“The Birth Day has been celebrated very sufficiently”

Boston 1775 has already explored the early American celebrations of George Washington’s birthday: when the first public ceremonies were reported, what date people chose to celebrate given the shift from Julian to Gregorian calendar since Washington’s birth, and what such celebrations meant for masculinity in Virginia.

When Washington became President, that birthday celebration turned into something very close to a national holiday. On 23 Feb 1796, John Adams reported to Abigail about the previous day’s observation in Philadelphia:

Yesterday was Birth Day and a Parade there was. At Night a magnificent Ball which you will read in the News Papers. A thousand People in a vast Room a Circle of 80 feet Diameter.

On 3 March he added an observation about the celebrations in Massachusetts; he had read about the preparations for them in a newspaper.

I see that at Boston and Cambridge &c. the Birth Day was celebrated with great Splendor as it was here. The old song is verified as I always said it would be. “The more he is envied the higher he[’]ll rise.” Increase of abuse will produce an increase of Salutation.

The editors of the Adams Papers identified the source of that quotation as a song published in London in 1788, the last year John and Abigail lived in Britain. It was “an old song” as John wrote, however. It appeared in The Weekly Amusement for 15 Feb 1735 (N.S.), and thus was older than he was. That version concluded: “Let’s merrily pass life’s remainder away; / Upheld by our friends, we our foes may despise; / For the more we are envy’d, the higher we rise.”

On 28 February, meanwhile, Abigail reported from Massachusetts:

you will see by the Centinel that the Presidents Birth Day Was celebrated, with more than usual Festivity in Boston, and many other places. in the Toasts drank, they have for once done justice to the V P. it is a Toast that looks, I conceive to a future contemplated event.

On 5 March she sent John her report from Quincy:

The Honours done to the President on his Birth Day have been very magnificent. At Boston and Cambridge very striking. Here it was all Dance and Glare. I suppose the Remembrance of the V. P. on those occasions considering that for the most part they forget him is with a View to the Reelection approaching.

Abigail expected Washington to be reelected later that year, and John to remain the party’s choice as Vice President, his talents neglected.

But on 9 March, John had some more observations to share:

The Birth Day has been celebrated very sufficiently. I have much doubt of the Propriety of these Celebrations. In Countries where Birth is respected and where Authority goes with it, there is congruity enough in such Feast: But in Elective Governments the Question is more doubtful. Probably the Practice will not be continued after another Year.

As John hinted, monarchies celebrated the birthdays of their heads of state. The President’s birthday was an echo of the king’s and queen’s birthdays during British rule, and he wasn’t entirely comfortable with that. The last sentence quoted hints at a bigger change: what John called on 1 March ”the Inclination of the Chief to retire,” though he added that Washington might yet be talked out of that plan.

In late February, Washington had spoken with Alexander Hamilton about drafting what became his Farewell Address. To be sure, they were starting with the draft of a similar statement the President had asked James Madison to draft four years before; Washington had then talked about retiring after one term and changed his mind. But this time, he really meant it. President Washington’s next birthday, in February 1797, would be his last in public office.

TOMORROW: The first transition, and what that meant for birthdays.

John Adams Contemplates His Birthday

John Adams was born in Braintree on 19 Oct 1735, Old Style, which was 30 October, New Style. That shift was the result of the British Empire’s belated adoption of the Gregorian calendar.

Adams adopted the new date, but he remembered the old one, as shown by his diary entry for 19 Oct 1772:

The Day of the Month reminds me of my Birth day, which will be on the 30th. I was born Octr. 19. 1735. Thirty Seven Years, more than half the Life of Man, are run out.—What an Atom, an Animalcule I am!—The Remainder of my Days I shall rather decline, in Sense, Spirit, and Activity. My Season for acquiring Knowledge is past. And Yet I have my own and my Childrens Fortunes to make. My boyish Habits, and Airs are not yet worn off.

At thirty-seven Adams thought he’d lived half his life, and had a little crisis about it. In the preceding year he’d actually suffered a breakdown of his health or spirits. Following a very busy 1770 in Boston, he’d decided to retire from politics and move the family back to Braintree. He even felt bad enough to take some time off work for a trip all the way to the medicinal springs at Stafford, Connecticut.

But within a month after that birthday in 1772, Adams was resolving:

I shall remove my Family to Boston, after residing in Braintree about 19 Months. I have recovered a Degree of Health by this Excursion into the Country, tho I am an infirm Man yet. I hope I have profited by Retirement and Reflection!—and learned in what manner to live in Boston! How long I shall be able to stay in the City, I know not; if my Health should again decline, I must return to Braintree and renounce the Town entirely. I hope however to be able to stay there many Years!

He had more than half a century ahead of him.

Fears in Framingham and Elsewhere

Yesterday I quoted two Connecticut newspapers from March 1775 reporting on the detection of a slave conspiracy in Natick.

