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.

Thorson on “Stone Walls on Minute Man,” 27 Feb.

On Saturday, 27 February, the Friends of Minute Man National Park will host its free Winter Lecture, this time beamed through the walls of our own homes.

This year Prof. Robert Thorson will speak about “The Stone Walls of Minute Man National Park.” Those walls are of course an icon of New England’s agricultural past.

After the battle of Lexington and Concord, many British officers and officials commented on the provincial militiamen using stone walls for cover. Historian and Member of Parliament Edward Gibbon, for instance, wrote: “Our troops during the march and retreat were chiefly harassed by flying parties from behind the stone walls along the road and by many shots from the windows as they passed through the villages.”

James T. Austin’s 1828 biography of Elbridge Gerry may be the earliest publication of Benjamin Franklin’s supposed response to people in London mentioning that detail as evidence of American cowardice: “I beg to enquire, if these same walls had not two sides to them?”

Whether or not that’s true, the Continental Congress delegate Charles Carroll credited Franklin with a parodic song 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:

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

Back to Prof. Thorson’s talk. Thorson is a geologist who has authored several books on stone walls. He has an intimate knowledge of the walls of Minute Man Park through his work on various projects there, notably at the Old North Bridge, Parker’s Revenge, and Bloody Angle locations.

Folks will be able to view this lecture via Zoom, through the Minuteman Media Network website, or in Concord and Carlisle live on cable channel 99. It is scheduled to run from 2:00 to 3:30 P.M. on Saturday.

The Junto Reviews the Books of Pauline Maier

Early this month The Junto devoted a week of their blog to reviewing the legacy of historian Pauline Maier, who died this summer. Their essays discuss both Pauline’s four major books (she also wrote valuable articles, reviews, and teaching texts) and where she fit into the late-1900s “ideology” school of historians of the Revolution. All the posts are worth reading, but here are some highlights.

Michael Blaakman on From Resistance to Revolution:

Maier demonstrated just how much a scholar can do by writing a history of both ideas and events, in ways that seem to me to have inspired many of the questions and methods that drove the subsequent generation of New New Political Historians. That ever-elusive sweet spot—where ideas and action, process and perception, meet—was the source of Maier’s powerful argument about why the revolutionaries opted for republican self-government after independence, and about how they learned its ins and outs through the work of colonial resistance.

Sara Georgini on The Old Revolutionaries:

Maier’s prosopography of five men and their “worlds,” accentuated by a thoughtful “interlude” on the rigors of political life in the colonies, marked a change in how historians used individual biographies to retell the Revolution to post-bicentennial Americans. First given as a series of lectures at New York University in 1976, the essays gather a fairly random matrix of people for a group shot of colonial life: Samuel Adams, Isaac Sears, Dr. Thomas Young, Richard Henry Lee, and Charles Carroll [plus] [New Hampshire Continental Congress delegate] Josiah and [wife] Mary Bartlett. . . . Wisely, Maier seized this opportunity to remind the reader that revolutionary thought did not happen outside of the colonists’ mundane or personal experience, but during and because of it.

Roy Rogers on American Scripture:

Maier makes several downright revolutionary moves in her interpretation of the Declaration and the movement toward American independence, more broadly. The most important, and most challenging to the common assumptions of historians and laypersons alike, is that there is nothing truly original about the Declaration. Maier sees the document “as a statement of political philosophy, [it] was…purposefully unexceptional in 1776.”

Ken Owen on Ratification:

The attention to detail, and especially the evident desire to treat each and every participant in the debates [over the Constitution] with respect for their views, is an approach that could easily tend to the arcane. Yet Maier writes with a verve and an evident passion for telling the story that can engage academic specialists with its attention to detail, yet also provide a gripping read for. It is easy to see that Maier had great fun researching, writing, and talking to others about this book…

Of these books I found From Resistance to Revolution most helpful for what interests me about pre-Revolutionary New England. The Old Revolutionaries might be the best for more casual reading since it focuses on individuals and each chapter can be taken on its own.

Paul Jennings: “required a ladder to get it down”

In sorting out the various stories of how George Washington’s portrait was removed from the White House before the arrival of British troops in 1814, lately scholars have been paying special attention to the 1865 memoir of Paul Jennings, enslaved in the White House at the time.

