Sestercentennial Talks in Boston on the 18th of April

Friday, 18 April, will be the 250th anniversary of the day when Maj. Edward Mitchell led over a dozen British army officers on horseback out into Middlesex County to tamp down alarms (and thus caused alarms).

The 250th anniversary of the day when William Dawes and Paul Revere rode out into the same countryside to do all they could to spread the alarm as far as Lexington, at least.

And finally the 250th anniversary of the day when more than 700 British light infantrymen and grenadiers embarked across the Charles River to begin their alarming march to Concord.

Some of those events will be reenacted that evening in various places, and there will also be talks in the city of Boston on both sides of the Charles River.

The U.S.S. Constitution Museum and Paul Revere House are sponsoring “The Messenger and the Maker,” a free evening of activities at the Constitution Museum in the Charlestown Navy Yard. From 5 to 9 P.M. families can explore the galleries and make their own lanterns to help escort Revere on his journey from the Navy Yard through Charlestown.

At 8:00 P.M. I’ll speak in the museum on “The Reasons for Revere’s Ride.” The organizers asked me to lay out the background for the events on 18 Apr 1775, and they said I had twenty minutes. Later they revised that to thirty. I’m preparing a whirlwind tour through history up to that fateful evening. And I can’t speak too long because the audience will go out to meet Mr. Revere.

At City Square Park in Charlestown, two events are scheduled at 8:45 P.M. Revere will arrive at Deacon John Larkin’s House and emerge to mount his borrowed horse. Around that event Joe Bagley, Boston’s Chief Archaeologist, will speak on “Unearthing the Untold Stories of Charlestown’s Sacrifice.” Drawing on recent discoveries and study, he will introduce the inhabitants of Charlestown, enduring the frightening end of one battle and the destruction caused by another.

Meanwhile, over in Boston’s North End, the Old North Church will offer a free costumed reading of Revolution’s Edge from 6:30 to 8 P.M. on Paul Revere Mall (or, in case of rain, inside St. Stephen’s Church). This play by Patrick Gabridge dramatizes the choices that the Rev. Mather Byles, Jr.; Capt. John Pulling; and Cato, the minister’s enslaved servant, faced in April 1775.

Starting at 7 P.M., the church will also host its traditional Lantern Service. This year’s keynote address will be offered by Heather Cox Richardson, professor of American history at Boston College and author of Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. This commemoration will also include inspirational music, Revere’s recollection of his ride, prayers for the nation, and the lighting of the lanterns in the belfry at about 8:15 P.M. (This event is currently at capacity.)

Making Plans for Battle Road 250

If you hope to visit the reenactments on Lexington common or Minute Man National Historical Park on Saturday, 19 April, it’s not too early to make plans about how to get there.

Between the local parades and the out-of-town crowds, moving around will be a challenge.

Here are three overlapping websites with transport information:

• Lexington 250
• Minute Man Park
• Concord 250

Basically, unless you live nearby or drive in well before dawn, you should expect to park at a distance from the events and then catch one of the many shuttle buses to within walking distance of the action you want to see.

The M.B.T.A. will run extra commuter trains on the Boston-Fitchburg line, but it won’t let passengers bring bicycles on board. 

There’s no food service inside Minute Man National Historical Park, and for security reasons visitors shouldn’t bring coolers. There are drinking fountains at the visitor centers, Hartwell Tavern, and the Nathan Meriam House. In addition to those sites’ usual restrooms, there will be portable toilets at Lexington’s satellite parking lots.

I recommend choosing which events you want to enjoy, heading for those, and enjoying the details rather than trying to see everything everywhere. The Battle Road 250 event inside Minute Man Park promises to be the largest, most accurate historical portrayal yet! And of course, we should hope for good weather.

Afternoon Talks in Lexington and Boston

Next week I have two afternoon speaking engagements that will also be available online to people in the know.

Monday, 14 April, 1:15 P.M.
Secrets on the Road to Concord
Lexington Veterans Association

In April 1775, British general Thomas Gage drew up plans for his troops to march nineteen miles into unfriendly territory. The Massachusetts Patriots, meanwhile, prepared to thwart the general’s mission. There was one goal Gage and his enemies shared: for different reasons, they all wanted to keep secret just what those troops would look for in Concord.

This will be the latest variation of my talk on Gen. Gage’s fateful mission. I continue to investigate that event, particularly the identity of the spy in Concord who sent him very good intelligence in very bad French. Alas, I don’t have any new discoveries to debut here.

The Zoom link for this talk is on this page. Other speakers in this series appear here.

