David Hartley: “singular in his dress”

Last month I wrote about David Hartley (1732-1813), the Member of Parliament who went from being a far-out-of-power rookie lawmaker in 1774 to signing the Treaty of Paris for Britain in 1783.

He was by no means a typical British gentleman of the time, and not just because of his scientific talent or progressive views on slavery. In The Literature and Literati of Bath (1854), George Monkland wrote of Hartley (at least in later life):

He was a man of an ingenious and inventive mind; in his person and appearance, I can recollect, he was somewhat eccentric; he wore a hat of peculiar shape, and no cravat, but his shirt collar was turned down, and simply confined by a black ribbon tied in a bow, which, at the time I speak of, was by no means an usual style of costume; now-a-days, when men wear anything and everything, he might perhaps have passed unobserved.

In a supplemental volume published the next year, Monkland quoted from a letter by the Rev. Richard Warner (1763-1857):

David Hartley was singular in his dress and simple in his manners, and (perhaps) rather affected the quaint apparel of the puritans; he never wore stockings. . . .

One day after dinner [in the fellows’ room of Merton College, Oxford, of which he was the second oldest fellow], allusion was made to Hartley’s stockingless legs, and denounced as a dirty practice. “I beg your pardon,” said Hartley, and throwing off his shoe, and spreading his naked limb upon the table, “There, gentlemen, you see that there is not a speck of dust upon my foot.”

I think about this in contrast to how Hollywood would want to cast and dress a British diplomat signing the peace treaty with the Americans: as a highly aristocratic, formally dressed snob brought low, not an eccentric intellectual who probably outdid Benjamin Franklin in informality.

For more on eighteenth-century stockings, particularly ladies’, see this post on All Things Georgian.

Filling in the Hole in West’s Painting

Yesterday I showed an image of Benjamin West’s painting of the American diplomats who went to Paris to negotiate the end of the War for Independence.

As shown above, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay signed the treaty of peace with Great Britain. West also pictured Henry Laurens and William Temple Franklin, two other Americans involved in the negotiation. But he couldn’t get David Hartley to represent the British side he had signed for, so West abandoned the painting.

In the last few decades, at least two New England artists stepped in to fill that hole.

In 1983 the U.S. Postal Service commissioned a painting for a stamp commemorating then bicentennial of the treaty signing. David Blossom of Weston, Connecticut, created the image above, showing the treaty signers only—and Hartley from the rear. Esther Porter adapted the image for the stamp. Blossom’s original painting now belongs to Winterthur.

In the last decade, David R. Wagner of Scotland, Connecticut, undertook a series of paintings about events along the Rochambeau Revolutionary Route. To that he added an image of the Treaty of Paris, based on West’s original, but with Hartley inserted, reportedly based on other portraits.

Wagner’s painting was shown at the Carroll Museum in Baltimore and at Yorktown in 2008. Judging by the artist’s website, it is now available for purchase.

Hartley and Franklin, Reunited in Paris

I’ve been writing about the on-again, off-again correspondence of Benjamin Franklin and David Hartley, British scientist and Member of Parliament. Their relationship actually turned out to be a factor in the end of the war.

After London received news of the Battle of Yorktown, Lord North’s government fell. In March 1782 power shifted to the Marquess of Rockingham, longtime leader of the opposition, with a mandate to bring the American War to a close before it cost even more money. Rockingham filled the post of prime minister for all of four months before he died of the flu.

The Earl of Shelburne, one of Rockingham’s secretaries of state, took over. He was already steering negotiations with the U.S. of A.’s European diplomats through his envoy, the merchant Robert Oswald. By November 1782 Oswald worked out preliminary articles of peace with Franklin in France.

Meanwhile, Rockingham’s other secretary of state, Charles James Fox, refused to serve under Shelburne. He led other Rockingham Whigs, such as Edmund Burke, out of government. (That created openings for such rising politicians as William Pitt, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-three; they didn’t call him “the Younger” for nothing.)

David Hartley had opposed the American War all along, but he also disliked Shelburne and voted against the preliminary articles for peace. Hartley was a Fox ally, and he also maintained a personal friendship with Lord North, despite their political differences.

In April 1783 Fox and North, longtime opponents, made a surprising alliance to force Shelburne out of power. Shortly afterwards, George III appointed Hartley the new negotiator with the Americans. Fox and North both trusted Hartley, and they thought his friendly correspondence with Franklin would help to finish the negotiations on favorable terms.

