The Deborah Champion Story Today

Yesterday’s posting brought the tale of the Deborah Champion letter up to the present, with versions of the text appearing on websites as well as books as an authentic historical source about a young Connecticut woman early in the Revolutionary War. It’s linked to authoritative institutions like the Library of Congress and the University of Connecticut. And now that it’s appearing online, the Deborah Champion story can reach more people more quickly than ever.

Yet, as I laid out before, the letter’s historical details, language, and narrative style strongly suggest that it’s a fiction created around 1900. No one has ever come forward with an original document. The two divergent transcriptions are both said to be accurate, but I suspect the second to surface was created to correct the more obvious problems of the first.

The letter was probably inspired by a tradition among descendants of Deborah’s father, Henry Champion. As put into print in 1891, that tradition implied Deborah had undertaken at least two rides, one to bring dispatches to Gen. George Washington and the other to carry a payroll past British patrols. The letter gathers all those details into one mission.

Unfortunately, the family lore had already become garbled as to Deborah’s age and marital status by the time it was printed. There doesn’t seem to be concrete evidence or independent strains in separate family lines to support the story. Thus, though there might have been a kernel of truth in the tradition of Deborah Champion’s ride, it’s impossible to sift that out in a convincing way.

Some scholars I know have taken one look at the Deborah Champion letter and recognized it as inauthentic. They’re historians used to reading real eighteenth-century correspondence, versed in the events and customs and language of that period. There are so many unreliable tales from the Colonial Revival that they weren’t surprised to encounter one more, and simply moved on to more promising material.

On the other hand, researchers with less specific experience might come across the text, look for Deborah Champion’s name in other books, find an increasing number of authors accepting the story, and conclude that the letter is reliable. After all, some fine historians have accepted it.

This series of postings appears to be the first thorough analysis of the Deborah Champion letter as a historic source. It’s the first to unearth the most dubious version of the text, the 1926 newspaper publication that said it was dated 1776, and to trace the links among the Champion descendants who shared the story in the early 1900s. Dr. Sam Forman deserves the credit for initiating the project and leading the research team, including myself, Rachel Smith, Derek W. Beck, Tamesin Eustis, and the timely assistance of Kevin Peel and Will Brooks.

Our work was possible only because of all the digital resources we’ve all gained in recent years: Google Books, newspaper scans, genealogical sites, and of course email. The internet also made it possible to publish such a detailed debunking economically. A print journal would probably be able to justify only a couple of pages warning scholars off (as the William & Mary Quarterly did with Mary Beth Norton’s warning about the Dorothy Dudley diary in 1976).

So now the question is whether the worldwide availability of the two texts of the letter, information about their publication, and our analysis can catch up to the books and websites that promulgate the letter as authentic reliable. Once someone raises doubts with a few strong points, people’s skepticism usually kicks in and they can spot a lot more holes for themselves.

At least I hope so.

A Critical Mass of Deborah Champion Retellings?

In recent years, an increasing number of books have referred to Deborah Champion’s experience carrying dispatches. Usually those are brief mentions, such as her name dropped in Liberty’s Daughters (1980), by Mary Beth Norton, a landmark in American women’s history. Holly A. Mayer describes Champion’s trip in a footnote of Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution (1996), citing the Library of Congress typescript.

The most prominent recent description seems to be two pages of Carol Berkin’s Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence (2007). It appears in a chapter on stories that have “come down to us only through family tales, told and retold, exaggerated and embellished in the process, but with a kernel of truth nevertheless.” Despite that warning about the retellings being less than fully reliable, Berkin then retells the story in full, including the easily refuted statement that “the British were already at Providence” and praise from Gen. George Washington.

Revolutionary Mothers doesn’t cite any primary source directly. Rather, its note points to:

• Sally Smith Booth’s The Women of ’76 (1973), which I quoted yesterday.
  
• the 1986 Connecticut report Great Women in Connecticut History, which in turn relied on the Bicentennial report described yesterday,
  
• the one-sentence mention of Deborah Champion in Ray Raphael’s A People’s History of the American Revolution (2002).

That approach reflects how Revolutionary Mothers is a summary work for a popular audience. But it gains its authority because Berkin is a respected pioneer in women’s history.

