A Print of a “Patriotick Barber”

On 14 Feb 1775, 250 years ago today, Robert Sayer and John Bennett published a satirical print, probably created by Philip Dawe, titled “The Patriotick Barber of New York.”

As I discussed back here, that was one of several images Sayer, Bennett, and probably Dawe produced for British customers interested in American affairs.

The artist appears to have taken inspiration from news stories printed in British newspapers. In this case, the article appeared in the 7 January Kentish Gazette, the 13 January Edinburgh Advertiser, and perhaps elsewhere.

As quoted by R. T. H. Haley in The Boston Port Bill as Pictured by a Contemporary London Cartoonist, it said:

The following card, copies of which were circulated at New York, is too singular not to merit insertion:

“A Card,
“New York, Oct. 3rd.

“The thanks of the worthy sons of liberty in solemn Congress assembled, were this night voted and unanimously allowed to be justly due to Mr. Jacob Vredenburgh, Barber, for his firm spirited and patriotic conduct, in refusing to complete an operation, vulgarly called Shaving, which he had begun on the face of Captain John Crozer, Commander of the Empress of Russia, one of his Majesty’s [troop] transports, now lying in the river, but most fortunately and providentially was informed of the identity of the gentleman’s person, when he had about half finished the job.

“It is most devoutly to be wished that all Gentlemen of the Razor will follow this wise, prudent, interesting and praiseworthy example, so steadily, that every person who pays due allegiance to his Majesty, and wishes Peace, Happiness, and Unanimity to the Colonies, may have his beard grow as long as ever was King Nebuchadnezzar’s.”

The picture showed the barber, well wigged but ugly and sneering, pushing the handsome but half-shaved captain out of his chair. “Orders of Government” poke from the captain’s pocket while another man tries to hand him a letter marked “To Capt. Crozer.”

The print carried the subtitle “The Captain in the Suds,” and underneath it was the verse:

Then Patriot grand, maintain thy Stand,
And whilst thou sav’st Americ’s Land,
Preserve the Golden Rule;

Forbid the Captains there to roam,
Half shave them first, then send ’em home,
Objects of ridicule.

On the barbershop wall are engraved portraits of the Earls of Camden and Chatham, British politicians who spoke up for the colonies’ cause, plus Chatham’s recent speech. Beside them hangs the Continental Congress’s Articles of Association, a boycott that hadn’t actually been announced when this incident took place.

In the top and bottom of the picture are wig boxes with the names of local Whigs: “Alexander McDugell,” John Lamb, Isaac Sears, and so on. One says, “Welle Franklin.” Was that the royal governor of New Jersey?

Perhaps the most striking detail of this print is that I can’t find any mention of the incident in the American press, nor of the men involved. The event appears to have been recorded only in the British newspaper reports, and those would have been long forgotten if not for this picture.

But because the print was so dramatic, 200 years after publication it inspired Ashley Vernon and Greta Hartwig to create a one-act opera, The Barber of New York.

TOMORROW: More about the barber.

What to Expect at the Battle of Camden

Later this month a new book will appear in the Emerging Revolutionary War series: All That Can be Expected: The Battle of Camden and the British High Tide in the South, August 16, 1780, by Rob Orrison and Mark Wilcox.

With the Battle of Camden, Britain seemed to find a strategy to win back the rebellious southern colonies. Crown forces took Savannah, Georgia, in the fall of 1779, then Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1780. The king’s army, which hadn’t penetrated far inland from the northern ports, now began to set up outposts in the Carolina backcountry.

The Continental Congress assigned Gen. Horatio Gates, victor at Saratoga, to rebuild its army in the south from Continental regiments in the middle states and militia from Virginia and North Carolina. He moved against Gen. Cornwallis’s troops near Camden, South Carolina. The two forces met on 16 Aug 1780.

The title of this new book comes from a report by Lt. Col. Benjamin Ford of Maryland: The British “have done all that can be expected of them; we are outnumbered and outflanked.” Gates’s career would never recover.

