Seminars at the Massachusetts Historical Society

As I was trying to sort out the accounts of the New York Tea Party, one of my biggest questions was how the New York Whigs got advance word that James Chambers was bringing in tea. First another merchant captain told the Philadelphia Whigs, who sent word to New York. Then a third captain showed up with nearly the same information, which he had copied from Chambers’s Customs filings.

And literally that tea was nobody’s business but Capt. Chambers’s—he had bought it himself, he was transporting it, and he would presumably pay the duty on it.

Now the American tea boycott made tea everybody’s business for a while. But no one seems to have found it remarkable for information on Capt. Chambers’s cargo to reach New York before he did. Today companies operate on the assumption that most such commercial information is proprietary, not public.

On Friday I attended a seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where research fellow Hannah Tucker helped make sense of that question for me. A graduate student at the University of Virginia, she’s working on the patterns and practices of merchant captains in the eighteenth-century British Empire.

In that period, I grasped from Tucker’s remarks, the uncertainty of Atlantic crossings, the difficulty of communication, and merchants’ and ship owners’ inability to supervise sea captains closely meant that they preferred an open information system to a closed one. It was in nearly everyone’s interest to know about other people’s business. If you tried to keep information within your firm, you could easily find yourself cut off with no information at all.

Thus, sea captains sent their merchant employers signed copies of their bills of lading via two or three other captains—rival mariners working for rival merchants. Captains shared news with others they met at sea. After landing, captains were debriefed for news they had about other ships out of the same port. And apparently it wasn’t that odd for one captain to view the Customs documents of another.

The Massachusetts Historical Society hosts many such insightful seminars on different topics and in different formats, all free and open to the public. (Some require reserving a spot in advance so the society can be sure it has enough seats and sandwiches.)

The session with Hannah Tucker was a “brown-bag seminar,” scheduled at noon (attendees can eat lunch during it); researchers early in their research discuss their current projects and what nearby documents they plan to examine. There are more formal evening series, including the Boston Area Early American History Seminar, when scholars share essays farther along toward publication.

The M.H.S. just announced its schedule of events for the fall and beyond, and here are seminars that caught my eye because of their links to Revolutionary America.

Friday, 7 Sept 2018, 12:00 noon
American Silver, Chinese Silverwares, and the Global Circulation of Value
Susan Eberhard, University of California, Berkeley

Silver coin was the primary commodity shipped to China from the United States in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of which was reworked into silverwares by Chinese craftsmen for British and American buyers. This talk explores the different silver conduits of the American trade relationship with China. Far from a neutral medium, how were understandings of its materiality mobilized in cross-cultural transactions?

Friday, 14 Sept 2018, 12:00 noon
A Possible Connection between a Scandal and Susanna Rowson’s Last Novel
Steven Epley, Samford University

The talk will describe evidence in letters and public records suggesting that best-selling author Susanna Rowson may have based her last novel, Lucy Temple, at least in part on a scandal in which she was innocently but indirectly involved in Medford, Mass., in 1799.

Wednesday, 17 Oct 2018, 12:00 noon
“Watering of the Olive Plant”: Catechisms and Catechizing in Early New England
Roberto Flores de Apodaca, University of South Carolina

Early New Englanders produced and used an unusually large number of catechisms. These catechisms shaped relations of faith for church membership, provided content for missions to the Indians, and empowered lay persons theologically to critique their ministers. This talk explores the content and the function of these unique, question and answer documents.

Monday, 22 Oct 2018, 5:15-7:30 P.M.
Paul Revere’s Ride through Digital History
Joseph M. Adelman, Framingham State University; Liz Covart and Karin Wulf, Omohundro Institute

This seminar examines components of the Omohundro Institute’s multi-platform digital project and podcast series, Doing History: To the Revolution. It explores Episode 130, “Paul Revere’s Ride through History,” and the ways the topic was constructed through narrative and audio effects, as well as the content in the complementary reader app.

