Hopestill Capen Still in the Boston Jail

We left the Boston merchant Hopestill Capen locked up in the Boston jail in mid-1777.

As a Sandemanian, Capen had stayed loyal to the British Crown—but then he’d stayed in Boston after the British military left. He refused to pledge allegiance to the colonies declaring independence in July 1776, rendering himself suspicious.

As I previously quoted, Capen tried a public plea for his release. His wife Patience petitioned the state government. His friends in the merchant community vouched for him.

On 20 June 1777, the Massachusetts Council approved a petition from merchant Robert Pierpont and others for Capen’s release. The lower house of the General Court “concurr’d as taken into a new Draught.”

A resolution is printed in Massachusetts Acts and Resolves, stipulating that Pierpont and friends would give “Give bond to the Treasurr. of This State in the sum of five hundred Pounds” that Capen would “appear before any Court in the County of Suffolk.”

But apparently the House never agreed to that wording, or those terms. Capen remained in jail.

On 24 Feb 1778, the Council took up a new petition from Patience Capen. That board named Benjamin Austin to a committee to consider it along with whatever members the House named.

On 3 March, the Council accepted that committee’s recommendation. Moses Gill (shown above) delivered the news to the House. And the House disagreed, telling the committee instead to “enquire of the Committee of Correspondence, &c. of the Town of Boston, respecting Mr. Capen.”

A week later, there was a new report. The Council again agreed with the committee, Jabez Fisher reported. The House again disagreed, and voted to set the petition aside.

The Council, made up of richer men, was apparently inclined to be more lenient, but the House, dominated by rural delegates, was still not in a forgiving mood.

The Massachusetts government had exchanged some of its Loyalist prisoners to bring captives back from New York. That wasn’t an option for Capen since he didn’t want to go over to the enemy.

And thus the legislative term ended in the spring of 1778 with Hopestill Capen still in the Boston jail.

TOMORROW: Change of heart.

In Search of Phillis Wheatley Peters at Old South, 1 Oct.

On Thursday, 1 October, Revolutionary Spaces’s Old South Meeting House will host a showing of Leslie Askew’s documentary In Search of Phillis Wheatley Peters.

This 35-minute film “reclaims the life of Phillis Wheatley Peters, America’s first published Black poet and 18th-century congregant at the Old South Meeting House. The film illuminates a largely overlooked chapter of her story: her marriage to John Peters and the radical choices she made in pursuit of autonomy, dignity, and love.”

After the screening, there will be a panel discussion with filmmaker Askew, biographer David Waldstreicher, and Jeneé Osterheldt, the Boston Globe’s Deputy Managing Editor for Culture, Talent, and Development. Audience members will be able to pose questions to the panel.

This documentary has been shown at the American Antiquarian Society, Salem State University, U. Mass. Amherst, and other sites, but this will be the first time it is screened in the poet’s own chosen place of worship.

This program is free and open to the public. Doors will open at 6 P.M., and the program will begin at 6:30. To register for a seat, visit this webpage.

The producer’s website lists other upcoming screenings in the next several weeks.

ADDENDUM on 28 September: This event at Old South has been postponed.

Widmer on “The Living Declaration,” 30 Sept.

On Wednesday, 30 September, the Massachusetts Historical Society will welcome Ted Widmer for a conversation titled “The Living Declaration: When in the Course of Human Events.”

Seats at this event have been sold out, but it’s still possible to register to view the conversation online.

The event description says:

Why do we have a Declaration of Independence? Why does it include language about human rights? In conversation with M.H.S. Chief Historian Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, historian and former presidential speechwriter Ted Widmer explores the complex lineage of the words and ideas in the Declaration and the dramatic sequence of events, many of them originating in Massachusetts, that led to the creation of the most consequential state paper in history.

Widmer’s new book, The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text, features a foreword by Gordon S. Wood, who died earlier this year.

People who have signed up to attend the in-person event will be able to view one of Thomas Jefferson’s manuscript copies of his draft for the Declaration. Folks who haven’t can study a scan here. This isn’t a working draft; it was one of the copies Jefferson made to let friends know what he wanted the Declaration to say.

This event will run from 6 to 7 P.M. Register for online access through this page.

Jortner on “Jewish Patriots” in Worcester, 29 Sept.

On Tuesday, 29 September, the American Antiquarian Society will host an online presentation by Adam Jortner on “A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom.”

