Looking All the Way Back on History Camp 2022

Many of the sessions at last month’s History Camp Boston were recorded, and the videos are going up on the web now.

I started the morning with a talk on “Digging and Debunking: Using Online Tools to Investigate the Myths of American History.” I’m not sure I actually got to all the topics promised in the description:

From Founders’ quotes to inspirational legends to details that historians have repeated for so long that nobody considers where they came from, our history abounds with assertions that we should be skeptical about. This workshop discusses how to assess such historical tales and tidbits. It will share tactics for using Google Books and other free resources to pinpoint when and where stories arose, and lay out the dynamic of “grandmother’s tales,” “memory creep,” and other ways legends spread. And every so often these techniques reveal that a story almost too good to be true is supported by solid evidence.

Then again, I wrote that description in late 2019, so I’m just glad that I got to this talk at all. (The blog posting I used as a visual aid and online starting-point is here.)

At the end of the day I was part of a panel on “Using New Media to Present History” organized by Michael Troy of the American Revolution Podcast, with Jake Sconyers of HUB History and Larisa Moran of History Dame.

A panel of podcasters, bloggers, and video bloggers discusses how new forms of media are transforming the presentation of History. We will discuss how podcasting and other new media differ from traditional media, why they reach new audiences, and trends in how presenting new media is continuing to change.

As usual, those sessions conflicted directly with others I’d hoped to attend, so I’m pleased that many more talks were recorded. Here are videos of other History Camp Boston 2022 sessions on aspects of Revolutionary America:

• Matthew Wilding and Mary Adams of Revolutionary Spaces on “Gamifying History: Roleplaying the Revolution”
• Salina B. Baker on “General Nathanael Greene and the American Revolution”
• Nancy Rubin Stuart on “Poor Richard’s Women: Deborah Read Franklin and the Other Women Behind the Founding Father”
• Steve Butz on “Shays’ Settlement in Vermont”
• David Dalrymple on “Captain Patrick Ferguson’s Experimental Corps of Riflemen”
• Roberta DeCenzo on “The Last Civilian Royal Governors of Colonial Massachusetts”
• Andy Volpe on “Re-Engraving Paul Revere: The Boston Massacre”
• Judy Cataldo on “The Bloody Flux of 1775, Looking at the Little Picture”
• Scott Nadler on “Inconvenient Founders: Thomas Young and the Forgotten Disrupters of the Revolution”

Plus you can see four presentations on aspects of the Salem Witch Trials! Talks on early westward expansion and Salem’s mercantile flowering and racism in early recorded pop music! Lots more! If more videos come on line after being reviewed, I’ll post more links.

History Camp Boston is a project of The Pursuit of History, a non-profit corporation that produces History Camps in other metro areas, the upcoming online History Camp America, and the weekly History Camp discussions with authors. I’m on the organization’s board. If you’re grateful for this content and want to see more such gatherings, please consider a donation to The Pursuit of History through its webpage.

The Hartford Wits and the Voice of Anarch

The “Poetry and the Constitution” event I described yesterday made me think there must have been poetry about the Constitution, part of the debate around that document. So I went looking.

In October 1786, some fraction of the “Hartford Wits”—David Humphreys (shown here twenty years later), Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Dr. Lemuel Hopkins—published a poem in The New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine.

Those verses were represented to the public as fragments of an ancient text found in a fort somewhere off to the west, like Ohio.

Over the next several months the Wits produced more verses for the newspaper, most supposedly pieces of a mock epic called The Anarchiad. This text told the story of a war between the spirit Anarch [boo! hiss!] and Hesper, “the guardian of the clime.”

By presenting these poems as “fragments,” the authors could eschew narrative or logical coherence and present their views on current troubles, such as:

• The Articles of Confederation just weren’t working out, and Connecticut hadn’t even participated in the Annapolis Convention to fix them.
• In western Massachusetts middling farmers were resisting taxes and shutting down courts while Rhode Island was issuing lots of paper money.
• A couple of local officials were being a real bother. (The Wits were already feuding with those men in the newspapers.)
• Young people today.

Here’s a short taste from Book IV, in the voice of Anarch:

Behold the reign of anarchy, begun,
And half the business of confusion done.
From hell’s dark caverns discord sounds alarms,
Blows her loud trump, and calls my SHAYS to arms,
O’er half the land the desperate riot runs,
And maddening mobs assume their rusty guns.
From councils feeble, bolder faction grows,
The daring corsairs, and the savage foes;
O’er Western wilds, the tawny bands allied,
Insult the States of weakness and of pride;
Once friendly realms, unpaid each generous loan,
Wait to divide and share them for their own.

Now sinks the public mind; a death-like sleep
O’er all the torpid limbs begins to creep;
By dull degrees decays the vital heat,
The blood forgets to flow, the pulse to beat;
The powers of life, in mimic death withdrawn,
Closed the fixed eyes with one expiring yawn;
Exposed in state, to wait the funeral hour,
Lie the pale relics of departed power;
While conscience, harrowing up their souls, with dread,
Their ghost of empire stalks without a head.

