of a crowd, and it didn’t come with any tidy moral.

However, that wasn’t the occasion when the bell cracked; it was one of a series of occasions. Rauch recalled seeing a crack twelve to fifteen inches long. The current gap is over two feet long, and a hairline crack extends another few inches from its top.

The last time the city ordered the bell to be rung was eleven years after the date Rauch remembered it cracking. On 26 Feb 1846, USHistory.org states, the Philadelphia Public Ledger reported:

The old Independence Bell rang its last clear note on Monday last in honor of the birthday of Washington and now hangs in the great city steeple irreparably cracked and dumb. It had been cracked before but was set in order for that day by having the edges of the fracture filed so as not to vibrate against each other. . . . It gave out clear notes and loud, and appeared to be in excellent condition until noon, when it received a sort of compound fracture in a zig-zag direction through one of its sides which put it completely out of tune and left it a mere wreck of what it was.

By that year, according to what he told the Times, Rauch had enlisted in the army, so he may well have been far out of hearing range. Thus, he went through life thinking he’d helped break the bell.

“We found that there was a big crack”

2011-12-06T08:50:00.060-05:00

Yesterday I started to quote a letter from E. J. Rauch published in the New York Times on 16 July 1911 about the crack in the Liberty Bell.

On George Washington’s birthday in 1835, when he was nine years old, little Emmanuel Joseph was returning from an errand for his mother when the custodian of the old Pennsylvania State House, a man named Downing, beckoned to him.

“Come here!” he called to me and several boys whom he spied in the square. After he had corralled six or eight of us—I don’t remember exactly how many—he told us that he wanted us to ring the Liberty Bell in honor of Washington’s Birthday. The idea pleased us very much—we boys were not in the habit of ringing the old bell—and we agreed to do it.

Then Downing climbed into the steeple of the State House and tied a rope to the clapper of the bell. Coming down again, he put the end of this rope into our hands and instructed us to pull with all our might, which we did.

We were working away, and the bell had struck, so far as I can recall, about ten or a dozen times, when we noticed a change in the tone. We kept on ringing, though, but, after a while, the steeplekeeper noticed the difference, too. Surmising that something might be wrong, he told us to stop pulling the rope. Then he climbed back into the steeple, we boys following behind.

On the side of the bell that hung toward Walnut Street we found that there was a big crack, a foot or fifteen inches long. Downing then told us to run along home. We obeyed.

What happened after that I forget—boy-like I didn’t do any worrying, and heard no more about the cracking of the bell until some years later. Then, however, and many times since, I have read of how the bell came to be cracked, but never have I seen the version which I have just given. I honestly believe it is the correct one.

A nineteenth-century tradition held that the bell cracked while being tolled on 8 July 1835 for Chief Justice John Marshall’s death. But perhaps that was the day when the public learned about the crack that had appeared a few months before. Perhaps Rauch misremembered the occasion when he had helped pull the rope. Or perhaps his story has no foundation in fact; normally people wouldn’t want credit for damaging a national icon, but the crack in the Liberty Bell is part of what makes it iconic.

The historical record shows, however, that Philadelphia continued to order the Liberty Bell to be rung after 1835.

TOMORROW: The final blow.

(The picture above illustrates a legend about the signing of the Declaration of Independence that Philadelphia author George Lippard came up with in 1847. It’s got nothing to do with Thomas Downing, E. J. Rauch, and the other boys. But I couldn’t resist using it.)

“How I Broke the Liberty Bell”

2011-12-05T08:37:00.002-05:00

A century ago, the 16 July 1911 New York Times ran a story headlined “‘How I Broke the Liberty Bell’—By the Boy Who Broke It.” I read about this confession in Gary B. Nash’s book on the bell and went in search of the full article. Old enough to be in the public domain, the story is available in the newspaper’s public archive and more easily at Sunday Magazine.

Emmanuel Joseph Rauch contacted the Times to state that he had helped to put the famous crack in the famous bell. He told the paper that he had been born in Pennsylvania on 6 Nov 1825 and had reached the age of eighty-six. Actually, that meant he he was in eighty-sixth year, but he tended to give himself an extra.

Rauch had worked for both the army (a lieutenant in the Civil War) and the railroads, among other enterprises. In 1886 he moved to New York, joined the Manhattan Elevated Railway company, and became “road foreman of engines.” I find his name on a letter to the Locomotive Engineers’ Monthly Journal in 1892. Age and the arrival of electric engines spurred Rauch’s retirement. His granddaughter Julia Rhoads left a biographical article about him among a few other papers at Penn State.

E. J. Rauch’s letter as the Times began this way:

The Liberty Bell was cracked, as I remember, on Washington’s Birthday, 1835, and this is the way it was done:

I was then 10 [sic] years old. On that day I had been sent by my mother on an errand to a shop not far from our home. On my return from it, I was walking through State House Square when I noticed that the janitor or steeplekeeper of the old State House building was beckoning to me. His name was Downing—“Major Jack” we used to call him—and he was a well-known character in Philadelphia at that time.

Hold on! The name “Major Jack Downing” was a character that Seba Smith of Maine had created as a voice for humorous essays starting in 1830. Three years later a New York writer, Charles Augustus Davis, started using the same pseudonym. So was Rauch remembering a fictional character?

In fact, the 1829 Register of Pennsylvania records “Thomas Downing, watchman at the State House, praying for an advance in his salary.” He did so again in 1835. In 1839 Thomas Downing testified before the legislature about a political fight the previous autumn; he stated, “I live in the Terret of the State House.”

An 1884 history of Philadelphia identifies the old State House janitor as “Tommy Downing,” well known to the city’s firefighting societies because he rang the old State House’s alarm bell. Charles Franklin Warwick’s Keystone Commonwealth, published in 1912, states:

The last ringer of the [Liberty] bell was Thomas Downing. His term of office extended from 1827-35. He lived in the steeple and the pipe from his stove protruded through one of the openings. It was while he was the ringer that the Bell cracked in 1835.

Even though Downing had to stop ringing the old bell that year, his later legislative testimony shows he continued to live in the tower.

So a Mr. Downing was indeed “janitor or steeplekeeper of the old State House building” when Rauch was a boy. Folks probably took to calling him “Major Jack” after the fictional character.

TOMORROW: Back to Rauch’s story.