It looks like this presentation will be based on Jortner’s book of the same name, published by Oxford University Press in 2024. On the Jewish Book Council website, Stuart Halpern described that book like this:

…a mag­is­te­r­i­al his­to­ry of Amer­i­ca’s first Jew­ish cit­i­zens. It weaves tales of promi­nent lead­ers like Ger­shom Seixas and Jonas Phillips with lit­tle-known accounts of rev­o­lu­tion­ary Jew­ish troops, fundrais­ing for the first syn­a­gogues (and sub­se­quent intra­com­mu­nal dis­putes), and Jews respond­ing to anti­semitism by chal­leng­ing their antag­o­nists to life-endan­ger­ing duels. Demon­strat­ed through­out the book is how the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in Amer­i­ca’s ear­li­est years wres­tled with its past and mapped its future — just like the coun­try itself. . . .

Jort­ner places great empha­sis on how Jews peti­tioned against test oaths, pledges to Chris­t­ian val­ues that pre­vent­ed Jews from hold­ing polit­i­cal office. These efforts helped shape reli­gious free­dom in the Unit­ed States.

Adam Jortner is a professor of American History at Auburn University. His other books on early American history include The Gods of Prophetstown: Tippecanoe and the War for the American Frontier and Blood from the Sky: Miracles and Politics in the Early American Republic.

Jortner has explored various channels for sharing historical information with the public, from a regular column in Current magazine to being part of the writing team for Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? His Audible downloads include The Hidden History of the Boston Tea Party, Faith and the Founding Fathers, and a new 24-lecture Great Courses series on the year 1776.

This online event will take place from 7 to 8 P.M. Register through this page.

Also available now via the A.A.S. is Prof. Ronald Angelo Johnson’s talk on his new book, Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution.

Johnson, the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Professor of History at Baylor University, discusses “the ways in which English and French language newspapers from 1758 to 1783 informed and inspirited revolutionary Atlantic inhabitants in British North America (later the United States) and French Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) toward freedom, liberty, and equality.”

Fighting Fires Inside Besieged Boston

On 18 Nov 1775, Gen. William Howe issued instructions for fighting fires in Boston.

The town had had its own rules about fires since the early 1600s, with all households required to bring out their own buckets and competing companies pulling in water-pumping engines.

But by late 1775 most of the town’s population were British soldiers or people attached to them. There was also a hostile enemy outside, which might have prompted worry about saboteurs.

Gen. Howe needed to ensure the remaining civilians and his troops didn’t get in each other’s way, so in his general orders he wrote:

Upon the Discovery of a Fire, Notice is to be given as Usual, by the Ringing of Bells & the Cry of Fire in the Streets, at which time the Regts. will Immediately get under Arms on their Regimental Parade & wait there for further Orders, Unless when a Fire may break out in the Quarters of the Regt; & in that case, the Corps is to quit the place, to make Room for the Inhabitants, who are to Repair to the Fire with all the Buckets in their possesion to give their Assistance, every House holder putting up a Light in a Front Window. A Caution to be observed upon all Alarms whatever.

All persons failing so to do, will be punished in a most Exemplary Manner.

The Bells are not to Ring for the Alarm more than One quarter of an Hour.

The Fire Wards, the Engine Masters & Men Acting under them, are not to be interrupted by any Officer or Soldier in the Execution of their Duty. The Firewards, known by Red painted Staffs, with Heads of Brass are to have the whole Management & Conduct of the Engines & People Assembled to Extinguish a Fire.

Neither are the Inhabitants to be Stopped or impeded in Times of Fires, by the Milatary unless they are Armed, in which case they are to be taken into Custody.

All the Associated Companies, from the essential Service they may be of, are to Attend the Fires without Arms: the Royal North British Volunteers excepted, who have been already Appointed to a particular Duty with Arms.

(The Associated Companies meant the recently established Loyalist militia. The Royal North British Volunteers were primarily Scotsmen; on 29 October Howe had assigned them to patrol the area around Fanueil Hall.)

Women belonging to the Army will not be Allowed to be present at any Fires that may happen.

A Premium of Twenty Shillings Sterling will be given to the Men who bring the first Engine, & work it, at the Fire.

The Firewards are to take into their possession, all Buckets found in Vacated Houses, & to Distribute them among the Residing Inhabitants.

