Speeding Up “Slow-Motion Scholarship”?

I’ve been doing test drives on the Clements Library’s machine-made transcriptions of documents from the Thomas Gage Papers, seeing how useful those texts from Transkribus are.

Archiving documents already costs money, of course. Systematic scanning of those documents and making them available online costs more.

Producing accurate transcriptions for those documents requires even more labor, with a lot of expertise and patience thrown in. That might be the most expensive stage.

The U.S. government once deemed that work important enough to fund. We can look back at precedents like the Varick Transcripts of Gen. George Washington’s letters made in the 1780s, Peter Force’s American Archives in the ante-bellum period, and the major scholarly projects of the Progressive, New Deal, and Cold War eras.

Originally based on thick printed volumes, that effort has naturally spread to computers and computer networks. Founders Online is not only hosted by the National Archives, but its constituent projects received funding through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (N.H.P.R.C.).

But that was all before the current administration set out to slash funding for historical projects that don’t feed its leader’s ego, both within the budget process and illegally outside of it. In June the Organization of American Historians issued a report titled “The Federal Assault on History: A Record of Executive Actions,” (P.D.F. download). It says:

Despite the impressive work done with the assistance of NHPRC grant awards, the program created by Congress often finds itself eliminated in presidential budget requests. FY 2026 and 2027 were no different, with the Trump Administration attempting to zero out the funding. As in prior years, Congress recognized the value that NHPRC brings to their districts and rebuked the effort, providing $5 million in grantmaking funds, though this represents a 50 percent cut to the program from FY2025.

Funding is only one of the challenges faced by NHPRC in 2025 and now in 2026. NHPRC is convened twice a year by the Archivist of the United States, its chair, to review grant proposals, recommend awards, and approve new calls for proposals. Without an Archivist of the United States duly confirmed by the Senate, the Commission has no chair to convene it and has not been able to meet since November 2024. This little-understood effect of the firing of the Archivist of the United States in February 2025 has blocked Congress’s intention to award millions of dollars in grant funding to archives and other historical institutions throughout the country.

That’s yet another part of our national government and polity that will need repair.

To be sure, there were limitations in that approach to transcribing archives. For example, there’s always been more funding available for the papers of elite American Founders than for other sorts. (Gen. Thomas Gage came from an elite class, too, but he was on the Wrong Side.)

Those monumental projects also took decades. Back in 1997 Lingua Franca magazine published an article by Jack Hitt titled “In the Franklin Factory: Slow-Motion Scholarship in an Age of Academic Obsolescence.” It concluded with a glimpse of the Benjamin Franklin Papers editors looking ahead to the end of their work after four decades. They’re still at it.

Given that environment, it’s easy to see the appeal of artificial-intelligence software as a way to ease, speed up, and democratize the transcription of handwritten documents. If, that is, the technology actually works.

TOMORROW: Alternative approaches.

“An account of the progress of our machine”

On 31 Aug 1775, the Rev. Benjamin Boardman, serving as a chaplain to Connecticut troops at the siege of Boston, wrote in his diary:

I collected this day in cash for the encouragt. of Mr. Bushnels Machine the sum of £13.4.4. in cash out of our regt.

Boardman was a graduate of Yale, and David Bushnell (1740–1826) had just graduated from that college.

On 24 September, Dr. Benjamin Church wrote to his British army contact:

The distroying the Ships in the manner I wrote you before they began to dispair of tho’ the former of the Machine is full of faith that he can do it, Works on hardly and so let him, I say.

This intel might have referred to the same machine, or to different technology designed to damage Royal Navy ships.

Bushnell’s invention was still in the works, but getting closer to completion, when the doctor and inventor Benjamin Gale (1715–1790) wrote from Killingworth to Silas Deane at the Continental Congress on 9 November:

In your last you requested I would give you an account of the progress of our machine, and whether anything may be expected of it. I now sit down to give you a succinct but imperfect account of its structure, which is so complicated that it is impossible to give a perfect idea of it. . . .

I conclude by the time this reaches you the machine will be in camp. Lately he has conducted matters and his designs with the greatest secrecy, both for the personal safety of the navigator as to produce the greatest astonishment to those against whom it is designed,—

if this projection succeeds, of which I make no doubt, as I well know the man and have seen the machine while in embryo, and every addition made to it fills me with fresh astonishment and surprize. And you may call me a visionary, an enthusiast, or what you please,—I do insist upon it, that I believe the inspiration of the Almighty has given him understanding for this very purpose and design.

But two weeks later, on 22 November, Gale had to report a delay:

I have to ask pardon for the wrong information I gave you. At the time of my last writing, I supposed the Machine was gone, but since find one proving the navigation of it in Connecticut River. The forcing pump made by Mr. [Isaac] Doolittle, not being made according to order given, did not answer; which has delayed him. The trials I mentioned to have been made since Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin’s being here, was the explosion, which prov’d beyond expectation.

The most famous American scientist of the day had stopped in Saybrook on his way back from Cambridge to Philadelphia in order to inspect this invention.

Gale sent another update and plea to Deane on 7 December:

…everything answers well, but still, he fails on one account. He proposes going in the night, on account of safety. He always depends on fox-wood, which gives light in the dark, to fix on the points of the needle of his compass, and in his barometer, by which he may know what course to steer and the depth he is under water, both which are absolute necessity for personal safety of the navigator; but he now finds that the frost wholly destroys that quality in that wood, of which he was before ignorant, and for that reason and that alone he is obliged to desist. He was detained near two months for want of money, and before he could obtain it the season was so far advanced he was, in the manner I have now related, frustrated. . . .

The person, the inventor of this machine, now makes all his affairs a secret even to his best friends, and I have liberty to communicate this much from him only with a view to know if Dr. Franklin knows of any kind of phosphorus that will answer his purpose; otherwise the execution must be omitted until next spring, after the frosts are past.

As of 1 February, Gale was still seeking some phosphorescent material for Bushnell. He wrote, “I have lately seen the man, and conversed freely with him. He is no enthusiast; a perfect philosopher, and by no means doubtful of succeeding.” But the siege of Boston would end before warm weather.

TOMORROW: A new campaign.

(Several replicas of the Bushnell’s machine have been built over the years based on the verbal descriptions. The one shown above was in Westbrook, Connecticut, as of last year.)

“I decided that I’d make clothing until something better came along”

After I started reading intently about the Revolution in New England, one of the first living historians I remember chatting with was Henry Cooke.

He was presenting the life of a tailor by, you know, tailoring clothes. He mentioned researching the career of a Boston tailor and militia officer named Thomas Marshall.