Faneuil Hall Renovated

2011-12-04T09:06:00.002-05:00

This week Charles Bahne alerted me that the Boston Globe website offers an article and slide show about the ongoing renovation of Faneuil Hall.

In a few months, the landmark will reopen with “new interpretive exhibits, educational space, and up-to-date technology” in the new Boston National Historic Park visitors’ center on the ground floor.

The upper floors will continue to house the auditorium built for public meetings and the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company’s museum. The building’s current configuration dates from 1806, when Charles Bulfinch oversaw its most extensive renovation.

The Faneuil Hall that housed the town meetings of the 1760s and 1770s was significantly smaller, as in this image (courtesy of Boston College).

Liberty Bell Curiosities

2011-12-03T08:33:00.001-05:00

Gary B. Nash’s The Liberty Bell, published by Yale University Press last year as part of a series on American icons, offers these intriguing facts:

In 1828 the city of Philadelphia commissioned William Meredith to make a new bell for the old Pennsylvania State House. That building’s damaged pre-Revolutionary bell was stuck on the fourth floor of a tower, and the city told the bell-maker that for $400 he could have it for scrap. After looking at the situation, Meredith decided it wouldn’t be worth the trouble of hoisting the bell down and hauling it away. And that’s why we still have the bell that, seven years later, abolitionists in New York dubbed the Liberty Bell.
In 1893, the Daughters of the American Revolution collected copper coins from the Roman Empire, the heads of pikes used by John Brown’s raiders, a silver spoon from John C. Calhoun, hinges from Abraham Lincoln’s house, links of George Washington’s surveying chain, a copper kettle from Thomas Jefferson, and Lucretia Mott’s silver fruit knife, and had them all melted down to make the Columbian Liberty Bell, a 13,000-pound tribute to the Liberty Bell at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. (Hey, cheer up! Most of those artifacts probably had horrible provenances.)
The Liberty Bell has been on display in Boston only once, for two days in 1903 around the 128th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. (Boston had asked for the bell three years earlier, but Philadelphia decided to keep it—perhaps to be present at the 125th anniversaries of the creation of the Continental Army and the naming of Washington as commander-in-chief.) After the bell arrived in Boston by train, it was carried on “a float drawn by thirteen bay horses and escorted by the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company” to the Bunker Hill monument for its brief display.
The bell rang to summon “eight thousand Philadelphians to the State House to hear the portentous news in April 1775—brought by Paul Revere after a five-day dash on his magnificent mare, Brown Betty, from Boston to the Quaker City—about the firefights at Lexington and Concord.”

Ooh! Ouch! Reading that last sentence is like watching a pig fall down a flight of stairs—getting both more awful and more risible with each bump. It mixes up Revere’s ride to Philadelphia with the Suffolk Resolves in the fall of 1774 with the series of express riders who carried news of shots at Lexington (but not yet Concord) in April 1775. The name of Revere’s horse was Brown Beauty, at least according to a 1930 genealogy. I don’t know about the eight thousand people, but Nash is an expert on the social history of Philadelphia, so on that detail I trust him.

Schecter on Washington’s Maps at Boston Public Library, 6 Dec.

2011-12-02T09:17:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday, 6 December, the Boston Public Library will host a talk by Barnet Schecter about his book George Washington’s America: A Biography Through His Maps.

This book is based on a collection of maps that Washington owned which were eventually bound in a single volume, now at Yale University. It traces the first President’s life through those maps, some of which he drew as a surveyor and landowner, most of which he collected as a land speculator, military leader, and political official.

The book is oversized and heavily illustrated, letting readers see the maps as Washington did. They show the territories he worried about taking or protecting, and the early growth of the U.S. of A.

Schechter is also author of The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution.

The library is presenting this talk in partnership with the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center and the Boston Map Society. It will begin at 6:00 P.M. in the Abbey Room, in the older part of the main library.

Upcoming Events at the Massachusetts Historical Society

2011-12-01T08:51:00.004-05:00

The Massachusetts Historical Society is hosting three events on the history of eighteenth-century America in one busy week.

Tonight William M. Fowler, Jr., will speak at 6:00 P.M. on his new book, American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783. Bill is a professor at Northeastern and a former director of the M.H.S. Reading his short biography of Samuel Adams was one of the steps that ultimately led me to Boston 1775 (so he has a lot to answer for). The reception before Bill’s talk will start at 5:30. Register for the event here.

On Tuesday, 6 December, at 5:15 P.M. the Boston-Area Early American History Seminar will feature a panel discussion on colonial family law. One presentation will look at “Boston Almshouse children and…their patterns of binding out through four multi-child narratives.” Another will explore “the little-known role played by midwives in the colonial courtroom.” Panelists are Abby Chandler of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell; Ruth Wallis Herndon of Bowling Green; and moderator Cornelia Hughes Dayton of the University of Connecticut.

Two days later at 5:30 P.M., in the Boston Seminar on the History of Women and Gender, Jennifer Morgan of New York University will present a paper called “Quotidian Erasures: Gender and the Logic of the Early Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.” The slave trade across the Atlantic coincided with the Enlightenment’s new scientific study of people. The result is more data for historians, but also more questions about how and why that data was collected and its meaning then and now. At least that’s how I interpret the seminar description. Prof. Linda Heywood of Boston University will comment.

Finally, folks interested in the seventeenth century might want to peek in on the seminar on Wednesday, 14 December, in which Jonathan Beecher Field of Clemson will lay out his research on how John Winthrop understood and presented the stories of “monstrous births” involving—surprise!—his religious and political enemies. With that appetizing subject, this is naturally a brown-bag seminar, starting at noon.

“Meat became available to the masses”

2011-11-30T08:43:00.001-05:00

The 21 Nov 2001 issue of the New Yorker, with the theme of food, includes an article (not freely available online) about historians at Hampton Court Palace in London recreating a dinner served to George III and his family on 6 Feb 1789. The king was just recovering from his earliest bout of madness, and that day was the first time that his attendants let him resume using a knife and fork.

Along the way reporter Lauren Collins says:

During the Georgian era [in England], meat became available to the masses. Farmers learned to produce fodder (turnips, swedes, and clover) that could sustain their cattle through the winter. The average ox sold at Smithfield Market in 1710 weighed three hundred and seventy pounds; by 1795, it had reached eight hundred. . . .