Such worries were nothing new. Back in September 1774, Abigail Adams had told her husband about a similar fear in Braintree:

There has been in Town a conspiracy of the Negroes. At present it is kept pretty private and was discoverd by one who endeavourd to diswaid them from it-he being threatned with his life, applied to justice [Josiah] Quincy for protection. They conducted in this way—got an Irishman to draw up a petition letting to the Govener telling him they would fight for him provided he would arm them and engage to liberate them if he conquerd, and it is said that he attended so much to it as to consult Pircy upon it, and one Liut. [?] Small [Maj. John Small?] has been very buisy and active. There is but little said, and what Steps they will take in consequence of it I know not.

Jason T. Sharples has found a deep tradition of such fears in British North America. The rumors would often take the same form: free blacks were tempting enslaved blacks, many masters and their families would be murdered all at once, blacks planned to burn the town…

The political and increasingly military tensions in Massachusetts in 1774 brought those fears to the surface again, alongside other, parallel rumors: that the British military planned to burn the town, that the provincial militia would raise 30,000 men and storm Boston, that the Crown would ship in thousands of French or Russian or Native soldiers. Most of those conspiracy theories were groundless.

People may have had their own doubts then, but they didn’t feel safe dismissing such dangers. Robert G. Parkinson just wrote about how such a worry affected people in Framingham as the war began:

Josiah Temple, a native of Framingham, Massachusetts (about fifteen miles south of Concord), published a book in 1887 on the town’s history. His recounting of what people remembered about the night of the Alarm was so different from the legend that he found it impossible to believe.

For four generations, the local story of the night of April 19, 1775, was that, as soon as the town’s militia marched north toward Lexington Green, a “strange panic” spread through Framingham. But that’s not what surprised the town historian, nor should it us. But what they said next certainly seems odd: “The Negroes were coming to massacre them all!” Some in the town, Temple noted, “brought the axes and pitchforks and clubs into the house, and securely bolted the doors, and passed the day and night in anxious suspense.”

More specifically, Temple wrote that the “women and children” in two Framingham districts felt this fear, particularly Mehetable, “wife of Capt. [Simon] Edgell,” a slaveholder. Temple also said, “Nobody stopped to ask where the hostile Negroes were coming from; for all our own colored people were patriots.” Peter Salem, for example, was marching with Capt. Edgell’s company. A black trumpeter reportedly roused the town militia. But Framingham is right next to Natick, where a free black man named Thomas Nichols had been arrested for fomenting unrest.

A similar fear affected women who gathered for safety from the regulars at a home in Menotomy, according to the Rev. Samuel A. Smith’s 1864 history:

The report was spread abroad that the slaves were intending to rise, and finish what the British had begun by murdering the defenceless women and children. It excited great consternation, therefore, among the women gathered at George Prentiss’s upon the hill, when they saw Ishmael, a negro slave belonging to Mr. [William] Cutler, approaching the house. They thought their time had come, but one, a little braver than the rest, summoned up courage to ask, “Are you going to kill us, Ishmael?”

“Lord-a-massy, no ma’am!” said the astonished black. “Is my missis here?”

Since Ishmael had stayed behind to save the Cutler tavern from burning, he had cause to be annoyed as well as astonished. In 1780, Ishmael Cutler, then thirty-six years old, enlisted as a soldier. The next year, he paid the town poll tax as a free man.

COMING UP: Who was Thomas Nichols?

Breakfast with John Adams

A lot of books and articles describe John Adams as drinking hard cider each morning. Not many, however, cite a source for that factoid.

Cider researcher Mark Turdo looked into that statement and expressed skepticism on his Pommel Cyder blog because Adams mentioned cider in his diary only twice:

July 26, 1796
In conformity to the fashion I drank this Morning and Yesterday Morning, about a Jill of Cyder. It seems to do me good, by diluting and dissolving the Phlegm or the Bile in the Stomach.

July 28, 1796
I continue my practice of drinking a Jill of Cyder in the Morning and find no ill but some good Effect.

The first of those entries shows Adams drinking “a Jill of Cyder” for his health as something new and noteworthy. Two days later he was trying to “continue my practice” and make it a habit. And if it became a habit, he would no longer have had cause to write about it. So I’m not sure these entries say anything about Adam’s hard cider habits except that he did not commonly drink it in the morning before July 1796.

The source of the statement about Adams’s habitual cider-drinking was his great-grandson Charles Francis Adams, Jr.’s local history, published first in D. Hamilton Hurd’s History of Norfolk County (1884) and then in his own History of Braintree (1891). He stated:

In the cellars of the more well-to-do houses a barrel of cider was always on tap, and pitchers of it were brought up at every meal, and in the morning and evening. To the end of his life a large tankard of hard cider was John Adams’ morning draught before breakfast; and in sending directions from Philadelphia to her agent at Quincy, in 1799, Mrs. [Abigail] Adams takes care to mention that “the President hopes you will not omit to have eight or nine barrels of good late-made cider put up in the cellar for his own particular use.”

Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was not born until nine years after John Adams had died. His father knew the former President and edited his papers, so he could have passed on this information about cider-drinking in later life. By the late 1800s, prominent statesmen’s drinking habits were caught up in the cultural debate over temperance. But I think the statement seems reliable.

(The image above is a portrait of John Adams distributed in boxes of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran, Shredded Wheat, and 40% Bran Flakes in the mid-1940s. It comes courtesy of the Willard Digital Collections in Battle Creek.)

Meeting the Quincy Women, 12 Nov.

In January 1759, John Adams paid a call to Col. Josiah Quincy’s house in Braintree (shown here).

There the young lawyer found his host’s daughter Hannah (1736–1826) and her first cousin Esther Quincy (1738–1810).

Referring to Hannah Quincy as “O.” in his diary, Adams compared the two young ladies:

O. thinks more than most of her Sex. She is always thinking or Reading. She sitts and looks steadily, one way, very often, several minutes together in thought. E. looks pert, sprightly, gay, but thinks and reads much less than O. . . .

O. makes Observations on Actions, Characters, Events, in Popes Homer, Milton, Popes Poems, any Plays, Romances &c. that she reads and asks Questions about them in Company. What do you think of Helen? What do you think of Hector &c. What Character do you like best? Did you wish the Plot had not been discovered in Venice preserved? These are Questions that prove a thinking Mind. E. asks none such.

But really they were both flummoxing him: “I talk to Hannah and Easther about the folly of Love, about despizing it, about being above it, pretend to be insensible of tender Passions, which makes them laugh.”

Hannah Quincy married Dr. Bela Lincoln of Hingham the next year. Esther Quincy married Adams’s friend and fellow lawyer Jonathan Sewall in 1764. That same year, Adams married Abigail Smith, whose mother was a Quincy.

On Thursday, 12 November, Nancy Carlisle will speak at Old North Church in Boston on the topic “From the Revolution to the Close of the Nineteenth Century, the Remarkable Women of the Quincy Family.”

In a family where six successive generations of Quincy men held prominent public roles in the civic life of Boston and New England, the women in the family have long been overshadowed. But in reality it is because of them that we know as much as we do about their husbands, fathers, and brothers. When we shine a light on the lives of the Quincy wives and daughters we learn about the role that intelligent, articulate, and engaged women played in the political and cultural life of the region.

Carlisle is the Senior Curator of Collections for Historic New England. For the past three years she has focused on the Quincy House and its inhabitants as part of a major reinstallation.

This talk is scheduled to start at 6:30 P.M. It is free, but Old North asks people to reserve seats through this site. There will be a reception afterwards.

Massachusetts Towns Line Up Against the Stamp Act

Two hundred and fifty years ago, representatives to the Massachusetts General Court were heading home after a very short legislative session.

Gov. Francis Bernard had called the lower house of the Massachusetts legislature to convene on Wednesday, 25 September, in Boston. Most of the representatives summoned to that meeting had been elected back in May, and their towns had given them instructions about how to vote on the big issues of the day. But the Stamp Act, and New England’s forceful response to it, had produced a bigger confrontation than anyone imagined. Many towns therefore held another meeting to come up with additional instructions for their legislators.

On 23 September, Boston’s town meeting approved its special instructions, reiterating its opposition to the Stamp Act and anything that looked like compromise about that new law. That argument came out of a committee, but the man who gets the most credit for drafting it is Samuel Adams. Though the instructions didn’t use the phrase “taxation without representation” (not coined until 1767), that idea was the philosophical basis for Boston’s objection to the stamp tax.

When Boston created its instructions, its representatives in the House were:

• James Otis, Jr., the fiery attorney who a few years before had resigned his royal appointments and started to represent the interests of the Boston merchants.
• Thomas Cushing, one of those merchants. His late father had employed Samuel Adams in his mercantile house as a young man, with results that convinced both of them that Adams’s talents didn’t lie in business.
• Thomas Gray (1721-1774), also the province’s auditor. As a sign of how cozy the political class was then, the province treasurer whose accounts he checked was his older brother, Harrison Gray.

And there was a player to be named later.

Other Massachusetts towns came up with similar instructions for their representatives. In Braintree, Samuel Adams’s second cousin John was the principal drafter. John Adams later claimed that his draft had been adopted nearly without editing (there was a moderate amount of editing), and that it was the model for many other towns’ instructions (other towns were already making the same arguments). Braintree’s protest did use an impressive amount of legal jargon, however.

TOMORROW: The governor’s opening speech.

The Stamp Act on the South Shore

Protests against Parliament’s new Stamp Act spread outside Boston in the late summer of 1765, and commemorations of its 250th anniversary will take place outside Boston, too.