“Ah, the man with the shovel,” I said. Referring to Marshall’s role in the merchants’ confrontation with John Mein.

That’s when we knew we’d get along.

Cooke and I were part of the team that reenacted the Boston Massacre for several years leading up to its Sestercentennial. His face should also be familiar to anyone who attended the reenacted tea meetings at Old South Meeting-House in that period, and many other events.

Earlier this summer, the Tufts Now website shared Marc Chalufour and Alonso Nichols’s profile of Cooke as a university alumnus.

The interview reminds me how unruffled Cooke is, for a man who can make his own ruffles:

How did you get started doing historical reenactments?

When I was in high school, my guidance counselor said if I was going to go to college, I needed to have extracurricular activities. This is 1974, and he said there was this minuteman group starting in Randolph, Mass., and maybe I should join them. I have been doing living history in various forms ever since.

When did you start making your own costumes?

That happened very early. When I first got involved, the only clothing patterns that were available to us were from something called Sketchbook 76. But they were little more than sketches of pattern pieces and a drawing of what the finished object should look like.

When I was a college student, I started making historical clothing for myself. A lot of the guys in the unit would say, “Hey, I need an extra shirt, can you make me one?”

When I finished my master’s program, I was putting out résumés. I had done internships in archives, in museum collections, and assumed I would end up doing something like that, but I was competing with people with Ph.D.s for entry-level jobs. I decided that I’d make clothing until something better came along. That was 1984 and I’m still waiting.

At the same time, Henry Cooke takes his work quite seriously, learning from it and teaching others.

What have you learned from studying original 18th-century garments?

The clothing is a mold of the body that lived within it. I’ve studied Ben Franklin’s clothing, John Adams’s clothing, John Hancock’s clothing. You get an understanding and an appreciation of the humanity and the physicality of these people.

Franklin, I always thought, was this pudgy little guy. But he had a very muscular upper body because he was pulling on a printer’s beam throughout his career, and he loved to swim. He had the body of a swimmer.

For more, here’s a Journal of the American Revolution interview with Henry Cooke from a decade ago.

“Avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body”

Two hundred fifty years ago today, the Continental Congress finished polishing the Declaration of Independence and voted to approve the final text.

True to his character, Thomas Jefferson chose to be “a passive auditor” as his colleagues hashed over the words he’d drafted. But, he admitted to James Madison, the debate affected him:

during the debate I was sitting by Dr [Benjamin] Franklin, and he observed that I was writhing a little under the acrimonious criticisms on some of it’s parts; and it was on that occasion that, by way of comfort, he told me the story of John Thompson the Hatter, and his new sign. 

Jefferson didn’t explain that allusion in his letter to Madison, but he put it into his notes on Franklin:

When the Declaration of Independance was under the consideration of Congress, there were two or three unlucky expressions in it which gave offence to some members.

the words ‘Scotch and other foreign auxiliaries’ excited the ire of a gentleman or two of that country.

(Yes, suggesting that the Scottish were foreigners from outside the British Empire would have prompted complaints.)

severe strictures on the conduct of the British king, in negativing our repeated repeals of the law which permitted the importation of slaves, were disapproved by some Southern gentlemen, whose reflections were not yet matured to the full abhorrence of that traffic. altho’ the offensive expressions were immediately yielded, these gentlemen continued their depredations on other parts of the instrument.

I was sitting by Dr Franklin who percieved that I was not insensible to these mutilations. ‘I have made it a rule, said he, whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body. I took my lesson from an incident which I will relate to you.

when I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprentice Hatter, having served out his time, was about to open shop for himself. his first concern was to have a handsome sign-board, with a proper inscription. he composed it in these words ‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats. for ready money,’ with a figure of a hat subjoined. but he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments.

the first he shewed it to thought the word ‘Hatter,’ tautologous, because followed by the words ‘makes hats’ which shew he was a Hatter. it was struck out.

the next observed that the word ‘makes’ might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats. if good & to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made. he struck it out.

a third said he thought the words ‘for ready money,’ were useless as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. every one who purchased expected to pay. they were parted with, and the inscription now stood ‘John Thomson sells hats.’

‘sells hats’ says his next friend? why nobody will expect you to give them away. what then is the use of that word? it was stricken out, and ‘hats’ followed it, the rather, as there was one painted on the board.

so his inscription was reduced ultimately to ‘John Thomson’ with the figure of a hat subjoined.’

I don’t know any examples of authentic eighteenth-century hatters’ shop signs in the British Empire, but Colonial Williamsburg and the Adverts 250 Project have shared images of hatters’ wordy newspaper advertisements.

TOMORROW: Spreading the word.

“They unanimously pressed on myself alone to undertake the draught”

A few days after Timothy Pickering delivered an Independence Day oration in Salem in 1823, casting doubt on Thomas Jefferson’s importance in drafting the Declaration of Independence, Joseph E. Sprague (1782–1852) sent the text of that speech to Jefferson himself:

Supposing you might feel some little curiosity to see Col Pickering unwilling & ungrateful tribute to the illustrious Author of the Declaration of Independence I have taken the liberty to enclose it to you

Sprague was a postmaster and a Jeffersonian politician between terms in the Massachusetts House, so he had time to stir up trouble.

Near the end of the month Jefferson shared his version of the drafting story with his good friend and ally James Madison:

You have doubtless seen Timothy Pickering’s 4th of July Observations on the Declaration of Independance. if his principles and prejudices personal and political, gave us no reason to doubt whether he had truly quoted the information he alledges to have recieved from Mr [John] Adams, I should then say that, in some of the particulars, mr Adams’s memory has led him into unquestionable error. at the age of 88. and 47. years after the transactions of Independance, this is not wonderful.

nor should I, at the age of 80, on the small advantage of that difference only, venture to oppose my memory to his, were it not supported by written notes, taken by myself at the moment and on the spot.

he says ‘the Committee (of 5. to wit, Dr [Benjamin] Franklin, [Roger] Sherman, [Robert R.] Livingston and ourselves) met, discussed the subject, and then appointed him and myself to make the draught; that we, as a subcommittee, met, & after the urgencies of each on the other, I consented to undertake the task; that the draught being made, we, the subcommittee, met, & conned the paper over, and he does not remember that he made or suggested a single alteration.’ now these details are quite incorrect.

the Committee of 5. met, no such thing as a subcommittee was proposed, but they unanimously pressed on myself alone to undertake the draught.