At 7:00 P.M. this Sunday, 6 August, Orrison and Wilcox will chat about All That Can be Expected with series editor Dan Welch live on the Emerging Revolutionary War Facebook page. The recorded conversation will be posted on the allied YouTube and Spotify a week later.

A New Government in Britain in 1770

As the year draws to a close, I’m looking back on some of the notable events of 1770 that I didn’t discuss on their Sestercentennial anniversaries.

In January 1770, the Duke of Grafton’s government collapsed in London.

The duke had become prime minister in 1768 after William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, retired in a depression and Charles Townshend died unexpectedly. There was a lot of in-fighting among his fellow ministers, and sniping from both the left and right.

On 9 January, the lord chancellor, the Earl of Camden, ticked off all the other ministers but Grafton so much they decided he had to be replaced. Grafton asked an experienced government lawyer long allied with Pitt, Charles Yorke (shown above), to take the lord chancellor’s position. But Yorke had promised another Whig faction, under the Marquess of Rockingham, that he wouldn’t join Grafton’s government, so he declined.

At that point George III got personally involved. He invited Yorke to a private audience on 16 January and urged him to take the chancellorship. The king repeated the advice at a levee the next day, hinting that there would be no second chance. Yorke gave in, agreeing to the post in return for the usual peerage.

Almost immediately Yorke had second thoughts. (Or, given the way he’d wavered over the decision for days, seventh thoughts.) He moved from “the most violent agitation of spirits” to “a fixed state of melancholy.” On 19 January, he vomited blood. On 20 January, he died. Yorke had received the paperwork to elevate himself to be Baron Morden but had refused to put the chancellor’s seal on it.

Soon there were rumors that Yorke had committed suicide, and the debate continues. In the late nineteenth century the Dictionary of National Biography stated:

It was asserted, and came to be widely believed, that, goaded to frenzy by the resentment with which his defection was regarded by his party, the chancellor had committed suicide; and, as there was no post-mortem or other equivalent autopsy of the corpse, the lugubrious surmise remained alike uncorroborated and unrefuted.

As of this week Wikipedia says:

He went to his brother’s house, where he met the leaders of the Opposition, and feeling at once overwhelmed with shame, fled to his own house, where three days later he committed suicide (20 January 1770).

But the History of Parliament website argues:

The extraordinary circumstances of his death made it inevitable that there should be rumours of suicide. Indeed, in his Memoirs of the reign of George III [Horace] Walpole states as a fact that Yorke died ‘by his own hand’, though when he wrote to Mann, 22 Jan. 1770, he had attributed the death to natural causes. It is perhaps suspicious that the letters from Joseph Yorke to Hardwicke which must have referred to these events should have disappeared. But the case for a natural death is strong. Yorke had been in poor health for some time. On 8 Jan. 1770 he had written to Hardwicke that a ‘severe cold’ and ‘feverish heat…disables me from coming to town: I shall hardly be fit to stir before the end of the week’. On the 11th he had received Grafton’s letter asking to meet him. The succeeding days had been extremely taxing. Levett Blackborne passed on to a friend the account he had received from ‘a young lady—a relative of Mrs. Yorke’:

He ate voraciously and beyond his usual manner—which latterly was generally too much. Before the taking away of the cloth he complained of sickness and indigestion ... growing worse, he retired into a back dressing room, where he was heard retching with vehemence. After some time the family in the parlour was alarmed, and he was carried to bed having, as supposed, broke a blood vessel in vomiting.

This agrees in the main with Agneta Yorke’s account of her husband’s last days.

However he died, everyone agrees that the strain of the appointment was too much for Yorke.

Soon the Duke of Grafton resigned. The king pressed the chancellor of the exchequer and leader of the House of Commons to form a new government, which he managed to do by the end of January. That man was Lord North.

The Duke of Grafton’s government had been widely criticized for not preventing France from taking over Corsica in 1769. In contrast, Lord North’s government faced down Spain over the Falklands later in 1770. That foreign policy victory gave him standing to remain prime minister even as the crisis in the North American colonies got worse and worse.

Alexander Hamilton’s Love Letter Revealed!