As the Deborah Champion story has appeared in more such books, it appears more reliable. With each brief mention in an authoritative book, the story has gained more critical mass, making it seem more credible to the next author.

The Deborah Champion story seems to be especially popular in textbooks and reference books, which can have the names of major historians on the cover but are usually composed by committees working from secondary sources. In these, the tale can become even more dramatic and less accurate. Berkin and Wood’s Land of Promise (1983) told students, “Deborah Champion of Massachusetts was captured and interrogated as she carried a message for General Washington.” Sue Heinemann’s Timelines of American Women’s History (1996) included, “Deborah Champion gallops two days through enemy lines…” A Reader’s Digest book called The American Story (1998) declared, “Twenty-three-year-old Deborah Champion Gilbert of Connecticut rode more than 100 miles through enemy lines to deliver army payroll and dispatches…”

A few recent books quote some form of the Deborah Champion letter at length. David C. King’s American Heritage, American Voices: Colonies and Revolution (2003) uses the text published by Mary R. Beard. Women’s Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present (2005), by Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler, prints the entire Library of Congress text. Jeanne Munn Bracken’s Women in the American Revolution (2007) quotes Grunwald and Adler but omits the description of “Uncle Aristarchus” as a slave and his stereotypical trembling and dialect.

In addition, the University of Connecticut’s Early American Women Writers website quotes the Library of Congress version of Deborah Champion’s adventure. And it’s increasingly easy to find other websites quoting the letter or retelling its story.

TOMORROW: The Deborah Champion myth in an online world.

A Second Look at Deborah Champion and “Uncle Aristarchus”

Yesterday I brought the story of the Deborah Champion letter into the 1970s, when the Bicentennial and the search for female heroes in American history brought her back into print. The rise of women’s history not only brought more attention to the experiences of women in the American Revolution, but also new rigor to the study of that history.

Apparently around that time—we don’t know exactly when—another version of the letter arrived at the Library of Congress. That document offered a more plausible October 1775 date and cut some of the more dubious details about the siege of Boston in the 1912/1926 text. It was also the first transcript to mention an original document, supposedly owned by descendants. And of course the Library of Congress Manuscripts Department carries a lot of authority in a footnote.

One of the major differences between the two texts of the letter is the figure of Aristarchus, the enslaved man who supposedly accompanied the young woman on her ride from Connecticut to Massachusetts. Aristarchus appears twice in the text first published in 1912:

So, dear Patience, it was finally settled that I should start in the early morning and Aristarchus should go with me. He has been devoted to me since I made a huge cake to grace his wedding with Glory and found a name for the dusky baby which we call Sophronista. For a slave he has his fair share of wits, also. . . .

Suddenly, I was ordered to halt; as I could n’t help myself I did so. I could almost hear Aristarchus’ teeth rattle in his mouth, but I knew he would obey my instructions and if I was detained, would try to find the way alone.

In the text at the Library of Congress, Aristarchus is more prominent. In fact, most of the passages that appear only in that version refer to him in some way. In addition, that text changes his wife’s name from Glory to Chloe.

The Library of Congress text also turns Aristarchus into even more of a comic character. At the outset of the journey, the letter states: “Uncle Aristarchus looked very pompous, as if he was Captain and felt the responsibility.” But when a British sentry appears out of nowhere, the narrator says, “I really believe I heard Aristarchus’ teeth chatter as he rode to my side and whispered ‘De British missus for sure.’” This version has no suggestion that Aristarchus might complete the journey on his own.

I suspect that the Library of Congress text is the later one, revised to fix some glitches in the text that Mary Rebecca Adams Squire had written out before 1912. The changing treatment of Aristarchus also suggests that the person who revised the letter thought readers would expect more comedy from the figure of a black slave. Ironically, those same parts of the letter feel most dated and discomfiting now, and since the 1970s authors have often edited them out while quoting other passages.

A final note on the man’s name: Deborah (Champion) Gilbert had a nephew named Aristarchus, born 23 Oct 1784 to her brother Henry, the Continental Army officer. Aristarchus Champion graduated from Yale in 1807, settled in Rochester, and had a long career in law, real estate, and philanthropy before dying a bachelor in 1871.