I consented; I drew it; but before I reported it to the committee, I communicated it separately to Dr Franklin and mr Adams requesting their corrections; because they were the two members of whose judgments and amendments I wished most to have the benefit before presenting it to the Committee; and you have seen the original paper now in my hands, with the corrections of Doctor Franklin and mr Adams interlined in their own hand writings   

their alterations were two or three only, and merely verbal. I then wrote a fair copy, reported it to the Committee, and from them, unaltered to Congress. this personal communication and consultation with mr Adams he has misremembered into the actings of a sub-committee.

Jefferson didn’t write to Madison because he thought his friend might need convincing about this story. Rather, he was writing for posterity, putting his version of history on paper for us.

Though Pickering quoted John Adams’s letter, Jefferson took pains to excuse Adams of any fault but poor memory. By this time the two men had been corresponding amicably for over a decade. Indeed, Jefferson praised Adams in his letter:

had mr Adams been so restrained, Congress would have lost the benefit of his bold and impressive advocations of the rights of revolution. for no man’s confident & fervid addresses, more than mr Adams’s, encoraged and supported us thro’ the difficulties surrounding us, which, like the ceaseless action of gravity, weighed on us by night and by day. . . . he supported the declaration with zeal & ability, fighting fearlessly for every word of it.

Jefferson was less respectful of the arch-Federalist Pickering, though:

Timothy thinks the instrument the better for having a fourth of it expunged. he would have thought it still better had the other three fourths gone out also, all but the single sentiment (the only one he approves) which recommends friendship to his dear England, whenever she is willing to be at peace with us.

TOMORROW: Doctor’s advice.

“Jefferson proposed to me to make the draught”

At last we come to John Adams’s dramatic description of how he—and he alone—convinced Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence, in his August 1822 letter to Timothy Pickering.

You enquire why so young a man as Jefferson was placed at the head of the Committee for preparing a declaration of Independence? I answer, it was the Frankfort advice, to place Virginia at the head of everything.

Mr: Richard Henry Lee, might be gone to Virginia, to his sick family, for aught I know, but that was not the reason of Mr: Jefferson’s appointment. There were three Committees appointed at the same time. One for the declaration of Independence; another for preparing Articles of Confederation; and another for preparing a Treaty to be proposed to France. Mr Lee was chosen for the Committee of confederation, and it was not thought convenient that the same person should be upon both.

In fact, Lee wasn’t named to any of those three committees. Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston were placed on the Declaration committee on 11 June and the Articles committee on 12 June.

Mr Jefferson came into Congress in June 1775. and brought with him a reputation for literature, science, and a happy talent at composition. Writings of his were handed about remarkable for the peculiar felicity of expression. Though a silent member in Congress, he was so prompt, frank, explicit and decisive upon Committees, not even Saml Adams was more so, that he soon seized upon my heart, and upon this occasion I gave him my vote and did all in my power to procure the votes of others. I think he had one more vote than any other, and that placed him at the head of the Committee. I had the next highest number and that placed me the second.

The Committee met, discussed the subject, and then appointed Mr: Jefferson & me to make the draught; I suppose, because we were the two highest on the list.

The Sub-Committee met; Jefferson proposed to me to make the draught.

I said I will not; You shall do it.

Oh No!

Why will you not?

You ought to do it.

I will not.

Why?

Reasons enough.

What can be your reasons?

Reason 1st. You are a Virginian, and Virginia ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason 2d. I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular; You are very much otherwise. Reason 3d: You can write ten times better than I can.

“Well,” said Jefferson, “if you are decided I will do as well as I can.”

Very well, when you have drawn it up we will have a meeting.

A meeting we accordingly had and conn’d the paper over. I was delighted with its high tone, and the flights of Oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning Negro Slavery, which though I knew his Southern Bretheren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never would oppose.

There were other expressions, which I would not have inserted if I had drawn it up; particularly that which called the King a Tyrant. I thought this too personal, for I never believed George to be a tyrant in disposition and in nature; I always believed him to be deceived by his Courtiers on both sides the Atlantic, and in his Official capacity only, Cruel.

I thought the expression too passionate and too much like scolding for so grave and solemn a document; but as [Benjamin] Franklin and Sherman were to inspect it afterwards, I thought it would not become me to strike it out. I consented to report it and do not now remember that I made or suggested a single alteration.

We reported it to the Committee of Five. It was read and I do not remember that Franklin or Sherman criticized any thing. We were all in haste; Congress was impatient and the Instrument was reported, as I believe in Jefferson’s hand writing as he first drew it.

Adams made a copy of Jefferson’s draft before it was complete, and Jefferson kept another draft with marks on it. The latter shows that Franklin did make substantive contributions.

On Independence Day in 1823, Pickering quoted liberally from Adams’s letter in an oration, which he then published.

TOMORROW: What did Jefferson think of that?

A Super Bowl Toss-up

Through Craig Bruce Smith I learned that the coin to be tossed at the start of this year’s Super Bowl has a Revolutionary pedigree.

It’s a replica of the Libertas Americana medal that Benjamin Franklin commissioned in 1782 after learning of the French and Continental victory at Yorktown.

That medal has the date 1776 on one side, but the 1777 and 1781 dates of Saratoga and Yorktown are on the other. It’s not quite a Sestercentennial artifact, in sum.

The Super Bowl could have chosen a replica of Washington Before Boston medal, commemorating an event that occurred 250 years ago next month.

That, too, has a 1776 date on it, albeit in Roman numerals. The Continental Congress voted in 1776 to commission that medal, though the project didn’t get done until 1789.

Of course, choosing a coin this year that celebrates the recovery of Boston, based on a medal held by the Boston Public Library, might seem biased toward the New England Patriots.

The Jury for the James Caldwell Inquest

As I wrote yesterday, I now lean toward housewright Thomas Crafts, Sr., being one of the Suffolk County coroners who responded to the Boston Massacre rather than his namesake son.

In fact, Thomas Crafts was apparently the first coroner to act. His date on the inquest into the death of James Caldwell is “the Fifth Day of March” in 1770. In other words, his jury convened, examined the evidence, and issued their determination in the immediate hours after the shooting.

