“No body ever heard of a quarter Master in History as such”

As part of last weekend’s History Camp Valley Forge, I signed up for a tour of “F.O.B. Valley Forge” led by Army War College professor Ricardo A. Herrera, author of Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778.

I’ve visited Valley Forge before, but I was pleased to view the terrain again with an expert guide.

While standing in front of the oversized mounted statue of Gen. Anthony Wayne, Herrera spoke about how the Continental Army’s supply problems that winter were exacerbated by the lack of a quartermaster general. Thomas Mifflin resigned from that administrative post (for the second time) in November 1777.

In March 1778, Gen. George Washington finally twisted the arm of his most trusted lieutenant, Nathanael Greene, to take that job. It had been filled by civilians before, and Greene insisted on a promise that he could return to his army rank afterwards.

A year later, on 29 Apr 1779, Greene made his ongoing feelings about the assignment clear in a letter to Washington:

There is a great difference between being raisd to an Office and decending to one; which is my case. There is also a great difference betwext serving where you have a fair prospect of honor and laurels, and where you have no prospect of either let you discharge your duty ever so well. No body ever heard of a quarter Master in History as such or in relateing any brilliant Action.

But Greene was doing the job. His first big action as quartermaster general, Herrera explained, was to launch a “grand forage,” sending troops out into the countryside around Valley Forge to collect every type of supply that the army needed, paying in Continental scrip whether farmers were happy about that or not.

Greene put Wayne in charge of the main part of that effort. Col. Henry Lee and Cmdre. John Barry scoured other areas. That campaign for supplies kept the army together in the spring of 1777.

As I looked up at the statue of Wayne, I wondered whether there was a similar statue of Greene, given his importance. So I did some quick web-searching. Washington, Wayne, and Steuben appear to have been the only generals with standalone statues in Valley Forge National Park until this century.

In 2015, a statue of Greene by Susie Chisholm was put up near the Washington Memorial Chapel. It’s life-sized, not oversized. It’s on foot, not mounted. And I suspect it’s at that location because the chapel and its grounds are episcopal property, not part of the national park. (The National Park Service is in the business of preserving statues and monuments, not installing new ones.) Chapters of the Sons of the American Revolution funded this memorial.

And that public artwork is making sure that somebody has heard of a quartermaster.

“The idea of a place called Nova Scotia”

One of the most thought-provoking historical articles I’ve read recently is Alexandra L. Montgomery’s essay for the Journal of the History of Ideas blog, “Imagining Nova Scotia: The Limits of an Eighteenth-Century Imperial Fantasy.”

Montgomery, a Nova Scotian herself, writes that the visions of people far from the province have often overlaid actual life there.

Particularly during the decades on either side of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the then-colony became a near obsession among British colonial administrators on both sides of the Atlantic. Generations of men poured over questionable maps, spinning out schemes meant to exploit the region’s rich fisheries, timber stores, and geographically advantageous location along the major ship routes between Europe, the British mainland colonies, and New France. And yet,…while proposals for the region were unending, facts were in short supply.

Indeed, even the idea of a place called Nova Scotia was, for much of the early modern period, unmoored from any objective reality.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Earl of Halifax wanted to mold Nova Scotia into a “model colony,” with lots of British government money and oversight and a new capital named, naturally, Halifax. The French and Indian War made British Canada safer to settle but harder to pay for.

While the new leadership of the province and Board of Trade supported Halifax’s broad vision, they balked at its cost and chose to outsource the next phase of Nova Scotia’s transformation to private individuals and land companies. It was in this post-war context that some of colonial America’s most notable names became involved in the colony to their north. The Board of Trade’s open call for respectable land investors to take up and settle Nova Scotian land attracted no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin, and another company from Philadelphia hired a fresh-faced and not-yet-“mad” Anthony Wayne to survey their potential Nova Scotian lands.