It would be quite remarkable for an upper-class family like the Champions to name one of their sons after a man they had kept as a slave. (To be sure, naming your twin sons Aristarchus and Aristobulus was remarkable to begin with.) I see the real, well documented “Uncle Aristarchus” as another reason to think that the Deborah Champion letter was concocted from a stew of half-remembered lore and details that seemed old-fashioned to someone in the early 1900s.

TOMORROW: A critical mass of Deborah Champion.

[The photograph above is Jacksonville Stumpe’s picture of the Township Hall in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Aristarchus Champion inherited a considerable part of the land in that area, and in 1848 endowed the construction of this building as a town library. Champion never lived in Ohio, though.]

The First and Second Wave of Deborah Champion

The dubious Deborah Champion letter I’ve been discussing for more than a week appears to be a product of the Colonial Revival and the first wave of American feminism. It was first noted in 1902 and read at meetings of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the New Haven Colony Historical Society. Two similar versions of the text were printed in The Pioneer Mothers of America (1912) and the Jefferson County Journal (1926).

Mary Ritter Beard, the progressive historian, quoted an undated version from the Adams, New York, chapter of the D.A.R. in America Through Women’s Eyes (1933, reprinted 1969). Trying correct past misinformation, Beard stated that Deborah Champion undertook her ride in 1775 at the age of twenty-two.

American historiography went into a “debunking” period after the Colonial Revival, more skeptical about tales founded on family or local tradition. (Beard’s work on women actually fit into that revisionist trend because it pushed back against the field’s almost-exclusive focus on heroic men.) Then academic scholars came to dominate the study of history. Both trends worked against the idea of passing on heroic stories with little evidence. At the same time, in mid-century there was no longer such a strong push in American culture for active female role models. We haven’t found mentions of Deborah Champion’s ride in those decades.

The Deborah Champion story regained traction with the second wave of American feminism. As the movement for sexual equality grew in the 1970s and the Bicentennial approached, authors became more eager to find examples of women participating in the American Revolution—particularly participating in ways that we admire today. And unlike stories based only on family or local traditions, this story came with a dramatic account in what appeared to be Deborah Champion’s own voice.

We can see those forces coming together in the 1970s. The revival might have been kicked off by Sally Smith Booth in The Women of ’76, published in 1973. Booth devoted three pages to Deborah Champion, calling her “the eighteenth century woman’s answer to Paul Revere,” and the book’s back cover listed her as one of eight exemplars discussed inside. Booth’s retelling of the ride quoted selections from the 1912/1926 text (thereby removing much of the suspicious language). It stated Deborah’s age as twenty-two but suggested she rode in early 1776 and didn’t acknowledge her marriage at all. Booth’s book included a long bibliography but didn’t indicate a specific source for those quotations.

The American Revolution Bicentennial Commission of Connecticut and Pequot Press published Catherine Fennelly’s Connecticut Women in the Revolutionary Era in 1975. That short book also described Deborah Champion’s ride without citing sources. Rachel Smith notes that Fennelly referred elsewhere to Beard’s work, suggesting she’d found the story there.

Three years later, in A History of Women in America, journalists Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman wrote:

Early on in the war a young woman from Connecticut, twenty-two-year-old Deborah Champion, was able to carry vitally needed intelligence dispatches to General Washington in Cambridge, Massachusetts, because it never occurred to the British that a sweet-faced woman might be a spy. Champion, cool and easy, rode for two days through enemy territory and past enemy sentries to safely complete her mission. Champion, who has been called the female Paul Revere, was unlike the famous silversmith in that she was not captured by the British—her “night ride” was a success.

Again, Hymowitz and Weissman didn’t cite a source. (Their endnotes cover only direct quotations.)

TOMORROW: And eventually what looked like an even better source surfaced.

Deborah Champion, Cloaked Crusader

Last week’s postings showed how descendants of Henry Champion, particularly women who had joined the Daughters of the American Revolution, promulgated the dubious Deborah Champion letter in the early 1900s. They told the story at meetings, sent copies to other chapters, and probably shared a copy to the authors of The Pioneer Mothers of America.

This week’s postings have shown how the text of that letter changed over time, how its details don’t conform to facts about the siege of Boston, how it reads like historical fiction. Most of the Champion relatives could have been sincerely duped about the letter’s authenticity. But someone was working to maintain the fraud.