Decades later, Benjamin Bussey Thacher interviewed the shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes about how the crowd on King Street had carried away Caldwell’s body:

Caldwell, who was shot in the back, was standing by the side of Hewes at that moment, and the latter caught him in his arms as he fell, and was one of those who bore him up to Mr. [Alexander] Young’s, the Jail-House in Prison Lane. He…was at this time second mate of a vessel commanded by Capt. Morton. This man lived in Cold Lane, and Hewes ran down directly to his house, from Young’s, and told him what had happened. The corpse soon followed him. . . . Morton…looked upon the dreadful object, and shouted like a madman for a gun, to run out “and kill a regular”…

The 12 March Boston Gazette reported that Caldwell was buried out of Faneuil Hall alongside Crispus Attucks as a “stranger,” a detail later histories repeat. But the 19 March issue said: “In the account of the funeral procession in our last, it should have been said, James Caldwell was borne from the House of Capt. Morton in Cold-Lane, instead of Faneuil Hall.”

Way back in 2006, the first year of this blog, I identified that sea captain as Thomas Morton. (Over a decade later came the Boston Massacre Sestercentennial commemoration in the Old South Meeting House. That was a weird event, on the lip of the pandemic shutdown when we were all wondering whether we should gather at all. But the weirdest moment for me was hearing a speaker identify Caldwell as Capt. Thomas Morton’s mate and flashing back to when I’d drilled down to find that name.)

I was therefore struck by seeing Thomas Morton’s signature among the members of the coroner’s jury examining James Caldwell’s body. Clearly he was emotionally involved in that death. Nonetheless, coroner Crafts made him part of the inquest. Maybe that was a way to calm Morton down, letting him respond to the young man’s killing in a productive way.

Other members of this jury were prominent Bostonians. The foreman was town treasurer David Jeffries. His son, Dr. John Jeffries, was a juror, months before he testified as a defense witness for the soldiers. William Dorrington, keeper of the smallpox hospital, was another.

Other members of this coroner’s jury included:

• Samuel Gridley. In his testimony for the Short Narrative report, the apothecary Richard Palmes said he “followed Mr. Gridley with several other persons with the body of Capt. Morton's apprentice, up to the prison house.” Did that “Mr. Gridley” stay around to serve on the inquest jury?
• Nathan Spear, whose younger brother Pool Spear was in the crowd on King Street and offered testimony against the soldiers.
• Samuel Franklin (1721–1775), cutler. On 8 June, his first cousin once removed Benjamin Franklin wrote from London: “I received your kind letter of the 23d of March. I was happy to find that neither you, nor any of your family, were in the way of those murderers.” 

The verdict those fourteen men delivered to coroner Crafts: Caldwell was “murdered by a Musquet Ball shot thro’ his Body, & another Ball lodged in his Shoulder.” At first the men said the culprit was unknown, but then they revised the form to read “the Murderer a Soldier to us unknown.”

Covart on “First Drafts of the U.S.,” 8 Oct.

On Wednesday, 8 October, Old North Illuminated will present an online talk by Liz Covart, creator and host of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, about “The First Drafts of the United States: Early Experiments in American Union.”

The event description says:

Long before the Articles of Confederation, colonial Americans spent over a century struggling to unite—and mostly failing spectacularly.

Discover the forgotten stories of America’s “rough drafts”: the New England Confederacy’s bold 1643 experiment, the authoritarian disaster of the Dominion of New England, William Penn’s visionary continental congress proposal, and Benjamin Franklin’s ahead-of-its-time Albany Plan. Each attempt crashed against the rocks of regional jealousies, cultural clashes, and economic chaos.

These weren’t just boring political experiments; they were high-stakes gambles involving real people grappling with questions that still echo today: How do you balance local autonomy with collective strength? Can diverse communities truly unite?

For over a decade Covart has helmed the award-winning Ben Franklin’s World podcast, now up to more than 400 episodes and 13 million downloads. She was Founding Director of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios and Digital Projects Editor at the Omohundro Institute, and she co-founded Clio Digital Media and the History Explorers Club to connect history lovers outside the academy with cutting-edge scholarship. Covart earned her Ph.D. in history studying Albany, a crossroads of early American cultures.

This event will take place from 7 to 8:30 P.M. To sign up for the Zoom link, in exchange for a donation of your choice, go to this registration page.

Rev. Samuel Madden, the Lover of His Country

Samuel Madden was born in Dublin in 1686. His father was a physician, and his mother was part of the prominent Molyneux family.

Even before completing his studies at Trinity College Dublin in 1705, Madden inherited a considerable estate from his father. Therefore, while he became the Church of Ireland minister for the parishes of Galloon and Drummully, he never had to rely on those salaries.

(Some sources say Madden was chaplain or tutor to Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, but I don’t see when that would have been.)

Madden married Jane Magill (also written as Jean McGill) in 1709, and the couple had ten children over the next twenty-five years.

According to the Rev. Philip Skelton, who lived with the family as a curate and tutor early in his career, Mrs. Madden was “haughty” about her family background, indulgent to her children, and so strict in managing the family finances that she “took care to keep [her husband’s] pocket empty of money” so he couldn’t give it away.

The Rev. Mr. Madden was known for his charity. He made donations, collected money for causes, and helped to set up the Dublin Society. Through that organization and Trinity College he offered prizes or “premiums” for various discoveries and feats to benefit the nation, and was thus remembered as “Premium” Madden.

Madden’s other talent was for writing. In 1729 his play Themistocles, the Lover of His Country was performed in London to good reviews. Nine years later, his Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland, as to their Conduct for the Service of their Country, as Landlords, as Masters of Families, as Protestants, as Descended from British Ancestors, as Country Gentlemen and Farmers, as Justices of the Peace, as Merchants, as Members of Parliament described Irish society and the responsibilities of its ruling class. Madden corresponded with Dr. Samuel Johnson and other British literary lights.

In 1733, between those two major works, Madden anonymously wrote and published Memoirs of the Twentieth Century: Being Original Letters of State under George the Sixth, volume 1. In the vein of Gulliver’s Travels, published seven years before by the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift, this book critiqued contemporary society through a fictional narrative set at a distance. But instead of going to outlandish places, Madden invited readers into the far future—1997!

Madden’s first narrator, in the preface, is an opportunistic politician who’s lost his seat in Parliament and is sliding toward becoming a Jacobite. He describes how in 1728 his “good Genius” appeared to him during an illness. This spirit showed him “several large Volumes” of letters written to his descendant, the Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain at the end of the twentieth century.

By that time, these dispatches from British diplomats report, Jesuits ruled much of the world. Their pope held vast lands in Africa, Paraguay, and China; dominated the weak governments of Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire; and was making inroads among the Russians and Tatars. But Britain was standing firm and united under the House of Hanover. The narrator therefore returns to his patriotic support of the British system, and his Protestant determination to oppose Jesuits.

