Mercy Warren in History

Since I’ve been writing about the Warrens of Plymouth in 1775, it seems appropriate to mention that there’s a push to increase Mercy Warren’s visibility as the Sestercentennial proceeds.

Last month Nancy Rubin Stuart published this profile of Mercy Warren as “America’s First Female Historian” in the Saturday Evening Post.

Michele Gabrielson portrayed Warren in two episodes of the Calling History podcasts, which records first-person interpretations of historical figures.

And those folks and others launched a nonprofit organization called Celebrate Mercy Otis Warren, which can be found on Facebook.

One of that group’s goals is to have a bust of Warren installed in the Massachusetts State House, perhaps in the one empty spot in the senate chamber.

A bill promoting that plan has been moving through the legislature. As of today, the proposed language is:

The superintendent of state office buildings shall, subject to the approval of the State House Art Commission as to size and content, install and maintain in a conspicuous place of the Art Commission’s choosing in the State House, a memorial honoring Mercy Otis Warren, of Barnstable, Massachusetts, a leading author, playwright, satirist, and patriot in colonial Massachusetts, whose essays contributed to the creation of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, and whose book, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution became this country's first published history of the American Revolution. Said memorial shall be the gift of Cape Cod artist David Lewis who will bear all costs associated with the creation, transportation, and installation of the artwork.

Lewis has already created a full-size statue of Warren shown above. It towers in Barnstable, the town where she was born.

Now I realize part of the Massachusetts legislature’s job is to boost the state’s products, but there were histories of the American Revolution published before Warren’s in 1805. At the time people pointed to David Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution from 1789. Michael Hattem’s superb chronology of the historiography likewise pairs Ramsay and Warren.

(A year even before Ramsay came the Rev. William Gordon’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America. I suppose it doesn’t get counted as “this country’s first” because it was printed in Britain, and in some part written there. However, Gordon clearly composed a lot of material while living in Roxbury. Like Mercy Warren, he knew most of the local players.)

Of course, by coming later Warren’s book could cover the establishment of the federal government. Her final chapter describes the Shays’ Rebellion, the Constitutional Convention, and George Washington’s terms as President, with particular attention to the Jay Treaty. And then some remarks on John Adams that caused a deep rift between him and the Warrens.

I think that although Warren wrote history (just as she had earlier written poetry and closet dramas), her calling and strength were as an opinion writer. She didn’t disguise her feelings about Adams or the Federalist program overall. Writing in a Jeffersonian era, however, Warren was optimistic:

The wisdom and justice of the American governments, and the virtue of the inhabitants, may, if they are not deficient in the improvement of their own advantages, render the United States of America an enviable example to all the world of peace, liberty, righteousness, and truth.

“Snowballs covering stones” at the Massacre

In his 1789 History of the American Revolution, the South Carolina physician and historian David Ramsay (1749-1815, shown here) wrote that the crowd at the Boston Massacre was “armed with clubs, sticks, and snowballs covering stones.”

I believe that’s the first printed statement that Bostonians packed snow around rocks to throw at the soldiers. Earlier I’ve said that the earliest place I’d found that detail stated was in Sgt. Roger Lamb’s Journal, published twenty years later. It appears Lamb picked up the detail from Ramsay.

Or from intervening authors. The “snowballs covering stones” also appeared in Jedidiah Morse’s The American Geography (London: 1794), “History of the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in America” in The Britannic Magazine (1795), and William Winterbotham’s An Historical, Geographical, Commercial and Philosophical View of the American United States (London: 1795).

The snowballs with stony cores became a standard detail of descriptions of the Massacre in the nineteenth century. Even though that detail can’t be traced back to anyone who was at the event. Following the standards of his time, Ramsay didn’t specify his source, and the many authors who copied his language (at much greater length) didn’t even cite him.

A lot of eyewitnesses to the Massacre left testimony about it, and none described people packing snow around rocks. Lots of people said there was snow and ice on the ground, and in the air. Thomas Hall and Daniel Cornwall testified to seeing people throw oyster shells at the soldiers. An enslaved man named Andrew testified that people threw “pieces of sea coal” (i.e., coal imported from Cape Breton). So there’s better evidence that the locals didn’t even bother padding their stones with snow.

Looking for “Taxation Without Representation”

As I wrote yesterday, most sources credit James Otis, Jr., with coining the phrase “taxation without representation,” but he never actually used that phrase in his writings, and no contemporary quoted him directly as doing so. Otis certainly wrote about the problem, putting it at the center of the American objections to Parliament’s taxes in the 1760s and 1770s, but not in that exact way.

So is the phrase “taxation without representation” authentically Revolutionary, or actually a coinage of later years applied backwards, as the terms Intolerable Acts, lobsterback, and tricorn appear to be?

And I’m pleased to report that yes, we can document the phrase being used in the Revolutionary years. In 1769 the Rev. John Joachim Zubly (1724-1781) of Georgia authored a pamphlet titled An Humble Enquiry into the Nature of the Dependency of the American Colonies upon the Parliament of Great-Britain, and the Right of Parliament to Lay Taxes on the Said Colonies. He wrote:

In England there can be no taxation without representation, and no representation without election; but it is undeniable that the representatives of Great-Britain are not elected by nor for the Americans, and therefore cannot represent them...