Tuesday, 6 Nov 2018, 5:15-7:30 P.M.
“A Rotten-Hearted Fellow”: The Rise of Alexander McDougall
Christopher Minty, the Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society
Comment: Brendan McConville, Boston University

Historians have often grouped the DeLanceys of New York as self-interested opportunists who were destined to become loyalists. By focusing on the rise of Alexander McDougall, this paper offers a new interpretation, demonstrating how the DeLanceys and McDougall mobilized groups with competing visions of New York’s political economy. These prewar factions stayed in opposition until the Revolutionary War, thus shedding new light on the coming of the American Revolution.

Tuesday, 8 Jan 2019, 5:15-7:30 P.M.
The Consecration of Samuel Seabury and the Crisis of Atlantic Episcopacy, 1782-1807
Brent Sirota, North Carolina State University
Comment: Chris Beneke, Bentley University

Samuel Seabury’s consecration in 1784 signaled a transformation in the organization of American Protestantism. After more than a century of resistance to the office of bishops, American Methodists and Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans all established some form of episcopal superintendency after the Peace of Paris. This paper considers how the making of American episcopacy and the controversies surrounding it betrayed a lack of consensus regarding the relationship between church, state and civil society in the Protestant Atlantic.

Tuesday, 5 Mar 2019, 5:15-7:30 P.M.
Parson Weems: Maker and Remaker
Steven C. Bullock, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Comment: Elizabeth Maddock-Dillon, Northeastern University

This paper argues that Mason Locke Weems’s biography of George Washington built a bridge between Washington and the world of Abraham Lincoln and Ellen Montgomery. Weems’s stories were not just expressing early-19th century cultural commonplaces, but helping to create them. The paper connects these transformations with Weems’s work to recover Weems’s importance within his own time.

Tuesday, 7 May 2019, 5:15-7:30 P.M.
Panel: After the Fighting: The Struggle for Revolutionary Settlement
Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire; Katherine Grandjean, Wellesley College; Stephen Marini, Wellesley College; Brendan McConville, Boston University

In the ten years after the American victory at Yorktown in 1781, the nation faced myriad problems and challenges. This panel examines how the revolutionary generation confronted issues of diplomacy, governance and economic growth, and how the legacies of warfare and political convulsion shaped spiritual and social behaviors in those troubled years.

Check out the M.H.S. Events page for other sessions about other historical periods, subjects, and approaches.

“After the Destruction of Captn. Chambers’s Tea”

Everyone agreed that during the New York Tea Party of 22 Apr 1774 and associated demonstrations, the rest of the city was peaceful. Lt. Gov. Cadwallader Colden told the absent governor, William Tryon, “the Quarter where I reside, and the greatest Part of the Town were perfectly Quiet.”

For the Whigs, that showed how the New York community was normally peaceful and under control; right-thinking locals destroyed the eighteen chests of offensive tea and did no other damage. For their opponents, the fact that only a small fraction of New Yorkers got involved showed how the movement wasn’t really popular.

That split reflected the ongoing battle for public opinion. The Whig committee that orchestrated the tea destruction was playing to several audiences. They wanted to show the government and mercantile community in London, and the East India Company, that their city was adamantly opposed to paying the new tea tax. They wanted to warn merchants and sea captains like James Chambers against trying to evade that boycott.

They also wanted to show the Whigs of Boston and Philadelphia and other North American ports, who had already dealt with tea shipments, that they were just as strongly opposed. As Hugh Gaine’s New-York Gazette concluded its 25 April report:

Thus, to the great Mortification of the Secret and open enemies of America, and the joy of all the friends of liberty and human nature, the union of these Colonies is maintained in a contest of the utmost importance to their safety and felicity.

In addition, the Whigs wanted to assure the city’s riled-up populace, who actually started destroying the tea before the self-appointed leaders wanted, that their committee was looking out for the public interest.