Memoirs of the Twentieth Century was a milestone in speculative fiction, the first fictional narrative built around time travel. In daring to imagine a future, it denied the possibility of imminent end times. The book may not qualify as science fiction, however, since Madden didn’t imagine technology any different from what he knew in 1733. And it had very little literary influence since hardly anybody got to read it.

According to a footnote in John Nichols’s Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer: Printer (1782):

A thousand copies were printed, with such very great dispatch, that three printers were employed on it (Bowyer, Woodfall, and Roberts); and the names of an uncommon number of reputable booksellers appeared in the title-page. In less than a fortnight, however, 890 of these copies were delivered to Dr. Madden, and probably destroyed. The current report is, that the edition was suppressed on the day of publication.

The promised five additional volumes never appeared.

Madden had apparently trodden on some sensitive toes, but it’s not clear whose. The picture of parliamentary politicking isn’t flattering, and some sources guess that Sir Robert Walpole suppressed the book. There’s a long dedication to the Prince of Wales, who would be estranged from his father, George II—but that young prince wasn’t yet the anchor of formal opposition. Modern scholars suggest that Madden had the bad luck to publish just when Britain had to deal with the War of the Polish Succession, and continental turmoil made any hint of sympathy for the Stuarts problematic.

Few copies of Memoirs of the Twentieth Century survived. This one is at Oxford University. Charles James Fox owned another. But word of the book must have gotten around because by the end of the 1700s it was famous for being rare.

In the fall of 1757, the Rev. Mr. Madden sent a letter to the Royal Society praising Benjamin Franklin’s Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America. He wrote:

I am rejoiced at Mr. Franklin’s coming over with so good a Plan which to the shame of Governments has been overlooked such a number of years. If our Colonies be not properly modelled and protected nothing but Ruin and disgrace can follow.

That proved to be a better prophecy than Memoirs of the Twentieth Century.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Madden died in 1765. A few years after that, his grandson Thomas Hawkshaw joined the British army, only to be wounded on the first day of the American war.

“He died with the Effects of the Measles”

Henry Marchant (1741–1796, shown here) was a rising young lawyer in Rhode Island.

Born on Martha’s Vineyard, Marchant grew up in Newport and attended the College of Philadelphia (one of the schools that became the University of Pennsylvania in 1791).

In 1771 Marchant was appointed to be Rhode Island’s attorney general. He set sail for London to observe judicial practices there. His notes on James Somerset’s freedom case are an important document of that episode.

Marchant headed home in November 1772. On arriving in Boston, he received a boatload of bad news, as he told Benjamin Franklin in a letter. One loss was particularly close:

Mr. [Tuthill] Hubbart next informed me of the Death of my Third and only Son a Child of Three years old. He died with the Effects of the Measles, the Day after I left London. My two Daughters had been very ill with the same Disorder but are since happily recovered.

Measles was a common disease in colonial America. Martha Washington and other people at Mount Vernon caught it in 1760, and some of her enslaved workers in 1773. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benny caught measles in 1772, like little William Marchant. In 1788 Henry Knox reported that he had five children going through the disease.

In 1783 Abigail Adams reported that her son Charles had came down with the measles, adding: “it has proved very mortal in Boston. Tis said 300 children have been buried since last March.” Abigail’s sister Mary Cranch included a cousin’s descriptions of his symptoms in a letter in 1790:

I know you Will rejoice to hear that cousin Tom has got comfortable through the Measles. He caught them at Cambridge the day he arriv’d from new york— He came here the Monday after & told me he thought he had them but return’d the next day—promising to return as soon as he felt the Symtoms The Monday following his cousin William brought him home in a close carriage but he did not break out till Wednesday.

he was pretty sick but not very bad till they came out. He had Several faint turns before & sometimes felt as if he did not weigh a pound after they broke out— The rash came first but the measles soon follow’d thick enough, his cough was troublesome & his Fever pretty high but upon the whole I think he has had them light to what people in general have or to what you & I had. There are many People Who have them now extreamly bad & many have died with them—

Measles was overshadowed by smallpox, another disease that produced fever and spots, because smallpox was much deadlier. On the other hand, measles is much more contagious—spreading far more quickly and easily than Covid-19, H.I.V., and other viruses we’ve faced in recent decades.

We don’t have to worry about measles as much as past generations did because in 1954 medical scientists developed a vaccine. Cases in the U.S. of A. dropped precipitously after the government approved regular immunizations in 1963.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy, Jr., has cockamamie ideas about vaccines. In fact, Kennedy was chosen for his cockamamie ideas—he has no other connection to health services. In particular, experts blame Kennedy for promoting a measles epidemic in American Samoa in 2019.

During his confirmation hearings Kennedy made noises about believing in vaccines, pointing out that all his children have been immunized. But as soon as he was in office and a media outlet gives him free rein to talk, Kennedy returned to spouting all sorts of lies about the nature of the vaccine, its effectiveness, and its side effects.

This past month, Kennedy demanded that the Centers for Disease Control adapt to his anti-vaccine beliefs, cancel highly promising research, and curtail the availability of Covid-19 boosters for Americans. When the head of the C.D.C. refused to go along, Kennedy and Trump forced her out, prompting the next level of managers to resign in protest.

There are many ways the Trump administration is harming people and causing deaths around the globe. The effects of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine crusade, if not stopped, will be among the most damaging. Parents will once again be feeling the same grief as Henry Marchant for no good reason.

“According to Dick Penns bon Mot”

As quoted here, in April 1776 Carter Braxton wrote home to Virginia from the Continental Congress: “It is a true saying of a Wit—We must hang together or separately.”

Was Braxton referring to a generic “Wit,” or had he heard this remark from a specific person, or attributed to a specific person? His letter didn’t say.

Editors of the Benjamin Franklin Papers suggested that Braxton might have been alluding to Franklin. But given how Alexander Graydon credited the remark to Richard Penn speaking in 1774 or 1775, Braxton might have been referring to that lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania instead.

Graydon didn’t publish his Memoirs of His Own Time until 1811, however. While that’s decades before anyone attributed the remark to Franklin, it’s also decades after Penn allegedly spoke. Is there any closer evidence?

Indeed, there is. In April 1786, John Adams wrote home from London to his brother-in-law Richard Cranch. At the time Britain and the new U.S. of A. were trying to sort out their trading arrangements, and states were starting to compete with each other.

Charles Jenkinson (1729–1808, shown here) was the new president of the Council for Trade and Plantations overseeing British overseas commerce. Jenkinson had served in the administrations of Lord Bute, George Grenville, and Lord North, and Adams viewed him as part of a cabal inimical to America. (Later in 1786 Jenkinson became Baron Hawkesbury, and in 1796 the first Earl of Liverpool.)