Seafood was plentiful, too: an account book shows that thirteen varieties, from salmon to smelts, were requisitioned in a month at [the royal palace at] Kew. A barrel of oysters cost five shillings. Cod was ordered “crimped”—the fishmonger would score it to the bone, while it was still alive, to give it a firmer flesh.

For reasons of hygiene as well as of fashion, the Georgians mistrusted raw fruits and vegetables. Cucumbers, lettuce, and celery were served stewed. Tomatoes—known as “apples of love”—had been in England since the sixteenth century, but people didn't start eating them until around 1800.

Still, the Georgian palate was sophisticated, especially in its marriage of sweet and savory flavors, evident in such delicacies as pistachio ice cream. The grocery list for Kew in February, 1789, includes hams (379 1/4 pounds), anchovies, “vermicelly,” “Paramazan cheese,” isinglass (gelatinized dried fish bladder, for clarifying beer), and sago (the pith of palm stems, for milk puddings). Many Georgian dishes would strike contemporary taste buds as almost Christmassy.

The American diet was probably plainer, but ample. Observers agreed that the common American was in better health than the equivalent European. The lower population density meant less disease, and the more equal distribution of wealth and greater demand for labor meant more people could enjoy adequate daily nutrition.

For studies of what early New Englanders ate, I recommend the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife volume Foodways in the Northeast.

Tea Party Time Coming Closer

2011-11-29T08:59:00.001-05:00

Tickets for the annual reenactment of the meeting at Old South Meeting House that led up to the Boston Tea Party are on sale now. The sales site says:

By December 16, 1773, all the fuss about tea in Boston had come to a boil. Three ships loaded with tea sat anchored in Boston harbor. The Patriots were determined to prevent the tea on these ships from being landed on American soil, because if it were, a tax would be due upon it.

This is where you join the party! Come take on the role of Patriot or Loyalist in this spirited reenactment of the Boston Tea Party. Hear from the likes of John Hancock, the richest man in Boston; Francis Rotch, owner of the ship Dartmouth; famed orator and doctor Joseph Warren; and notorious rabble rouser Samuel Adams.

Note the stereotypical treatment of Samuel Adams as a troublemaker, despite the fact that we’re supposed to admire what he notoriously roused the rabble to do. Longtime Boston 1775 readers know that I occasionally grouse about misrepresentations of Samuel Adams as an unreasonable troublemaker. But only occasionally.

This year the event is co-sponsored by the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum; that nascent institution’s website says it’s a bit over 200 days from opening. That gives its staff plenty of time to improve its presentation about David Kinnison.

Dig at the Durant-Kendrick Homestead

2011-11-28T08:53:00.000-05:00

Yesterday’s Boston Globe included a regional story on an archeological dig in Newton, at the Durant-Kendrick Homestead.

I’d never heard of this site. Growing up in Newton, as my friend Jack Riccardi has said, means you learn on school field trips that the Jackson Homestead is the center of U.S. history, perhaps followed by Independence Hall and the White House. But Historic Newton, guardian of the Jackson Homestead, also spearheaded the study of the Durant-Kendrick site.

Of the main house there, the Globe states:

The circa-1730s structure is endowed with centuries of history.

For starters, Edward Durant III - whose father built the house, which originally sat on 97 acres along with several outbuildings and barns - was involved in numerous town committees that responded to national issues when the Colonies were on the verge of the Revolutionary War, according to the research of independent scholar Mary Fuhrer.

The Kenrick family, who took over ownership in 1790, operated the largest plant nursery in New England from the site, according to [Historic Newton director Cynthia S.] Stone. They had around 200 species of pear trees, and varieties of apples, flowers, berries, and ornamental trees. They sold plants to people throughout the country, changing the landscape of the United States, Stone said. . . .

Throughout this process, their biggest discovery was the sunken dairy, with its brick floors and walls. It was likely used in the late 18th or early 19th century for processing milk into butter or cheese, Beranek said, then was filled in during the 1850s with construction rubble and trash.

The project is headed by Christa M. Beranek of the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The artifacts are now being analyzed, and there are plans for a report and an exhibit at Historic Newton.

I find that Edward Durant’s floor stencils from around 1780 have inspired some modern decorating products.

“All this commotion about the Bell”

2011-11-27T08:50:00.001-05:00

In his short book The Liberty Bell, Gary B. Nash quotes from a reminiscence by William Linn which he could credit only to “Unidentified source from Independence National Historical Park files.”

Google Books let me find Linn’s statement at greater length in The Liberty Bell: Its History, Associations and Home, a booklet compiled by E. R. Gudehus and published by the city of Philadelphia in 1915.

The full recollection was:

All this commotion about the Bell makes me think of my boyhood days, when we would go down to the old Bell and, with paving stones, try to knock off a piece of it.

If the Bell would break at all, it would have broken then, when these boys hammered it with pieces of iron and stones trying to get a piece off.

For nearly a hundred years no one had paid any particular attention to the Bell. Then came the Centennial, when the worship began, although it had hung in the Hall for years. That was done, no doubt, to save it, or the boys would have broken it all up.

There was an attorney named William Linn in Philadelphia active in Republican politics in the late 1800s. He died on 22 Nov 1922, according to the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. The 24 November Reading Eagle stated that he had been a Civil War officer and “more than 70 years of age.” In the following year, Linn’s widow sent the Public Ledger a manuscript of his reminiscences of old Philadelphia. So I’m thinking that man’s probably the source of this anecdote, and it refers to the period around 1850.

As Nash shows, the bell was just becoming famous then because Abolitionists adopted it as a symbol of freedom and author George Lippard had linked it fictionally to the Declaration of Independence. But people hadn’t yet accepted the value of preserving something old for everyone, as opposed to trying to take a souvenir of it for oneself. In 1852 the city moved the bell from a little-visited upper floor of Independence Hall to the ground floor—though I can’t tell whether that meant boys had less of a chance to pound on it, or more.

The United States Eagle as It First Appeared

2011-11-26T08:46:00.004-05:00

This is Charles Thomson’s sketch of how he pictured the Great Seal of the United States in June 1782. The Continental Congress had asked him, as its longtime secretary, to offer some suggestions. Drawing on the discussions of previous committees, Thomson submitted this written proposal:

On a field Chevrons composed of seven pieces on one side & six on the other, joined together at the top in such wise that each of the six bears against or is supported by & supports two of the opposite side the pieces of the chevrons on each side alternate red & white. The shield born on the breast of an American Eagle on the wing & rising proper. In the dexter talon of the Eagle an Olive branch & in the sinister a bundle of Arrows. Over the head of the Eagle a Constellation of Stars surrounded with bright rays and at a little distance clouds.