That installment was first published on 11 Jan 1787. A couple of weeks later, Daniel Shays’s Regulator force tried to seize the federal armory in Springfield. Militia general William Shepard and his men fought them off, killing four. “Behold the reign of anarchy,” indeed.

TOMORROW: More constitutional commentary.

Digging for Shays

The Burlington Free Press just ran an Associated Press story (also picked up by the Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal) about a high-school teacher’s archeological dig in Sandgate, Vermont, with roots in post-Revolutionary America:

On the south side of a mountain in Sandgate, Steve Butz and his students from Cambridge High School are unearthing what he and townspeople believe was the hideout of Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain who fled Massachusetts in 1787 after leading a fight against harsh economic policies.

“Everybody around here would be quick to tell you that’s Shays’ village,” said Jean Eisenhart, who has lived in Sandgate for almost 30 years. “It’s local lore.”

Historical documents, including a land transaction, prove Shays lived in Sandgate, but the exact location has never been verified. Butz hopes the dig will be able to pinpoint where Shays and his men made their home. . . .

Shays stayed in the state for about two years, then left, eventually settling in New York after he and the other rebels received pardons. Some of his followers remained in Vermont.

Butz said the settlement was later abandoned and the buildings burned in around 1810. That’s consistent with what other historical records say was an epidemic — there’s no indication of what disease — that swept the area, killing many.

Town records indicate the area was never settled again. It was owned by a succession of timber companies that would occasionally log the area in the intervening two centuries.

Here’s the Shays Settlement Project Facebook page. The image above shows a “Bronze, 18th century ornamental crotal bell” recovered at the site.

Talk on the Shays Rebellion in Lincoln, 16 Mar.

On Sunday, 16 March, the Friends of Minute Man National Park will host a lecture by Gary Shattuck on “Shays’ Rebellion: The Trials for Job Shattuck.”

It looks like this lecture will be based on Gary Shattuck’s recent book, which the publisher describes like this:

It is not often that descriptions of historical events can be rewritten absent compelling evidence that those past accounts were somehow in error. But that is precisely the result when new-found court documents, presumed to not even exist, shed surprising new light on the involvement of Capt. Job Shattuck, one of the principal leaders in the event history has come to call “Shays’s Rebellion.”

In Artful and Designing Men: The Trials of Job Shattuck and the Regulation of 1786-1787, Gary Shattuck (half-nephew, seven generations removed) delves deeply into the significant contributions made by this charismatic and well-respected veteran of the Seven Years’ War, the Revolutionary War, and community member as he transitioned from peaceful town father to protest leader. Tried and sentenced to death for high treason, shocking new information provided during his trial now forces a reassessment of this honorable man’s actions, resulting in the deserved rehabilitation of a reputation that history has denied until now.

Here’s a woodcut of Job Shattuck and his fellow resistance leader/scapegoat Daniel Shays from an almanac in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Last fall Marian Pierre-Louis interviewed Gary Shattuck about his book for the Fieldstone Common podcast.

This talk will begin at 3:00 P.M. at Bemis Hall in Lincoln. It’s free and open to the public.

“Voucher for rations delivered at the Port of Williamston”?

Last month the Boston Globe reported on the opening of a vault in the Massachusetts State House. Officials found nothing earth-shaking inside, and the contents produced more small mysteries than they solved.

But perhaps the most intriguing item, provenance unknown, was a note inked in elaborate cursive script on a small piece of aged paper dated 1787: “Voucher for rations delivered at the Port of Williamston.”

Treasury staff members said they had no idea where the item was from or its significance. But that note and other historical documents from the safe are set to be examined this week by a specialist from the state archives.

That document is not among the items shown in the photo gallery accompanying the article, so I’m working with no more information than in those paragraphs. But here are some guesses.

Might “Williamston” be how this receipt writer spelled “Williamstown”?

Might “Port” actually be “Post” or “Fort”?

Why would Massachusetts have supplied food to a military post in Williamstown? There were forts built there when Englishmen settled the town in the 1750s, but they had long been put to other use by 1787.

That was the the year of the Shays Rebellion, however, when special militia regiments recruited in and around Boston marched west to confront an uprising of farmers and veterans. After a couple of skirmishes, the rebellion melted away (as did the militia, a few weeks later).

Some of the uprising’s leaders found refuge in Vermont, then an independent state. Militia officer Royall Tyler crossed the border to try to capture Daniel Shays in early 1787. He wrote home of “Driving 40 miles into the State of New York at the Head of a Party to apprehend Shay” and “closing the Pases to Canada.” Williamstown is at the border of Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont, so perhaps that was where Tyler’s militiamen were stationed and supplied for a while.

(Photograph courtesy of teacher Mr. Voelger.)