Thursday, 17 April, 3 P.M.
The Mystery of Joseph Warren’s Informants
Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 87 Mount Vernon Street, Boston

According to one early source, as the last step before sending William Dawes and Paul Revere off to Lexington, Dr. Joseph Warren consulted with one crucial informant. Was that Margaret Gage? William Jasper? Another individual? Or is that story simply unreliable?

I’ll retrace my thinking on those questions and discuss the historiography around that issue. When did historians begin to investigate that person? How did the campaign for women’s suffrage color the discussion? And what does it mean that Dr. Warren’s intelligence was wrong?

This talk can be watched online by following the instructions at the bottom of this page.

“That the leaning of the writer of the above might not be mistaken…”

Yesterday I quoted most of the Boston News-Letter’s 22 Aug 1765 report on the first anti-Stamp Act protest the week before.

In 1856 Samuel Gardner Drake (shown here) quoted the same article at length in his History and Antiquities of Boston. He appears to have missed printer Richard Draper’s sarcastic jibes at the crowd, however. Drake wrote:

That the leaning of the writer of the above might not be mistaken, he closed by a memorable saying of Lord Burleigh, much in use in those days, “England can never be undone but by a Parliament.” Thus the mob was encouraged, and, as by the sequel it will appear, a very partial account was given of what had taken place. The course taken by the papers under the control of the Government had some effect in producing the above, for the News-Letter had been jeered by them because it had not come out with early denunciations of the proceedings of the mob.

The criticism of the News-Letter appeared in an Whiggish newspaper, not in one “under the control of the Government.” The Boston Whigs faulted Draper for not reporting on the demonstration at all; if he’d “come out with early denunciations of the proceedings of the mob,” they’d have faulted him even more vigorously.

Drake’s extract included these lines from the News-Letter (with modernized capitalization and punctuation):

The populace after this went to work on the barn, fence, garden, and dwelling-house, of the gentleman against whom their resentment was chiefly levelled [Andrew Oliver], and which were contiguous to said hill. And here, entering the house, they bravely showed their loyalty, courage, and zeal, to defend the rights and liberties of Englishmen. Here, it is said by some good men that were present, they established their Society by the name of the Union Club.

In context, coming right after describing rioters breaking into Oliver’s house “to defend the rights and liberties of Englishmen,” the reference to the “Union Club” looks like another bit of Draper’s sarcasm.

Whigs in Bristol, England, had formed a Union Club by 1750, pushing for political reform and the protection of liberties. In the 1760s a ship of that name was visiting Boston. New Englanders would have known what the “Union Club” stood for—and should have seen the irony of forming one in somebody else’s house.

In 1865 William V. Wells quoted that line about the “Union Club” without its context in his Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams. He went on to say those men were doubtless the same group as the “Sons of Liberty” who had organized the protest.

Later authors repeated that equation: the Sons of Liberty, the Union Club, and the “Loyall Nine” (a term from yet another source, published later) were all names for the same protest organizers identified by the Rev. William Gordon.

In fact, I haven’t found a single source besides the Boston News-Letter using the name “Union Club” that way. It doesn’t reappear in the newspapers. It doesn’t show up in John Adams’s or Samuel Adams’s writings. It doesn’t show up in John Rowe’s or John Tudor’s diaries. Given the sarcasm in the initial report, I doubt the “Loyall Nine” ever really adopted the term.

(By December 1774 a Union Club was established in Salem. It contributed something for the poor after the Boston Port Bill, and on 16 December Samuel Adams sent a thank-you letter to Samuel King. I can’t find any other period mention of that organization.)

Richard Draper’s “Report of these Images”

As long as I’m discussing nomenclature for Boston’s political groups in the 1760s, I’ll tackle “the Union Club.”

America’s first public, outdoor demonstration against the Stamp Act took place along Boston’s main road on Wednesday, 14 Aug 1765. The big elm where the protesters hung effigies hadn’t yet been named Liberty Tree.

The next day, Richard Draper published his Boston News-Letter newspaper with a two-page supplement. It didn’t report on the protest, however—that sheet was entirely devoted to foreign news.

The News-Letter did print Gov. Francis Bernard’s 15 August proclamation of a reward for the rioters who had torn down stamp agent Andrew Oliver’s building the night before. That was the paper’s only description of the event.