The Congress’s seal committee made some changes to the eagle’s wings and the stripes on the shield, resulting in the following design. (Remember that it’s reversed when the seal is used to emboss a document.)

Kind of scrawny by modern standards, wasn’t it? More images and history at GreatSeal.com.

Franklin: “I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen”

2011-11-25T21:00:00.001-05:00

As long as I was writing about Benjamin Franklin and turkeys, I thought I’d look into the oft-repeated statement that he preferred the turkey to the bald eagle as a symbol of the new republic.

That came from a letter to his daughter, Sally Bache, written from France on 26 Jan 1784. Franklin had just received news of the Society of the Cincinnati, and he didn’t really care for it. Most of his letter was about “the absurdity of descending honors.” As for the Cincinnati “ribbands and medals,” Franklin called them “tolerably done,” but then went on to repeat other people’s criticisms.

One of those complaints concerned the eagle that formed the basis of the medal. (The example shown here belonged to Gen. Henry Knox.) Franklin reported, “Others object to the Bald Eagle as looking too much like a Dindon or Turkey.” Derived from “d’Inde” or “from the Indies,” “dindon” was the French word for “turkey.”

Thoughts of eagles and turkeys launched Franklin into a comparison of their symbolic qualities:

For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him. With all this Injustice, he is never in good Case but like those among Men who live by Sharping & Robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy.

Besides he is a rank Coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the District. He is therefore by no means a proper Emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America who have driven all the King birds from our Country. . . .

I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America. Eagles have been found in all Countries, but the Turkey was peculiar to ours. He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.

Franklin’s understanding of bald eagle behavior left a lot to be desired, according to that bird’s fans. But he liked drawing political lessons from an animal’s supposed habits, as in this letter about rattlesnakes (probably).

While people often quote Franklin’s words in regard to the Great Seal of the United States, he wasn’t discussing that depiction of the eagle. He’d made other suggestions about a U.S. seal back when he was a member of the Continental Congress, but never wrote publicly about the design eventually adopted. This family letter wasn’t published until decades after his death.

I’m therefore inclined to think Franklin offered his turkey suggestion mostly as a joke, like his proposal of daylight saving time the same year.

Dr. Franklin’s Turkey Hotline

2011-11-24T08:48:00.011-05:00

In 1750, Benjamin Franklin was deep in his investigation of electricity. He told a correspondent at the Royal Society in London that he planned to try killing a turkey with [what we’d now call] the static charge from two big glass jars.

On 25 December, Franklin wrote to his brother John in Boston describing the result of that experiment:

Two nights ago being about to kill a Turkey by the Shock from two large Glass Jarrs containing as much electrical fire as forty common Phials, I inadvertently took the whole thro’ my own Arms & Body, by receiving the fire from the united Top Wires with one hand, while the other held a Chain connected with the outsides of both Jars.

The Company present (whose talking to me, & to one another I suppose occasioned my Inattention to what I was about) Say that the flash was very great & the crack as loud as a Pistol; yet my Senses being instantly gone, I neither Saw the one nor ~~felt~~ heard the other; nor did I feel the Stroke on my hand, tho’ I afterwards found it raised a round swelling where the fire enter’d as big as half a Pistol Bullet by which you may judge of the Quickness of the Electrical Fire which by this Instance seems to be greater than that of Sound Light & animal ~~Motion~~ Sensation.

What I can remember of the matter is, that I was about to try whether the Bottles or Jars were fully charged, by the Strength & Length of the stream issuing to my hand, as I comonly used to do, & which I might Safely enough have done if I had not held the chain in ye. other hand; I then felt what I know not how well to describe; a universal Blow thrôout my whole Body from head to foot which seem’d within as well as without; after which the first thing I took notice of was a violent quick Shaking of my body which gradually remitting, my sense as gradually return’d, & then I thôt the Bottles must be discharged but could not conceive how, till at last I Perceived the Chain in my hand, and Recollected what I had been About to do:

that part of my hand & fingers which held the Chain was left white as tho’ the Blood had been Driven Out, and Remained so 8 or 10 Minutes After, feeling like Dead flesh, and I had a Numbness in my Arms and the back of my Neck, which Continued till the Next Morning, but wore off. Nothing remains now of this shock but a Soreness in my breast Bone, which feels as if it had been Bruised. I did not fall but suppose I should have been knocked down, if I had received the Stroke in my head. The whole was over in less than a minute.

Franklin wanted his brother to warn young James Bowdoin, whom he had just sent a bunch of electrical writings, about this possible danger. The letter survives in the Bowdoin Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society; you can see it here.

Undaunted, Franklin returned to his experiments and sent a full report to the Royal Society, where it was lost but not before being summarized for its Philosophical Transactions:

He made first several experiments on fowls, and found, that 2 large thin glass jars gilt, holding each about 6 gallons, were sufficient, when fully charged, to kill common hens outright; but the turkeys, though thrown into violent convulsions, and then lying as dead for some minutes, would recover in less than a quarter of an hour. However, having added three other such to the former two, though not fully charged, he killed a turkey of about ten pounds weight, and believes that they would have killed a much larger. He conceited, as himself says, that the birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tender.

Those experiments led Franklin becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1756.

“Speechless in the face of its errors of fact”

2011-11-23T09:08:00.018-05:00

In a discussion of sources and previous studies on page 297 of Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North, C. S. Manegold wrote:

By contrast, the almost bizarre piece, “An ‘Animadversion’ upon a ‘Complaint’ against ‘the Petition’ of Belinda, an African Slave,” by Vincent Carretta, published in Early American Literature in 1997, left me literally speechless in the face of its errors of fact (he posits that Isaac Royall was “an American invention” cooked up as a “slur against the avariciousness, Jewishness, and royalist sympathies of the ‘master’”). I can only say here, what was he thinking?

In fact, those phrases come from a previous paper by E. W. Pitcher that Carretta was quoting and refuting. Carretta’s two-page communication in the journal explained that Royall was a well-documented Medford slaveholder, and that Belinda’s original petition is preserved in the Massachusetts state archives. He stated, “The written account of Belinda’s petition [that the previous author doubted] is almost certainly fictionalized, but that does not render Belinda and her petition fictions.”