Interestingly, those women didn’t need the evidence of the Deborah Champion letter to join the D.A.R. Their common ancestor Henry Champion is well documented as a commissary general for the Continental Army, qualifying all his descendants for membership. His son, also named Henry, was a high officer in the army, mentioned in George Washington’s correspondence. The Champion men already offered an authentic Revolutionary heritage.

What’s more, the Champion family remained prominent in Connecticut. The commissary general’s house is preserved as the headquarters of the Colchester Historical Society. The Connecticut Historical Society holds a collection of his and his son’s papers. (More are at the Litchfield Historical Society.) Deborah Champion’s husband, Samuel Gilbert, was a respected state legislator and jurist, and their son Peyton R. Gilbert’s papers are at Yale.

But this letter provided a Revolutionary heritage for the Champion women—not just Deborah, who supposedly performed a ride to rival Paul Revere’s, but also the women who preserved and shared her story over a century later. It might have been particularly meaningful for women in branches of the family who had moved away from Connecticut. The most likely candidate for writing the letter was Mary Rebecca Adams Squire of Ohio and Pennsylvania, who first received praise for sharing the “charming tale” in 1902 and supplied a version to another branch of the family in the following decade.

The letter portrays Deborah as brave, patriotic, dedicated to her father and General Washington, and active. She’s not a “stay at home” focused wholly on feminine handcrafts. She steps into the traditionally male role as rider. In that respect, the Deborah Champion story is similar to the stories of Emily Geiger (first published in 1832, no contemporaneous documentation), Abigail Smith (first published in 1864, refuted by family documents), and Sybil Ludington (first published in 1880, no contemporaneous documentation).

The story of her ride to Boston made Deborah Champion a heroine that later generations of Americans could relate to: a seventeen-year-old loyal daughter undertaking a dangerous mission for Gen. Washington. No matter that she was actually twenty-two years old and married by the (earliest) date of the letter. No matter that the letter is full of improbable details and language.

In 1980, two of Deborah Champion’s descendants donated a fur-lined red cloak to the Connecticut Historical Society. In its newsletter the society reported the “family tradition” that Deborah “wore it when she rode through British lines in 1775, carrying dispatches to General Washington.” Yet even with all its detailed descriptions of clothing, the letter doesn’t describe that fur-lined red cloak.

I asked Lynne Bassett, an expert on historic textiles, about that garment. She replied that it appears “entirely authentic. It’s made of red wool broadcloth with shag trimming the edges. All of the construction details are right.” It’s a much more impressive artifact than we have from the vast majority of eighteenth-century American women. But without the dramatic story provided by the dubious letter, it would still be an empty cloak.

TOMORROW: The Deborah Champion revival.

Other Dubious Documents about Revolutionary Women

Over the past several days, I’ve been sharing the judgment of a group of researchers about the letter attributed to Deborah Champion of Connecticut in 1775 or 1776. We concluded, as others have less loudly before us, that this text was composed and revised in the late 1800s or early 1900s. The letter was probably inspired by the Champion family’s tradition about Deborah undertaking rides for her father, first published in 1891. That might have been an accurate memory, but there’s no reliable evidence to back it up.

Did author of the letter intend for people to take it as a genuine historic document? There are examples of American women in late nineteenth century composing fictional historic diaries or letters about Revolutionary figures, apparently not expecting them to be treated as authentic. Isabella James composed a “letter from Lydia Biddle” during the siege of Boston that the Boston Daily Advertiser published in 1875. Mary Williams Greeley wrote the “Diary of Dorothy Dudley” published by the Ladies’ Centennial Committee of Cambridge in 1876. Both women were reportedly surprised when readers took their fictions as authentic. But by then the damage had been done: for decades authors have been rediscovering those publications and citing them as genuine.

That sort of story might have been part of the genesis of the Deborah Champion letter: composed by one of her descendants as a fictional recreation of the family traditions about her, and then taken by other descendants to be real. I suspect that a lot of myths about the Revolution started as inspiring fables for children about their ancestors, not meant to be repeated or taken as fact. But those children grew up into adults who believed those stories were both accurate and of national importance, and put them into the public record.