Shortly after Samuel Adams led the Boston town meeting to complain about the law in instructions for its legislators, his younger second cousin John drafted a similar document for rural Braintree. In his post-Presidency memoirs, John Adams described that initiative this way:

I drew up a Petition to the Select Men of Braintree, and procured it to be signed by a Number of the respectable Inhabitants, to call a Meeting of the Town to instruct their Representatives in Relation to the Stamps. The public Attention of the whole Continent was alarmed, and my Principles and political Connections were well known. . . .

I prepared a Draught of Instructions, at home and carried them with me: the cause of the Meeting was explained, at some length and the state and danger of the Country pointed out, a Committee was appointed to prepare Instructions of which I was nominated as one. We retired to Mr. [Samuel] Niles House, my Draught was produced, and unanimously adopted without Amendment, reported to the Town and Accepted without a dissenting Voice. These were published in [Richard] Drapers Paper, as that Printer first applied to me for a Copy. They were decided and spirited enough. They rung thro the State, and were adopted, in so many Words, As I was informed by the Representatives of that Year, by forty Towns, as Instructions to their Representatives.

Actually not, say the editors of Adams’s papers. The draft in Adams’s handwriting was amended a little for the official version, and only a few instructions from other towns resemble Braintree’s.

In fact, Braintree’s arguments should sound quite familiar, though the language was a lot more legalistic:

We further apprehend this Tax to be unconstitutional. By the great Charter of Liberties, no Amerciament is to be imposed, but by the oaths of good and lawful Men of the Vicinage, and no Freeman is to be disseized of his Freehold &c but by the Judgment of his Peers &c or Law of the Land.—And We have always understood it to be a grand and fundamental Principle of the British Constitution that no Freeman should be subjected to any Tax to which he has not given his own Consent in Person or by Proxy. And indeed, the Maxims of the Common Law, as we have hitherto received them, are to the same Effect that a Man and his Property cannot be seperated but by his own Act or fault.

Still, drafting those resolutions helped to launch John Adams’s political career.

On Thursday, 13 August, the Abigail Adams Historical Society will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the anti-Stamp Act movement with Prof. Christopher Hannan’s talk on “The Stamp Act Riots and the Beginning of Revolution.” The society’s press release tries to make the case that the 13th will be the sestercentennial of when the effigies were hung on Liberty Tree, but I’m pretty sure they went up early in the morning of the 14th. But no doubt those effigies were under construction the night before.

This event will take place from 7:00 to 9:00 P.M. at the Abigail Adams Birthplace, 180 Norton Street in Weymouth. Admission is $10 for members, $15 for others. /$10 members; the society asks people to reserve space by email.

Gen. Washington in Cambridge, 19 July

This Saturday, 19 July, Gen. George Washington will return to his Cambridge headquarters, at least in the form of reenactor John Koopman. He’s scheduled to be at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site from noon to 4:00 P.M., and that federal site is free to all visitors.

Abigail Adams had met the new commander a few days before he moved into that mansion, and on 16 July wrote to her husband John, assuring him that the Continental Congress had made the right choices:

The appointment of the Generals Washington and [Charles] Lee, gives universal satisfaction. The people have the highest opinion of Lees abilities, but you know the continuation of the popular Breath, depends much upon favorable events.

I had the pleasure of seeing both the Generals and their Aid de camps soon after their arrival and of being personally made known to them. They very politely express their regard for you. Major [Thomas] Miflin said he had orders from you to visit me at Braintree. I told him I should be very happy to see him there, and accordingly sent Mr. [John] Thaxter to Cambridge with a card to him and Mr. [Joseph] Read to dine with me. Mrs. [Mercy] Warren and her Son were to be with me. They very politely received the Message and lamented that they were not able to upon account of Expresses which they were that day to get in readiness to send of.

I was struck with General Washington. You had prepaired me to entertain a favorable opinion of him, but I thought the one half was not told me. Dignity with ease, and complacency, the Gentleman and Soldier look agreably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feture of his face. Those lines of Dryden instantly occurd to me

“Mark his Majestick fabrick! he’s a temple
Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine
His Souls the Deity that lodges there.
Nor is the pile unworthy of the God.”

General Lee looks like a careless hardy Veteran and from his appear­ence brought to my mind his namesake Charls the 12, king of Sweeden. The Elegance of his pen far exceeds that of his person.

Washington and his retinue never made it out to the Adamses’ home at Braintree, and it doesn’t look like Abigail ever visited the Cambridge headquarters, though John did. This letter did, however, eventually lead Abigail to a second meeting with Gen. Lee.

TOMORROW: Abigail Adams passes on a request for a commission.

“Turtius Bass and wife are parted.”