Adams wrote:

Mr Jenkinson, I presume, has, by his late Motions in Parliament, all of which are carried without opposition, convinced the People of America, that they have nothing but a ruinous Commerce to expect with England.

Our Crisis is at hand, and if the states do not hang together, they might as well have been “hanged Seperate,” according to Dick Penns bon Mot in 1784.

Did Adams write the wrong date, meaning 1774 instead of “1784”? That would be in accord with Graydon’s memory and Braxton’s 1776 mention of “a Wit.” Penn left Pennsylvania for Britain in 1775, carrying the Olive Branch Petition, and I don’t think he returned during the war (contra Graydon). Or did Adams hear Penn voice or repeat this remark in London in 1784?

TOMORROW: Looking for eighteenth-century uses.

“Hang Together” on the Restoration Stage

Yesterday I alluded to a Professor Buzzkill podcast as my spur to look for the statement “We must hang together or separately” in a letter by the Virginia politician Carter Braxton.

That same episode from 2022 stated that the “hang together” wordplay can be traced further back to “John Dryden’s 1717 book, The Spanish Fryar, where it is referred to as a ‘Flemish proverb.’”

Dryden (1631–1700) produced his play The Spanish Fryar, or The Double Discovery in 1681, and it was reprinted often after that. In Act IV, Scene 1, one character says, “I’ll not hang alone, Fryar,” and Friar Dominick eventually replies, “in the Common Cause we are all of a Piece; we hang together.”

Dryden wasn’t the only playwright to play on the phrase “hang together” in 1681, however. Aphra Benn (1640–1689, shown here) wrote this exchange in The Round-Heads; Or, The Good Old Cause (Act III, Scene 1):

Fleet. My Lords and Gentlemen, we are here met together in the Name of the Lard———

Duc. Yea, and I hope we shall hang together as one Man—a Pox upon your Preaching. [Aside.

Unsurprisingly, Dr. Samuel Johnson chose Dryden over Benn to demonstrate the use of “hang together” in his dictionary.

As for Professor Buzzkill’s remark about a “Flemish proverb,” I can’t find any mention of that phrase in three early editions of Dryden’s Spanish Fryar. Perhaps that was an annotation by the editor of a later edition based on the 1717 text. Or perhaps separate references to a “hang together” saying got muddled together.

It would be striking if the “hang together” witticism came from another language because double meanings of that sort are often hard to translate. Indeed, the Rev. E. O. Haven’s 1869 textbook on Rhetoric uses Edouard Laboulaye’s unsuccessful attempt to render the saying (credited to Benjamin Franklin) in French as evidence for his warning “Puns usually Untranslatable.”

Be that as it may, the idea that a “Flemish proverb” was the seed of this American quotation has taken hold and now appears several places—all apparently after 2022. I welcome any earlier reference.

TOMMOROW: A post-Revolutionary reference.

“You will have doubtless have an account of their surprizing Ticonderoga”

One striking feature of Richard Lechmere’s 22 May 1775 letter to Henry Seymour Conway, partially transcribed here, is how well informed the Loyalist merchant was about events outside besieged Boston.

Lechmere wrote to the British politician:

you will have doubtless have an account of their surprizing Ticonderoga in which Fort, there was upwards of One hundred pieces of Cannon, and some Mortars, these they are bringing down, and a Considerable train are expected to arrive from Providence to Morrow...

Col. Ethan Allen had led the takeover of Fort Ticonderoga on 10 May, only twelve days before. Lechmere not only had that news, but also an estimate of how many artillery pieces the rebels would find there.

Lechmere understood that ordnance was to be brought to the siege lines around Boston. The Massachusetts committee of safety’s orders for Col. Benedict Arnold also stated that possibility. It wasn’t some wild brainstorm of Henry Knox later in the year.

The letter also refers to “a Considerable train…from Providence.” On 8 May the Rhode Island government had commissioned John Crane as a captain of an artillery company. However, he brought only four small cannon to the siege lines. Those weren’t “Considerable,” even by Rhode Island standards, though they did double the number of brass artillery pieces available to the Continentals. Most artillery in Rhode Island was, I suspect, being held back for privateering.

But that wasn’t all Lechmere had heard about. He had heard news from Pennsylvania:

Mr. [Benjamin] Franklyn & General [Charles] Lee are Arriv’d at Philadelphia the former chosen a Delegate to the Congress & most probably the Latter may be appointed Generalissimo of the Rebel Army. Birds of a feather flock together

Lechmere probably had only a dim awareness, if any, of George Washington from Virginia. Lee, on the other hand, was a celebrated veteran of the British army who had come through Massachusetts the previous year. Lechmere wasn’t the only contemporary to mention him as a candidate to be commander-in-chief.

The Intriguing Portraits of William Williams

[Today’s posting would be simpler if so many of the people involved weren’t named Williams.]

Yesterday I passed on articles about Fara Dabhoiwala’s conclusions about a painting of the Jamaican scholar Francis Williams.

Dabhoiwala hypothesizes that this portrait was made in or shortly after 1759 by the artist William Williams, born in Wales in 1727 but active in the American colonies.

William Williams is known for a couple of other portraits of unusual men in Britain’s American empire.

One portrait, now lost, showed the Haudenosaunee leader Theyanoquin, often called “King Hendrick” by British sources. In January 1755, Theyanoquin was in Philadelphia meeting with Gov. John Penn and the Council about a land dispute. At the time, British authorities were pleased to have the Haudenosaunee as allies in their growing conflict with the French.

The Fishing Company of Fort St. David’s, a genteel men’s club, commissioned William Williams to paint Theyanoquin’s portrait, and club records show it was displayed in their clubhouse. (This club later merged with the Schuylkill Fishing Company, discussed here.)

Later in 1755, Theyanoquin led a contingent of Native soldiers in a British force commanded by Sir William Johnson. Col. Ephraim Williams, Jr., led the Massachusetts contingent. (His brother, Dr. Thomas Williams of Deerfield, came along as a surgeon, and their relative, the Rev. Stephen Williams, as a chaplain.)

That British force clashed with the French beside Lake George on 8 September. Col. Williams and Theyanoquin were both killed, though ultimately Johnson claimed victory.

That event made Theyanoquin, or Hendrick, a martyr for people in Britain. Elizabeth Bakewell and Henry Parker issued an engraved portrait of him titled “The Brave old Hendrick the great Sachem or Chief of the Mohawk Indians” (shown above). That print isn’t dated, and its source is uncertain, but scholars appear to believe that it was most likely based on the William Williams painting. If so, it’s the only remaining version of that image.