The available databases being incomplete, I’m not entirely sure Zubly coined the phrase “no taxation without representation,” but so far his pamphlet is the earliest use I’ve seen.

James Burgh (1714-1775) also used the phrase in his long work Political Disquisitions; or, An Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses, published in 1774. He even titled the second chapter of his Book II “Of Taxation without Representation.”

So “taxation without representation” is authentically American! Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. Zubly was Swiss by birth and, though he represented Georgia in the Second Continental Congress, advocated reconciliation with Britain. He was driven out of Savannah when it was under independent government and returned there and died under royal rule.

As for Burgh, he was a Scottish by birth, and a clergyman in a parish near London. He advocated the American cause, and Political Disquisitions became quite popular in the U.S. of A. But, like Zubly, Burgh considered himself British.

But don’t worry! I’ve also found some examples of Americans using the phrase. “Taxation without representation” appears in statements issued by Dover, New Hampshire, on 10 Jan 1774; by York, Massachusetts (Maine), on 20 Jan 1774; and by John Smith on 6 July 1775, while he was locked up in “Strafford Prison” as a suspected Loyalist. But the fact that I didn’t stumble across more citations might indicate that the phrase wasn’t as dominant as we’ve come to expect.

“Taxation without representation” appeared in several early histories of the conflict:

• David Ramsay’s History of the Revolution of South-Carolina (1785) and History of the American Revolution (1789).
• William Gordon’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America (1789).
• Tobias Smollett’s The History of England, from the Revolution to the End of the American War, and Peace of Versailles in 1783 (1796), discussing how the same issue was raised in Ireland.

So historians might have snatched up that quick, three-word formulation of the colonies’ problem soon after the war, and it became one of the major ways we remember the American Revolution.

Rev. William Gordon Goes to Press

After the Rev. William Gordon’s The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America was printed in England in 1788 and then reprinted in the U.S. of A., Bostonians who had heard the minister read from his manuscript were puzzled. Parts of it seemed to be missing.

One man, writing to a Boston newspaper in 1821-22, recalled hearing Gordon read “three or four pages” about how the 47th Regiment of Foot had tarred and feathered a Billerica farmer named Thomas Ditson, Jr., in March 1775. In the printed version, that episode occupied only “a few lines.” Another correspondent noted a sensitive topic that had dropped out: “I refer here particularly to the subject of negro slavery.” He added that Gordon “was also persuaded to soften his harsh picture of the illustrious Exempt.” I have no idea what that means, but it could refer to the portrayal of such popular figures as John Hancock.

The first writer told the newspaper, in a reminiscence reprinted in Hezekiah Niles’s Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America, of what he’d heard about the book’s publication:

In 1790 I embarked for England, where I was introduced to a relation of Doctor Gordon, of whom I enquired how the Doctor had succeeded in his history? He smiled and said, “It was not Doctor Gordon’s history!”

On my requesting an explanation, he hold me, that on the Doctor’s arrival in England, he placed his manuscript in the hands of an intelligent friend, on whom he could depend, who, (after perusing it with care), declared that it was not suited to the meridian of England, consequently would never sell. The style was not agreeable—it was too favourable to the Americans—above all, it was too full of libels against some of the most respectable characters in the British army and navy—and that if he possessed a fortune equal to the duke of Bedford’s, he would not be able to pay the damages that might be recovered against him, as the truth would not be allowed to be produced in evidence.

The doctor had returned to his native country, and expected to enjoy “otium cum dignitate [leisure with dignity].” Overwhelmed with mortification, and almost with despair, he asked the advice of his friend; who recommended him to place the manuscript in the hands of a professional gentleman, that it might be new modelled, and made agreeable to English readers; this was assented to by the doctor, and the history which bears his name was compiled and written from his manuscript, by another hand!

In any event, the history didn’t become a success. People saw its style as stodgy. Gordon was unable to retire on the proceeds, and ended up a poor minister for a poor congregation.

Furthermore, the final text—whoever was responsible for it—destroyed Gordon’s reputation as a historian a century later. In the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1899, Orin Grant Libby showed that large portions of Gordon’s History were copied or closely paraphrased from The Annual Register, a Whiggish review of the events of each previous year co-founded by Edmund Burke. Other passages came from The History of the Revolution in South Carolina (1785), by Dr. David Ramsay (shown above, courtesy of the Smithsonian).

Kids, don’t try this at school! Our standards on plagiarism have become much stricter, especially in the last few years. Authors quoted much more freely in the 18th century. In fact, Ramsay also borrowed from The Annual Register, and when he revised his own book, historian Arthur H. Shaffer noted, he adopted some of Gordon’s rewrites of his prose.

Without Gordon’s original manuscript, it’s impossible to know whether he had copied that material himself or his British editor did. But he certainly signed off on the final text and hoped to make money off it. And the result of its twisted journey to print is that most modern historians consult Gordon’s book for sporadic passages about Revolutionary politics and war in Massachusetts, where he had first-hand knowledge, and ignore the rest as derivative.

(Back in April, the 18th-Century Reading Room ran a passage from Gordon’s book about Gen. Charles Lee.)