Boston’s Whigs complained that Draper was tilting his coverage to please the royal government. In his 22 August issue the printer objected to the News-Letter being called “a Court-Paper…under the Controul of higher Powers.” He insisted:

IN regard to the Occurrences of last Week, we would observe, that it was out of our Power to give a perfect Account thereof, as the Transactions were not finished, and a partial one would perhaps have drawn down the Resentment of many of the true Sons of Liberty, and caused us to be more in Fear, than it is said were of publishing any Thing relating thereto:—

Had the Gentleman who furnished one of the Papers with a decent Account of the Affair, been so kind as to have sent us something of the same Nature, he would have saved himself the Trouble (if he really took the Trouble) to inform the Public that we filled an extraordinary Half Sheet with immaterial Foreign Articles.

The News-Letter’s account of the anti-Stamp Act protest, “as concise and true…as it is in our Power,” followed. In the details it agreed with the Monday newspapers, but it also included several sarcastic zings at the protest.

VERY early on Wednesday Morning, the 14th Instant, were discovered hanging on a Limb of the Great Trees, so called, at the South Part of this Town, two Effigies, one of which by the Labels appeared to be designed to represent a Stamp-Officer, the other a Jack-boot, with a Head and Horns peeping out of the Top. said by some of the Printers, to be the Devil or his Imp; but, as we are not acquainted with that Species of Gentlemen, we cannot so well determine whether it was an exact Resemblance or not:

The Report of these Images soon spread thro’ the Town, brought a vast Number of Spectators, and had such an Effect on them that they were immediately inspired with a Spirit of Patriotism, which diffus’d itself through the whole Concourse: So much were they affected with a Sense of Liberty, that scarce any could attend to the Task of Day-Labour; but all seemed on the Wing for Freedom.

About Dusk the Images were taken down, placed on a Bier, (not covered with a Sheet, except the Sheet of Paper which bore the Inscription) supported in Procession by six Men, followed by a great Concourse of People, some of the highest Reputation, and in the greatest Order, ecchoing forth, Liberty and Property! No Stamp! &c—

Having passed through the Town-House, they proceeded with their Pageantry down Kingstreet, and it is said intended for the North Part of the Town; but Orders being given, they turned their Course thro’ Kilbystreet, where an Edifice had been lately erected, which was suppos’d to be designed for a Stamp-Office.

Here they halted, and went to work to demolish that Building, which they soon effected, without receiving any Hurt, except one of the Spectators, who happened to be rather too nigh the Brick Wall when it fell: This being finished many of them loaded themselves with the wooden Trophies, and proceeded (bearing the two Effigies) to the Top of Fort-Hill; where a Fire was soon kindled, in which one of them was burnt; we can’t learn whether they committed the other to the Flames, or if they did whether it did not survive the Conflagration, being its said like the Salamander conversant in that Element.—

The Populace after this went to work on the Barn, Fence, Garden, and Dwelling-House, of the Gentleman against whom their Resentment was chiefly levelled, and which were contiguous to said Hill; and here entering the House they bravely showed their Loyalty, Courage, and Zeal, to defend the Rights and Liberties of Englishmen:——

Here, it is said, by some good Men that were present, they established their Society by the name of The Union Club.—

Their Business being finished, they retired, and proceeded to the Province-House, which was at about 11 o’Clock, gave three Huzzas, and all went quietly home.

The report went on to events of 15 August: Oliver’s resignation and an aborted action against Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s house.

The 19 August Boston Gazette offered a detailed and favorable description of the protest in its own two-page supplement. The same day’s Boston Evening-Post printed a positive report from “A.Z.,” who also got in the dig at Draper’s paper. The Boston Post-Boy, friendly to the royal government, ran nothing. None of the three Monday papers reprinted Gov. Bernard’s proclamation.

TOMORROW: The long and short of “The Union Club.”

How Did the Sons of Liberty Bowl Gain Its Name?

Yesterday I quoted from a report of an 1873 special meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society where a member displayed the silver bowl that Nathaniel Barber had commissioned from Paul Revere one hundred and five years before.

That year the bowl came back to Boston after decades of being owned by a man in New York.

That same page in the M.H.S. Proceedings went on to say:

The name “Sons of Liberty” is said to have been adopted here from its having been used in a speech in Parliament by our friend Colonel [Isaac] Barré. The fellowship under the name here was formed after the passage of the Stamp Act, and was first called in a Boston paper “The Union Club.” It was composed mostly of mechanics, and held secret meetings, at which the risings and other measures were planned. The principal committee met in the counting-room of Chase & Speakman’s distillery, in Hanover Square.

That report didn’t link the “Fifteen Associates” named on the bowl to the “Union Club” or “Sons of Liberty,” except in the general way that they were all on the same side of the pre-Revolutionary political divide.