Hartley walked into a very complex situation since France, Spain, and the U.S., though formally allied and bound to negotiate together, were all secretly angling for their own advantages and undercutting each other. Though there weren’t any more major campaigns on the North American continent, naval battles in the Caribbean and the siege of Gibraltar were still going on, tipping the balance of power and affecting different nations’ hunger for peace.

The Americans in Paris insisted on making very few changes to the terms they had reached with Oswald. If Hartley wasn’t going to sign over Canada, they weren’t about to concede anything else. France and Spain, meanwhile, thought the Shelburne ministry’s agreement to give the new American republic land all the way west to the Mississippi River was quite generous already.

In the end, the Treaty of Paris was basically what Oswald had negotiated eight months earlier. Hartley had voted against those terms, but his main contribution to the final treaty was the “Paris” part—he refused to leave the city for Versailles. On 3 Sept 1783, Hartley signed the final Treaty of Paris on behalf of Great Britain. Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay signed on behalf of the U.S.

(The picture above is Benjamin West’s famous unfinished canvas of the American diplomats involved in the negotiations in Paris. Hartley declined to pose.)

“I have therefore been backward in Writing”

As I described yesterday, in late 1775 David Hartley, an opposition Member of Parliament, sent two letters to Benjamin Franklin proposing an unlikely way to reconcile Britain’s central government and the rebellious North American colonies. The Crown would pull back its tough laws on Massachusetts and the colonies would guarantee all slaves the right to trial by jury.

In The House of Commons: 1754-1790, Lewis Bernstein Namier and John Brooke called Hartley’s proposal “a tribute both to his benevolence and naïvety”:

It never occurred to Hartley that even if the British Parliament could be induced to pass such an Act, it would merely be regarded in America as one more example of British tyranny.

Franklin must have been savvy enough to know that. So how did he respond?

He didn’t. The next surviving letter from Franklin to Hartley was sent from Passy, France, in 1777, over a year later. It began:

I received duly your Letter of May 2nd. 77. including a Copy of one you had sent me the Year before, which never came to hand, and which it seems has been the Case with some I wrote to you from America.

This is the equivalent of “Your email never arrived, something must have gone wrong with my emails, let’s start over.” Which, given the wartime conditions, was quite plausible.

But then Franklin protested a little more:

Filled tho’ our Letters have always been, with Sentiments of Good Will to both Countries, and earnest Desires of preventing their Ruin, and promoting their mutual Felicity, I have been apprehensive that if it were known a Correspondence subsisted between us, it might be attended with Inconvenience to you. I have therefore been backward in Writing, not caring to trust the Post, and not well knowing, who else to trust with my Letters. But being now assured of a safe Conveyance, I venture to write to you, especially as I think the Subject such a one as you may receive a Letter upon without Censure.

Which at least opens the door to another explanation: Franklin found Hartley’s letters so impolitic and impractical that he just didn’t make a priority of responding.

Either way, Franklin started right up where his last extant letter had left off, complaining about how badly the Crown was treating the colonies:

She has given us by her numberless Barbarities, in the Prosecution of the War, and in the Treatment of Prisoners, (by her Malice in bribing Slaves, to murder their Masters, and Savages to Massacre the Families of Farmers, with her Baseness in rewarding the unfaithfulness of Servants, and debauching the Virtue of honest Seamen, entrusted with our Property,) so deep an Impression of her Depravity, that we never again can trust her in the Management of our Affairs, and Interests.

Once again, even though Hartley had advocated more rights for enslaved people and eventual abolition, all Franklin had to say about slaves was that the British army was encouraging them to revolt. His personal opposition to slavery was growing, but at this point he was writing as a diplomatic representative of the U.S. of A.

In fact, by the time the two men resumed their correspondence, Hartley was advocating that Parliament ban the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He was the first British abolitionist to propose such a law. It took another generation for that idea to take hold.

TOMORROW: Hartley and Franklin meet again.

David Hartley’s Bright Idea

After my talk at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site earlier this month, there was a long and lively question-and-answer session. And one question I didn’t have a great answer for. So I went home and looked up more stuff.

The question was about a suggestion made to Benjamin Franklin that American governments should guarantee slaves the right to trial by jury. How did that idea arise, and how did Franklin respond?

