A Copley Portrait and the Story Behind It

Last month the Pook & Pook art auction house in Pennsylvania sold two paintings of a little girl named Priscilla Greenleaf (and her dog).

One, attributed to Joseph Badger and dated about 1750, went for $20,000, or double the top range of its estimate. 

The other, an early work by John Singleton Copley, sold for $500,000, or more than six times the initial estimate. That’s what appears in this thumbnail.

The Copley portrait, which Pook & Pook dated to about 1757, was posthumous. That’s because Priscilla had probably died in 1750, soon after Badger painted her.

John Greenleaf, the children’s father, was an apothecary. As D. Brenton Simons wrote in Witches, Rakes, and Rogues, when his eleven-month-old son died in January of that year, soon after the deaths of his daughters, he suspected poison.

Greenleaf accused a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl he enslaved, Phillis Hammond, of giving the baby arsenic. Arrested and under pressure, she confessed to killing John, Jr., and Elizabeth. The family believed she killed Priscilla as well. The newspapers published little about the case, not even the Greenleaf name.

Phillis Hammond pled guilty to murdering baby John that spring. She was sentenced to death. The Boston Evening Post reported, “Her Mother died with Excess of Grief.” Phillis was hanged on 16 May 1751. The Rev. Dr. Mather Byles preached at the execution. Some printer issued a broadside with a crude woodcut and verse titled “The bitter Effects of Sin,” the source for Phillis’s surname.

The Greenleafs had Badger’s portraits of Priscilla and Elizabeth to remember their daughters. (The latter is now in the collection of Colonial Williamsburg.) But evidently they wanted an image of their murdered son, and for the pictures to match.

John Singleton Copley was still a teenager himself when the Greenleafs commissioned him to paint all three of their lost children. The pictures of Elizabeth and John are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The museum website says of the boy’s outfit: “Copley’s source for John’s exotic cap and pose was a print after Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of Lord Bury as a child.” Likewise, though his picture of Priscilla followed Badger in posing the little girl with a dog, he may have used a European print as a better model.

Peeking in on the Hive, 8–9 Feb.

On Saturday and Sunday, 8–9 February, the Friends of Minute Man Park will once again host “The Hive,” a living history symposium designed to prepare people for the Battle Road reenactment in April.

As of this writing, the event is sold out, and the Eventbrite page is putting people on a waitlist.

Nonetheless, I think it’s worth listing the formal presentations. On Saturday:

12:00 noon: 1775: The Year the War Began, Bob Allison
The War for American Independence began in 1775. Why? Why did armed conflict not begin sooner? Could war have been avoided? Neither side wanted a war, but each would accept one in order to establish its aims. What were the aims of each side, what obstacles were in the way of achieving them, and how was the situation different at the end of the year?

1:10 P.M.: Infantry in Battle in the Eighteenth Century, Alexander Burns
This presentation will explore the world of combat for eighteenth-century infantrymen in North America and Europe, in order to contextualize the fighting on April 19th, 1775. Across the Atlantic World, infantrymen often fought in flexible and adaptable ways, firing without orders, firing at longer ranges than their officers preferred, and by taking cover on the battlefield. In this process, these enlisted men played an important role by asserting tactical reforms from below.

2:20 P.M.: Farming and Land Use along the Battle Road in 1775, Brian Donahue
This talk will describe the development of colonial farming in Concord and Lincoln. It will focus on the pattern of settlement and land use along the Battle Road by 1775. It is drawn from Brian's book The Great Meadow, which can be consulted for greater detail on any neighborhood, particularly from the Meriam House to the Hartwell Tavern.

3:30 P.M.: April 19th Overview and Panel Discussion about British and Colonial Tactics, Alexander Cain, Jim Hollister, Sean Considine, and Jarrad Fuoss
The Battle of Lexington and Concord is often associated with the image of British soldiers marching in tight formations and in the open, incapable of defending themselves against the unorthodox tactics of the minute men. How much of this is real vs historical fiction? How did the fighting along the bloody Battle Road compare to more regular military practices?

On Sunday:

11:00 A.M.: Sober, Industrious Women: Portraying the Roles of Soldiers’ Wives, Don Hagist
Wives of soldiers had to work to earn their keep, but many of their jobs were associated with parts of the military infrastructure that isn't portrayed at reenactments. This talk will present ways to effectively present the roles of nurses, sutlers, seamstresses, gardeners and others within the limitations of modern reenactment encampment settings.

12:10 P.M.: Massachusetts Men’s Civilian Clothing 1750–1775, Paul Dickfoss
Using depictions in period art and portraiture, historian Paul Dickfoss will provide a detailed glimpse into how men from Massachusetts dressed in the late colonial period.

1:20 P.M.: Battle Road Fashion Runway, Ruth Hodges and friends
Looking for some inspiration to update your Battle Road impression? The Minute Man Living History Authenticity Standards offers a wider variety of impressions than first meets the eye. Differences are sometimes subtle, and the devil is in the details! See some excellent examples of women and children of 1775 Middlesex County Massachusetts in this very first Battle Road Fashion Runway!