Criticizing someone for saying something he was actually quoting to debunk—that’s the sort of thing Mitt Romney does. Except I think Manegold made an honest mistake.

In fact, the previous paper was itself a response to an earlier paper by Joanne Braxton and Sharon M. Harris, so there were multiple levels to keep straight. For the record, this posting is my response to Manegold’s response to Carretta’s response to Pitcher’s response to Braxton and Harris.

More Pelham Miniatures—Or Are They?

2011-11-22T08:57:00.050-05:00

Miniatures that Henry Pelham painted while he lived in America are very rare. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has one of Stephen Hooper; correspondence between Pelham and Hooper confirms that the artist produced such a miniature.

During the war, Pelham left Massachusetts for Ireland. The National Gallery of Ireland has a miniature Pelham painted in 1779 of Lewis Farley Johnston, a little boy who grew up to be a judge.

I suspect that Pelham’s relationship to his celebrated half-brother John Singleton Copley has made people eager to attribute more miniatures to him. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston says this image of Peter Chardon, Jr. (1738-1766) was painted by Pelham in “about 1760”—but Henry was only eleven years old that year. (Perhaps he painted it from a 1760 Copley portrait after Chardon’s death.)

The M.F.A. also has a couple of miniatures attributed to Copley that show Henry Pelham as a grown man—or they show Copley’s brother-in-law Jonathan Clarke instead. Or maybe Pelham painted Clarke.

In 2007, Freeman’s sold the miniature of Jeremiah Kahler shown above as Pelham’s work. That auction house also said that Kahler was born in Hull and “lost at sea before 1830.” In fact, according to records of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, Kahler was born in Germany and “died at Boston, Feb. 2d, 1829, aged 86, extremely poor.” Period newspapers confirm both the date and the poverty.

I went looking for information on when Kahler arrived in New England. The earliest record I found of him dates from 1784, when he subscribed along with over two hundred other businessmen to improve Boston Common. The Massachusetts General Court naturalized him in November 1788 under the name Jeremiah Joachim/Joakim Khaler, which implies, but doesn’t prove, that Kahler had not been established in Massachusetts before independence. That act identified the merchant as “late a subject of the King of Denmark”; perhaps Kahler had come to Boston from the Danish West Indies.

The first newspaper advertisement I found from Kahler appeared in the Columbian Centinel in 1793. The next year he married Hannah Spear (1765-1845), and he was active in many business and charitable societies around the turn of the century. Kahler’s translations from German newspapers for the Boston press were reprinted all along the Atlantic seaboard, and he was the connection between Bostonians and Prof. Christoph Daniel Ebeling of Hamburg.

For Pelham to have painted this miniature, Kahler would have had to arrive in America before March 1776, when the artist left with the British military. It’s conceivable that the two men crossed paths somewhere else. But it seems most likely that this miniature was created by another, less interesting artist.

Little Portrait from a Little Brother

2011-11-21T08:43:00.006-05:00

After John Singleton Copley’s portrait-painting career took off in the early 1770s, he stopped painting so many miniatures. His younger half-brother Henry Pelham took on that task.

Skinner Auctioneers just sold one of the miniatures that Pelham made from his older brother’s full-sized work, showing merchant Adam Babcock (1740-1817, at left). Babcock was the son of Joshua Babcock, a Rhode Island physician, Chief Judge, and Assembly Speaker [hey, the place was even smaller then]. The elder Babcock went on to sign the state’s declaration of independence from Britain, issued two months before the Continental Congress’s Declaration of Independence.

The auction house says Adam Babcock was from Boston, and indeed he died there, but at the time of those portraits he was based in New Haven, Connecticut. He was the plaintiff in a long lawsuit over a 13s. pair of leather breeches, described starting here.

The auctioneer notes that the gold case of this miniature looks just like one from Paul Revere’s workshop, which is interesting given the big argument Pelham and Revere had in early 1770.

TOMORROW: Sniffing out more Pelham miniatures.

Drummers Beating

2011-11-20T08:40:00.004-05:00

In the eighteenth-century British army, drummers had the duty of whipping men convicted in courts-martial. This became a political issue when troops was stationed in Boston in 1768-1770.

From 1759 to 1843, His Majesty’s 29th Regiment had black drummers. Adm. Edward Boscawen bought the first batch of those musicians at Guadaloupe and gave them to his brother, the regiment’s colonel. At least three of those original men were still with the regiment in 1775.

When the 29th was sent to Boston in 1768, locals were surprised to see black soldiers whipping white ones. Within a week of the troops’ arrival, the 6 October Boston Evening-Post reported:

In the Morning nine or ten Soldiers of Colonel [Maurice] Carr’s Regiment for sundry Misdemeanors, were severely whipt on the Common. To behold Britons scourged by Negro Drummers, was a new and very disagreeable Spectacle!

Whigs played up this inversion in one of their one-sided dispatches to newspapers in colonies to the south about life in occupied Boston. In February 1769, however, they also reported that a black drummer was himself whipped because he “had adventur’d to beat time at a concert of music.”

The Continental Army was mostly modeled after the British army, and the drummers’ punitive responsibilities was one of the customs carried over. However, Americans drummers were more likely to be teenagers than those in the royal ranks.

That also caused a stir, as recalled by Israel Trask, an eleven-year-old boy who had accompanied his father to the siege of Boston. Recalling the spring of 1775, he said:

It was here I witnessed for the first time public punishment inflicted in the regiment. Five or six soldiers were condemned to be flogged for the crime, I believe, of being concerned in the mutiny at Boston. This incident was impressed on my memory with increased force from the interest made to exonerate Major [Ezra] Putnam’s son from his share of the duty of applying the cat to the naked backs of the criminals that fell to him as a drummer in the regiment. A year or two older than myself, he was, however, obliged to submit and take his share of the unpleasant duty with his colleagues.

Drummer Ezra Putnam, Jr., was actually sixteen years old. After the war he and his family moved out to the Ohio Territory, and in January 1791 he died in what became known as “the Big Bottom Massacre.”

Dublin Seminar 2012 on Dubliners and Other Irish

2011-11-19T08:31:00.001-05:00

Next year’s Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, to be held in Deerfield, Massachusetts, on 22-24 June 2012, will be on the topic of “The Irish in New England.”

