Looking Back on a Fun Month
After all, there’s so much of the Saga of the Brazen Head still to tell.
But I was intrigued by this essay at the American Revolution Institute about one of its recent acquisitions, an engraving titled “The Hero returned from Boston.”
That essay discussed the possibility that Warren’s informant was Margaret Gage, wife of the British commander. It also dismissed that idea as unlikely and unsupported. I wrote much the same years back, and didn’t think I had anything new to find out or share.
In its original form, however, that essay quoted a statement about the Gages I hadn’t seen before. That produced a jolting mix of emotions:
- A relevant source I’ve missed? How exciting!
- A relevant source I’ve missed? How embarrassing!
My posting about that prompted the director of the American Revolution Institute, Jack Warren, to revise the essay and to share thoughts in the comments of my posting on why that 1911 historian was so open to the idea of Mrs. Gage betraying her husband’s secrets.
Jack’s comments in turn prompted me to review all the evidence authors have used to point to Margaret Gage, starting in 1788, plus the milestones in the publication of that idea. To my surprise, I saw that for over a century almost every author who brought up that idea did so only to argue against it. So then I had to consider how the evidence came to appear stronger the further we were removed from the eighteenth century.
During that review I also came across a source that didn’t mention Margaret Gage, though it’s been used to bolster a case against her: the Rev. Jeremy Belknap’s diary from late 1775. And I was lucky enough to realize it could link to another source I discussed a couple of years ago, memories of tales told by Josiah Waters around 1800. If both those sources are reliable, they tell us exactly who Dr. Warren got information from and how: the completely overlooked knife-maker William Jasper.
All that, as I suggested above, was a pleasant surprise. It was the result of an intriguing artifact and essay, fortuitous timing, errors to be corrected (including my own), input from commenters, a new approach to the evidence, and the proliferation of digitized sources.
And a bonus: This week Bob Gross alerted me that the Loyalists Commission claims are available digitized on Ancestry.com, so now I can go explore exactly what Thomas Beaman’s family said about him and a lot more.
3 comments:
Congratulations, John! This is very exciting research and it's fun to be able to read it in real time, literally as it's being done. I look forward to reading your new pieces, and new discoveries, each day. Thank you for looking into this so thoroughly. (And with you, we know it's likely to be true.)
David Hackett Fischer was definitely a strong proponent of the Margaret Gage-as-spy theory. I recall him making a big point of it at a talk at Old South Meeting House, shortly after "Paul Revere's Ride" came out. In fact, that was the first I had heard of that theory.
While Margaret Gage was almost certainly not a spy, it does seem that she was pretty unpopular in Boston, both with the men of the Army (and their wives), and with the Whiggish populace of the town. Her beauty, her flaunting of her sexuality, her background, all contributed to hard feelings and jealousy against her. Over the centuries, the negative comments made about her back then have morphed into false allegations of her disloyalty.
Yes, Prof. Fischer made the strongest case for Margaret Gage as informant, and that carried along the telling in a lot of public history (museums, movies, etc.) for a while. In a comment on this posting, Jeanne Munn Bracken says Fischer has backed away from that idea more recently.
I can’t think of any commentary on Mrs. Gage from Bostonians. Maybe some complained about the ball for officers’ wives. That painting seems to have been shown only in New York and London.
One detail that struck me while reviewing what people had written about Margaret Gage is that few authors used her given name, even as they aimed to rebut the allegations against her, until Alden and Fischer. I wonder if people could even picture her as an individual.
This has been a great series, that I have enjoyed very much. Thank you!
The loyalist claims on Ancestry are a great resource — be aware that the index is spotty. A number of folks are there but didn't make the index.
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