Later, on 10 Mar 1776, as the British military started to load their evacuation ships, Gen. Howe ordered:

the strictest care taken that the Town be not set on Fire; by Accident or by Design. Any Person detected setting Fire; to the Town without Authority will suffer immediate Death.

There were occasional fires in Boston during the military occupations of 1768–1700 and 1774–1776, but no more than usual. The soldiers and civilians worked together to contain them.

After the siege, returning Bostonians found the biggest fire-related damage to the town wasn’t from conflagrations but from people pulling down fences, trees, and even buildings for firewood.

Thomas Lynch and the Continental Army’s Black Soldiers

On 23 Oct 1775, Thomas Lynch, Jr., and two of his colleagues in the Continental Congress, Benjamin Harrison and Benjamin Franklin, conferred with Gen. George Washington and political leaders of the New England colonies about setting up the Continental Army for the coming year ahead.

Most of the current army’s enlistments ran out in December. Only the rifle companies from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland had enlisted on different terms. They had promised to serve for twelve months, or until the middle of 1776.

One of the many questions that October conference considered was:

Ought not Negroes to be excluded from the new Inlistment especially such as are Slaves—all were thought improper by the Council of Officers?

Washington’s generals had followed his lead in voting to exclude black soldiers, though there were some opposing voices, as I discussed back here.

Thomas Lynch, as a southern planter and politician, almost certainly supported the idea of keeping black men out of the army. His fellow South Carolinian, Edward Rutledge, had even proposed pushing black soldiers out in September and “was strongly supported by many of the Southern Delegates,” according to the notes of Richard Smith of New Jersey.

That makes Lynch’s letter to Washington on 8 December particularly interesting. By then the general was worried that not enough men of any sort would re-enlist for the new year. If the British heard about an incredible shrinking enemy, Washington feared, in January they would charge out of Boston and Charlestown and overwhelm the thin Continental lines.

Lynch wrote to the commander:

I shall not take upon me to advise. tis as improper as needless. your Rifle Men, Negroes, & Deserters may in proper passes defend your artillery Ammunition & Stores[.] shoud your Lines be deserted, & the glorious, golden opertunity of ending the War be lost, let not Hope be lost also.

Somehow Lynch believed that the “Negroes” in the Continental ranks would still be available to Washington, along with the riflemen (whose enlistments were still in force) and “Deserters.”

It’s such a brief comment that it’s hard to know what Lynch was thinking. Did he expect the black soldiers would be in the same boat as the deserters, with nowhere else to go? Was he so used to ordering around enslaved people that he automatically assumed Washington could demand the “Negroes” stay?

Either way, Lynch’s remark was a backhanded acknowledgment that the Continental Army did have soldiers of African heritage, despite Rutledge’s efforts, and that they might be most valuable in the worst emergency.

“Unearthing Fort Rutledge” at Clemson, 25 Sept.

On Friday, 25 September, Clemson University will host a talk by Prof. Joshua Catalano titled “Unearthing Fort Rutledge.”

The event description says:

Tucked away on the edge of Clemson University’s campus are the remains of the Cherokee town of Esseneca and Fort Rutledge. Most people passing by the old monument near the site are unaware of the history.

On August 1, 1776, a small battle occurred at Esseneca between the South Carolina militia and British/Cherokee force. Following the skirmish, the militia destroyed the town and built Fort Rutledge. The fort played an important role in the American Revolution serving as a staging area for patriot expeditions. It also served as a mechanism of settler colonialism, further displacing the Cherokee from their home.

The British "destroyed" the fort in 1780, and nature buried what was left over the centuries. This history is little remembered. In 2021, Clemson faculty and students partnered with the National Park Service and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to unearth what was left of the fort. This research led to new and unexpected discoveries that are changing our understanding of the region’s history.

Dr. Joshua Catalano as an Associate Professor and Public History Coordinator in Clemson’s History department. In addition to the Fort Rutledge project, he is working on a study of the production, dissemination, and continual reinterpretation of the memory of the Gnadenhutten Massacre of 1782 and the burning of Col. William Crawford.

Clemson was founded in 1889 on a plantation once owned by John C. Calhoun, the Senator, Vice President, and advocate for chattel slavery. He had named that property Fort Hill because of memories of Fort Rutledge nearby, though for a long time the fortification’s exact location was lost.