Who was the Braintree man that Abigail Adams called “Tertias Bass” in 1776? I was ready to give up that quest when I came across a letter that Abigail’s older sister Mary Cranch sent to her in 1785:

Turtius Bass and wife are parted. He has sold the House and land which his Sons liv’d in and divided his Estate into four parts, given his wife one fourth part, one half to his two Sons. The remainder he has taken to support himself and Nell Underwood in their Perigrinations to the Eastward [i.e., Maine] whither he is going he says to settle.

And as he is going into a new country, tis proper he should take a young person to help People it, and her abbillity to do it She has given ample proof off by presenting somebody (she swore them upon Leonard Clevverly [1758-1828]) with a pair of Twins last winter. She liv’d in Mr. Bass’s Family—but as they both dy’d she was at Liberty to pursue her Business as Housekeeper in some distant part of the State as well as at Braintree, and who would be Maid when they might be mistress?

Mr. Bass was so generious to the Girl, that he keept her in his house to lay in, and gave Mr. [Royall] Tyler a handsome Fee as Counsel for her in case Mr. Cleaverly should deny the charge which he did most solemnly. In this case the woman has the advantage in law. He was oblig’d to enter into Bonds, but the children dying, and Mr. Tyler not appearing, he took up his bonds and Mr. Bass was oblig’d to bear all the charges.

Mrs. Bass is in great trouble. Seth is mov’d into the House with her, and the other Son with his wife and child are mov’d seventy mile into the country out of all the noise of it—so much for Scandle.

This letter tells us that in 1785 “Turtius Bass” had a wife and two sons, at least one of them married with a child and the other named Seth. Page 55 of this 1835 genealogy indicates that “Turtius” was most likely the Samuel Bass born in 1737, son of Seth and Eunice Bass. He married Alice Spear in 1758 and had sons Jeriah in 1760 and Seth in 1761. That book says nothing of Nell Underwood. It also says nothing about when this Samuel Bass died, indicating that his relatives in Braintree had lost track, or chosen to lose track, of him.

But this biographical directory from 1897 suggests that Samuel Bass settled in Wilton, Maine, and his son Jeriah eventually brought his family there, too. After another century, their descendant George H. Bass was a leading local shoe manufacturer.

As for Alice Bass, neighbors John and Abigail Adams bought some of her land in 1788.

The Mystery of Tertias Bass

As I quoted yesterday, Abigail Adams wrote that in the spring of 1776 the only person in Braintree making saltpetre was “Mr. Tertias Bass as he is calld.” But no such name appears on the town records. Later she wrote that “Tertias Bass” was serving as lieutenant in a militia company, but no such name appears on militia records.

The answer to this mystery starts with the arrival of Deacon Samuel Bass in Braintree around 1640, one of the town’s earliest settlers. He had a lot of sons, and they had a lot of sons, and as a result a century later the town had a lot of men named Bass. When John Adams went to Philadelphia in 1775, for example, he hired a neighbor named Joseph Bass as a personal servant. The colonel in charge of Lt. Bass’s regiment was Col. Jonathan Bass.

The prevalence of that surname was especially problematic when families paired it with a common first name, and colonial New England families chose from a smaller pool of given names than we use today. One particularly popular given name was Samuel.

In that situation, the custom of the time was to distinguish the two men by:

• profession, which also carried legal weight. Thus, in 1704 the town’s tithingmen included “Samuel Bass[,] Carpenter” and “Samuel Bass[,] Cooper.”
• militia rank or other professional achievement. Braintree’s 1792 tax list included both “Ensign Samuel Bass” and “Lieutenant Samuel Bass.”
• suffixes such as “Senior,” “Junior,” and “tertius,” or third.

To make it more confusing, however, those suffixes weren’t permanent and they weren’t necessarily indications of a father-son relationship. “Samuel Bass, Jr.” was simply the younger of the two Samuel Basses doing business in town at the time. When the older one died, he became “Samuel Bass,” or “Samuel Bass, Sr.” if there were others younger than him. So the same man could be designated in different ways on documents only a few years apart.

This genealogy page reports a 1761 will witnessed by “Samuel Bass (tertius).” In 1785 Braintree chose “Mr. Samuel Bass, 3rd” as a selectman. Were those the same man, twenty-four years apart, or had the “tertius/3rd” designation been passed down from one man to another? I’m not sure. But I didn’t find any other Braintree Basses using that suffix.

It’s striking that Abigail Adams’s letters from 1776 indicate that one local Bass was known to his neighbors by the suffix “Tertius” as if that were his given name. Presumably he had been the third-oldest Samuel Bass in town at birth and grew up behind two others for so long that people got used to calling him “Tertius.” (Or “Tertias” in Adams’s spelling.)

There’s a very early published genealogy of the Bass family from 1835 listing multiple Samuels alive in 1776, and local and family historians have added more. Was “Tertius” the Samuel Bass reportedly held prisoner by the British military? The Samuel Bass who helped found Braintree, Vermont?