Julie Miller of the Library of Congress recently wrote at Medium about the effort to read crossed-out lines in one of its Alexander Hamilton letters.

This is a 6 Sept 1780 letter from Hamilton to his fiancée Elizabeth Schuyler (“Betsey” in real life, “Eliza” in the musical), two months before they married. Most of the letter is about the American loss at the Battle of Camden (Gen. Horatio Gates “seems to know very little what has become of his army”). That material was first published in John Church Hamilton’s 1850 edition of his father’s writings.

In the twentieth-century edition of Hamilton’s papers, which make up part of Founders Online, editor Harold C. Syrett added a new detail about that document: fourteen lines of the first paragraph had been heavily crossed out and illegible.

Miller tells the next stage of the story:

When the Library of Congress recently digitized the Alexander Hamilton Papers, that letter, unedited, with its 14 obliterated lines, became visible to all for the first time. However, the lines were still unreadable.

To find out what lay beneath the scratchings-out, Fenella France, chief of the Preservation Research and Testing Division, and preservation staff Meghan Wilson and Chris Bolser used hyperspectral imaging. A noninvasive analysis that employs light at different wavelengths to capture information not visible to the eye, hyperspectral imaging can determine the composition of inks and pigments, track changes in documents over time and reveal faded, erased or covered writing.

The article shows that process and what Library of Congress scholars now believe those crossed-out lines say. Most likely John C. Hamilton deleted them himself out of familial and Victorian embarrassment at his father writing to his mother about the couple anticipating “the unrestrained intercourses of wedded love.”

As Miller points out, that’s far from the biggest deletion from Alexander Hamilton’s correspondence. All the letters that Elizabeth Hamilton wrote to her fiancé and husband are gone, most likely destroyed by her own choice.

More to See at Saratoga and Camden

Two important Revolutionary War battlefields have recently been augmented with more land, according to news reports.

However, in both cases that land was already owned by an organization devoted to environmental and/or historical preservation. So these additional acres don’t appear to have been in danger of being built or paved on.

The New York History Blog reported:

Saratoga National Historical Park finalized the acquisition of 170 acres of historically significant land in April, after 10 years of collaboration with the Open Space Institute (OSI). After a minor administrative boundary adjustment to the park in 2016, Saratoga successfully secured funding from the Land and Water Conservation Fund to provide for the transfer of the property from OSI.

The property, located in the Town of Stillwater at the northeast end of the park on State Route 4, is a key portion of the historic site of the Battles of Saratoga, considered by many to be the turning point of the American Revolution. In September of 1777, this parcel was surrounded by the British Army to the north and the American Army to the south. When the British broke camp and advanced upon the American positions, General [John] Burgoyne and his troops occupied the high ground on this property, making it the “high water mark” of the British Army’s advance southward from Canada toward Albany. A road cut diagonally across this parcel and a fortification was built on the hilltop to block the road.

The land, purchased by OSI in 2005, also included a segment of the historic Champlain Canal, along which a region-wide effort is underway to construct a trail, known as the Champlain Canalway Trail, which runs for 62 miles between Whitehall and Waterford. In 2014 the town of Stillwater received a Consolidated Funding Application grant to complete the segment of the path that runs through the property, and in 2016 OSI donated that portion of the property to the Town of Stillwater. Navigating the administrative logistics of funding, boundary revisions, and coordinating environmental analysis and appraisals was finally complete to ensure the protection of this treasured landscape.

The Battle(s) of Saratoga was of course a major American victory, and that area has been preserved and celebrated for a long time.

It’s harder to find support to preserve the sites of major American defeats. In Camden, South Carolina, the local Chronicle-Independent newspaper reported on a portion of the battlefield where Gen. Horatio Gates lost big-time to Gen. Cornwallis:

The Palmetto Conservation Foundation recently transferred ownership of the 476-acre core battlefield to the Historic Camden Foundation. The battlefield is recognized as a National Historic Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. . . .

Historic Camden Foundation also owns and manages the related Revolutionary War site, “Historic Camden,” south of the modern downtown. Historic Camden, which includes the original colonial village site, is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is recognized as a National Park Service affiliate. . . .