In the case of Deborah Champion, however, we have not just the tradition put into print in 1891 but a document said to support that tradition. And that document was changed at least once, possibly to remove obvious anachronisms and holes. Each revision was presented to readers as an accurate transcription of an authentic document. So there was some knowing chicanery along the way.

Again, there are precedents for that. In 1900 Helen Evertson Smith published Colonial Days and Ways, as Gathered from Family Papers, presenting it as a series of accurate transcriptions of historical documents from her family. In particular, the book quoted letters and a diary it said were written by Juliana Smith during the Revolutionary War. Juliana Smith is a documented person, and her home and family were real.

Helen Evertson Smith did inherit and collect historical documents; her papers are now at the New-York Historical Society. But her book fictionalized those documents in both details and language, where she didn’t simply make up texts. Ives Goddard discussed the problems with relying on Colonial Days and Ways in a 2005 paper (P.D.F. download). The In the Words of Women blog lists it among “Dubious Sources” on women during the Revolution. Nevertheless, the book continues to be reprinted and cited as a historical source.

Of course, there are also plenty of precedents for fables, falsehoods, and fake documents about men in the Revolutionary War. These examples stand out because they were created by women about other women when there were relatively few historical sources and limited educational and professional opportunities for that half of the population.

COMING UP: The question of motive—for telling the story, and for retelling it.

The Deborah Champion Letter as Historical Fiction

One quality of the Deborah Champion letter, in either version, that struck everyone on the team of researchers that Joseph Warren biographer Sam Forman assembled is its novelistic detail. In short, it reads like fiction. What’s more, Tamesin Eustis wrote, “Not only is it an extraordinarily well-organized ‘narrative’ that doesn’t read true for most letter-writing, it has the tone, style, and language of something written in a later era.”

Derek Beck said:

The letter is written to someone she is close to, but there seems to be language in the letter that is really meant as exposition to us the audience, as if the letter is not truly personal. One example: “John and Jerry are both good saddle horses as you and I know.” Well, if both “you and I know,” why I am explaining it? I see this in movie scripts all the time: crappy dialogue that feels unreal, and is the result of bad writing produced by a writer who is attempting to pass exposition to the audience but couldn’t find a natural way to do so.

In fact, this letter doesn’t really feel very familiar between the two at all. There’s nothing that seems to require insider knowledge between the two. I don’t feel like I’m a voyeur snooping on a personal letter, I feel like I’m reading a story, with words too polished for a mere personal letter.

In particular, I think the texts—especially the version published in 1912 and 1926—spotlight details that were quaint and historic to readers around the turn of the last century. For instance, the writer has a habit of mentioning garments and often even the cloth they’re made of: “small clothes for father,” “my linsey-woolsey dress,” “my camlet cloak,” “my close silk hood,” “her calash.” Almost all of those fabrics and garments had gone out of fashion by the early twentieth century. The letter says nothing about a straw hat or a linen gown or anything else that would still be familiar.

The letter—again, the earlier published version in particular—offers a lot of verbatim dialogue for verisimilitude, but again that conversation is made to seem antique. The Champions weren’t Quaker, but this is the way the letter has them speaking:

“Deborah, I have need of thee; hast thou the heart and the courage to go out in the dark and in the night and ride as fast as may be until thou comest to Boston town?”

“Surely, my Father, if it is thy wish, and will please thee.”

“I do not believe, Deborah, that there will be actual danger to threaten thee, else I would not ask it of thee, but the way is long and the business urgent. The horseman that was here awhile back brought dispatches which it is desperately necessary that General Washington should receive as soon as possible. I cannot go, the wants of the army call me at once to Hartford, and I have no one to send but my daughter. Dare you go?”

“Dare! father, and I your daughter,—and the chance to do my country and General Washington a service. I am glad to go.”

In short, the Deborah Champion letter reads like deliberately written historic fiction, albeit poorly researched.

TOMORROW: The Colonial Revival context.

[The appearance of The Turning of Anne Merrick above isn’t meant to suggest that Christine Blevins’s historical fiction is poorly researched. I just liked the cloak.]

Rachel Smith on the Deborah Champion Letter

As I’ve described, a couple of months back Dr. Samuel Forman asked a bunch of Revolutionary-history contacts to assess a letter attributed to Deborah Champion of Connecticut describing a trip to Gen. George Washington’s headquarters early in the war. 