There are also workshops, drills, inspections, and mutual advice for a couple of hours each morning and breakout sessions on specific elements of an eighteenth-century impression on Sunday afternoon. High standards and mutual support like this is what makes the Battle Road reenactment so terrific.

The Hive’s other sponsors are the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, Revolution 250, and the Massachusetts Army National Guard. It will take place at the Massachusetts National Guard Museum and Archives in Concord for folks who can secure a spot.

“The seller is nothing less than a collector of the tax”

Here are some paragraphs from the seventh Letter from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, John Dickinson’s 1767–68 essays arguing against the Townshend duties:

There are two ways of laying taxes. One is, by imposing a certain sum on particular kinds of property, to be paid by the user or consumer, or by rating the person at a certain sum. The other is, by imposing a certain sum on particular kinds of property, to be paid by the seller.

When a man pays the first sort of tax, he knows with certainty that he pays so much money for a tax. The consideration for which he pays it, is remote, and, it may be, does not occur to him. He is sensible too, that he is commanded and obliged to pay it as a tax; and therefore people are apt to be displeased with this sort of tax.

The other sort of tax is submitted to in a very different manner. The purchaser of any article, very seldom reflects that the seller raises his price, so as to indemnify himself for the tax he has paid. He knows that the prices of things are continually fluctuating, and if he thinks about the tax, he thinks at the same time, in all probability, that he might have paid as much, if the article he buys had not been taxed. . . .

The merchant or importer, who pays the duty at first, will not consent to be so much money out of pocket. He therefore proportionably raises the price of his goods. It may then be said to be a contest between him and the person offering to buy, who shall lose the duty.

This must be decided by the nature of the commodities, and the purchaser’s demand for them. If they are mere luxuries, he is at liberty to do as he pleases, and if he buys, he does it voluntarily: But if they are absolute necessaries or conveniences, which use and custom have made requisite for the comfort of life, and which he is not permitted, by the power imposing the duty, to get elsewhere, there the seller has a plain advantage, and the buyer must pay the duty.

In fact, the seller is nothing less than a collector of the tax for the power that imposed it. If these duties then are extended to the necessaries and conveniences of life in general, and enormously encreased, the people must at length become indeed “most exquisitely sensible of their slavish situation.”

That quoted phrase came from Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws.

This letter concluded:

These duties, which will inevitably be levied upon us---which are now levying upon us---are expresly laid FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE OF TAKING MONEY. This is the true definition of “taxes.” They are therefore taxes. This money is to be taken from us. We are therefore taxed.

Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves. We are taxed without our own consent, expressed by ourselves of our representatives. We are therefore---SLAVES.

Dickinson thus put himself among the American Whigs who equated a lack of full political rights for white men of property with a state of slavery while keeping actual chattel slaves. Unlike most of his countrymen, however, Dickinson did something about that. In 1786 he finished manumitting everyone he had claimed as property.

Join Us for “The Outbreak of War,” 3–6 Apr.

Last spring I worked with the Pursuit of History, the nonprofit founded by Lee Wright to organize History Camp, to produce a weekend of talks and tours about the New England rebellion of 1774.

This spring we’re offering a new program. On 3–6 April, we’ll gather in Concord and visit nearby towns to explore “The Outbreak of War.”

Once again, there are a limited number of seats available for this event, and I understand most have already been reserved. People are coming from as far away as California, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.

The event will start with dinner on Thursday, 3 April, at the eighteenth-century Wayside Inn in Sudbury. Over dessert I’ll review what led up to April 1775 and look ahead to the next three days.

On Friday, 4 April, we’ll meet inside the Wright Tavern in the center of Concord. Massachusetts Provincial Congress delegates met in committee in this building in the spring of 1775, and on April 19 the British commanders used it as their headquarters. We’ll hear presentations from these experts:

• Jayne Triber, Ph.D., author of A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere.
• Don N. Hagist, author of Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution and editor of The Journal of the American Revolution.
• Alexander Cain, author of We Stood Our Ground: Lexington in the First Year of the American Revolution.
• Joel Bohy, expert in historic arms who appears regularly on Antiques Roadshow, sharing findings from recent battlefield archeology.

On that day we’ll also visit Concord’s Old Hill Burying Ground and North Bridge.

That evening, we’ll have dinner at the Colonial Inn, which dates to 1716. I’ll speak afterwards about how the royal government and the Massachusetts Patriots competed to control information before and after the battle.

On Saturday, 5 April, we’ll visit Lexington Common, viewing the historic buildings and monuments nearby and watching the rehearsal for the 250th-anniversary reenactment of the first shots of the Revolutionary War. (We have a contingency plan if bad weather postpones that rehearsal.) We’ll also stop at the Hartwell Tavern site, the Parker’s Revenge site, and the Jason Russell House in Arlington.

On Sunday, 6 April, attendees can sign up for an optional tour of colonial Marblehead architecture with Judy Anderson for an additional cost.

Some meals are included, and some will be up to the attendees. Lodging isn’t included in the cost, but there are rooms available for reserving at the Colonial Inn and other hotel possibilities nearby.

The Pursuit of History has a webpage with lots more details about the event. That page also includes a couple of videos of me out in Concord on a winter day, looking ahead to spring.