Three years later, the Catalogue of the Loan Collection of Revolutionary Relics: Exhibited at the Old South Church described the same bowl this way:

Silver Bowl. For some years previous to the Revolution a number of gentlemen known as the ”Sons of Liberty” used to meet and discuss the questions of the day. In 1768, the Colonial Assembly of Massachusetts Bay voted to raise a Committee of Correspondence with her Sister Colonies on their grievances. The British Ministry demanded the repeal of this act. The Assembly voted “not to rescind,” and in commemoration of this vote the Sons of Liberty had this massive Punch Bowl made.

That description thus presented the fifteen men listed on the bowl as “the ‘Sons of Liberty.’” Not just Sons of Liberty, but the Sons of Liberty.

In 1881 The Memorial History of Boston included Edward G. Porter’s chapter on “The Beginning of the Revolution.” That weighty history mashed together the “party of Boston mechanics” who organized the first anti-Stamp Act protest in 1765 (as named by the Rev. William Gordon) with “the Sons of Liberty” who used the silver punch bowl in 1768. In fact, they were two separate groups; not one name appears on both lists.

Other authors followed suit, soon calling it “the Sons of Liberty bowl.” And after the bowl came on the market in 1949, as described by Museum of Fine Arts curator Ethan Lasser, Arts Digest referred to it as “Paul Revere’s celebrated Sons of Liberty Punch Bowl, thought by some to rank third among American historical treasures, after the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” [The phrase “by some” is doing a lot of work there.]

The current webpage for the artifact is titled “Sons of Liberty Bowl” and refers to “the Liberty Bowl.” The bowl does indeed have the words “Liberty” and “Librties,” and a picture of a Liberty Cap, inscribed on it. But the phrase “Sons of Liberty” was attached over a century later.

I agree that the fifteen men named on the bowl were Sons of Liberty as Boston used that term in the late 1760s. Nathaniel Barber and Daniel Malcom were particularly active in resisting royal officials. But they weren’t the only, the first, or the leading Sons of Liberty in town.

And this isn’t the only surviving punch bowl associated with Sons of Liberty in Boston, either. The Massachusetts Historical Society has a porcelain bowl owned by Benjamin Edes, one of the group Gordon credited for those anti-Stamp Act protests.

“This BOWL commemorative of Events prior to the American Revolution”

In August 1768 a Boston Gazette item, quoted back here, announced that Nathaniel Barber had commissioned a large silver bowl “for the Use of the Gentlemen belonging to the Insurance Office kept by” him. These weren’t his clerks, it appears, but his investors.

That group in turn invited “a Number of Gentlemen of Distinction in the Town” to drink toasts with them. The bowl’s engraving celebrated the 92 members of the Massachusetts General Court who refused to rescind the Circular Letter of 1768.

That newspaper item didn’t name the artisan who created the silver bowl: Paul Revere. Nobody then knew he’d become more famous than Barber or any of the other men whose names he engraved on the vessel.

Several of those gentlemen participated in the Boston Sons of Liberty’s dinner in Dorchester in August 1769. To be sure, there were nearly 300 other men there, too, including Revere and most members of the “Loyall Nine.”

At some point in the middle of the nineteenth century new words were engraved around the bowl below Revere’s original words and pictures:

This BOWL commemorative of Events prior to the American Revolution, was purchased of the Associates whose names are inscribed upon its surface, by Wm. MACKAY, one of their number, from whom upon the demise of the latter, in Feby 1832, it became the property of Wm. MACKAY, his Grandson in direct line, a Resident of the City of New York.

The Associates were Citizens of Boston.

Then someone added to the flat bottom of the bowl:

* at whose death in 1873, it
passed into the hands of his
Brother ROBT. C. MACKAY of
Boston

And finally, even later:

and ROBERT C. MACKAY on Mar. 11, 1902
transferred it to MARIAN LINCOLN PERRY
of Providence, Rhode Island
a great great grand-daughter of
JOHN MARSTON
one of the fifteen associates

The term “Associates” also appears in the Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings reported on a special meeting on 16 Dec 1873, when the Rev. George E. Ellis displayed that bowl for other attendees. Thay report referred to “the Fifteen Associates, belonging to Boston, for whom the bowl was made.”

It appears the M.H.S.P. article picked up the word “Associates” from the later carving around the bowl, while the engraving on the bottom may have taken the phrase “the fifteen associates” from the M.H.S.P. article.

In any event, nowhere on the bowl did the phrase “Sons of Liberty” appear, and the original newspaper report from 1768 didn’t use that term.

TOMORROW: Crossing the streams.