One member of that team is Rachel Smith, Assistant to the State Historian at the University of Connecticut, Hartford. I’m sharing her assessment of the Library of Congress text as a “guest blogger” posting.

Tone: If all the references to the Revolutionary War were removed and I were asked to date this letter, I would have placed it in the second quarter of the nineteenth century by its language and tone alone. The overwrought, flowery prose of the letter reeks of the popular writing sensibilities of the early-to-mid-1800s. Admittedly, the overwhelming majority of colonial documents I’ve read were written by men, but I’d still suspect this kind of over-the-top, hyper-descriptive, “sentimental” prose wasn’t commonly used by women until after the advent of female academies (last decade of the eighteenth century/early nineteenth century).

Also, the disconnect between the author’s writing style and the style of her father’s almost comically archaic speech strikes me as very odd—certainly unlike anything I’ve seen in correspondence of other young adults in that period (Quakers excepted). (I have seen slave/African dialects written out in the eighteenth century, but that was always to underscore their otherness; something one wouldn’t do with one’s respected father.)

Internal logic: There seems to be a lot of totally unnecessary description—e.g., “You know our Continental bills are so small you can pack a hundred dollars very compactly”; a contemporary wouldn’t need to be told any of that, but it sure is a wonderful (and convenient) visual for a Victorian audience totally unfamiliar with colonial paper money.

Timing: I’m not familiar with the context of this letter, but I wonder why Deborah would write such a long and explicitly detailed letter to her friend describing her “dangerous mission” when the wartime atmosphere was still an extremely volatile one in October of 1775. The liberal use of the phrase “The British” is anachronistic for late 1775 for the same reasons it would have be anachronistic for Paul Revere to yell “The British are coming” a few months earlier.

Specific language: Perhaps the most quantifiable evidence for this letter being suspect. The writer’s use of “family room” instead of “parlor” is an immediate red flag; according to the Oxford English Dictionary that term didn’t come into popular use in the United States until well into the mid-nineteenth century. Other anachronisms include “keeping-room” (O.E.D.: 1790s) and “stay-at-home” (O.E.D.: 1806). Many other phrases, like “a nice hot breakfast,” also strike me as extremely anachronistic, but those aren’t as easy to pin down chronologically.

Our thanks to Rachel Smith for her contribution to this inquiry. Things aren’t looking good for the letter’s credibility, are they?

TOMORROW: Novelistic detail.

[The photo above shows the Prudence Crandall Museum, a Canterbury, Connecticut, house that in the 1830s became one of those female academies.]

Deborah Champion Encounters the Army

This week I’m dealing out an analysis of the Deborah Champion letter about traveling from Connecticut to Massachusetts in October 1775. Dr. Samuel Forman, who launched this inquiry, has posted the two variant transcriptions of the letter on his website. (There is no known original.)

After offering an extraordinarily level of detail about Deborah Champion’s journey through Connecticut, the letter omits nearly all details about her important destination, Gen. George Washington’s headquarters. Despite being addressed to a friend whose brother was in the American army, the letter says nothing about the condition of those soldiers.

The version of the letter at the Library of Congress offers an explanation for this reticence:

Just as I finished that sentence father came into my room and said “My daughter if you are writing of your journey, do not say just how or where you saw General Washington, nor what you heard of the affairs of the Colony. A letter is a very dangerous thing these days and it might fall into strange hands and cause harm…”

But nothing like that sentence appears in the transcriptions published in 1912 and 1926.

Nevertheless, the Deborah Champion letter does offer a glimpse of the military—the other military. The high point of suspense is when the writer and her elderly slave encounter a royal army patrol. “The British were at Providence, in Rhode Island,” the letter says. I quote from the 1912 version:

I heard that it would be almost impossible to avoid the British unless by going so far out of the way that too much time would be lost, so I plucked up what courage I could and secreting my papers in a small pocket in the saddle-bags, under all the eatables mother had filled them with, I rode on, determined to ride all night. It was late at night, or rather very early in the morning, that I heard the call of the sentry and knew that now, if at all, the danger point was reached, but pulling my calash still farther over my face, I went on with what boldness I could muster.