I looked in the Franklin Papers at Founders Online, and sure enough, a British Member of Parliament proposed that step to Franklin in late 1775. That M.P. was David Hartley (1730-1813, shown here), already introduced on Boston 1775 as the most boring speaker in the House of Commons.

Hartley became acquainted with Franklin in London through their mutual interest in science. He was elected to Parliament for the first time in late 1774. When Franklin headed home to Philadelphia, Hartley suggested they correspond regularly to share ideas about how to reconcile the Crown and the colonies. Because nobody was in a better position to solve the imperial crisis than a rookie lawmaker on the far side of the political opposition.

On joining the Continental Congress, Franklin sent Hartley letters laying out the standard American position, which would later inform the Declaration of Independence. For instance, on 12 September he wrote:

Your Nation must stop short, and change its Measures, or she will lose the Colonies for ever. The Burning of Towns, and firing from Men of War on defenceless Cities and Villages fill’d with Women and Children: The exciting the Indians to fall on our innocent Back Settlers, and our Slaves to murder their Masters; are by no means Acts of a legitimate Government: they are of barbarous Tyranny and dissolve all Allegiance.

Hartley replied on 14 November with a detailed plan for compromise by the two sides. To be more exact, Hartley sent Franklin a letter signed “G.B.” which said it was merely passing on ideas from “Your friend Mr. Hartley.” The first step, he agreed, was for Parliament to suspend three of the Coercive Acts: the Massachusetts Government Act, the Boston Port Bill, and the Administration of Justice Act. The next step:

To pass an act to establish the right of trial by jury to all Slaves in America and to annull all Laws in any Province repugnant thereto, and to require the enrollment of the said act by the respective assemblies of each Province in North America. . . .

I have consulted several American Gentlemen, who have all expressed themselves as confident that America would not hesitate to comply to the act of Jury to slaves, if they could be assured by their compliance with such an act of parliament, that they could secure to themselves restoration to their condition in 1763. It would be a satisfaction to receive some respectable or authentic opinion from America upon that subject.

Why trial by jury? I suspect that was the most basic right in British Whig thought, rooted in Anglo-Saxon legal traditions, not dependent on a person’s property or gender, and available even to criminal defendants. Establishing that right for enslaved blacks would start them on the stairs to more rights.

One wonders who the “several American Gentlemen” Hartley consulted were, because the only initiative in 1775 less likely than convincing Parliament to relax its strictures on Massachusetts (where an actual war had broken out) was to convince American slaveholders to give their human property more rights.

Nevertheless, Hartley thought well enough of his plan to repeat it in another letter to Franklin on 23 November. And on 7 December, well before he could have heard back from America, he brought his ideas to the House of Commons, explaining at length:

The object of the act of Parliament to be proposed to America may be perhaps in the event the abolition, but at present can only be considered as the first step to correct a vice, which has spread through the continent of North-America, contrary to tbe laws of God and man, and to the fundamental principles of the British Constitution. That vice is slavery.

It would be infinitely absurd to send over to America an act to abolish slavery at one word, because, however repugnant the practice may be to the laws of morality or policy, yet to expel an evil which has spread so far, and which has been suffered far such a length of time, requires information of facts and circumstances, and the greatest discretion to root it out; and, moreover, the necessary length of settling such a point would defeat the end of its being proposed as an act of compromise to settle the present troubles; therefore, the act to be proposed to America as an auspicious beginning to lay the first stone of universal liberty to mankind, should be what no American could hesitate an instant to comply with, viz: That every slave in North-America should be entitled to his trial by jury in all criminal cases.

America cannot refuse to accept and to enroll such an act as this, and thereby to re-establish peace and harmony with the parent State. Let us all be reunited in this, as a foundation to extirpate slavery from the face of the earth. Let those who seek justice and liberty for themselves, give that justice and liberty to their fellow-creatures.

With respect to the idea of putting a final period to slavery in North-America, it should seem best, that when this country had led the way by the act for jury, that each Colony, knowing their own peculiar circumstances, should undertake the work in the most practicable way, and that they should endeavour to establish some system, by which slavery should be in a certain term of years abolished. Let the only contention henceforward between Great Britain and America be, which shall exceed the other in zeal for establishing the fundamental rights of liberty to all mankind.

