“The wider transatlantic workers’ struggle that helped make the American Revolution”?

Jacobin just published Tom Cutterham’s essay “Class Struggle Was a Crucial Part of the American Revolution,” reflecting his upcoming book, Empire Ablaze: The American Revolution and the Atlantic Working Class.

The article begins:

Late in 1776, with the War of Independence underway in the American colonies, a twenty-four-year-old housepainter named James Aitken walked into Britain’s most important naval dockyard and set it on fire. The damage was significant: estimates for repairs were twice the value of the tea destroyed at Boston harbor three years earlier.

The sense of threat experienced by Britain’s ruling elite was also profound. Few people today remember Aitken’s acts of sabotage against the British war machine. But they deserve recognition as part of the wider transatlantic workers’ struggle that helped make the American Revolution.

Aitken is the subject of one of my favorite books on the Revolution, Jessica Warner’s The Incendiary. But I’m not convinced he’s good evidence of a transatlantic political movement, even though he did start his life in working-class Scotland, was in Pennsylvania during the first years of the Continental Congress, and then returned to Britain to support the American cause. Aitken didn’t connect with other activists, except for Silas Deane in Paris. He seems to have been socially inept. Aitken was a movement of one.

Likewise, something seems to be missing from the article’s description of the Gordon Riots:

In London too, the long-standing collaboration between laborers, artisans, and the commercial middle class proved a point of fracture as the possibility of revolution grew too close for comfort. When huge crowds took to the streets in the summer of 1780, burning the home of the Lord Chief Justice, throwing open prison gates, and attacking centers of imperial power like the East India Company offices, it seemed as though the “general effort” [Catharine] Macaulay had called for might finally be at hand.

Those riots were spurred by support for a rather mad aristocrat’s protest against a new British law granting more political rights to Catholics. Though the violence threatened the political establishment, was it really for the benefit of the working class?

I expect Cutterham’s longer book addresses the details of these cases. And I don’t disagree that economic friction between the working class and their employers (still called “masters” in many fields) was part of the Revolutionary era. But so were a bunch of other factors that may have driven events more and certainly muddy the waters. Cutterham’s points are worth considering with care.

“I know that our way will bring us there”

Yesterday’s posting mentioned the Rev. Samuel Ashbow, a Baptist minister from the Mohegan community in Connecticut.

A lot of information about Ashbow comes from Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England by W. DeLoss Love (1899). Both Ashbow and Occom studied with the Rev. Eleazer Wheelock and worked on his conversion missions before breaking with him theologically and organizationally.

The Rev. David McClure (1748–1820, shown here) also left a glimpse of Ashbow in his diary. This passage comes from the summer of 1768 when McClure was an undergraduate at Yale College. He “took a ride to the Sea Shore & in company with Mr. Chester Bingham tarried a few days at Narraganset,” the Native community in what’s now Charlestown, Rhode Island.

Sabbath, attended the Indian meeting, at their meeting house, which was small & about the size of a common school house. About 50 Indians were present. They were mostly elderly people. They sung, prayed & exhorted. There were 4 or 5 who exhorted. The principal speaker was called Sam’l Ashpo.

They were all very earnest in voice & gesture, so much so that some of them foamed at the mouth & seemed transported with a kind of enthusiasm. When they prayed, all spake audibly, some in english & some in Indian. It was indeed a confused noise. . . .

I stood near to Ashpo, and noticed the following expressions in his prayer er in confession of sins. We must allow for grossness of the style, from his imperfect knowledge. “Lord, thou knowest what a poor vile sinner I have been; how I have been a vile drunkard, and like a beast have lain drunk in my own spue, all night at taverns and on the road; but O Lord, thou has forgiven me my sins, for the sake of our blessed Saviour Jesus Christ, who can save the vilest sinner” &c.— . . .

As a sample of their ready wit even in serious things, among other instances, after meeting passing the house of one of the speakers, standing in his door, He said to me, “How do you like our way of worship?[”] I replied some things are very good; but would it not be more edifying, in prayer for one to pray & the congregation to join?—He replied “that will never do. Must make ’em all pray. Plaguy apt to cheat.”

When in the Meeting, one of the Exhorters addressed me & my companion, & said “this is the way that we Indians have to get to Heaven. You white people have another way. I don't know but your way will bring you there, but I know that our way will bring us there.”

Though McClure was contemptuous about the worshippers’ “simple and vulgar” way of expressing their understanding, I thought the metaphors he recorded them using were actually quite evocative.

One of the exhorters said, “I have been up the North ward in the french war, and when cold weather come on orders come—Go into winter quarters. This was dreadful news, to stay there all winter in cold & hunger; but soon word come again, strike your tents & home boys home. Then was all glad, and so it is with a christian going to Heaven.”