I was ready to give up on nailing down “Tertias Bass” until I stumbled across a piece of juicy gossip from Abigail Adams’s sister.

TOMORROW: Hmm. Should I share that?

Saltpetre in Braintree

John Adams was one of the Continental Congress delegates most enthusiastic about the war effort, and therefore eager to see Americans producing saltpetre to make into gunpowder. I doubt he’d ever tried that process himself, but in March 1776 he asked his wife Abigail to do so back home in Braintree.

Abigail wrote back to John in Philadelphia:

You inquire of whether I am making Salt peter. I have not yet attempted it, but after Soap making believe I shall make the experiment. I find as much as I can do to manufacture cloathing for my family which would else be Naked.

I know of but one person in this part of the Town who has made any, that is Mr. Tertias Bass as he is calld who has got very near an hundred weight which has been found to be very good. I have heard of some others in the other parishes. Mr. Reed of Weymouth has been applied to, to go to Andover to the mills which are now at work, and has gone. I have lately seen a small Manuscrip describing the proportions for the various sorts of powder, fit for cannon, small arms and pistols. If it would be of any Service your way I will get it transcribed and send it to you.

As the folks at the Massachusetts Historical Society showed us on Tuesday, this passage comes toward the end of a letter best known for Abigail’s plea to “Remember the Ladies” in designing the new republic, probably a plea for more equal property laws in a marriage. Considering how she was volunteering to send John military information, one might think his reply would have been more respectful.

Be that as it may, on 29 September Abigail told John about a new military development: “Nathl. Belcher goes Capt. and Tertias Bass Lieut. from this Town. They March tomorrow.” Lt. Bass was away from home for a while, so that was the end of his saltpetre production—unless his wife took over.

I’m not sure where those troops were marching or why. Nathaniel Belcher (1732-1786?) captained a company in Col. Jonathan Bass’s Massachusetts militia regiment for much of the war. Pattee’s History of Old Braintree and Quincy includes a list of men who served in Belcher’s company for four days in June 1776, but doesn’t mention another deployment until 1777. And in June that company didn’t have a lieutenant named Bass.

TOMORROW: What kind of name is “Tertias Bass”?

Choc-Talk at the Boston Athenaeum, 7 Jan.

On Thursday, 7 January, the Boston Athenaeum will host a lecture by Anthony M. Sammarco on “The Baker Chocolate Company: A Sweet History,” which is also the title of his new book. The talk will start at 12:00 noon. It’s free, but one must reserve a spot by calling 617-720-7600.

The event description says:

The Baker Chocolate Company was founded along the Neponset River in 1765 by Dr. James Baker and James Hannon, a skilled chocolate maker. Over the next two centuries, the company became one of the leading manufacturers of chocolate and cocoa in North America.

I’ve seen notices of similar talks by Mr. Sammarco at other venues, too.

The Baker chocolate factory in Dorchester is often said to be the first in North America. However, the descendants of Joseph Palmer of Braintree wrote that a chocolate factory was among the workshops he and Richard Cranch erected in the Germantown section of that town before the Revolution. And other Bostonians were advertising chocolate in the newspapers as early as the 1720s.

I’m not sure how the Baker Chocolate Company documentation stacks up against the rest. The company has not been shy about promoting its history. Then again, neither were the Palmer descendants.

“Get a Horse for Pappa.”

In August 1776, Abigail Adams realized that if she wanted her husband John to come home from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, she would have to make the trip possible. Procuring his own horses was too hard for him—perhaps because everyone expected a big battle around New York.

So on 22 August, Abigail reported that she had convinced a neighbor named Bass—probably Joseph Bass, who had worked as John’s servant in 1775—to ride to Philadelphia with an extra horse and accompany John home. As to those horses:

I shall write to my Father to request of him that he would endeavour to procure for you a couple of Horses. I shall try some other Friends and will fix of Bass as soon as tis possible to procure Horses for you. . . .

As to applying to —— [she probably meant the Massachusetts government] for Horses, I remember the old proverb, he who waits for dead mens shooes may go barefoot. It would only lengthen out the time, and we should be no better of, than before I askd. I will have them if they are to be had at any price, and they may pay for them. I think you have done your part.

Abigail had other worries on her mind. Nabby, Charly, and Tommy Adams were still getting over their smallpox inoculations, and they wanted their father home. On 25 August, Abigail sent John this anecdote to remind him of his paternal responsibilities:

I was talking of sending for you and trying to procure horses for you when little Charles who lay upon the couch coverd over with small Pox, and nobody knew that he heard or regarded any thing which was said, lifted up his head and says Mamma, take my Dollor and get a Horse for Pappa.