People can attend this lecture in person or online through this link.

The Danger of Speaking Truth to the Power-Hungry

The author of History by a Hair, Richard Kurin, is the Smithsonian Institution’s Distinguished Scholar and Ambassador-at-Large. A cultural anthropologist by training, he was previously the Under Secretary overseeing all the organization’s museums and scientific centers.

Kurin’s new book includes a foreword by Lonnie G. Bunch III, the retiring Secretary of the Smithsonian. Its back-cover blurbs include praise from David M. Rubenstein, former chair of the Smithsonian Board of Regents.

Ordinarily, those connections to America’s national history museum would be assets for History by a Hair. Under the current administration, they’re complications, especially when the book presents historical information that reactionaries don’t want to hear.

The New York Times reported:

An event on Sept. 22 announcing the findings has been moved from the American history museum to a less prominent Smithsonian location, limited to descendants and closed to the news media. An online public lecture by Kurin through the institution’s educational arm set for the next day was canceled.

The Smithsonian has been treading lightly under President Donald Trump because of his festering cultural resentments and wish to leave his footprint on Washington, D.C. In July the White House issued an executive order supposedly meant to “restore trust” in the Smithsonian—actually one of the most respected and beloved institutions in American culture.

We know Donald Trump doesn’t really care about accurate U.S. history. If he did, he wouldn’t have installed a plaque on one of his golf courses marveling at a Civil War battle that never happened. He’d have recognized immediately that it would be wrong to say that Revolutionary War troops “took over the airports.”

Donald Trump wants control of the Smithsonian, just as he grabbed control of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Reflecting Pool, the Sestercentennial celebrations, and the White House’s East Wing. The scars on the D.C. landscape show us how well those moves have worked out.

Since the Smithsonian was chartered by Congress and has a robust governance system, Trump has only been able to exert pressure from the outside. The latest scheme his staff has come up with is to install signs between the empty Reflecting Pool and Smithsonian museums warning visitors of what they’ll find inside.

As Kevin M. Levin has pointed out, the federal agency tasked with writing, designing, and planting those signs is the National Park Service—another target of Trump’s hunger for power. The New York Times just reported on the damage the administration has inflicted on that agency.

In its story about History by a Hair, the Times hinted at how people feared the book could become a focus of Trump’s temper. Even though, as Karin Wulf writes, the historical findings about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings are “so far beyond a reasonable doubt we’re in planetary orbit.” Because, as I said before, Trump doesn’t really care about accurate U.S. history.

Richard Kurin will come to Boston to talk about History by a Hair on 6 October at an appearance at WBUR’s CitySpace.

Traces of a Last-Minute Fight over Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy

Yesterday I wrote about History by a Hair, Smithsonian anthropologist Richard Kurin’s new book on his effort to determine if there is a genetic match between Thomas Jefferson and descendants of Sally Hemings and Martha Jefferson.

That book is due to be published this week, but it ran into some jarring bumps in the last two months. Having worked in publishing, I presume Dr. Kurin and folks at Crown Publishing (part of Penguin Random House) worked feverishly to finalize its pages.

It appears that the book is Kurin’s personal narrative of working on the investigation over fifteen years. While collecting genetic samples, he met many descendants of the Jefferson–Wayles–Hemings family.

Among those people was Mary Brady-Atkins. She is, as described in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “a retired Michigan State University professor with a Ph.D. in psychology.” At ninety-eight, Dr. Brady-Atkins is the oldest living descendant of Madison Hemings. She gave Kurin a D.N.A. sample early in the project. He visited her in Pittsburgh over the ensuing years and asked to include her photo in the book.

The Chronicle article also reports that on 11 August Kurin spoke about his book to John H. Works, Jr., who claims descent from Thomas and Martha Jefferson. In 2000 Works co-founded the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society to raise questions about the growing evidence of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship. He is now that organization’s president, treasurer, and secretary.

Back in 2002, Works spoke of the value of genetics as he worked to exclude Hemings descendants from the Monticello Association, formed by descendants of Thomas Jefferson. The Raleigh News and Observer quoted him as saying, “For (Hemings descendants) to say, ‘I don’t need no DNA evidence,’ well, I’m sorry, but you do.” I see no sign that Works also insisted on D.N.A. evidence from people claiming descent from Martha Jefferson. (And he doesn’t appear to use the double negative normally.)