Of course, not everyone supported the tea destruction. The first newspaper attack on the action appeared in James Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer on 28 April. In highly emphasized language a correspondent demanded:

What is the Committee of Observation? By whom were they appointed? and what authority had they to order Capt. Chambers, or any body else, to attend them at Mr. [Samuel] Francis’s, or any other place whatsoever? Who says, and upon what authority does he say, that the sense of the city was asked, relatively, either to the sending away Capt. [Benjamin] Lockyer, or the destruction of the tea on board the London? Has not every London Captain brought tea, under the same circumstances? And, if so, what were the Apostates that informed against the unfortunate man, who was threatened with DEATH for obeying the laws of his country? . . .

I wish the printers of public chronicles would be cautious of disgracing their papers, by publishing party relations. While they adhere to matters of fact, ’tis all well; but when they expand their columns to either patriot or ministerial minions, without any known evidence,— nay, contrary to the truth of fact,—they must not, they cannot, they shall not hope to escape the animadversions of a lover of Constitutional Liberty; but a sworn foe to Coblers and Taylors, so long as they take upon their everlasting and unmeasurable shoulders, the power of directing the loyal and sensible inhabitants of the CITY and PROVINCE of NEW-YORK.

According to Lt. Gov. Colden, the radical Whigs actually lost the ensuing political struggle. On 7 Sept 1774, he wrote to the governor:

After the Destruction of Captn. Chambers’s Tea, and some other violent Proceedings of the pretended Patriots, the principal Inhabitants began to be apprehensive and resolved to attend the Meetings of the Inhabitants when called together by Hand Bills.

The Consequence has been that [John Morin] Scott, [Alexander] McDougall, [Isaac] Sears & [John] Lamb are all in disgrace, and the People are now directed by more moderate Men. I hope that the giving [of] any new offence to Parliament will be guarded against.

New York City remained in a delicate balance between factions. In the summer of 1775 it simultaneously welcomed both Gov. Tryon and Gen. George Washington. In 1776 New Yorkers celebrated the Declaration of Independence by tearing down George III’s statue, and then half a year later the city, retaken by the British military, became the center of Loyalism for the rest of the war.

TOMORROW: What happened to Capt. James Chambers?

“Undoubted intelligence of hostilities being begun at Boston”

The 28 Apr 1775 Pennsylvania Mercury newspaper contained several letters about the fighting in Massachusetts nine days before. One that had just arrived in Philadelphia the previous evening began:

Hartford, April 23, 1775.

Dear Sir,

These are to inform you, that we have undoubted intelligence of hostilities being begun at Boston by the regular troops; the truth of which we are assured divers ways, and especially by Mr. Adams the post [rider]; the particulars of which, as nigh as I can recollect, are as follow:

General [Thomas] Gage, last Tuesday night, draughted out about 1000 or 1200 of his best troops in a secret manner, which he embarked on board transports, and carried and landed at Cambridge that night, and early Wednesday morning by day break they marched up to Lexington, where a number of the inhabitants were exercising before breakfast as usual, about 30 in number, upon whom the regulars fired without the least provocation about 15 minutes, without a single shot from our men, who retreated as fast as possible, in which fire they killed 6 of our men, and wounded several, from thence they proceeded to Concord;

on the road thither, they fired at, and killed a man on horseback, went to the house where Mr. [John] Hancock lodged, who, with Samuel Adams, luckily got out of their way by secret and speedy intelligence from Paul Revere, who is now missing, and nothing heard of him since;

when they searched the house for Mr. Hancock, and Adams, and not finding them there, killed the woman of the house and all the children, and set fire to the house; from thence they proceeded on their way to Concord, firing at, and killing hogs, geese, cattle and every thing that came in their way, and burning houses. 

The letter’s description continued through the action at Concord, the march of the British reinforcement, the capture of prisoners, and many other events. Interesting events like “the death of General [Frederick] Haldimand,” Lord Percy being “burnt with other dead bodies, by the troops in a barn,” and the 300-man British contingent at Marshfield “all killed and taken prisoners.”

Alexander McDougall, one of the Patriot leaders in New York, had endorsed this document as an accurate copy of the original letter. Sharing and copying such letters was a common way to spread news in a crisis.