Hartley then moved for a vote on his idea. The vote was overwhelmingly negative.

TOMORROW: And what did Franklin say about Hartley’s proposal?

“He Would Much Rather Sit on Christmas-Day...”

On Monday, 19 Dec 1774, the British Parliament debated “raising the Supply granted to his Majesty”—i.e., enacting taxes, in this case a land tax. The country’s landowners were, understandably, against raising this charge, so the House of Commons agreed to Lord North’s proposal to keep it at “three Shillings in the Pound.”

Then a member named David Hartley (1732-1813) rose to speak. Representing Kingston upon Hull, he was one of the radical Whigs opposed to the government’s American policy, meaning the Boston Port Bill, Massachusetts Government Act, and duties enacted since 1767. He insisted that Parliament had to deal with the crisis in the Massachusetts Bay colony, where nearly all the army troops on the continent were holed up in Boston.

This description of Hartley’s speech comes from a record of Parliamentary activity published in 1775 (which leaned toward the Whigs):

Mr. Hartley rose, and in a mild, sensible speech, enlarged upon the very extraordinary conduct of Administration concerning American affairs.

He said the accounts from that country were truly alarming; that the Resolutions of the Continental Congress evidently proved that the people were determined not to submit to the late Acts passed in relation to America, nor to any other of a like complexion; that the Troops now stationed at Boston, and the inhabitants of that Town, had no means of procuring subsistence but by Sea, or from the country; that either method was now equally difficult, as the Harbour would be frozen up, and the land carriage, even if subsistence was to be had, rendered impracticable, as the country would be covered with snow; and that, under such circumstances, the situation of the Troops would be no less deplorable than that of the miserable inhabitants.

He continued to say, that he was not well versed in sieges; but if he understood right, he took it that the Town of Boston was surrounded by General [Thomas] Gage with lines of circumvallation, and that such being the very critical state of things, respecting both the situation, the temper, and disposition of the military and the natives, he submitted it to the gentlemen on the other side how they could reconcile it to the duty they owed to the Nation in their publick, or to their constituents in their private capacity, to agree to a long adjournment, while things remained in so dangerous and alarming a state, without taking any one step to avert the numerous and fatal mischiefs which they portended.

For his part, he affirmed solemnly, he would much rather sit on Christmas-day, and continue to do so, de die in diem [from day to day], than go to the country [i.e., adjourn] in so critical a season, without at least agreeing to some measures, though they should extend no further than prevention.

According to Nathaniel Wraxall, who entered Parliament in 1780, Hartley was by no means a stirring orator:

The Rockingham Party had not among them a more zealous adherent; but in Parliament, the intolerable length, when increased by the dullness of his Speeches, rendered him an absolute nuisance, even to his own friends. His rising always operated like a dinner bell.

One day, that he had thus wearied out the patience of his audience; having nearly cleared a very full House, which was reduced from three hundred, to about eighty persons, half asleep; just at a time when he was expected to close, he unexpectedly moved that the Riot Act should be read, as a document necessary to elucidate, or to prove, some of his foregoing assertions.

[Edmund] Burke, who sat close by him, and who wishing to speak to the Question under discussion, had been bursting with impatience for more than an hour and a half; finding himself so cruelly disappointed, bounced up, exclaiming, “The Riot Act! my dear friend, the Riot Act! to what purpose! don’t you see that the mob is already completely dispersed?”

The sarcastic wit of this remark, in the state of the House, which presented only empty Benches; encreased by the manner and tone of despair, in which Burke uttered it; convulsed every person present except Hartley, who never changed countenance, and insisted on the Riot Act being read by one of the Clerks.

Be that as it may, I found that Hartley’s argument had a certain resonance this month, when American legislators also argued about whether to stay in session, not on Christmas but in the days after Christmas. And ended up finishing before the holiday after all.

Back in 1774, the House of Commons “adjourned for Christmas recess” on Friday, 23 December, after the king approved the renewed act “granting to his majesty certain duties upon malt, mum, cyder and perry” as before. The land tax was completed in February. Lord North and his ministers maintained their American policy, and war began in April.

During the war, North’s government had to raise the land tax, which cost it support. After years of fighting and the defeat at Yorktown, a new ministry in London changed policy and started to negotiate a withdrawal from those thirteen colonies. That government appointed David Hartley to represent Britain at the signing of the Treaty of Paris.