Suddenly, I was ordered to halt; as I could n’t help myself I did so. I could almost hear Aristarchus’ teeth rattle in his mouth, but I knew he would obey my instructions and if I was detained, would try to find the way alone. A soldier in a red coat proceeded to take me to headquarters, but I told him it was early to wake the captain, and to please to let me pass for I had been sent in urgent haste to see a friend in need, which was true if ambiguous. To my joy, he let me go on, saying: “Well, you are only an old woman anyway,” evidently as glad to get rid of me as I of him. Will you believe me, that is the only bit of adventure that befell me in the whole long ride.

Again, the text at the Library of Congress differs on significant details, quoting Aristarchus as saying, “De British missus for sure.” Really.

As Derek W. Beck and I both saw immediately when we read this text, this is bunk. There were no British redcoat checkpoints in New England during the siege of Boston. The Royal Navy was operating gingerly along the coast, but all the king’s troops were inside Boston—that’s why there was a siege. Providence was the site of Rhode Island’s rebellious Patriot government and never in redcoat hands. Far from it being “almost impossible to avoid the British” troops on the road in October 1775, it was impossible to find them.

Conversely, the 1912 letter repeatedly refers to going to Boston:

• The writer says she’s been “To Boston! Really and truly to Boston.”
  
• Her father tells her, “ride as fast as may be until thou comest to Boston town.”
  
• “When I arrived in Boston, I was so very fortunate as to find friends who took me at once to General Washington…”
  
• “I stayed a week in Boston, every one was so kind and good to me, seeming to think I had done some great thing…”
  
• “Did I tell you that I saw your brother Samuel in Boston?”

(The text at the Library of Congress offers a completely different description of meeting Washington and no statement about staying a week in Boston.)

Again, the whole point of the siege of Boston is that it was impossible for Gen. Washington, his troops, and their family visitors to get into that town. Washington was in Cambridge. The Connecticut troops were camped there and in west Charlestown and in Roxbury. If Deborah Champion’s father had really been so worried about her, he would have made sure she knew which towns to visit and which to avoid.

TOMORROW: More anachronistic details.

Deborah Champion and Samuel Gilbert in 1775

I’ve been analyzing the text(s) of the Deborah Champion letter describing that young woman’s adventurous trip from Connecticut to Cambridge in September 1775—or, according to another transcription, June 1776.

More discrepancies arise when we try to situate this letter into what we know about Deborah Champion’s life. When Mary Rebecca Adams Squire sent the letter to the ladies of Adams, New York, she wrote:

The letter seems to be a copy of one written at the age of 17, by Deborah Champion, daughter of Commissary General [Henry] Champion of the Continental Army, to her dear friend, Patience Gilbert of East Haddam [Connecticut].

The name “Gilbert” doesn’t actually appear in the letter. It’s addressed “My Dear Patience” and closes with a postscript “P. S.—Did I tell you that I saw your brother Samuel in Boston? He desired his love if I should be writing to you.” (The Library of Congress typescript says: “I saw your brother Samuel in Boston. He sent his love if I should be writing you.”)

Those details combine to produce what we might now call a little “Easter egg” for romantic readers to uncover—a glimpse of young Deborah Champion’s courtship with Patience Gilbert’s brother Samuel, the man she married, during the siege of Boston. Squire drove that home by appending a final line to the transcript she sent to New York: “Deborah Champion afterward married Samuel Gilbert.” The book Pioneer Mothers of America states: “It was only a short time afterward that Miss Deborah became Mrs. Samuel Gilbert.”

Except the dates don’t add up. Local and family records say that Deborah Champion married Samuel Gilbert of Gilead, Connecticut, on 3 Sept 1775. Even at the earliest date to appear on the Deborah Champion letter, therefore, she was no longer Deborah Champion during her trip—she was Deborah Gilbert. To be sure, no version is signed with a full name. But there’s no indication in those texts that the writer is a recently married woman beholding to and living with a husband rather than a father.

What’s more, in the autumn of 1775 Samuel Gilbert wasn’t serving with the Continental Army “in Boston.” He was in Hartford as a member of the Connecticut legislature. (Deborah’s brother Henry was part of the American army, but the letter says nothing about visiting him.)