But that fuse fizzled instead of booming, and by the time the more populous British colonies to the south were coming together to resist Parliament’s new taxes, American Whigs saw Nova Scotia as what a colony shouldn’t be.

In his 1767/1768 Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, John Dickinson pitted the colonies that would eventually break away from the empire against the somewhat newer areas of British control, among which he included Nova Scotia. He rejected the attempts to settle Nova Scotia as damaging to the population levels of the older colonies, not to mention a colossal waste of money.

That attitude colored the American Revolutionaries’ thoughts on whether to treat Nova Scotia as a potential ally, Montgomery writes.

The last image her article left me with was Nova Scotia at the end of the war, firmly within the British Empire and now the Loyalists’ first place of refuge. “Shelburne, Nova Scotia,…transformed from a boom town of as many as 14,000 people in 1783 to a near ghost town with over 300 empty houses just a few years later.”

Parsing Little Turtle’s Speech

Last month the Aacimotaatiiyankwi blog of the Myaamia (Miami) community shared an interesting conversation about the records from an 1795 treaty conference.

Representatives of the Myaamia (Miami) and other Native nations and of the U.S. government met in Fort Greenville in the part of the Northwest Territory that became Ohio. Gen. Anthony Wayne had won the Battle of Fallen Timbers almost a year before, and the Jay Treaty had deprived the Native alliance of support from Britain.

The Myaamia leader Mihšihkinaahkwa or Little Turtle (c. 1747-1812, shown here) made a speech that survives in four English forms:

• The official report of the U.S. government published in the American State Papers.
• The diary of U.S. military surgeon Dr. John F. Carmichael (1761-1837).
• A brief report from John Askin, Jr., a British and Ottawa trader held prisoner by the Americans.
• A translation of the official English text into Miami, seeking to recreate the original a century later, which was then translated back into English.

The blog also hosted a conversation about those different texts among scholars George Ironstack, Hunter Lockwood, David Costa, Daryl Badwin, and Cameron Shriver. The comparison illuminates some facts about the Myaamia situation in 1795 and about language. For example:

George Ironstrack: Gabriel Godfroy’s [doubly translated] version strikes me as a straight up translation from the English he was provided. We know there is a major language shift between Little Turtle’s time (ca. 1795) and Gabriel Godfroy (ca. 1890). Not that Godfroy wouldn’t have understood Little Turtle’s speech, but I don’t think it tells us a lot about the actual words Mihšihkinaahkwa spoke on that day or the oratorical style he might have used for that circumstance.

For the American State Papers version, we know that William Wells was the interpreter and so I tend to trust the interpretation at a pretty high degree on account of his level of fluency and relationship with Little Turtle, and we also see them working hand in glove politically, which helps me to trust the initial translation, at least. . . .

Cameron Shriver: In the John Carmichael version, I’m struck by how similar it is to the American State Papers version. They almost fully agree, but there are some interesting details in the Carmichael version. “Open your ears and I will tell you where they live,” he says. “The marks of my forefather’s houses are yet plain to be seen. … The Potawatomis live on the St. Joseph and the Wabash, the Ottawas live at ‘blank,’ the Ojibwes live on ‘blank,’ and there are other place names that Carmichael apparently could not write down. Little Turtle is saying explicitly where the Ottawas and Ojibwes and Potawatomis live, and Carmichael just doesn’t know what those words mean or Wells is not translating them from the Miami names. . . .

David Costa: I do wonder whether Godfroy put something into his translation that’s not immediately evident, that might not have been characteristic of his normal speech. You know, there was an oratorical style. There might have been some subtle things about how Godfroy translated this that might have been harking back to “well I kind of remember when I was a kid when people would make speeches.” Maybe he tried to throw in a few old-fashioned turns of phrase into it, like [Thomas Wildcat] Alford did when he translated the Shawnee Bible.