In the same decade, Williams painted the radical Quaker Benjamin Lay. The earliest trace of this portrait appears to be a remark in Benjamin Franklin’s 10 June 1758 letter from London to his wife Deborah. The retired printer wrote: “I wonder how you came by Ben. Lay’s Picture.”

Unfortunately, Deborah’s letters to Benjamin before and after that one don’t survive, so we don’t know what she’d told him about that picture or how she answered his query. Franklin had published some of Lay’s writing decades earlier, but the man wrote a lot, and I don’t see signs of a close friendship.

Deborah Franklin might have commissioned William Williams to paint Lay because she sensed public interest in an engraved portrait. At some point such an engraving appeared, credited to painter “W. Williams” and engraver “H.D.” That was Henry Dawkins, another British-born craftsman who had come to the Middle Colonies of America to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. (It’s also possible Dawkins published that engraving himself and the “Picture” Benjamin Franklin wrote about was a print, not the painting.)

That brings us back to Francis Williams, the Jamaican polymath. Did William Williams paint his portrait with an eye toward its eventual engraving? No such engraving survives.

The painting went into the hands of the planter and lawyer Edward Long (1734–1813), who published a history of Jamaica in 1774. That book includes a poem by Francis Williams and a short, inaccurate, racist biography of him. Did Long at some point also think of putting an illustration of Williams into the book?

For more about those unusual portrait subjects, see Eric Hinderaker’s The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery, Marcus Rediker’s The Fearless Benjamin Lay, and Vincent Carretta’s article “Who Was Francis Williams?” in Early American Literature.

“Apprehensive, that the Government of these States, may in future times, end in a Monarchy”

Last month the Journal of the American Revolution published Ray Raphael’s article “A Kingly Government?: Benjamin Franklin’s Great Fear.”

Franklin and James Madison were among the most vocal of the men at the Constitutional Convention wary of assigning too much power to the executive branch, or investing too much of that power in one man.

Ray Raphael writes:

Madison opened the bidding. Wouldn’t it be “proper,” he asked, “before a choice should be made between a unity and plurality in the Executive, to fix the extent of the Executive authority?” Madison proposed minimal powers: “to carry into execution the national laws” and “to appoint offices in cases not otherwise provided for.” With little dissent, state delegations agreed. Executive authority was subservient to legislative demands, save only for some lesser appointments. Most significantly, he/they would not possess the “powers of war and peace.”

Later the debate turned to whether there would be a single executive and how long one man would hold that office:

Franklin stewed over the prospect of a single executive serving for seven years. “Being very sensible of the effect of age on his memory,” he told the Convention the next morning, he carefully wrote down his objections. Saddled with a weakened voice and failing eyes, he would find it difficult to read aloud what he had just penned, so James Wilson offered to read it for him:

It will be said, that we don’t propose to establish Kings. I know it. But there is a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government. It sometimes relieves them from Aristocratic domination. They had rather have one tyrant than five hundred. It gives more of the appearance of equality among Citizens, and that they like. I am apprehensive therefore, perhaps too apprehensive, that the Government of these States, may in future times, end in a Monarchy.

I’d like to refute Franklin’s belief in “a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government.” However, too many people speak of U.S. Presidents as solely responsible for laws, court decrees, wars, and other actions that the Constitution explicitly assigns to other branches. And a smaller but still too large number of people are attracted to obvious strongmen.

Back in 1787, as the convention went on, however, most delegates seem to have let those worries subside a bit. The example of George Washington in the chair probably had an influence. No better solutions presented themselves.

We know that Franklin and Mason opposed a single executive, fearing the extent of his powers. They had sounded the alarm at the outset of the convention, and [George] Mason’s opposition to ratification would highlight the dangers of a single executive as well as the absence of a bill of rights. But Madison’s concern has received scant attention. A chief architect of the Constitution’s checks and balances, he failed to gain traction for this protection against an executive who put himself over country. Convention fatigue might well have played a role.

The Constitution did explicitly reserve “powers of war and peace” for the legislature, and limited the single executive to a four-year term. While the British Crown could veto legislation, a U.S. President’s veto could be overridden. Still, the fear of a President taking on monarchical powers and the rest of the government being unable or unwilling to stop it remained.

Ray Raphael’s article ends with Franklin’s exchange with Elizabeth Powel, as recorded by James McHenry:

Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy. A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.

(I’ve discussed that anecdote at length since 2017.)

“Brushes with the law reshaped rural time consciousness”

The topic of this seminar at the David Center for the American Revolution in Philadelphia caught my eye: “The Triumph of Bank Time in the Early Republic.”

The scholar sharing that paper, Dr. Justin Clark, is Senior Lecturer in the History Department at Cornell University and formerly an Associate Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His current projects include the anthology A Cultural History of Time in the Age of Empire and Industry (1789–1914) and his own book A Clockwork Republic.

Here’s the abstract that Clark probably wrote for the seminar series, probably months back, so it may or may not reflect his work as it’s coming out:

Historians have long believed that Americans relinquished more “natural” forms of time consciousness only with the industrial developments of the antebellum period: mass-produced clocks and watches, railroad timetables, and growing reliance on factory wage labor. Yet as this paper argues, rural republicans had already developed a more modern and abstract understanding of time by the 1790s.

Throughout the eighteenth century, an intermediate network of coastal merchants, wholesalers, and village shopkeepers connected manufacturers in the British Isles with rural producers in the colonies. By quietly pricing interest—the time value of money—into the cost of goods, inland shopkeepers protected the rural customer who paid by the harvest with the Liverpool merchant who charged interest by the day. The accommodation between these two financial cultures collapsed with the Revolution, as an examination of account books, commercial correspondence, newspapers, and other sources shows.

After 1783, as a condition for renewing commerce with their newly independent American counterparts, British merchants demanded the swift repayment of old debts with interest. These demands quickly travelled down the chain of debt from coastal importer to villager, such that rural debtors found themselves dragged not only into court, learning in the process what Franklin’s urban artisans already knew: “Time is money.” As one agricultural journal urged in 1799, “every minute thou hast ever spent in consulting Almanacks for the weather, has been entirely lost, or very foolishly employed”; time was better spent watching the financial calendar.

Long before the appearance of the steamboat, train, village clock or factory, these brushes with the law reshaped rural time consciousness. Ultimately, this paper argues, impersonal and inflexible demands for punctuality played an overlooked but significant role in contemporary episodes of agrarian resistance such as Shays’ Rebellion.