Jennings (shown here, courtesy of the Library of America blog) was born in 1799, so he was still in his mid-teens as the foreign enemy approached. Over fifty years later he stated:

It has often been stated in print, that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White House she cut out from the frame the large portrait of Washington (now in one of the parlors there), and carried it off. This is totally false. She had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment. John Susé (a Frenchman, then door-keeper, and still living) and Magraw, the President’s gardener, took it down and sent it off on a wagon, with some large silver urns and such other valuables as could be hastily got hold of.

“John Susé” was obviously Jean Pierre Sioussat, whom Dolley Madison called “French John.” “Magraw, the President’s gardener,” was called an “Irish gardener, Thomas M’Gaw,” in Charles J. Ingersoll’s 1849 history of the war.

Some later authors said that Jennings held the ladder for Sioussat as he lifted the portrait off the wall, but Jennings made no such statement. In fact, he claimed no personal role in saving the portrait. I suspect that those later authors read that slaves had been involved, knew that Jennings was a slave in the White House, and made the leap to rendering him one of those slaves. But there were several other slaves on the scene as well, and he took no credit for saving the picture.

Furthermore, while Jennings refuted authors who stated that Dolley Madison cut the painting from its frame, he didn’t contradict Madison herself because she made no such claim. In her letters she wrote that she “insisted” on and “ordered” and “directed” the work. First Ladies with servants don’t lift heavy objects or break wooden furniture themselves. After all, that’s what servants are for.

All the accounts—from Madison, Jacob Barker, Sioussat, and Jennings—are easy to reconcile when we consider the:

• confusion and distress of the evacuation of Washington.
• large number of servants and other helpers who were probably rushing around, trying to save valuables, necessities, and lives.
• decades between the event and when people set down their recollections.

Madison gave the orders. Sioussat probably took charge of carrying them out. Sioussat, McGraw, and some anonymous black servants, free or enslaved, did much of the actual heavy lifting. (Jennings was privy to that work but not greatly involved; as a young footman who belonged to the Madisons, he might have been busy with their personal effects.) Barker, Robert DePeyster, and their anonymous slaves drove the painting away to safety.

The steps of the process appear to have been:

• deciding that the portrait must be saved.
• getting it down off the wall.
• breaking it out of its big decorative frame (leaving the canvas uncut and still stretched on its inner frame).
• loading the canvas into a wagon to be moved.

In 1849 Sioussat told Ingersoll that Dolley Madison was gone before all these steps were complete, and Jennings hints the same. However, she must have stayed long enough to ask Barker and DePeyster to drive it away, and by that time it was down from the wall. Again, she made the arrangements, though the servants did the work.

Jean Pierre Sioussat: “laboring with a hatchet”

Busy in the background of the accounts of saving George Washington’s portrait from the advancing British army in 1814 are the servants—the people who probably did most of the heavy work. Dolley Madison wrote, “I directed my servants in what manner to remove it from the walls.” Jacob Barker recalled being “assisted by two colored boys” as he drove away with the canvas.

Some of those servants were still living in the capital when this episode launched a minor historical controversy in 1848. One was Jean Pierre Sioussat (1781-1864), White House doorman during the James Madison administration (shown here). Dolley Madison referred to him as “French John (a faithful domestic)” in the letter she dated 1814 and provided to a biographer more than twenty years later.

Charles J. Ingersoll relied on Sioussat’s memory in his Historical Sketch of the Second War between the United States of America and Great Britain (1849):

Mrs. Madison, with the carving-knife in her hand, stood by while French John and others strove to detach the picture uninjured from its heavy external gilt frame, and preserve it whole on the inner wooden work, by which it was kept distended and screwed to the wall.

Charles Carroll, of Bellevue, a gentleman intimate in the President’s family, entered from the affair of Bladensburg [i.e., the British rout of American forces], while the French porter, John Siousa, and Irish gardener, Thomas M’Gaw, were laboring with a hatchet to take down the picture, and remonstrated against Mrs. Madison risking capture for such an object, which, Mr. Carroll urged, ought not to delay her departure.

Her letter to her sister, Mrs. Washington, states that the picture was secured before she left the house. Mr. Siousa, who is highly worthy of credit, thinks she was gone before it was done, as her letter expresses the accomplishment. The Irish gardener, to whose aid, in the midst of the work, Mr. Jacob Barker came in, according to Siousa’s recollection, while he was gone to bring an axe, got the picture down from the wall, and placed it in the hands of Mr. Barker; with whom, according to Siousa’s statement, there was no other person except a black man, whom he took for Mr. Barker’s servant.