Another said, “I have been to New Port & down the wharf, & seen a ship just going to sea. There friends shake hands, and cry farewell, soon the sails are up & the wind comes & she goes, & all hands huzza, (hurraw) so it is with a christian going to Heaven.”

Three or four of Ashbow’s sons died fighting for the Continental cause, starting with Samuel, Jr., at Bunker Hill. He remained in Connecticut after the war while many other Christian Natives in the northeast, including Occom, were pushed to the Brotherton community in upstate New York and then on to Wisconsin. 

Up and Down the River Screening and Discussion in Charlestown, 11 June

On Thursday, 11 June, the National Parks of Boston and Bunker Hill Community College will host a screening and discussion of the new short film Up and Down the River, dramatizing the choices of Mohegan people during the American Revolution.

This movie was directed by Madeline Sayet and co-written by her and her mother, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, vice chair of the Mohegan Council of Elders. It stars several Native actors from the Mohegan and other communities.

The film description says:

Spanning the colonial and American Revolutionary eras, Up and Down the River delves into the difficult decisions made by members of the Mohegan Tribe at these pivotal periods in both tribal and U.S. history. Featured in this film is the Ashbow family, including Hannah and her son Samuel Ashbow, Jr. Choosing to fight alongside the American colonists, Samuel Ashbow, Jr., died at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, becoming one of the first Indigenous soldiers to die in the American Revolution.

Ashbow’s father was the Rev. Samuel Ashbow (1718–1795) of New London, Connecticut.

After the film showing, there will be a reflective conversation between Zobel and endawnis Spears, Practitioner in Residence for Tribal Engagement at Brown University and Co-Founder and Director of Programming and Outreach at the Akomawt Educational Initiative.

This program will begin at 6 P.M., with doors open half an hour before. It’s scheduled to last ninety minutes. The showing and discussion are free to the public, but registration is required.

Archeological Investigation on Breed’s Hill This Month

For the next couple of weeks, the Boston City Archaeology Department will be conducting a dig on Breed’s Hill in Charlestown. The public can watch the investigation proceed while visiting the battle monument.

The program’s website explains:

There have been multiple archaeological surveys surrounding the Bunker Hill Monument, the site of the redoubt on Breed’s Hill and currently a National Park. These surveys have revealed the likelihood that the 1775 redoubt structure may still be identifiable under the current surface of the grassy hill.

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) and other non-invasive remote sensing techniques have been useful for finding earthworks, and a previous GPR survey on the monument hill in the 1990s had promising results suggesting an oval-shaped trench present on the hill.

Technology has significantly improved since this original survey and the City Archaeology Program is actively working with the National Park Service and other partners on a plan to re-survey the top of the hill to provide an even better underground snapshot of the location and condition of the 1775 redoubt.

A goal of the project is to accurately document the presence and location of the 1775 redoubt, including the potential for an archaeological trench across the original redoubt to reveal a section of the surviving fortification as part of the 250th celebrations in the summer of 2025.

In addition to the redoubt, the team is also actively working to use remote sensing techniques to identify areas of potential burials for the more than 300 individuals who lost their lives during the battle, including both colonial and British forces. The colonial forces included people of color and Native individuals from multiple Native nations. No burials will be disturbed as part of this work, but radar and documentary surveys may help to better protect these locations.

The department is working working with the National Park Service and American Veterans Archaeological Recovery with support from the Friends of Boston Archaeology.

The department shares lots of information from previous archival and geographical investigations of Revolutionary Charlestown on its webpage.

Cutting Remarks

Here’s another data point on the phrase “Tarleton’s quarter(s)” in the early American republic.

This item that appeared in the Centinel of Freedom newspaper, published in Newark, New Jersey, on 4 Dec 1798.

Original and True.

AFTER the battle of Cowpens, in which [Banastre] Tarleton’s dragoons were so roughly handled by the Americans, he drew up his men, and riding in front of the line, communicated to them strict order to give no quarter thereafter.

A short time after, in an action where the American militia threw down their arms and begged for their lives, one of them answered, “aye, aye! we’ll give you quarter; but as we are in something of a hurry, we’ll only halve you now, and quarter you as we come back:” and so hewed them down with their sabres.

“This naivete passed from mouth to mouth, and excited laughter in the midst of carnage! Were these men or fiends?”

This anecdote reflected the American memory of Tarleton and his men as monsters. There’s no evidence from the British side that the lieutenant colonel gave such an order, nor any evidence from wartime for this remark by one dragoon.