Plans for the property transfer began in earnest last fall. Historic Camden reviewed documents and reports from PCF, including “Battle of Camden Development Report, 2016,” compiled by the Olde English District tourism agency. Historic Camden provided legal and financial documents for PCF review. Both PCF’s and Historic Camden’s boards of directors gave final approval in late winter for the real estate transaction. . . .

PCF acquired the battlefield in 2002 when Katawba Valley Land Trust and Historic Camden asked for help to protect the battlefield from private sale and development. The organizations first negotiated a conservation easement with property owner Bowater Inc., a pulp and paper corporation. The easement protected 310 acres of the battlefield’s core. . . . Because Bowater wanted to sell rather than own property with a conservation easement, PCF purchased the 310 acres. Five years later in 2007, PCF purchased 161 adjoining acres owned by Crescent Resources, which was a subsidiary of Duke Energy. Both acquisitions were funded through the South Carolina Conservation Bank. The Daughters of the American Revolution also transferred to PCF the 6 acres they had protected since 1907. Katawba Valley Land Trust continues to hold the property under permanent conservation protection.

After assuming ownership, PCF conducted archaeological research to locate and protect graves and cultural resources, curated artifacts for public display in the Camden Archives and Museum, and replanted longleaf pine to help restore the battlefield landscape. As a trail-builder, PCF also constructed three miles of walking trails with interpretive signage, a podcast of battle history, and a digital topographic map.

Historic Camden plans to continue PCF’s work, and strengthen the connection between Camden’s history and the larger Southern Campaign that won the War for Independence.

People can see that “core battlefield” land by driving on Flat Rock Road 2.2 miles off U.S. Highway 521. The newspaper adds, “The remaining 824 acres where the Battle of Camden was fought are privately owned.”

“George, be King”

John Nicholls (1744-1832) was a Member of Parliament from 1783 to 1787, and again from 1796 to 1802.

Politically, Nicholls leaned to the left, opposing Edmund Burke and then the younger William Pitt and eventually his early ally Charles James Fox. He saw good in the early French Revolution, opposed British war measures, and championed electoral reforms.

Nicholls’s father had been physician to George II, so he was privy to court gossip from an early age. But of course his political views colored how he interpreted gossip about that monarch and his grandson and successor. In his Recollections and Reflections Personal and Political as Connected with Public Affairs during the Reign of George III, published in 1820, Nicholls profiled the new king this way:

The young King (for he was at that time little more than twenty-two years of age) was of a good person, sober, temperate, of domestic habits, addicted to no vice, swayed by no passion—what had not the nation to expect from such a character? . . .

I recollect the expression used to my father by Mr. [Charles] Pratt, at that time Attorney General, afterwards better known by the name of Lord Camden, within four months after the King’s accession: “I see already, that this will be a weak and an inglorious reign.”

I recollect also the relation which a friend of my father’s gave to him of a conversation which he had had with Charles Townshend: “I said to Charles Townshend, I don’t want to know any state secrets, but do tell me what is the character of this young man?” After a pause, Charles Townshend replied, “He is very obstinate.”

It was also observed that the Princess Dowager of Wales had kept the young Prince from having any confidential intimacy with any person except herself and the Earl of Bute: the pretence for this was the preservation of his morals. In truth, they had blockaded all approach to him. A notion has prevailed, that the Earl of Bute had suggested political opinions to the Princess Dowager; but this was certainly a mistake. In understanding, the Princess Dowager was far superior to the Earl of Bute; in whatever degree of favour he stood with her, he did not suggest, but he received, her opinions and her directions. The late Marquis of Bute told me, that at the King’s accession, his father, the Earl of Bute, had no connexion beyond the pale of Leicester House [the late Prince of Wales’s residence]. He added, “I never lived with my father, nor did any of his children.” Could such a man be fit to be a minister?