There might be other descriptions based on Sioussat’s stories, but I haven’t found any directly from him or claiming to be based entirely on his words.

TOMORROW: A fifteen-year-old witness, and trying to pull it all together.

Jacob Barker: “the portrait was taken by Mr. Depeyster and myself”

When Charles Carroll of Bellevue’s son claimed that his father had saved the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington in the White House in 1814, Dolley Madison wasn’t the only person who responded.

In 1847 Jacob Barker (1779-1871), a businessman in New Orleans, wrote a letter confirming that he and Robert DePeyster had carried the painting away from the presidential mansion at the First Lady’s behest. Barker also wrote: “Several persons assisted in taking down the portrait, and the most active was the venerable Mr. Carroll.”

That wasn’t good enough for the younger Carroll, who wrote a newspaper article niggling at Barker’s mistaken details. Barker then replied with a much longer account of the event, dated 8 Feb 1848. This extract picks up as Barker rushes back to the White House after the American defenses have broken:

As soon as our troops broke and retreated, the President sent his servant express to warn his good lady of her danger, with directions to leave immediately. . . . The messenger preceded me five or ten minutes, having passed me on the Pennsylvania avenue, and given the information, with a request that I would repair to the house and assist in their departure. . . .

Whether I found your father there, or whether he came in subsequently, I do not know; but I do know that he assisted in taking down the portrait of Washington and left the house with the President, leaving the portrait on the floor of the room in which it had been suspended to take care of itself, where it remained until the remnant of our army, reduced to about 4,000, passed by, taking the direction of Georgetown, when the portrait was taken by Mr. Depeyster and myself, assisted by two colored boys, from the said room; and with it we fell into the trail of the army and continued with it some miles. Overtaken by night, and greatly fatigued, we sought shelter in a farm house.

No other persons assisted in removing or preserving the picture. I acted at the special request of Mrs. Madison, and Mr. Depeyster co-operated with me in carrying her wishes into effect. I always supposed the praiseworthy solicitude originated with her; it would require very positive and clear proof to induce me to change that opinion. It certainly did not originate with me or with Mr. Depeyster; nor have I ever intimated that any other than Mrs. Madison was entitled to the least credit therefor.

The younger Carroll responded with more angry accusations, so in Barker’s next public letter, later in 1848, he cited Dolley Madison’s authority to assert that Charles Carroll deserved no credit at all, not even for helping to get the painting down from the wall. So there.

COMING UP: The servants speak.

(The photograph about shows Charles Carroll’s 1801 Bellevue mansion in Washington, D.C., now known as Dumbarton House and the headquarters of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America.)

Dolley Madison: “I have ordered the frame to be broken”

Among the most famous legends of Dolley Madison is that she saved Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington from the White House as the British army approached the capital in 1814. Thomas Fleming’s Smithsonian article “How Dolley Madison Saved the Day” does a good job of retelling this story.

A major source for that episode is Madison’s own letter to her sister dated 23 Aug 1814, which says in part:

Our kind friend, Mr. [Charles] Carroll, has come to hasten my departure, and is in a very bad humor with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of Gen. Washington is secured, and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall. This process was found too tedious for these perilous moments; I have ordered the frame to be broken, and the canvass taken out it is done, and the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen of New York, for safe keeping.

However, that letter exists only as a manuscript Madison created in the 1830s for a biographer. In a 1998 article “Dolley Madison Has the Last Word” (readable here), David Mattern notes that this text has a different tone from a letter she definitely wrote after fleeing Washington, more brave and less self-pitying. As a result, historians think that Madison might have composed that account from memory or reshaped an authentic contemporaneous letter to tell the story as she wished it made public.

In the mid-1840s Charles Carroll of Bellevue’s son began to assert publicly that his father had been responsible for saving the Washington painting. In 1848 Dolley Madison wrote that Carroll didn’t deserve such credit. She reiterated that saving the painting was her idea: “I directed my servants in what manner to remove it from the walls, remaining with them until it was done.” She also identified the two New York gentlemen who received the painting as Jacob Barker and Robert DePeyster—the latter being the father of the newspaper publisher to whom she wrote.

COMING UP: Other eyewitness statements.