In that same letter, Abigail reported some success at finding mounts:

Our Friends are very kind. My Father [the Rev. William Smith] sends his Horse and Dr. [Cotton] Tufts has offerd me an other one he had of unkle [Quincy] about 5 year old. He has never been journeys, but is able enough. Mr. Bass is just come, and says he cannot sit out till tomorrow week without great damage to his Buisness. . . . Tho I urged him to sit of [i.e., set off] tomorrow, yet the Horses will be in a better State as they will not be used and more able to perform the journey. I am obliged to consent to his tarrying till then when you may certainly expect him.

Bass is affraid that the Drs. Horse will not be able to travel so fast as he must go. He will go and see him, and in case he is not your Brother has promised to let one of his go.

Bass finally departed with the two horses on 29 August.

On 5 Sept 1776, John wrote back:

I am rejoiced that my Horses are come. I shall now be able to take a ride. But it is uncertain, when I shall set off, for home. I will not go, at present. Affairs are too delicate and critical.

I usually admire Abigail Adams more than I sympathize with her, but in this case I feel like she deserves a free swing of the frying pan.

“One Misfortune in our family”

During his trip to attend the Continental Congress at Philadelphia in May 1775, John Adams used a mare who got spooked in New York and destroyed his father-in-law’s sulky, as described yesterday. The same horse might appear in this vignette from a little more than a year later.

On 14 July 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to John, once again in Philadelphia, with important news from their Braintree farm:

There is one Misfortune in our family which I have never mentiond in hopes it would have been in my power to have remedied it, but all hopes of that kind are at an end. It is the loss of your Grey Horse.

About 2 months ago, I had occasion to send Jonathan of an errant to my unkle Quincys (the other Horse being a plowing). Upon his return a little below the church she trod upon a rolling stone and lamed herself to that degree that it was with great difficulty that she could be got home.

I immediately sent for [neighbor] Tirrel and every thing was done for her by Baths, ointments, polticeing, Bleeding &c. that could be done. Still she continued extreem lame tho not so bad as at first.

I then got her carried to Domet but he pronounces her incurable, as a callous is grown upon her footlock joint. You can hardly tell, not even by your own feelings how much I lament her. She was not with foal, as you immagined, but I hope she is now as care has been taken in that Respect.

The last line indicates that this mare might not have been healthy enough for riding or pulling vehicles any longer, but might still pay for her keep by bringing forth a colt. But that left John Adams without a way to come home from Philadelphia.

Revolutionary Encampments to Visit in June and July

This weekend, 27-28 June, Minute Man National Historical Park hosts a special encampment of Revolutionary War reenactors (particularly the 10th Massachusetts Regiment, the Ladies of Refined Taste, and the Authentic New England Campaigners) portraying life in the Continental Army camps during the siege of Boston.

The event is titled “Now We Are One,” referring to how the New England provincial militias regiments became the Continental Army with the arrival of the Continental Congress’s endorsement, the new commander-in-chief (shown here), and some companies from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.

On Saturday, the scenarios will focus on midsummer when the new general arrived with a different notion of how officers should behave and how an army should be run. Meanwhile, the New England officers were trying to figure out what had gone wrong at Bunker Hill, and the New England militiamen were still adjusting to life as full-time soldiers.

The Sunday scenarios will show the same army a few months later. Riflemen are arriving from the south, troops are leaving for the north, and there are whispers about a high-ranking traitor. And the Crown forces are still in Boston! Visitors will be welcome each day from 9:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M.

The park’s Hartwell Tavern will be the center of activities, standing in for Gen. Washington’s actual headquarters from late July 1775 through early April 1776. The real building is now Longfellow National Historic Site, an N.P.S. property in Cambridge, and is open for tours all summer.

In addition, I hear that the Braintree Historical Society will host an encampment by the French Regiments Saintonge and Bourbon on the weekend of 18-19 July 2009. This will be on the grounds of the 1785 Sylvanus Thayer House, 786 Washington Street, in Braintree. The schedule includes a farmers’ market, military and civilian demonstrations, games, a visit from Mr. and Mrs. Adams, and candlelit music and dancing with the Wayside Inn Steppers in the evening.

Joseph Palmer’s Letter on Lexington

At the blog of the National Heritage Museum in Lexington, Jeff Croteau offered a look at an official period copy of Joseph Palmer’s letter about the shots at Lexington, sent south with an express rider named Israel Bissell. That letter will be on display in the museum for the rest of this week only.

Joseph Palmer (1716-1788) was born in England and came to Massachusetts in 1746 with his wife Mary and her young brother, Richard Cranch. The two men developed a glass factory (archeological debris here) and other workshops in the Germantown section of Braintree, as explained in this lecture by Warren S. Parker. Cranch married Abigail Adams’s older sister Mary. The Palmers had a son, Joseph Pearse Palmer, and all three men were drawn into Revolutionary politics. Reportedly the older Joseph broke with the London government only after the Boston Massacre.