The Princess Dowager of Wales was a woman of a very sound understanding, and was considered as such by all who had occasion to converse with her. But she had been educated in the Court of her father, the Duke of Saxe Gotha. . . . When the Princess of Wales came to the Court of St. James, she found the British Sovereign a very different character from that which she had seen at Saxe Gotha. She found him controlled by his Ministers, indulged in petty gratifications, but compelled to submit to their opinions on all important subjects. We cannot be surprised that she was disgusted at this; and it is well known that she ever impressed upon the King from his early years this lesson, “George, be King.”

In his History of the Life and Reign of George IV (1831), William Wallace cited Nicholls and repeated his analysis, but turned that quotation from the Princess Dowager into “George, be a king.”

George III indeed tried to influence the ministries that governed under him. But he also sincerely believed in the British constitutional notion of Parliament’s sovereignty. After Gen. Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown, he accepted the defeat of Lord North’s ministry—a major step away from monarchical supremacy.

London’s Response to the Marshfield Loyalists

In February 1775 Gen. Thomas Gage received the thanks of the town of Marshfield, or at least of the Loyalist majority at that February town meeting, for stationing British soldiers in that town.

The royal governor responded as protocol demanded: he sent back a public letter of gratitude, praising the citizens’ initiative “at a Time when Treason and Rebellion is making such hasty Strides to overturn our most excellent Constitution, and spread Ruin and Destruction through the Province.” Likewise, Adm. Samuel Graves thanked the town for its loyalty.

Back in January, Gage had reported to his superiors in London how he had sent troops to Marshfield and expected good results. He might even have started to turn the political tide, regaining some control over Massachusetts outside of Boston.

Marshfield came up as Parliament debated further steps to pacify New England. Former governor Thomas Hutchinson (shown above) visited the House of Lords on the afternoon of 16 March. In his diary he recorded that one of the colonies’ strongest supporters, Lord Camden

upbraided the Ministry with being pleased with every appearance of concession from the Americans: a little town of Marshfield had desired soldiers from Gage; he thought it was an inland town, and that 100 men had marched 40 miles into the country without being destroyed: but, alas! it appears by the map to be a town upon the sea coast, to which the men were sent by water—a town which had six of Mr Hutchinson’s Justices in it.

Upon mentioning my name, most of the Bishops, and many Lords who sat with their backs to me, turned about and looked in my face. It happened that I never made a Justice in that town whilst I was in the Government.

Two days later, Hutchinson complained to Jonathan Sewall in unusually emotional terms about Lord Camden’s remark:

I am a little angry wth him for asserting that the departure of the little town of Marshfield from the confederacy was owing to Mr Hutchinson’s having made six Justices there, wch. brought the eyes of the Lords upon me, who, I doubt not, believed him, though it happens unluckily for him that I never made a Justice in that town. Our American patr[iots] hardly exceed him in boldly asserting, to say the least, what he knows not to be true (you may transpose not if you will) to support his cause.

Ld Suffolk spake very well. Ld Mansf. was silent, but looked with sovereign contempt upon his adversary. Attending two or three debates in the H. of L. has lessened the high opinion I had formed of the dignity of it when I was in England before.

On 30 March, Parliament passed the New England Restraining Act, designed to apply economic pressure to the whole region in the same way the Boston Port Bill was squeezing Boston. That law limited both trade and fishing out of New England ports. However, it made a couple of exceptions, such as:

XI. Provided also, and be it enacted by the authority aforesaid, That nothing in this Act contained respecting the Fisheries carried on by his Majesty’s subjects in North America, shall extend, or be construed to extend, to any Ship or Vessel being the property of any of the inhabitants of the Townships of Marshfield and Scituate, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, employed in or carrying on the Mackerel, Shad, and Alewife Fisheries only, if the Master or other person having the charge of any such Ship or Vessel as aforesaid, shall produce a Certificate, under the hand and seal of the Governour or Commander-in-Chief of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, setting forth that such Ship or Vessel, (expressing her name and the name of her Master, and describing her built and burthen) is the whole and entire property of his Majesty’s subjects of the said Townships of Marshfield and Scituate, and was the property of one or more of them, on or before the twenty-fifth day of March, in the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, which Certificate or Certificates such Governour or Commander-in-Chief is hereby authorized and required to grant.