Works’s society has long argued that the President’s brother, Randolph Jefferson, or one of that man’s sons could have fathered the Hemings children—thus providing the Jefferson Y chromosome that Dr. Eugene Foster matched to a patrilineal descendant of Eston Hemings in 1998. In 2017, Works began gathering genetic samples for his own study. As of last November, he was petitioning to exhume the body of John Randolph Jefferson, one of those sons (and thus not one of his own ancestors).

In response to people like Works pointing fingers at Randolph Jefferson, Korin’s study collected samples from that man’s descendants as well. According to the New York Times, geneticists Richard (Ed) Green and Beth Shapiro of the University of California at Santa Cruz found that those people’s D.N.A. does not significantly match that in Thomas Jefferson’s hair, nor in samples from descendants of Martha Jefferson or Sally Hemings. In sum, the new study renders the argument that Randolph Jefferson or his sons fathered Sally Hemings‘s children not just historically unlikely but scientifically implausible.

In their 11 August conversation, Kurin told Works about his colleagues’ findings. He said their analysis had been reviewed by “Carlos D. Bustamante of the University of Oklahoma; Erich D. Jarvis of Rockefeller University; and Eric D. Green, chief medical officer of the DNA-sequencing giant Illumina and former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.”

Works asked when that study will be published. Kurin said it was being considered by a scientific journal. As is standard, the journal has found more peer reviewers unknown to the authors, and Kurin and his colleagues are not allowed to name the journal publicly while it goes through its process.

On 19 August, the Chronicle reports, Works “sounded the alarm” about Kurin’s book to the Monticello Association. Works took the position that it was premature for Crown to issue History by a Hair before the underlying scientific paper is published and assessed. (The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society chose a different route back in 2001, publishing its critique of the 1998 genetic study itself rather than submitting those arguments to a journal for outside peer review.)

Sometime before 2023, Works gave an interview to the documentary filmmaker Sanjay Rawal, though it’s unclear what that conversation was about. On a new Instagram reel, the filmmaker states that he became interested in the Jefferson-Hemings question only later, after meeting Mary Brady-Atkins. According to this article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, his film, now tentatively titled We Hold These Truths, came to focus on “the long friendship that Brady-Atkins formed with the Jefferson family, despite the ancestry being connected to enslavement.” Rawal appears to have connected Brady-Atkins and Works in 2023, per the Chronicle.

On 24 August, five days after Works’s “alarm,” Brady-Atkins withdrew her participation from Kurin’s D.N.A. study. The Chronicle says that Rawal helped Brady-Atkins to draft her email message, alongside her daughter and her friend and executor.

Brady-Atkins’s data was then removed from the genetic database and her samples destroyed. I presume that required a revision of the paper under review, though it reportedly didn’t produce a significant change in the findings. In addition, Kurin probably had to edit his book to remove her photograph and anecdotes in the last weeks before publication.

According to the Chronicle, Dr. Brady-Atkins withdrew because of the same objection that Works was expressing: “the book is being published…before its science has been vetted by a scientific journal’s peer-review process.” In addition, that article stated that Brady-Atkins felt “Kurin often treated her as more of a friend than as a research participant, while not always showing her the courtesy and clarity she felt was owed to her in either role—not giving her an advance copy of the book, for instance.”

The Chronicle also states of Brady-Atkins:

In her view, not enough attention has been paid to the possibility that another male Jefferson relative, such as his younger brother, was responsible. Based on what she knows about the founding father, she doesn’t think “a man of that integrity would get involved” with Hemings.

“What I’ve read about Jefferson and my knowledge of human behavior and my experience as a clinical psychologist, I just feel in my gut that this man did not sire these children,” she said.

As late as April 2024, Brady-Atkins identified herself publicly as “the oldest descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.” But she has come to the same position as the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society.

We probably have more historical evidence about who fathered Sally Hemings’s children than for any other Americans born in the same circumstances. Nonetheless, for more than thirty years some authors have demanded genetic evidence to resolve the question. As science advances, that D.N.A. evidence has become more detailed and specific to Jefferson himself. Will it ever be enough to satisfy everyone?

TOMORROW: Meanwhile, in Washington.