Of course, much of the information in this letter was completely false. Ironically, it’s one of the few public reports of Paul Revere’s part in the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but he’s lost in a great fog of unfounded accusations about the royal troops and unfounded boasts about the damage the provincials had done.

Tomorrow night I’ll speak to the Lexington Historical Society about the Massachusetts Patriots’ efforts to spread news of the events of 19 Apr 1775 and win public sympathy for their actions. I’m not sure whether this letter would count in that campaign as a success or a failure.

“A constitution to be offered to the people”

Here’s an unusual discussion of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 between two New Yorkers, published in (of all places) The Cincinnati Miscellany in 1846.

That Ohio periodical stated, “The following letter, published now for the first time, was written by Gen. [Alexander] M’Dougal [shown here] to Judge [William] Goforth of New York, afterwards one of the first settlers of Columbia” in the Northwest Territory:

Fish Kill, February 7th, 1780.

My Dear Sir:—

This will inform you that I have been at quarters here, since the 6th of December last, in order to get rid of an old complaint of the stone. The symptoms have so far yielded to medicine, as to render them more tolerable than they were.

I have seen the report of the committee of the convention of Massachusetts Bay of a constitution to be offered the people for their approbation. From some sentences in it, I think they have not wholly lost sight of an establishment [i.e., state support for one favored religion]. I am inclined to believe this was occasioned by their dread of the clergy; for if the convention declared against such a measure, they would exert themselves to get a negative put on it when it should be proposed to the people. But independent of this subject, I think the people will not approve of it, or any other form, which gives energy to the government or social security to the people. To give security to a people in the frame of a government, they must resign a portion of their natural liberty for the security of the rest. There is a large county in that state that will not suffer a court of justice to sit to do any business. These very people have become so licentious that they have taken flour by force of arms from a magistrate in this state, who was retaining it here according to law to supply the army, which has been frequently distressed for the want of that article. From this specimen you may form a judgment what kind of constitution will suit that people. There is a great deal of good sense among them; but I have my doubts of its having effect in the frame of govemment.

I want some small articles from your town. I shall be much obliged to you to inform me how much higher dry goods are than they were before the war for hard money? What can the best leather breeches be bought for in like specie? Your old subaltern is well.

I wish to hear from you by post on the subject of my request as soon as possible.

I am, dear sir, your humble ser’t,
ALEX. M’DOUGAL.

Judge W. Goforth, New York.

Massachusetts towns did end up approving that constitution of 1780, which is still the basis of the state government today. However, I believe the approval came only after the legislature defined the rules in a fashion that Samuel Eliot Morrison later called “political jugglery.”

TOMORROW: What exactly did that mean?

A Door into Harbottle Dorr’s Newspapers

A couple of years ago, I mentioned the newspapers that Boston hardware dealer and selectman Harbottle Dorr collected, annotated, and indexed during the Revolution. Three of the four big volumes have long been owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society. In 2011 the society bought the fourth.

The M.H.S. has now digitized the complete Harbottle Dorr Newspaper Collection so anyone can check it out. I got a sneak peek at that website earlier this year, and it promises to be a very valuable resource.

As shown in the advertisement above, Harbottle Dorr was a hardware merchant. But he had the  mind and soul of an archivist. Just above his own shop notice, you can see he penned a cross-reference from the essay by “Junius Americanus” to another item in the collection. He inserted such notes and highlights throughout his newspapers, along with occasional (one-sided) editorial commentary and educated guesses about who wrote pseudonymous essays.

Dorr also compiled an index with nearly 5,000 entries, covering both the newspapers and some pamphlets he thought deserved to be bound with them. The M.H.S.’s Beehive blog shared this glimpse of how Dorr indexed the articles:

• Cold Water, the Pernicious effects of drinking too much in hot weather &c. 212
• Dogs Mad, Symptoms of 11
• Drowned Persons Recover’d 638
• Earth opening & swallowing Person’s at Quebec 601
• Mcdougal Capt. [Alexander] presented with venison (in Prison) 50
• Rum Danger of drawing it by candlelight 192
• Speaker of the House of Commons in Great Britain Sir John Cust died because the House would not let him go to ease the Calls of Nature; They Alter that Custom 85
• Tea, Ladies of Boston sign not to drink any vid. Under Agreement 31.
• Thunder Terrible, Broke on a Magazine & produced terrible Consequences. 418.