The call for papers says:

The Seminar is now accepting proposals for papers on the historical Irish presence in New England. The topic includes direct Irish immigrants and their descendants—Catholic and Protestant; North and South; Gaelic Irish, Hiberno-Norman or Old English, English settlers, Ulster-Scots or Scotch-Irish; as well as secondary migrants through Great Britain and British North America (Canada, the Maritimes, Newfoundland).

From the trickle of Irish settlers among the mariners, merchants, farmers, and fisherman, and the servants in the colonial period to the expanding traffic in the early nineteenth century to the flood tide of famine refugees in the 1840s and later, Irish men and women brought customs and beliefs that have had an indelible impact on New England life.

Topics for papers might include the Irish language; the revival of traditional music, dancing, and storytelling; Irish foodways; linen production; male laborers and female servants; and the larger issues of discrimination and class conflict. Other topics might be employment in railroad and canal construction, textile and shoe manufacturing; labor organization; spectator sports; shantytowns, urban enclaves; rural settlements such as the farming community of Benedicta, Maine; charitable, fraternal and religious organizations such as the 1737 Charitable Irish Society in Boston.

The Seminar encourages papers that reflect original research, especially those based primarily on underused resources such as letters and diaries, vital records, federal and state censuses, naturalization records, newspapers, portraits, prints and photographs, business and banking records, material culture, oral histories, and autobiographies.

To submit a proposal for this conference, download this form, complete it, and return it with the requested information to the seminar’s director.

I’m thinking of proposing a paper on the soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. One was definitely Irish, and almost all of them had Irish names. Their ethnic and likely religious background was one more reason they were so unwelcome in Boston in 1768-1770.

Harvard Preoccupied

2011-11-18T08:43:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I went to Harvard’s Houghton Library to look at an entry in the journals of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. To be precise, I went to see if the poet’s brother had transcribed one word correctly when he published those journals.

I’ve researched at Houghton before [starting when I was about ten—long story], but not for a few years, so I needed a Special Collections card from the Library Privileges Office.

The only problem was that Harvard Yard is closed to outsiders, the university administration’s response to the small “Occupy Harvard” movement. A person needs a Harvard identification card to get into the Yard, even if he’s there to pick up a Harvard identification card.

I phoned ahead to the Library Privileges Office to ask how they’re handling that paradox. A friendly fellow told me to tell the police officers at the gate that I wanted to go to the Library Privileges Office in the Widener building. Depending on the individual officer’s priorities, he or she would either send me on to the office or escort me there.

Unfortunately, word of that arrangement hadn’t reached all the officers. In fact, I found that only one person per gate was aware of it. And the only gate where it’s supposed to apply is the Widener Gate. After multiple inquiries, an officer told me to go straight into the back door of Widener and speak to the security guard. The security guard then told me to go straight out of the building again and around to its front.

But by then, you see, I’d broached the special police line. I could go anywhere in the Yard. But all I wanted was my card, and I still had the regular library security process to navigate. I went up the big steps, filled out the form, sat for the photo, got my card, and headed to Houghton.

So it’s possible for outsiders to visit the university for research—it may just take more polite persistence than usual. My particular experience yesterday might have been shaped by the cold rain, making the police officers reluctant to leave the awnings set up for their protection to escort me anywhere. On the other hand, I probably earned some brownie points by helping the gents at Widener gate hoist their awning up high enough for a van to drive underneath. It’s a weird situation, and everyone’s probably improvising as we go along. (I never saw the protesters.)

As for Longfellow’s journal, his handwriting is ambiguous; brother Sam didn’t make an obvious error. However, from other sources I feel confident that the poet received a visit not from “Mrs. Vassal” but from “Mr. [Darby] Vassal.”

A Quick Online Visit to Williamsburg

2011-11-17T08:39:00.003-05:00

As long as I’m talking podcasts, I must mention Colonial Williamsburg’s “Past and Present” series. I believe this is still the only podcast regularly devoted to the Revolutionary period. (If anyone knows of another, please tell me.)

These conversations are only about ten minutes, so they don’t go into great depth. But there is breadth. Most of the interviews are about life in eighteenth-century Williamsburg or notables from that time, but other podcasts delve into the challenges of running that monumental living-history museum and investigations into other periods of Virginia history. Each podcast also comes with an online transcript for review.

The first host I heard was Lloyd Dobyns, who sounds like a classic television journalist because he was one. The current host is Harmony Hunter, also a writer and editor for the Colonial Williamsburg website. Both ask the basic questions that visitors might well have.

Also available at history.org is the Colonial Williamsburg Journal. The latest issue has a disappointing article on the Boston Tea Party by the museum’s renowned and retired archeologist Ivor Noël Hume. Its recounting of North America’s tea protests of 1773-74 is incomplete and in some details inaccurate. It mentions none of the fine books devoted to the Tea Party such as Benjamin Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots, Marc Aronson’s The Real Revolution, and Benjamin Labaree’s The Boston Tea Party.

Better to look at the “New in the Collection” page, which this month features a portrait of Isaac Barré by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Barré was badly wounded in the right cheek during the Battle of Québec, and Horace Walpole said that gave him “a peculiar distortion on one side of his face, which it seems was a bullet lodged loosely in his cheek, and which gave a savage glare to one eye.” But Reynolds seems to have smoothed out Barré’s features and actually cast his other cheek into shadow.

In Our Time and the Industrial Revolution

2011-11-16T09:14:00.001-05:00

My favorite podcast is In Our Times with Melvyn Bragg from BBC Radio 4. In each episode Bragg, a peculiarly British combination of broadcast host and novelist, sits down with three academics to discuss some topic from history, culture, science, or philosophy. The archives of the podcast stretch back over a decade, to when the show was half an hour instead of forty-five minutes—which must have meant even more reminders from Bragg to hurry along.

The History section of the website has a show on “Washington and the American Revolution.” Many more episodes cover elements of the British Empire in the eighteenth century: “The Enclosure Movement,” “Women and Enlightenment Science,” “The Jacobite Rebellion,” “Edmund Burke,” “The East India Company,” “Electrickery,” “The Sublime,” and so on. There are also a lot of shows on aspects of the classical world, which helped to shape that culture.