From “Loyall Nine” to “Sons of Liberty”

We have a reasonably good idea of who eight of Boston’s “Loyall Nine” were:

• John Avery, Jr., distiller and merchant
• Thomas Chase, distiller
• Thomas Crafts, Jr., painter
• John Smith, brazier
• Stephen Cleverly, brazier
• Henry Bass, jeweler
• George Trott, jeweler
• Benjamin Edes, printer

In addition, the ship masters Henry Wells and Joseph Field were also lumped in with this group by different contemporaries.

Within months after they started organizing anti–Stamp Act protests, the group appears to have adopted another name. Back during Parliament’s debate over that law, opponent Isaac Barré called American colonists “Sons of Liberty,” as reported to this side of the Atlantic by Jared Ingersoll. By the fall the “Loyall Nine” started using that phrase.

The handbills that Bass described the group printing in his December 1765 letter said: ”The True-born Sons of Liberty, are desired to meet under LIBERTY-TREE, at XII o’Clock, THIS DAY…” Evidently any man could merit that label by coming out to resist the new tax from London. In early 1766 the phrase also started to appear in newspapers in other ports.

But the group also used that term for themselves. In January 1766 John Adams called them “the Sons of Liberty.” On 15 February, Crafts wrote to Adams that “the Sons of Liberty Desired your Company at Boston Next Wensday.” Those are clearly references to a specific group, not to everyone taking a certain political stand.

It looks like the more general use won out. By August 1769, “An Alphabetical List of the Sons of Liberty who din’d at Liberty Tree [Tavern], Dorchester” included 300 names. Clearly those Sons of Liberty weren’t just the “Loyall Nine”—though all eight men listed above were there.

Nonetheless, because of some unsubstantiated claims and portrayals in popular culture, the belief persists that the Sons of Liberty was an identifiable group of activists, not a mass movement, as I’ve written before. Because of that squishiness, I tend not to use the term. But of course it’s strongly associated with the Revolution.

TOMORROW: Back to the bowl.

Counting the “Loyall Nine”

In a 19 Dec 1765 letter divulging details about Boston’s latest Stamp Act protest, and earlier ones, Henry Bass wrote of the organizers as “the Loyall Nine.” He added:

And upon the Occasion we that Evg. had a very Genteel Supper provided to which we invited your very good friends Mr. S[amuel] A[dams] and E[des] & G[ill] and three or four others and spent the Evening in a very agreable manner Drinkg Healths etc.

On 15 Jan 1766 John Adams wrote in his diary:

Spent the Evening with the Sons of Liberty, at their own Apartment in Hanover Square, near the Tree of Liberty. It is a Compting Room in Chase & Speakmans Distillery. A very small Room it is.

John Avery Distiller or Merchant, of a liberal Education, John Smith the Brazier, Thomas Crafts the Painter, Edes the Printer, Stephen Cleverly the Brazier, [Thomas] Chase the Distiller, Joseph Field Master of a Vessell, Henry Bass, George Trott Jeweller, were present.

I was invited by Crafts and Trott, to go and spend an Evening with them and some others, Avery was mentioned to me as one.

Finally, in 1788 the Rev. William Gordon wrote in his history of the Revolution about the first anti-Stamp protest, back in August 1765:

Messrs. John Avery, jun. Thomas Crafts, John Smith, Henry Welles, Thomas Chace, Stephen Cleverly, Henry Bass, and Benjamin Edes…provide and hang out early in the morning of August the fourteenth, upon the limb of a large old elm, toward the entrance of Boston, over the most public street, two effigies,…

Those sources, which were published in reverse chronological order, all seem to refer to the same group of men. The lists of names overlap—but not exactly.

Bass said there were nine men, and seemed to treat Samuel Adams, Edes, and Gill all as guests. Gordon named eight men, including Edes among them. John Adams also listed Edes in the group, and he treated George Trott, not on Gordon’s list, as in the group.

John Adams didn’t list Henry Wells from Gordon’s list (though Tea Leaves and some subsequent books misquote him as doing so). Instead, Adams named Joseph Field, saying he was a ship captain. According to mentions in the Boston press before he died in 1768, Henry Wells was also a ship captain. Would either of them have been in town long enough to help plan protests? 

It’s therefore difficult to say exactly who the “Loyall Nine” were, but there was definitely a political club supping at the Chase distillery near Liberty Tree and organizing the protests under that tree.

TOMORROW: A change of names?

“The ideals of American life still in force today”

The Museum of Fine Arts just shared an essay by Ethan Lasser, the the John Moors Cabot Chair for the Art of the Americas, about the silver punch bowl made by Paul Revere and engraved with several merchants’ names.