Thus, Parliament viewed Marshfield and its neighbor to the north—the one part of Massachusetts that appeared to have welcomed the king’s troops—as not part of the rebellion.

TOMORROW: Was Marshfield a “Tory town”?

The House of Lords Considers the Declaratory Act

The Rockingham government’s strategy to extricate itself from the unenforceable Stamp Act and yet maintain Parliament’s authority was to couple the repeal of that law with the Declaratory Act.

That act stated outright that Parliament’s laws were binding in British colonies. No other legislature in the empire could be more powerful than the Parliament in London. That would become part of the constitution of the British Empire.

In an undated letter to Lt. Gov. Cadwallader Colden of New York, Maj. Thomas James, who went to London after an anti-Stamp mob destroyed his house on 1 Nov 1765, described the Lords’ debate on the law this way:

the House of Lords in point of Question; whether the Mother Country has a Right to lay an Internal Tax upon the Americans? and whether the Colonies are not subject to the Decrees of King Lords and Commons.

Given by 125 to 5 That the Colonies are subject to the Laws of Great Britain; and that the Acts of the House of Commons are binding throughout all the Colonies of America

The 5 in favour of America were Cambden — Paulet — Torrington — Cornwallis — Shelburn — The first made a very Good Speech upon a Wrong Cause But the Lord Chancellor [the Earl of Northington] Cut Him to pieces; and observed; He wonderd how Lord Cambden could attempt to support so bad so dangerous and so unjust an Argument, with so serene a Countenance;

The Commons have resolved that the Colonies ought to be subject to the Laws and Decrees of Great Britain; they are softening all Resolves with a firmness, that they shall be permanent. The Repeal of the [Stamp] Act will be the last Resolve. I believe it will be softened—

Of the five peers who voted against the Declaratory Act, Baron Camden succeeded his nemesis Northington as Lord Chancellor later that year. Camden continued to advocate for American rights even more than his colleagues in the short-lived Chatham administration. His speech against the Declaratory Act indirectly led to the phrase “No Taxation without Representation.”

Charles Powlett, the Duke of Bolton, committed suicide in July. Not even Horace Walpole knew why. His brother succeeded him, switching from the opposition in the House of Commons to supporting the government until 1778, when he got sick of how the American War was going.

Viscount Torrington was a young man, only twenty-four. He married a daughter of the Earl of Cork in July, and they had several children. He voted for less strict policy toward America at a couple of other important moments but doesn’t appear to have been a vocal political leader.

The Earl of Shelburne became prime minister late in the American War and completed the 1783 Treaty of Paris to end it. Under his next and higher peerage, Marquess of Lansdowne, he was the recipient of Gilbert Stuart’s famous full-length portrait of George Washington.

And finally there’s Earl Cornwallis (shown above), in 1766 a lieutenant colonel in the army as well as a peer. We know what he had to do in the Revolutionary War. Afterwards, Cornwallis went on to a more successful career building the British Empire in India.

Stamp Act Approved by Lords

On 27 Feb 1765 the House of Commons gave final approval to the new Stamp Act for North America. The bill then moved on to the House of Lords.

The North American colonies had some friends in the British peerage, or at least men willing to argue against chief minister George Grenville. However, the Duke of Newcastle (1693-1768), a former chief minister, seems to have been mostly retired. The Marquess of Rockingham (1730-1782, shown here) was the rising leader of the Whig opposition, but on this point he was silent.

In another year, Rockingham’s legal ally Charles Pratt (1714-1794) would be Baron Camden, and wartime minister William Pitt (1708-1778) would be the Earl of Chatham. They would advocate for North America in the upper house during the following years, but not yet.

The Lords approved the law on 8 Mar 1765. There was no debate and no vote against.

The Stamp Act went to King George III for final approval. And then it ran into unexpected trouble.

The Earliest Appearance of “No Taxation without Representation” (so far)

In March 1766, Parliament repealed its Stamp Act for North America but passed the Declaratory Act, meant to establish that it had the power to pass laws governing those colonies—including, implicitly, new tax laws.