One phrase that appears in both of the detailed contemporaneous sources is “any white man who wore a hat.” This might be a bit redundant because the scholars agree that an early term for white people in Miami and other languages of the area was “people who wear hats.” Notably, the back-translation of the late 1800s doesn’t use that language, suggesting the description no longer held power.

TOMORROW: Defining territory.

Studying the Settlement of Nova Scotia

The L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History recently announced the winner of its first Viv Nelles Essay Prize for best paper in the field.

The honoree is Alexandra Montgomery, graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, for “Philadelphia’s Plantations: The Great Nova Scotian Land Boom and Reimagining the British Empire Between the Wars, 1763-1775.”

Montgomery explained her research in this blog posting:

As an American born kid growing up in Halifax, the question of why that chunk of land stayed British while the rest of the colonies to the south declared independence was something of a puzzle. I became even more confused when I learned that most of the people who lived there at the outbreak of the Revolution were New Englanders, a group of people who my trips to Boston and Connecticut to visit family had convinced me had been waiting to rebel practically since the Mayflower made landfall.

As I got older and started to study the history of North America more seriously, my understandings grew much more nuanced. But I discovered that many historians puzzled over the same problem I had. It turned out that there were many theories for Nova Scotia’s loyalty: a supposed culture of neutrality, a lack of connections to the rest of the continent, a heavy British military presence, and Anglo Nova Scotia’s markedly different relationship to the imperial center have all been cited as possible explanations.

Yet, in my own work I’ve become more and more interested in a slightly different question. What kinds of alternate futures did people imagine for the region? What did people—British, French, and Indigenous—think and hope was possible?

I want to take the opportunity of this blog post to explore these questions through a perhaps unlikely figure, Alexander McNutt. McNutt was born in Ulster, grew up in backcountry Virginia, and gained notoriety in the 1760s as a promoter and land agent working in and around Nova Scotia. McNutt was responsible for bringing several hundred white Protestant families into the colony at a time when such settlers were being courted by the province and the Board of Trade.

McNutt’s plans, however, were much bigger: he claimed to have contacts throughout North America and Europe, an army of agents, and contracts with thousands of prospective settlers. McNutt talked his way into massive reserves, and then set off a craze in Nova Scotian lands in Philadelphia which roped in the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Anthony Wayne. At the height of his influence, on one day in 1765 he and his associates were granted nearly 1.5 million acres of Nova Scotian land. Yet by the end of the decade his career and his finances were in tatters and his grants were revoked.

When war broke out in North America, McNutt sided with the rebellious American colonies, corresponding with the Continental Congress about bringing Nova Scotia into their coalition. He arrived in Massachusetts in 1778. But being on the winning side of the war meant McNutt lost the settlement he had organized to the north.

Going Way Back with Blazing Combat

The Warren company started publishing Blazing Combat in 1965. It was a quarterly comics magazine—larger than a typical comic book, without color, and thus not under the Comics Code Authority. It lasted only four issues before being canceled for lack of sales.

Some people said that Blazing Combat failed because military officers wouldn’t allow the magazine to be sold in PX stores since it offered a jaundiced view of war. Others say it was simply too gruesome for a mass audience. The entire run has been collected in one volume.

All of the stories were written or co-written by editor Archie Goodwin, who worked with some of the medium’s stellar artists. Most of the tales were set during America’s mid-20th-century wars, but in each issue Goodwin reached further back into the past as well. There were two Revolutionary War comics.

The first, “Mad Anthony,” features Gen. Anthony Wayne, but as a supporting character, and hardly mad at all. The tale is really about two fictional soldiers putting out each other’s eye. The pictures suffer from the mustache problem I’ve noted elsewhere, with Wayne drawn like Errol Flynn.

The other Revolutionary tale is “Saratoga!”, illustrated by Reed Crandall. That story is a straightforward retelling of the battle’s crucial American counterattack, with the final panel’s twist being that the general who carried the day was Benedict Arnold. But the story’s real stunner is the art. Click on the panels above for a larger image, and just look at that hatching!