Lasser wrote:

What does the year 1949, in the aftermath of World War II, when America was entering a decade of prosperity, have to do with a silver punch bowl from the 18th century? This is the year Revere’s piece entered MFA’s collection. It’s a remarkable story: the bowl descended through the family of William Mackay, one of the Sons of Liberty it celebrates. In 1902 ownership shifted, and the bowl fell into the hands of Marian Lincoln Perry, great-great-granddaughter of John Marston, another one of the Sons of Liberty.

After Mrs. Perry’s death in 1935, the enterprising New York art dealer Israel Sack set out to place the bowl in an institution. He received offers from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but felt strongly that “the bowl should belong to the city that gave it birth” and offered it to the MFA. “It was made in Boston for men of Boston and by a famous silversmith of Boston,” he said. “It belongs in Boston.”

Edwin J. Hipkiss, then the MFA’s curator of Decorative Arts, was quick to act. He realized the bowl spoke of the past—but also of his own time, when the United States had endured a more recent fight for freedom in World War II. In Hipkiss’s words, the piece “expresses the hopes and achievements of dauntless Americans of 180 years ago and commemorates the ideals of American life still in force today.”

Prominent Bostonians rallied to help Hipkiss raise funds to acquire the bowl for the Museum. “Acting independently for the Museum of Fine Arts,” they initiated the Revere Sons of Liberty Bowl Fund. Their rousing, all-caps fundraising letter is still in our curatorial files: “THE BOWL IS A SYMBOL OF OUR FREEDOM because it commemorates the very first unified stand for liberty in the country.” . . .

Leafing through our files, I came upon the Boston Public School Superintendent’s Circular #103, dated November 30, 1948. “To the principals of Schools and districts,” the letter begins:

The School committee invites the school children of Boston to make a voluntary contribution … to keep permanently in our city this priceless relic made in Boston by a famous silversmith of Boston in tribute to sterling patriots of Boston.

When was collection day? December 7, 1948, the seventh anniversary of Pearl Harbor—a day of infamy brightened by this symbol of freedom. Thousands of school children participated in the effort and, a few weeks later, in the opening weeks of 1949, the Sons of Liberty Bowl was acquired and made its debut at the Museum.

It struck me how this telling looks back repeatedly to World War II but doesn’t mention the Cold War with the Soviet Union that the U.S. of A. had just entered. Americans were eager to point to the values of liberty, faith, and the like, in contrast to oppressive, godless Communism. Recruiting schoolchildren to give money for “A SYMBOL OF OUR FREEDOM” and “in tribute to sterling patriots” fits right into that moment.

“Our goal is neither criticism nor celebration; it is to understand”

The American Historical Association has once again responded to a dubious and harmful White House executive order with a statement on behalf of its members and other historical organizations.

The A.H.A. message is:

The Executive Order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” issued on March 27 by the White House, egregiously misrepresents the work of the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian is among the premier research institutions in the world, widely known for the integrity of its scholarship, which is careful and based on historical and scientific evidence. The Institution ardently pursues the purpose for which it was established more than 175 years ago: “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” The accusation in the White House fact sheet accompanying the executive order claims that Smithsonian museums are displaying “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology.” This is simply untrue; it misrepresents the work of those museums and the public’s engagement with their collections and exhibits. It also completely misconstrues the nature of historical work.

Historians explore the past to understand how our nation has evolved. We draw on a wide range of sources, which helps us to understand history from different angles of vision. Our goal is neither criticism nor celebration; it is to understand—to increase our knowledge of—the past in ways that can help Americans to shape the future.

The stories that have shaped our past include not only elements that make us proud but also aspects that make us acutely aware of tragedies in our nation’s history. No person, no nation, is perfect, and we should all—as individuals and as nations—learn from our imperfections.

The Smithsonian’s museums collect and preserve the past of all Americans and encompass the entirety of our nation’s history. Visitors explore exhibitions and collections in which they can find themselves, their families, their communities, and their nation represented. They encounter both our achievements and the painful moments of our rich and complicated past.

Patriotic history celebrates our nation’s many great achievements. It also helps us grapple with the less grand and more painful parts of our history. Both are part of a shared past that is fundamentally American. We learn from the past to inform how we can best shape our future. By providing a history with the integrity necessary to enable all Americans to be all they can possibly be, the Smithsonian is fulfilling its duty to all of us.