But I’m also pleased to hear about topics only remotely connected to the stuff of Boston 1775, especially those I don’t know anything about. Right now my MP3 player includes files on Shinto, Delacroix, and the siege of Tenochtitian. I don’t feel I have time to read books on such topics, but I can fill a subway ride listening to an erudite chat about them.

One of the liveliest conversations in the bunch comes in the first of two shows on “The Industrial Revolution.” Bragg usually voices the understanding of an exceedingly well read amateur. One of his guests is anxious to dissuade him of the notion that there was something special about the British (or the Scottish) in spearheading that technological change. The main difference was coal, she says—northern Britain simply had more coal than France did. Self-congratulatory harrumphing about British ingenuity verges on “racism.” Bragg bites back at that, but can’t argue with the data on coal supplies.

I thought back to that show while reading Malcolm Gladwell’s article on Steve Jobs in this week’s New Yorker. He notes the coal theory, but then points to this April 2011 paper by Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr, summarizing it like this:

They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.

In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling—and the tweaker’s tweaker. He created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation.

I immediately wanted to know what Melvyn Bragg and his guests thought of the theory. Is it old-fashioned harrumphing in new language, or a clever application of new sociological thinking? Not that any discussion will settle the question (we can’t experiment with history, after all), but it’s always healthy to look at old ideas in new ways.

“To petition the Government for a redress of grievances”

2011-11-15T08:40:00.000-05:00

The part of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment that we forget most easily comes at the end: “the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The White House website now has a whole section inviting citizen petitions, called “We the People.” Individuals can sign in to create a petition or endorse one already posted.

And what do we the people care most about, based on the largest number of signatories to a single petition? As of yesterday, by a small margin, it’s:

“Crack down on puppy mills.”

That’s followed by cracking down on the T.S.A., not cracking down on hemp producers, and not cracking down on drugs in general. In fact, a lot of these petitions involve marijuana.

One of the more popular asks to end the Electoral College, a change that Boston 1775 has long supported. We must note, however, that amending the Constitution requires action by Congress and the states, not the executive branch.

Similarly, the White House is not where one should go to change the law of New York or overturn a Supreme Court decision.

Some petitions that appear to be properly directed also appear less than compelling. More than 12,000 people have asked the government to “formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.”

Others plead, “Allow Seriously Backlogged EB2/EB3 Beneficiaries with Their I-140 Approved to File I-485 and Apply for EAD & AP.” That has a whiff of a special interest, wouldn’t you say?

At least one petition rhetorically reaches back to the Founders. “Recognize the contribution of Flemish Americans to the establishment and settlement of America” states:

George Washington is a direct descendant of the Count of Flanders and Benjamin Franklin, the Roosevelts, Lord Baltimore (the founder of Maryland), a dozen signers of the Declaration of Independence, John Jay (the 1st Chief Justice) and many others have Flemish ancestors.

(That’s mainly because William the Conqueror married a daughter of the Count of Flanders in the eleventh century and allied with that region; there are more than twice as many years between that event and Washington’s birth than between his birth and today.)

White House staffers have posted only ten responses so far. Unsurprisingly, they restate the administration’s policy positions or explain why it can’t take positions on matters pending in courts. On 4 November, Jon G. of Michigan replied by petitioning, “We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition,” saying that would have a higher chance of success.

But perhaps the quality of response depends on the quality of ideas that We the People propose.

“Making History” at Boston College through 11 December

2011-11-14T09:01:00.000-05:00

I became curious about the discovery of the Ribchester Parade Helmet after visiting an exhibit now at the McMullen Museum inside Devlin Hall at Boston College. Called “Making History,” it consists mainly of material from the Society of Antiquaries in London.

Founded in 1707 and receiving a royal charter in 1751, the Society of Antiquaries provided a center for the systematic study of Britain’s past. In essence, it was Enlightenment thinking applied to history.

Among the society’s early work on display in Chestnut Hill are:

A 1785 reproduction of a painting of the coronation of Edward VI, showing a broad sweep of London at the time. This was useful since the original painting burned up in 1793.
Careful drawings of the great Stonehenge collapse of 1797.
A Bronze Age shield and a crucifix found on Bosworth Field, both found around 1778.
A drawing of that Ribchester Helmet, found in 1796.
A painting commissioned from young artist J. M. W. Turner in 1793 to record the look of the St. Augustine’s Gate at Canterbury. At the time the building was a brewery.

Among the items on display that helped influence American history are a copy of John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, which named this region, and a copy of the Magna Carta dating from some time after 1225.

The Antiquaries were on the forefront of historical preservation. Not many people in eighteenth-century Britain and America valued keeping buildings or artifacts around just because they were old if they could be useful some other way.

And the item displayed at the top of this posting? That’s a late-1700s ballot box from the Society. A member put his [naturally] hand into the hole and dropped a ball to the left or right to vote “YEA” or “NO.” The ball dropped into one of the two drawers at the bottom to be counted later.

John Walton, accidental archeologist

2011-11-13T08:42:00.001-05:00

On 3 Aug 1796, the Blackburn Mail, a newspaper of Lancashire County, England, reported:

A few days ago some ancient figures etc. were discovered in a scar on the Ribble side near Ribchester, a few miles from this place, about 9 feet below the surface of the earth. The river had washed part of them there, which induced the persons who discovered them to dig up the earth, where they found a metal helmet or cap-a-pie, embellished with a number of small figures of men on horseback, with swords in their hands…

The person who first discovered those “ancient figures” was thirteen-year-old John Walton. His father, a clogmaker, went back (presumably bringing John to point out the spot and help with the digging) and unearthed several more Roman artifacts.

About a year and a half later, the Waltons’ sold their discoveries to Charles Townley, a local collector. He put another description of their discovery in a letter to the Society of Antiquaries in London:

These ancient remains, composed chiefly of bronze, were found during the summer of 1796, at Ribchester, the ancient [settlement of] Coccium of the itinerary of Antoninus, situated upon the banks of the river Ribble, in the county of Lancaster, by the son of one Joseph Walton, in a hollow that had been made in the waste land at the side of the road leading to the church, and near the bend of the river. The boy, about thirteen years old, being at play in that hollow, rubbed accidently upon the helmet at the depth of about nine feet from the surface of the ground. When the helmet was extracted the other articles were found with it, deposited in a heap of red sand, which formed a cube of three feet. . . .