Sequencing Thomas Jefferson’s D.N.A. Confirms Historical Evidence

The New York Times is reporting on a Smithsonian study to be published in book form this week that:

• completely sequenced Thomas Jefferson’s D.N.A.
• found that it matched fifth-generation descendants of both Martha Jefferson and Sally Hemings in the percentage to be expected of descendants of Thomas Jefferson.

The book is History by a Hair: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings & Solving a 200-Year-Old Mystery, by Richard Kurin.

When Kurin launched this study fifteen years ago, the sort of genetic testing it ended up using wasn’t yet available. Extracting a complete genome from hair was thought to require follicles, not a snipped lock, plus a lot of luck that the molecules hadn’t degraded.

Another bump in the road was when strands of hair found in Jefferson’s edited Bible turned out not to be his, based on their mitochondrial D.N.A.

But Monticello was able to provide another hair sample, said to be clipped from Jefferson’s head during his last illness in 1826. That produced a match with the descendants who had provided D.N.A. samples.

Back in 1998 Nature published a study led by Eugene A. Foster which found a Y-chromosome match between patrilineal descendants of one of Jefferson’s paternal uncles and a patrilineal descendant of Eston Hemings. The same test found that chromosome was different for patrilineal descendants of Jefferson’s nephews Patrick and Samuel Carr and of Thomas Woodson, believed by some relatives to be a Jefferson child.

Already there was strong historical evidence for Jefferson’s paternity of Eston Hemings, his brother Madison Hemings, and the other siblings Madison named. The Y-chromosome findings were entirely consistent with Madison’s description of the family in 1873. Most historians considered the question settled.

Some Jefferson “defenders,” however, responded to the Foster study by proposing Thomas Jefferson’s brother Randolph or his sons as a possible source for that patrilineal D.N.A. Those men had never been publicly linked to Sally Hemings before.

This new analysis looked at Thomas Jefferson’s D.N.A. distinct from Randolph’s, removing that brother and his sons from consideration. 

This study also involved more descendants, not just those with a patrilineal connection. In fact, the descendant in the study sharing the most D.N.A. with the third President (5%) is a descendant of Sally Hemings, not of Martha Jefferson.

Lund Washington’s Letter Mentioning William Lee’s First Wife

On 30 Dec 1775, Lund Washington wrote a letter to his distant cousin George, who was also his employer.

George was off in Cambridge commanding the Continental Army. As his cousin’s plantation overseer, Lund caught him up on various details of the operations at Mount Vernon.

As published in the Papers of George Washington in the 1980s and shared at Founders Online, that letter ended abruptly:

I will have gravel Carted for the walks. One of the men that went out with James Cleveland left him when he found they were likely to suffer.

There was no signature. “This document is incomplete,” said the editors, nonetheless adding a period to the end.

That letter was in the collection of Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. At some point in the next quarter-century, scholars must have gotten a better look at it. Perhaps it had been mounted or otherwise sealed off.

Today Mount Vernon shares a scan of that page, plus the opposite side with the rest of the letter.

It turns out Lund Washington continued his sentence on the next page: “…were likely to suffer for want of provisions.” (George Washington had sent James Cleveland out to his Ohio claims.)

Later the letter says:

if it will give Will any pleasure he may be told his wife and child are both very well.

Directed to Gen. Washington from Mount Vernon, that comment had to refer to William Lee, his body servant, one of the few other people to make the trip to Massachusetts. It’s the only evidence to indicate that William, born about 1751, had married and fathered a baby before the war.

I didn’t know this source when I wrote about William Lee in a report for the National Park Service on Washington in Cambridge. That report highlights how in February 1776 the general paid Margaret Thomas to make shirts for Lee, years before the man told Washington that he and Thomas had married during the war. We don’t have any documents saying when Lee’s first marriage ended.

Mary V. Thompson, the Mount Vernon historian specializing in its enslaved community, cited Lund Washington’s 30 Dec 1775 letter in a 2014 article for the Journal of the American Revolution. It’s informed other writing about William Lee since, such as his entry at the Encyclopedia of Virginia.

However, Mount Vernon doesn’t share a transcript of the full letter. There’s no indication at Founders Online, which is based on the printed Washington Papers, that a more complete text exists. Rotunda’s index for William Lee doesn’t note this letter among the documents referring to the man.

The result is a scholarly paradox. Lund Washington’s letter to his cousin is now available for anyone to read. But half of it—perhaps the most interesting half—is impossible to find through the standard way to access George Washington’s correspondence.