At the Bulwark, Grand View University history professor Thomas Lecacque also wrote in response:

Trump is mad about the Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” because it “claims that ‘sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism’ and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’” This is about as honest as the Trump administration has ever been. “Museums in our Nation’s capital,” the order preaches, “should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” Apparently, that shared reality is centered on the idea that race is a biological fact. This is not true historically or scientifically or in any other way outside the miserable, backwards swamp logic of white supremacy. . . .

The risk is not that Americans will be misled on particular matters of fact, but that they’ll lose their respect for the idea of the truth—will capitulate to the cynical lies. This, in turn, engenders a cultural atmosphere that is inhospitable to dreams and ideals and hopes. It would be to give up our birthright of earnest optimism and our sense that we can always improve our lot and that of the world.

In the Guardian, Wellesley College professor Kellie Carter Jackson wrote:

Trump’s executive order is not about restoring the truth. Quite the opposite. It creates false narratives and myths that promote the supremacy of whiteness. This executive order has the potential for harm because erasure is violence; it robs the public of the truth. Because there is no way to explain slavery and segregation as not “inherently harmful and oppressive”, Trump would rather not explain it at all. . . .

It was impossible to separate the story of Black military service and valor from racial discrimination and violence. Similarly, one cannot separate out the “good” from the “bad” in creating an honest narrative about the United States. Accordingly, the [National Museum of African American History and Culture] holds a special place in America, one where the complexity of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are recognized as founding fathers and slaveholders. There is no abolitionist movement without slavery. There is no suffrage movement without women’s denial. There is no civil rights movement without racism and oppression. These are the facts. Museums exist to collect, preserve and exhibit the past as it happened. Archivists and curators care deeply about their mission to be accurate and authentic.

And author David M. Perry in Foreign Policy:

…the United States has already entered a multiyear cycle commemorating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, but it’s about to intensify as the calendar turns to April, taking the country from celebrations of Paul Revere’s ride (April 18-19, 1775) to the signing of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776). The executive orders targeting the Smithsonian strongly suggest that the Trump administration will bleach the story of American history in a way that tries to claim legitimacy for our current post-constitutional order.

The ritual anniversary moments intensify national mythmaking, moving the story to the formation of the nation, with the new authoritarians controlling any and all official narratives in ways that emphasize not the rebellion against a British king, but a submission to the new American one. As historical claims go, trying to make Trump into the culmination of the American Revolutionary War is no more intellectually serious than those executive orders, but mythmaking doesn’t have to be true to be effective.

As historians, as Americans, as teachers and students, we’re going to need to engage these false narratives not just with fact-checking, but with better, truer storytelling of our own. And we don’t need to make myths to claim patriotism for our side. Looking clearly at the past—whether recognizing the truth about the local historical concentration camp or the much bigger story about the long struggle to put ideals about multiracial democracy into true practice—is patriotic.

Why Did Gage “order their muzzles to be beat in”?

When I spoke to the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati in February, a descendant of artillerist William Burbeck asked me a provocative question about The Road to Concord.

After the Boston militia train’s four brass cannon after they disappeared in September 1774, Gen. Thomas Gage expended a lot of effort on locating them. In February 1775 he may have sent Capt. William Browne and Ens. Henry DeBerniere to Worcester to hunt for them.

Gage definitely sent Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie and his troops to Salem to seize them. He sent Browne and DeBerniere to Concord to confirm they were in that town, and then he organized the fatal expedition on 18–19 April to grab them.

Gage’s final orders for the commander of that April expedition, Lt. Col. Francis Smith, said: “If you meet any Brass Artillery, you will order their muzzles to be beat in so as to render them useless.”

After all that hunting, why didn’t Gage order those guns to be returned to Boston?

Here’s my analysis of the general’s thinking and why he’d have been happy to hear that those four cannon were destroyed. (As it happened, Patriots had already moved them beyond Concord, perhaps to Stow, by the time the redcoats arrived at James Barrett’s farm.)

First of all, those four cannon didn’t pose a big military threat. They were two- and three-pounders, fine for training on but not the biggest force in battle. The Royal Artillery had many more and bigger weapons. Furthermore, intelligence suggested that the Patriots hadn’t succeeded in mounting them well.

Rather, I posit, those field-pieces posed a bigger threat to Gage’s standing with his superiors in London. He had put sentries in front of the armories, patrols on the Boston streets, and guards at the town’s only gate—and yet those four guns had disappeared. Gage had reasons to suspect they had also been slipped past Leslie’s reach in Salem before being moved to Concord. (In fact, they arrived in Concord from Dorchester, but he didn’t know that.) In sum, those four brass cannon made him look utterly incompetent.