The index and archivists’ descriptions are searchable, producing one of the best doors into the collection. (The newspapers themselves aren’t transcribed.) Another entry is through the dates of important events. And if one has a citation to a Boston newspaper story from someone else’s footnote, it’s worth checking out whether Harbottle Dorr had anything to say about that item.

Comparing Bissell and Revere

In a half-serious, half-parodic poem called “Israel Bissell’s Ride,” western Massachusetts newspaper columnist Gerard Chapman wrote:

He lacks the renown that accrued to Revere
For no rhymester wrote ballad to blazon his fame;
But Bissell accomplished—and isn’t it queer?—
A feat that suggested Revere’s to be tame.

But such praise for Bissell over Paul Revere is based on some important misunderstandings.

One mistake is assuming that Bissell rode all the way to Philadelphia, switching horses along the way. (According to legend, his first mount collapsed and died as he rode into Worcester, and he hopped on another.) Bissell’s name indeed appeared in all the copied letters because Joseph Palmer had mentioned him specifically before signing his name. But Palmer’s letter also specified Bissell’s job: to carry the message “quite into Connecticut.”

Other riders took over in that colony and carried the message south. That’s how the post system was designed to work. Alexander McDougall of the New York Committee of Correspondence even stated the name of the courier to New Brunswick: a “Mr. Moorbach.”

Writers like Chapman praise Israel Bissell for riding over a much longer distance than Paul Revere, and that doesn’t change even if he went only as far as Connecticut. But length is only one way to compare Revere’s and Bissell’s actions.

Revere rode on a night when the British military was out to stop messengers just like him. He evaded a Royal Navy warship, narrowly escaped capture after leaving Charlestown, and was actually captured in Lincoln. In contrast, Bissell rode in daytime, farther and farther from the battle, with no danger of being captured or shot.

Revere also did a lot of other things on 18-19 April: gathering intelligence about the British march for Dr. Joseph Warren, arranging to send the news by signal-light to Charlestown, alerting militia officers along his way west, helping Samuel Adams to convince John Hancock to leave Lexington, and finally helping to hide Hancock’s papers as the first shots rang out on Lexington common.

Bissell, on the other hand, stuck to his job as a mail carrier. There’s no evidence of him doing anything else for the Patriot cause in in 1775. Bissell did an important task, but another post rider could have taken his place and done the same. Revere had the connections and persistence to do more than any other alarm rider on 18-19 April.

TOMORROW: What’s more, it looks like Israel Bissell didn’t really ride at all.

(The image above is Grant Wood’s rendering of Revere’s midnight ride from the Grant Wood Gallery.)

What Could Nine Stripes Mean?

Yesterday I started to write about the Bostonian Society’s “Liberty Tree Flag” and its ongoing efforts to authenticate that banner as one which indeed flew from Boston’s Liberty Tree to signal popular meetings.

That flag has nine vertical stripes, alternating red and white, as shown here. It’s natural to ask, therefore, what those stripes might symbolize. That was the topic of Dr. Whitney Smith’s talk at the Old State House Museum on Monday evening.

But first, some of the earlier explanations proffered for the nine stripes. David Martucci’s essay on American Revolutionary flags quotes one (without, I should say, endorsing it):

According to Standards and Colors of the American Revolution by Edward W. Richardson (University of Pennsylvania Press & the Pennsylvania Society of Sons of the Revolution and its Color Guard, 1982) the nine stripes could correspond to nine segments of the cut up rattlesnake in the cartoon (representing New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia).

Unfortunately, Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 cartoon calling for colonial unity shows a snake in eight pieces. (He didn’t include Georgia, and treated Delaware as part of Pennsylvania.)