“The Prize Papers of the American War” Workshop, 8 Oct.

On Friday, 8 October, the Prize Papers Project at Britain’s National Archives will host an international symposium on “The Prize Papers of the American War of Independence.”

Online registration to this event is available, but folks should know that it will take place in London. The discourse will start at 4:30 A.M., Boston time.

The workshop description says:

Bringing together specialists on prize law, the American War of Independence and the Prize Papers, the workshop approaches the collection as a transnational archive of wartime capture and its afterlives. The workshop creates a forum for sustained international exchange and collaboration.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of both the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in July and the opening of the British Vice-Admiralty Court in newly-captured New York City in September 1776. Although exceptionally rich, the prize papers of this court have been largely inaccessible. The newly catalogued papers of the New York court (and its mother-court in London) provide new perspectives on the War of Independence at sea, and on lived experiences of the time, through the intercepted papers and letters found by the British on merchant and fighting ships.

Maritime warfare was central to the War of Independence. Controlling, disrupting, and capturing shipping was crucial to the war on both sides. America started privateering early, in 1775, and sought new (previously forbidden) trading partners. From 1778, French naval and privateering activity expanded the war against Britain, followed by Spain and the Netherlands. British naval forces and loyalist privateers sought to stop American and allied shipping, enforce their imperial authority, and weaken the Continental cause. The conflict eventually extended far beyond the North American seaboard.

An initial group of papers from 150 captured ships, American or supporting America, will be published online on 8 October in the Prize Papers Portal, the open-access online database of the Prize Papers Project. . . . Major bodies of captured material from American, French, Spanish, Dutch and recaptured British vessels will be published in the coming months and years…

Presentations schduled for 8 October include:

• Amanda Bevan & Luan Cakolli: “A Voyage of Discovery and Delivery … and what we’re learning along the way”
• Suzanne Foxley: “American Experience of British Prize Law”
• Séverine Angers: “Write to me by different ships as the English capture many”
• Randolph Cock: “Piecing Together Clues from the U.S.S. Lexington, 1777: A Whodunnit”
• Rebekah Harbord: “Behind the Scenes: Preparing documents from the Prize Papers for digitisation”
• Bethany Groff Dorau: “‘Taken by 64 Guns’: A Case Study of Dalton Marine Captain Offin Boardman”
• Christopher Minty: “‘False & Colourable’: The Brigantine Adventure and the Paper War of the American Revolution”
• Abby Mullen: “Mutiny or Loyalty?: Revolt from the Enemy in American Prizes”
• Graham Moore: “Revolution 250: Exhibiting the Prize Papers at The National Archives”
• John Beiner & Lucas Haasis: “History at the Helm: The Prize Papers and the Making of the Videogame Ahoy”

The keynote address to close out Friday will be delivered by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, author of The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It (Basic Books, 2024).

The Prize Papers Project is run by the National Archives, U.K., and the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Other organizers of this event are the German Maritime Museum Bremerhaven and the German Historical Institute London. The workshop will be hosted by Nele Popp, Amanda Bevan, Oliver Finnegan, and Lucas Haasis.

This symposium occurs alongside an exhibit at the National Archives in Kew titled “Revolution 250: America's Independence Story 1763–1783,” which will run through 29 November.

“Behind Enemy Lines” along Lake Champlain, 25 Sept.

On Friday, 25 September, America’s History, L.L.C., is offering a unique tour titled “Behind Enemy Lines: General Benjamin Lincoln’s Pawlet Expedition and the Battle of Diamond Island.”

The event description explains:

In September 1777 during Lt. Gen. John Burgoyne’s campaign to capture Albany, American militia commanded by Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln staged a daring raid on the British army’s supply line from Fort Ticonderoga to Lake George and Skenesborough. It is one of the most unappreciated operations of the campaign.

Although the Pawlet Expedition had some successes and some failures, in the main, it created major consternation in Burgoyne’s mind, forcing him to roll the dice in a failed attempt to turn the left flank of Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates’s army at Bemis Heights. Burgoyne’s defeat on October 7, 1777 paved the way for an ultimate retreat back to Saratoga (Schuylerville, New York) and the surrender of his army on October 17.