The general never reported the disappearance of those guns to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State, or Lord Barrington, Secretary of War. In fact, in describing the Salem mission, he suggested that he had intelligence about cannon being smuggled in from Dutch territory; there’s no such report in his file. As each month ticked by, Gage may have felt more pressure to resolve this problem before his bosses learned about it.

Thus, Gen. Gage’s top goal for the Concord expedition wasn’t to recover those guns—it was to make their potential to embarrass him go away. Turning the four cannon into useless hunks of bronze out in the countryside looked like the most efficient way to do that. Then he could report to London that his men had succeeded in destroying all the artillery they found without raising many questions.

In contrast, carting those field-pieces back to Boston would have prompted questions about where they had come from. Country folk would have seen them, as would the soldiers themselves. Boston militia leaders might have demanded them back (playing dumb about who stole them). The ministers in London may have become curious. All that would have made it harder to keep the embarrassing story of the cannon thefts quiet.

Gage was also concerned for his soldiers. Hauling several hundred pounds of metal along the road to Boston would have required a wagon and horses, plus men guarding that transport, all moving more slowly than soldiers on the march. The general didn’t send Lt. Col. Smith out with wagons because he wanted the troops to move fast—expeditiously, in fact. Even if they had confiscated a wagon and draft horses in Concord, their return trip would be slower if they brought the cannon along.

Gage actually gave orders for the regulars not to weigh themselves down too much:

You will order a Trunion to be knocked off each Gun, but if its found impracticable on any, they must be spiked, and the Carriages destroyed. The Powder and flower must be shook out of the Barrels into the River, the Tents burnt, Pork or Beef destroyed in the best way you can devise. And the Men may put Balls of lead in their pockets, throwing them by degrees into Ponds, Ditches &c., but no Quantity together, so that they may be recovered afterwards.

The goal was to destroy the provincials’ military supplies as quickly as possible and then get back to safety. He hoped Smith’s men would be able to meet up with Col. Earl Percy’s relief column before the rebels organized a military response. That didn’t happen. But the situation would probably have been even worse if the troops were withdrawing from Concord at wagon speed.

“Merely a private individual traveling for curiosity”

As recounted yesterday, over champagne Julien-Alexandre Achard de Bonvouloir divulged to a British secret agent that he’d been meeting with the French ambassador to Britain, the Comte de Guines.

The young Frenchman had just come from Massachusetts, where war had broken out months before. He offered to be a liaison between the French government and the American rebels.

De Guines consulted by letter with the Foreign Minister of France, the Comte de Vergennes (shown here—that letter is reproduced and translated in B. F. Stevens's Facsimiles of Manuscripts in European Archives Relating to America, 1773-1783). The two officials agreed to send Bonvouloir back to North America as their own secret agent.

The terms were:

• De Guines and Bonvouloir agreed the young man would present himself as “a merchant of Antwerp,” then part of the Austrian Netherlands.
• The French government would pay Bonvouloir a “salary of two hundred louis.”
• Bonvouloir couldn’t tell his family what he was up to, not even “His brother, an officer in the Lyons regiment, [who] was in London at the time.”

The mission was just as restricted. Bonvouloir was to meet with delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, but he couldn’t confirm that he was an emissary of the French government and he couldn’t make any promises of aid. According to the historian Edwin Erle Sparks, he could “assure the American leaders that France had no intention on Canada”—though of course a promise from “merely a private individual traveling for curiosity” carried no weight.

The whole episode reads very much like a modern spy novel—not an Ian Fleming type but the more cynical sort like John Le Carré’s The Looking-Glass War. Bonvouloir was hungry to make his mark, to rise above his status as a younger, disabled son sent off to the colonies, to do something for his country. His government took advantage of that eagerness.

Almost a year later, on 16 June 1776, De Guines wrote another letter to Vergennes about Bonvouloir. By this time the British royal authorities in America were hunting for him. His French government contacts weren’t sure how to get him off the continent, or whether it would be worth it. De Guines had to prod Vergennes into authorizing the payment of another year of salary as promised. The ambassador planned to ask Bonvouloir’s brother to write to him via Québec, but he assured the minister “he and his brother are always liable to be disavowed if any inconvenience should result from their action.”

Not aware of that future, in October 1775 Bonvouloir sailed for Philadelphia “in the ‘Charming Betsy,’ Captain John Farmer.” That information comes from another document in the Earl of Dartmouth’s papers—evidence that the British government was already tracking this operation.

I plan to return to Bonvouloir later in the year, around the 250th anniversary of his meetings in Philadelphia.