Delegates from nine colonies attended the Stamp Act Congress of October 1765, around the same time that Boston’s Whigs gave Liberty Tree its political name. So could the flag have nine stripes to symbolize those nine colonies? I doubt the Whigs would have done that because some colonies not at the congress had nonetheless opposed the Stamp Act, including close neighbor New Hampshire; Virginia, oldest and largest of Britain’s American colonies; and Nova Scotia. When you see yourself in a titanic struggle for your political liberties, you don’t want to alienate your friends.

Another possible explanation is that the “Liberty Tree Flag” is only part of the original banner. It might have contained more vertical stripes. It might even be just a scrap of a much larger flag with thirteen horizontal stripes, the common arrangement of early national flags. But that would have been a huge, heavy banner, probably impractical for this use. And there doesn’t seem to be any physical or documentary evidence suggesting that this banner was only a minor part of the original.

In his public lecture, Dr. Smith offered an ingenious new theory: the four white stripes and five red stripes represented the number 45. Any American Whig of the 1760s would have immediately recognized that number as a reference to issue No. 45 of John Wilkes’s magazine The North-Briton, which landed him and some of his associates in jail in London for sedition.

American Whigs indeed adopted the number 45 as one of their symbols for resistance to unjust government from London. In 1768, a group of Whig businessmen commissioned Paul Revere to create a punch bowl for them, and among the many political mottoes engraved on it was:

No 45.
Wilkes & Liberty

In fact, the men even seem to have called the whole bowl “Number 45.” Merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary for 1 Aug 1768: “Spent the evening at Mr. Barber’s Insurance Office & the Silver Bowl was this evening for the first time introduced, No. 45. Weighs 45 ounces & holds 45 gills”. (Nathaniel Barber’s name is one of those inscribed on the bowl.) Now dubbed the “Sons of Liberty Bowl,” this artifact is at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Probably the most memorable American use of the number 45 came two years later in New York, after Alexander McDougall was put in jail for criticizing the royal government in a broadside—a freedom of press issue much like Wilkes’s. Then someone noticed that the proceedings against McDougall fell on page 45 of the legislative record. Coincidence? They thought not. Mary Louise Booth’s 1867 History of the City of New York states:

...on the forty-fifth day of the year,...forty-five of the Liberty Boys went in procession to the New Jail, where they dined with him on forty-five beef-steaks cut from a bullock forty-five months old, and, after drinking forty-five toasts with a number of friends who joined them after dinner, separated, vowing eternal fidelity to the common cause.

On another occasion, McDougall was reportedly visited by forty-five virgins singing him either (according to different sources) forty-five songs or the 45th Psalm. Historians seem to enjoy this episode particularly because it offers the chance to quote an anonymous Tory’s suggestion that all those virgins were forty-five years old.

We can even connect the number 45 to Liberty Tree. On the evening of 19 May 1766, the next issue of the Boston News-Letter reported, there were forty-five lanterns hung on Liberty Tree. However, that same item also indicates that the town’s Whigs were moving on to higher numbers. They thought their tree “would have made a more loyal and striking Appearance if [the number of lanterns] increased to the glorious Majority of 108.” So they loaded up the tree with more than twice as many lanterns the next night. Even Revere’s punch bowl features the number 92 more prominently than Wilkes’s 45.

(What, for goodness’ sake, was the significance of 108 or 92? I’m guessing that the “glorious Majority of 108” referred to the margin of victory when the House of Commons voted 275-167 to repeal the Stamp Act in early 1766. As for 92, after Gov. Francis Bernard insisted the Massachusetts House rescind its vote against the Townshend Act in 1768, ninety-two legislators refused to comply.)

So what do all those numbers mean to the “Liberty Tree Flag”? While American Whigs did adopt the number 45, I’m unaware of any other time they used four and five stripes to symbolize it—that would have required more explanation than, say, embroidering “45” on the cloth. Also, when Whigs celebrated 45, they weren’t shy about proclaiming that symbolism and what it meant in their newspapers.

TOMORROW: What Boston newspapers said about the flag on Liberty Tree.