In 1774, Joseph Palmer became a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, and then of its Committee of Safety. On 18 Apr 1775, he was staying in Watertown at the house of Joseph P. Palmer’s in-laws, the Hunts. That son’s wife, Elizabeth Palmer, later wrote this account:

On the night of the eighteenth of April, I heard the drum beat; I waked Mr. Palmer and said, “My dear, I hear the drum”

He was out of bed with the rapidity of a bullet from a gun and, while he was dressing, his father entered and said, “My son, we must ride, I have received an express. Three men lie dead at Lexington.” My husband was off in an instant.

I entreated the old gentleman not to go, but he would not stay. He told me that there would probably be another brigade along soon and that I had better remove out of the way. They had their horses saddled and their pistols loaded in the barn, for they expected some sudden alarm. They were gone immediately. I never saw anything more of them until the next night at ten o’clock.

I don’t believe all that; the family’s legends don’t all add up. But the letter in the National Heritage Museum’s collection shows that Palmer was active on the morning of 19 Apr 1775, spreading the word about the fight at Lexington on behalf of the Provincial Congress.

Today Jeff has posted about Israel Bissell’s route from Watertown to New York, using Google Maps. It took Bissell only four days riding, which shows how much he hurried. Along the way officials copied Palmer’s letter in order to pass the news on to others, and this document is one of those hurried copies, made for the Committee of Correspondence in Norwich, Connecticut.

[ADDENDUM: Please see Boston 1775’s 2010 postings about Isaac Bissell.]

Massachusetts Manuscript Maps

Back in January I bumped into the Massachusetts Historical Society’s “Massachusetts Maps” online exhibit. A lot of these images are manuscript maps—i.e., drawn by hand, not made for mass reproduction, and thus not to be seen anywhere else. Until now.

Among the choice selections:

• A British army officer’s map of Charlestown, Boston, and Dorchester in late 1775, showing the fortifications of his army and the rebels.
• Society founder Jeremy Belknap’s map of Boston harbor that same year.
• Belknap’s sketch of the extent of a fire in Boston in April 1787, with the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles’s house at the top and the site of the chopped-down Liberty Tree at bottom. “Frog Lane” is now [CORRECTED] the part of Boylston Street that defines a southern border of the Common.
• Belknap’s similar report on the fire of 1794, which shows the ropewalks where fights broke out between workers and soldiers in March 1770 as well as some landmarks of post-Revolutionary society: the controversial Federal Street Theater, the Tontine Crescent, and the Boston Glass-house.

The exhibit also offers a look at other locations in Massachusetts:

• John Adams’s notes on Braintree and Weymouth in 1760.
• Berkshire County in 1777, when it extended more to the east than today.
• Nehemiah Bennett’s 1785 map of Stoughton, which shows “Col. [Richard] Gridleys Mill.”

And I’ve barely started to explore the graphic representation of the comprehensive Boston property survey of 1798.

“The Importation of Germans”

In a recent Boston Globe, Stephen Kenney described how our country’s conflicting attitudes toward immigrant labor—both “Stay Out” and “Come Do Our Dirty Work”—have deep roots:

In the mid-18th century, the Province of Massachusetts Bay recruited German immigrants to work as printers and glassmakers. A lottery was established to finance the project, and skilled workers were exempted from military service. . . .

In 1750, the Massachusetts General Court crafted an immigration reform measure: “An Act to prevent the Importation of Germans and other Foreign Passengers in too Great a Number in one Vessel.” It reflected a fear of disease. “Through want of necessary room and Accommodations,” aboard ships, “they may often Contract Mortal and Contagious Distempers [and infect others] on their arrival.” . . .

Today, records of this German immigration remain in the Massachusetts Archives. During the Great Depression they were taped into notebooks as part of a WPA project. A grant from the National Foundation for the Humanities funded their conservation, preserving them from the corrosive effects of brown, oozing tape and iron gall ink.

Among those Germans coming into the Broad Bay area of northern Massachusetts (now Maine) in 1752 were Georg Frederich Seiter, born 1727 in Langensteinbach, and Christine Salome Hartwick. The following year, they moved down to Braintree, when Joseph Palmer and Richard Cranch were trying to establish a glass factory and other early industrial facilities in an area still called Germantown. George and Sarah, as the young immigrants came to be known, got married on 20 Mar 1753.

The Seiders (another name change) had three children in Braintree, the last being a son they named Christopher, baptized 18 Mar 1759. After the glass factory burned, the family moved to Boston, where they had three more children. Around the time of his eleventh birthday, Christopher became the first person to die in a Boston riot against the new Crown policies. (Here’s what happened.) So there’s a direct link between this wave of immigration at mid-century and the Revolution a generation later.

Most of the preceding genealogical information comes from Wilford W. Whitaker and Gary T. Horlacher’s Broad Bay Germans: 18th Century German-Speaking Settlers of Present-Day Waldoboro, Maine, published in 1998 by Picton Press.