Time working as it does, I won’t be able to log into this seminar because I’ll be traveling. And since this seminar is a discussion of a work in progress, it won’t be recorded. We’ll have to wait until Clark publishes. But already the concepts are giving me something to think about on the plane.

For folks interested in the history of Boston, Justin Clark’s previous book is City of Second Sight: Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture.

Barbara Oberg and the Infrastructure of Early American Scholarship

Barbara Oberg, historian of early America, passed away this month. Though Oberg had the rank of professor in the Princeton History Department, she was known for a career of less visible work that benefited historical scholarship.

Primarily, Oberg was the lead editor of the Benjamin Franklin Papers and then the Thomas Jefferson Papers. Between the two series, she oversaw the publication of more than twenty volumes. In doing so, she both helped generations of scholars and readers access that correspondence and trained other documentary editors.

Dr. Oberg also edited collections of scholarly essays: Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World, Federalists Reconsidered, and Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture.

Oberg was also known within the profession for serving the non-university organizations that support scholars, research, and publication. The Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture just eulogized her this way:

Barbara was also an insightful and incisive leader. Keenly aware of the importance of institutions for scholarship, she was devoted to the organizations that support early American history, including the OI. From 2010 to 2023, she served on the OI’s Executive Board, presiding as Chair from 2014 onward. Her steady counsel, exceptional generosity, and subtle wit helped us flourish even as we navigated shifts in leadership and sponsorship and moved into our new home. We are profoundly grateful to her for her help.

The OI is not the only organization to have benefitted from Barbara’s keen intellect and energetic engagement. She helped steer the American Philosophical Society, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Society of Documentary Editors.

Indeed, at “A Life in Letters: A Celebration of Dr. Barbara Oberg”—a 2023 symposium jointly organized by the OI and the American Philosophical Society—historians, editors, and cultural leaders gathered in Philadelphia to discuss the ongoing importance of Barbara’s work. At “Barbara Fest,” as we called it, speakers and audience members alike testified to her profound impact on the organizations they cared most about.

The sessions of that symposium can be viewed here on YouTube. Historians of early America discuss Franklin, Jefferson, women, the field of documentary editing, and what Barbara Oberg brought to each of those areas.

“Franklin was no friend of Wilkes…”

Last month the History of Parliament blog shared Dr. Robin Eagles’s review of Benjamin Franklin’s dislike and distrust of John Wilkes, based on his correspondence in Founders Online.

Eagles writes:

Franklin was no friend of Wilkes, who was ejected from his seat in the Commons following the infamous affair of North Briton number 45 and the printing of the scandalous Essay on Woman. They had much in common – both running newspapers and having voracious appetites for knowledge. They may also have coincided at the so-called ‘Hellfire Club’. Yet Franklin was repelled by Wilkes’s excesses.

I wrote about Franklin and the Baron le Despencer’s club a year ago. My conclusion was that those two men didn’t become friends until years after the baron had let the club lapse, in large part because Wilkes was blabbing about it. Some books do point to evidence for a connection between Franklin and the club; however, that evidence was made up by a British author who was a habitual liar.

Back to actual documented history.

After Wilkes had fled overseas in December 1763 leaving his case to be tried by the Commons in absentia, Franklin followed his case closely, satisfied to see Parliament resolved to rid itself of someone he considered unsuitable. On 11 February 1764 Franklin, briefly back in America, responded to his friend, Richard Jackson, MP for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, that he was ‘pleas’d to find a just Resentment so general in your House against Mr. W.’s seditious Conduct, and to hear that the present Administration is like to continue’.

Franklin’s perspective may have altered somewhat when he became friendly with Wilkes’s brother, Israel. He was even invited to ‘eat his Christmas dinner’ with the Wilkeses at the family house in Red Lyon Square in 1766. [Mr and Mrs Israel Wilkes to Franklin, 23 December 1768] He remained, though, appalled by the disorder prompted by John Wilkes’s actions and recorded in detail the riots and destruction in London and beyond during the chaotic election year of 1768.

Nonetheless, reports of those same disturbances and Parliament’s expulsions convinced the Whigs in faraway Boston that Wilkes would be a good ally in their fight to reform the British administration. 

Washington on Franklin on Gage on Lexington

In 1789, President George Washington went on a tour (I might even say a progress) through the northern United States.

This is how he recorded his travel through Massachusetts in his diary on Thursday, 5 November:

About sunrise I set out, crossing the Merrimack River at the town, over to the township of Bradford, and in nine miles came to Abbot’s tavern, in Andover, where we breakfasted, and met with much attention from Mr. [Samuel] Phillips, President of the Senate of Massachusetts, who accompanied us through Bellariki to Lexington, where I dined, and viewed the spot on which the first blood was spilt in the dispute with Great Britain, on the 19th of April, 1775. Here I parted with Mr. Phillips, and proceeded on to Watertown, intending (as I was disappointed by the weather and bad roads from travelling through the Interior Country to Charlestown, on Connecticut River,) to take what is called the middle road from Boston.

Washington didn’t mention where he dined in Lexington, but other sources confirm that it was at the tavern of William Munroe, who had been a militia sergeant back in April 1775. That building is now one of the museums of the Lexington Historical Society.

The President’s travelogue sounds rather dry, but this item in the 7 Jan 1790 Berkshire Chronicle suggests he was actually in a cheerful mood:

ANECDOTE.
When the President of the United States, in his late tour, was at Lexington, viewing the field where the first blood was shed in the late war; he with a degree of good humor, told his informant, that the Britons complained to Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, of the ill usage their troops met with at Lexington battle, by the Yankies getting behind the stone walls, and firing at them. The Doctor replied, by asking them whether there were not two sides to the wall?

Well, it’s not exactly Abraham Lincoln’s joke about Ethan Allen, but we rarely get to hear Washington tell funny stories at all.

Washington’s comment echoes a poem published in the 27 Nov 1775 Boston Gazette called “The King’s Own Regulars.” Written in the voice of the redcoats, it includes this couplet about Gen. Thomas Gage:

Of their firing from behind fences, he makes a great pother,
Ev’ry fence has two sides; they made use of one, and we only forgot to use the other.

The following spring, Charles Carroll described this poem to his wife as “a song made by Dr. Franklin.” It looks like Franklin might have written those lines while visiting Gen. Washington in Cambridge in October 1775, then left them behind for the local press. And President Washington remembered the doctor’s pithy point years later.