One of the few voices against the Declaratory Act was Charles Pratt, first Baron Camden, soon to be Lord Chancellor of England. He argued, as he’d done when the Stamp Act was proposed, that since the colonists didn’t have any representatives in Parliament, by British tradition Parliament shouldn’t have the power to tax them.

Very few Members of Parliament agreed. Camden’s political ally William Pitt actually wrote the Declaratory Act. Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice, said Camden was mistaken. Only four other Lords voted against the bill.

That debate occurred just before London printers made a routine of reporting Parliament‘s proceedings in detail. But a few months later someone sent the text of Camden’s speech to printer John Almon (1737-1805), who included it in his Political Register for 1767. The text appeared in a gingerly form, perhaps as a thin guard against accusations of sedition: all the proper names were removed, so it recorded “L— C——” speaking to the “B—— p———” on the issue of taxing the “A——— c——.”

Camden had said:

My position is this—I repeat it—I will maintain it to my last hour,—taxation and representation are inseparable;—this position is founded on the laws of nature; it is more, it is itself an eternal law of nature; for whatever is a man’s own, is absolutely his own; no man hath a right to take it from him without his consent, either expressed by himself or representative; whoever attempts to do it, attempts an injury; whoever does it, commits a robbery; he throws down and destroys the distinction between liberty and slavery. Taxation and representation are coeval with and essential to this constitution. . . .

In short, my lords, from the whole of our history, from the earliest period, you will find that taxation and representation were always united; so true are the words of that consummate reasoner and politician Mr. [John] Locke.

As you can see, Camden’s argument was based on the linkage of taxation and representation. But nowhere in the speech did the baron use the phrase “taxation without representation.”

The Scots Magazine reprinted Camden’s speech in 1767. The London Magazine, or Gentlemen’s Monthly Intelligencer ran the text on two pages the following February. That magazine’s running head for the first page was “L— C——’s Speech.” The second page, as preserved by Google Books, was summed up this way:

And that page, published in February 1768, is the earliest appearance of the phrase “[No] Taxation without Representation” that I’ve found. It debuted in big letters at the top of a page of a widely circulated magazine. I suspect that pithy, rhyming summary of the argument below stuck in many readers’ minds and became the slogan for the American cause.

Thus, I posit that the person who coined the deathless phrase “taxation without representation” wasn’t James Otis, Jr., or the Rev. John Joachim Zubly or even Lord Camden. It was John Almon or an anonymous editor or printer in his shop, looking for a way to headline a couple of columns of text in a limited number of characters.

Saratoga Not the Turning Point?

The Smithsonian website offers Prof. John Ferling’s article “Myths of the American Revolution”. Ferling explores how some common generalizations about the war aren’t completely correct, and may in fact be mostly incorrect. As an example:

Saratoga was not the turning point of the war. Protracted conflicts—the Revolutionary War was America’s longest military engagement until Vietnam nearly 200 years later—are seldom defined by a single decisive event. In addition to Saratoga, four other key moments can be identified.

The first of those four moments is the combination of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, which, one might argue, was a starting point rather than a turning point. But those events did mark a turn from a political conflict with threatening military moves by both sides to a shooting war.

I’ll let you discover the three other “turning points” Ferling mentions. To make it harder, not all of them are battlefield developments. To make it easier, they all involve the tide turning in favor of the Americans.

But surely there had to be moments when the war turned in favor of the British, right? Otherwise, the war wouldn’t have lasted so long. Gen. William Howe’s sweeping reconquest of New York in 1776 wiped out a lot of the American momentum after successful campaigns at Boston and Charleston. Similarly, Howe’s victory at Brandywine sent the Congress scrambling out of its capital and erased the memory of Gen. George Washington’s smaller battlefield triumphs months before.

Finally, as Ferling notes elsewhere in the article, the British military’s southern strategy looked very good after the battle of Camden, with Georgia back in the Empire, Charleston firmly in British hands, and many Americans sick of the war. At that point, the Americans really needed a new turning point.