These are all the circumstances, relative to this discovery, which I could collect from the before-mentioned Joseph Walton, the person who dug these antiquities out of the ground, and sold them to me on December 8th, 1797.

Another local antiquarian, the Rev. T. D. Whitaker, later described also seeing “a sphinx of bronze” that might have been attached to the top of the helmet. But, he said, John Walton’s cousins had lost it before the family sold the collection.

Now called the “Ribchester parade helmet” and the “Ribchester treasure,” the surviving artifacts are in the British Museum, with replicas in a town museum near the find. John Walton’s name didn’t appear in nineteenth-century accounts, but surfaces (without citation) in modern tellings, like this P.D.F. download from the South Ribble Primary Schools.

(Despite the early newspaper report, the Ribchester Parish Council suggests that the treasure was “more likely to have been found behind one of the cottages opposite the primary school.” That might be based on a late description of the find quoted in this P.D.F. download without a source, suggesting that John Walton was digging near his home rather than exploring the Ribble riverbank.)

TOMORROW: A glimpse of the Ribchester treasure at Boston College.

Ebenezer Mackintosh, Captain of the South Enders

2011-11-12T08:42:00.000-05:00

Pope Night is turning out very long this year. Some Boston 1775 readers thought yesterday’s description of the Fifth of November celebration in 1765 put too much emphasis on upper-class gentlemen manipulating the crowds. But I can read the same events the other way as well: the crowds manipulating the elite. Or perhaps both groups got what they wanted together.

There are many more sources from the genteel class than from the working class, of course. Rich men of all political persuasions wrote about the “mob” with distaste. Friends of the royal government blamed riots on secret Whig instigators. Whigs blamed the same events on oppressive laws spurring entirely foreseeable anger from the lower sort. No one recorded much about what workingmen themselves thought, how they organized, and what they hoped to accomplish.

Alfred F. Young’s “Ebenezer Mackintosh: Boston’s Captain General of the Liberty Tree,” an essay published earlier this year in Revolutionary Founders, collects what we know about the most prominent working-class political figure in pre-Revolutionary Boston.

Mackintosh, a twenty-seven-year-old shoemaker, was the captain of the South End gang in 1764. It looks like the youth of that part of Boston chose him for that post, along with some unnamed lieutenants, but we have no idea how. The South Enders won that year’s Pope Night brawl, but a young boy was killed, town officials tried to seize the wagons, and North End captain Henry Swift lay in a coma for days.

In March 1765 Mackintosh, Swift, and others were indicted for rioting, with a stern lecture from Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson. Yet the same month, Bostonians elected Mackintosh as a Sealer of Leather, one of the town’s many inspectors. So clearly he was still popular, and commanded some respect from the men who could vote in town meeting.

The next month brought news of the Stamp Act, scheduled to take effect at the start of November. Boston was the site of America’s first public protest against that law, carried out by a large crowd in the South End on 14 Aug 1765. With Ebenezer Mackintosh as a very visible leader, that protest used the same sort of effigies as on Pope Night. The elm hanging over the proceedings was later dubbed “Liberty Tree,” and Mackintosh became its “Captain General,” a term borrowed from the militia.

Behind the scenes, it looks like the Loyall Nine, a group of young merchants and luxury craftsmen, did much of the preparation for that protest. Records also show that two days before it Samuel Adams had sworn out a warrant for unpaid taxes against Mackintosh and his partner; later, Adams apparently dropped that matter. Was that because Mackintosh had kept the violence under control and directed against the property of Stamp Act agent Andrew Oliver?

On 26 August, a more spontaneous crowd sacked Hutchinson’s house in the North End. That’s a very murky affair, made murkier by Hutchinson’s conspiracy theories. Mackintosh was arrested for the riot, then let go on the grounds that there would be worse trouble if he were locked up. No one preserved evidence that Mackintosh was actually involved, but by then many officials perceived him as controlling the Boston crowd.

That fall, protests against the Stamp Act spread up and down the Atlantic coast. In Massachusetts it became clear that Oliver wouldn’t be able to collect the new tax, and that judges and other officials would proceed without requiring stamped paper. With that struggle going his way, and legal threats still hanging over him, Mackintosh had an incentive to help keep Boston peaceful. At the same time, his South End gang constituency was probably looking forward to their Pope Night celebrations.

Yesterday’s posting said that town leaders convinced the South End and North End gangs to forgo their traditional brawl on 5 Nov 1765 by supplying a festive banquet instead. In fact, gentlemen paid for large quantities of food and drink three times that fall:

In late October, the two “richest men in town”—perhaps John Hancock and John Rowe—hosted two hundred workingmen at a tavern, with Mackintosh and Swift at the head table.
On Pope Night, there were refreshments for all under Liberty Tree as the gangs rolled their wagons around peacefully.
There was another formal dinner a week after the holiday, filling five rooms.

Furthermore, merchants gave the Pope Night officers new blue and red uniforms, hats, and canes. The young men first wore those in a public march on 1 November, the day the Stamp Act was to take effect. Mackintosh walked alongside William Brattle, general of the Massachusetts militia and Council member. A gentleman and a shoemaker, South Enders and North Enders, Pope Night officers and militia units—Bostonians thus showed their unified opposition to the Stamps. If Pope Night was all about having fun while showing off one’s patriotism, those parades and banquets accomplished the same thing without anyone getting bashed on the head.

Mackintosh wasn’t just getting a few meals and a fancy coat, furthermore. He was also getting a seat at the political table, a show of respect from gentlemen. There’s some evidence Mackintosh did have a wider political consciousness; he named his first son after a famous Corsican rebel. But we don’t have any sense of his platform, or how he might have differed on issues with the town’s rich merchants and employers. Was he a puppet, or a puppeteer, or just another actor in a complex process?

Supporters of the royal government and officials in London continued to worry about Mackintosh until the start of the war. Back in Boston, he was never prominent after 1766. Debt, the death of his wife, and possibly drink caught up with him. Mackintosh took his children to Haverhill, New Hampshire, in 1774.

More genteel men such as Dr. Thomas Young and merchant William Molineux became the Whigs’ street leaders. Members of the Loyall Nine, such as Thomas Crafts, rose to more high political offices. As for the crowds, they continued to act on their own, sometimes supporting Whig positions and sometimes defying pleas from Whig leaders. Even Mackintosh couldn’t really control everyone.