During this tour we will trace the march of Col. John Brown’s force from Pawlet to Ticonderoga Landing and Mount Defiance, Col. Samuel Johnson’s attack on Mount Independence, and Col. Benjamin Woodbridge’s actions at Skenesborough. We will take a boat ride to interpret Brown’s attack by water on the British supply depot on Diamond Island. Weather permitting (for docking purposes), we will land on the island, unlike Col. Brown, to see it from the British perspective.

This tour is limited to 39 participants. The bus will leave the parking lot of Fort Ticonderoga at 8 A.M. and return by about 5 P.M. (Fort Ti’s American Revolution conference starts that evening, with most presentations over the weekend.)

The $195 tour registration cost covers transportation by bus and boat; all admissions and gratuities; lunch, snack, and beverage breaks; a map and materials package; and the expertise of Bruce Venter as guide.

Dr. Venter is the author of The Battle of Hubbardton: The Rear Guard Action that Saved America. He created and co-manages the annual American Revolution conference in Virginia, as well as symposia, tours, and other events for students of American history.

For more information on this tour and to register, see this event page.

New York City Has Fallen

On 15 Sept 1776, 250 years ago today, the Continental Army withdrew from the southern end of Manhattan Island, leaving the city of New York to the British army.

That’s an orderly way to describe what happened. Here’s Gen. George Washington’s official dispatch to John Hancock and the Continental Congress the next day:

in the morning they began their Operations—Three Ships of War came up the North River as high [as] Bloomingdale which put a total stop to the removal by Water of any more of our provision &c. and about Eleven OClock those in the East River began a most severe and Heavy Cannonade to scour the Grounds and cover the landing of their Troops between Turtle-Bay and the City, where Breast Works had been thrown up to oppose them.

As soon as I heard the Firing, I road with all possible dispatch towards the place of landing when to my great surprize and Mortification I found the Troops that had been posted in the Lines retreating with the utmost precipitation and those ordered to support them, [Samuel Holden] parson’s & [John] Fellows’s Brigades, flying in every direction and in the greatest confusion, notwithstanding the exertions of their Generals to form them.

I used every means in my power to rally and get them into some order but my attempts were fruitless and ineffectual, and on the appearance of a small party of the Enemy, not more than Sixty or Seventy, their disorder increased and they ran away in the greatest confusion without firing a Single Shot—

Finding that no confidence was to be placed in these Brigades and apprehending that another part of the Enemy might pass over to Harlem plains and cut off the retreat to this place, I sent orders to secure the Heights in the best manner with the Troops that were stationed on and near them, which being done, the retreat was effected with but little or no loss of Men, tho of a considerable part of our Baggage occasioned by this disgracefull and dastardly conduct—

Most of our Heavy Cannon and a part of our Stores and provisions which we were about removing was unavoidably left in the City, tho every means after It had been determined in Council to evacuate the post, had been used to prevent It. We are now encamped with the Main body of the Army on the Heights of Harlem where I should hope the Enemy would meet with a defeat in case of an Attack

William Douglas, a Connecticut militia colonel whose troops had been guarding an area near Kip’s Bay, told his wife that “my Left wing gave way” under the initial artillery fire:

I Lay myself on the Right wing, wateing for the boats untill Capt. [Jonas] Printice Came to me and told if I ment to Save my Self to Leave the Lines for that was the orders on the Left and that they had Left the Lines. I then told my men to make the best of their way as I then found I had but about ten Left with me.

Caesar Rodney, one of Delaware’s delegates to the Congress, was in the region, and he gathered this information:

the Ships…began a verry heavy Fireing at Turtle-Bay, to Scour the Country previous to their landing the troops, but hurt no Body that I Can hear of—When the Fireing ceased their Troops began to Land and ours to Run as if the Devil was in them in Spite of all the Genel. Could do. They never fired one Gun—

General Whashington haveing discovered their intention to Land at that place, and haveing properly disposed of his troops in case of an Attempt in either or both the other places, ordered a Reinforcement and set out there himself. However before he Got to the place, met our people runing in Every direction. He Endeavoured by persuasion, Threats &c. to get them back, but all to no purpose, in Short they Run till they left the General to Shift for himself—

A story went round that Gen. Washington was so angry that he threw his hat on the ground and shouted, “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?” (per Gen. William Heath) or “Good God, have I got such troops as those?” (per George Weedon). No one who was with Washington at the time described him behaving that way. But of course those men had other things on their minds—and may have thought such behavior was perfectly understandable.