Notably, this tale was set after the Battle of Cowpens in January 1781. David Ramsay’s history, quoted yesterday, stated that the phrase “Tarleton’s quarters” arose after the Battle of Waxhaws more than six months earlier.

This article used an older sense of “naïveté,” meaning not the quality of being naïve but an action or remark arising from that quality. Not that I picture those dragoons as naïve.

When Did People Start Talking about “Tarleton’s Quarter”?

Last week saw the anniversary of the Battle of Waxhaws in South Carolina on 29 May 1780. That was a lopsided bloody victory for the British.

Todd Braisted, the historian of Loyalists, noted that many anniversary descriptions of that battle were stating that it gave rise to the sarcastic term “Tarleton’s quarter” for attacking foes trying to surrender, and that that phrase became a rallying-cry for Americans later in the war.

He asked on Facebook whether there is any contemporaneous evidence for that claim. The phrase doesn’t appear in American newspapers of the 1780s. No one was able to point to a letter using the term. If a phrase was really so widespread, why doesn’t it appear more often?

Steve Rayner found what might be the earliest print use of the phrase in Charleston author David Ramsay’s History of the Revolution of South-Carolina, vol. 2 (Trenton: 1785):

Lord Cornwallis bestowed on lieutenant colonel [Banastre] Tarleton the highest encomiums for this enterprize, and recommended him in a special manner to royal favour. This barbarous massacre gave a more sanguinary turn to the war. Tarleton’s quarters became proverbial, and in the subsequent battles a spirit of revenge gave a keener edge to military resentments.

At that time Ramsay was representing his state at the Confederation Congress, which was meeting in Trenton. That’s why this history of South Carolina wasn’t published in Charleston.

Three years later, the Rev. William Gordon (or his ghostwriter) lifted Ramsay’s sentences with minimal rewriting into The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment of the Independence of the United States of America, vol. 3 (London: 1788):

Lord Cornwallis bestowed on Tarleton the highest encomiums for this enterprise, and recommended him in a special manner to royal favor. Tarleton’s quarters is become proverbial; and in subsequent battles a spirit of revenge will give a keener edge to military resentments.

British supporters of the American republic picked up the phrase. The Scottish pamphleteer James Thomson Callender issued The Political Progress of Britain anonymously in Edinburgh in 1792. He started to revise and expand that text for a second edition but was arrested on 2 Jan 1793.

Callendar “with some difficulty made his escape” first to Ireland, then to America. Encouraged by Thomas Jefferson, he reprinted The Political Progress of Britain in Philadelphia in 1795. Later that year Callendar published a much expanded third edition, which on page 119 reels off a list of British government atrocities:

The peninsula within the Ganges, is the grand scene, where the genius of British supremacy displays its meridian splendour. Culloden, Glencoe, and Darien, the British famine of four years, Burgoyne’s tomahawks, Tarleton’s quarters, the Jersey prison-ship, and the extirpation of six hundred and fifteen thousand Irish men, women and children, dwindle from a comparison.

Callender evidently expected his readers (now primarily Americans) to recognize all those events without needing explanations. “Tarleton’s quarters” had indeed become proverbial, he believed.

That same year, back in London, William Belsham published his Memoirs of the Reign of George III, discussing the fight at Waxhaws in vol. 2:

This movement caused an immediate retreat of such corps as had been there collected for the relief of Charlestown. One of these was unexpectedly attacked and surrounded by Tarleton’s legion, which had marched one hundred and five miles in fifty-four hours. A very feeble resistance was made, and by far the greater part immediately threw down their arms, and begged for quarter: but a few continuing to fire, the British cavalry were ordered to charge, and a terrible slaughter was made amongst the unarmed and unresisting Americans; and from this time Tarleton’s quarter became proverbial.

That seems to be the first appearance of the phrase in a singular form, which became standard in American books in the next century.

The way Gordon and Belcham echoed Ramsay’s “became proverbial” wording shows that those authors, who had no ties to South Carolina, relied on Ramsay’s book. All traces of the phrase lead back to him.

Back in early 1780, Ramsay had been a military surgeon serving with the South Carolina militia. He was captured in the fall of Charleston and then held as a prisoner of war in Florida for nearly a year. Ramsay therefore didn’t have first-hand experience of how Patriots in the countryside reacted to the Battle of Waxhaws, but he undoubtedly knew people who were there.

It would be nice if we could find examples of people referring to “Tarleton’s quarter(s)” during the war, especially if we claim that phrase spread widely and inspired American fighters. It’s possible that Ramsay coined or refined the phrase to express how people had felt a few years before, or that he overstated how many people repeated it at that time. But we can be sure this phrase didn’t arise in the 1800s, unlike other oft-repeated tropes of the Revolution.