“The skull should be returned secretly to the grave”

For this part of the story of the British soldier’s skull I’m relying on Douglas Sabin’s April 19, 1775: A Historiographical Study, prepared for Minute Man National Historical Park and more widely published by Sinclair Street Publishing in 2011.

Sabin’s appendix, “The British Skull Controversy,” reviews a great deal of evidence. In this series I’m quoting additional sources, and my conclusion will be somewhat different.

In particular, Sabin summarized a 27 Nov 1891 letter from George Frisbie Hoar to George M. Brooks (1824–1893, shown here), president of the Concord Antiquarian Society. That organization operates the fine Concord Museum.

As I described yesterday, at that time Hoar was a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, living in Worcester after growing up in Concord. He was a past president of the American Antiquarian Society. He had clout.

As for Brooks, he was a probate judge and former member of the U.S. House of Representatives. The two men also had a personal tie: Brooks’s half-sister Caroline had married Hoar’s older brother Ebenezer. In fact, all three of those men had served in the U.S. House, two at a time.

According to Sabin:

In his letter to Mr. Brooks, Senator Hoar stated that he was forwarding to Mr. Brooks a box containing a skull sent to him by the president of the Worcester Society of Antiquity. Senator Hoar went on to explain that the Worcester Society of Antiquity felt that the skull should be returned to the grave in Concord from which they believed it had been taken years before.

Other sources clarify that the Worcester Society of Antiquity came to that decision only under pressure from Hoar. He was a member but “never an active member.” The Rev. Albert Tyler wrote that the senator “interested himself” in the skull. In 1906 society librarian Ellery B. Crane said “the late Hon. George F. Hoar induced its return to the authorities at Concord,” and three years later wrote that Hoar asked “if we would be willing to return [the skulls] to Concord. . . . he seemed quite anxious about it.” And, as I said, Hoar had clout.

Sabin’s appendix continued:

Hoar sent the skull with the bullet hole through it to Mr. Brooks under the condition that the skull be restored to its burial place. In the closing paragraph of his letter to Brooks, Hoar expressed his belief that the skull should be returned secretly to the grave without public notice or newspaper coverage. He feared that if the newspapers learned of the skull business the subject would become a topic of ridicule.

In fact, I suspect avoiding ridicule was Hoar’s major motivation from the start. Not jokes about the current action but derision for the Concord selectmen and town leaders back in the 1830s—in other words, Hoar’s revered father and his friends.

What would people say if the public found out that, shortly after erecting a monument near the two soldiers’ grave, Concord had authorized a a quack scientist to dig up those bodies and go off with their skulls? How many thousands of people had visited that monument, including the President of the U.S. of A. in 1875, without being told the full story?

Sabin wrote:

According to the late Lincoln amateur archeologist, Roland Wells Robbins, Senator Hoar’s original 1891 letter to Mr. Brooks contained a notation at the bottom which said “Returned to the grave, December the fifth, 1891”. This notation was signed by E.R. Hoar [the senator’s brother] and Henry L. Shattuck.

However, the Concord Museum couldn’t locate that document for Sabin when he wrote, and the copy of the letter at Minute Man Park doesn’t show the note.

But let’s assume that detail is accurate. In December 1891, some of Concord’s leading men quietly dug into the soldiers’ grave near the Concord Monument, inserted the partial skull sent from Worcester, and covered it up. Nobody would ever know, right?

There were three problems with George F. Hoar’s plan for dealing with this skull. First, he was mistaken about many significant details, starting with what grave it had actually come from.

Second, the lack of public documentation produced a vacuum that sucked in even more misinformation.

And third, Concord’s cranial reinterment stayed out of the newspapers for less than four years.

TOMORROW: Cover blown.