Lastly, I couldn’t find any evidence in genealogies that Samuel Gilbert had a sister named Patience. To be very charitable, I could entertain the possibility that Mary Squire simply guessed wrong about who “Patience” was, and this letter went to another acquaintance of Deborah Champion who really did have a brother named Samuel in the army. But this document isn’t putting me in the mood to be very charitable.

TOMORROW: Deborah Champion’s view of the siege of Boston.

Sorting Out the Deborah Champion Letters

Sam Forman has posted the two distinct surviving texts of Deborah Champion’s letter about traveling to Boston during the siege to deliver dispatches to Gen. George Washington for her father.

The first major difference between those texts is when and where the letter was apparently written.

• The text published in 1912 does not include a dateline.
• The similar text published in 1926 gives the date of “New London, June 14, 1776.”
• The typescript at the Library of Congress is dated “Westchester, Conn. Oct. 2nd, 1775.” That text also says Deborah Champion had been back home for ten days, meaning her ride occurred in September.

The June 1776 date is clearly impossible for a letter written soon after Deborah Champion returned from visiting Gen. Washington in Cambridge. More than two months before then, he had left Massachusetts and moved his army to New York. The October 1775 date is historically feasible, but that copy of the letter was the last to surface.

Alongside the two different dates are two different places from which the letter was apparently sent. Contemporaneous sources say that in 1775 her father, Henry Champion, lived in Westchester, Connecticut (in the house shown above), so that seems the more likely place for Deborah to sit down and write down her adventure. When Sarah E. Booth Champion, the widow of a later Henry Champion, read some version of this letter in New Haven in 1916, she stated that Deborah Champion had started her ride in Westchester. There’s no clue about whether the widow had a copy of the letter datelined “Westchester” or was applying her own knowledge of the family to the 1912 text.

It’s conceivable that Deborah Champion wrote her letter from Westchester in October 1775 and then, because it was so interesting, she or someone else wrote out a copy in New London the following June. A later copyist might have mistaken the date on the copy for the date of the original. Mary Rebecca Adams Squire sent the Deborah Champion Chapter of the D.A.R. a copy of the letter labeled “New London, June 14, 1776,” but no one seems to have doubted that date.

Someone in the Deborah Champion Chapter apparently supplied the text of its letter to the authors of Pioneer Mothers of America. If so, that person might have suppressed the dubious dateline. Alternatively, the authors could have done so, but they had an eye for discrepancies and plenty of other material to print. When the D.A.R. chapter’s local newspaper published its copy of the letter in 1926, it included the June 1776 dateline, suggesting again that no one recognized its oddity.

Meanwhile, someone working with an October 1775 original might have produced a more accurate transcript of the letter which eventually went to the Library of Congress. One that also referred to Deborah Champion’s father as “Colonel Champion,” for example, rather than “General Champion” as in the other versions. (He became a commissary general, but that wasn’t a military rank.)

Of course, another scenario is that people were quietly revising the text as time passed, realizing that it contained anachronistic details and hoping that nobody noticed.

TOMORROW: And frankly the second scenario appears more likely.

The Second Deborah Champion Letter

As I wrote yesterday, a 1912 book and a 1926 newspaper published the text of a letter in which young Deborah Champion described carrying dispatches to Gen. George Washington during the siege of Boston. Sam Forman invited a team of us to investigate that account.

In addition to the published texts, we also discovered that a typewritten transcript of Deborah Champion’s letter is part of the manuscripts collection of the Library of Congress. Derek W. Beck recruited a couple of Washington-based friends, Kevin Peel and Will Brooks, to visit the library on the last day before this fall’s government shutdown and see what that document looks like.

As I said, it’s a typewritten transcript, not an original from the eighteenth century. It was therefore created in the late 1800s or later, in the period when Champion family descendants were spreading Deborah’s story through the Daughters of the American Revolution. We found no clue about when that transcript came to the library.

The first page begins:

Copy of letter by Deborah Champion, daughter of Commissary-General Henry Champion of the Continental Army, telling of her ride to Boston to carry despatches to General Washington—an historic fact. The original letter still in possession of the Champion family.

Neither that typescript nor the library’s catalogue offer a further clue about where the “original letter” might be.

Sam Forman has now shared both texts on his website: the letter published in 1912 and 1926 in nearly identical forms, and the transcript in the Library of Congress. Comparing the two texts reveals some interesting features:

• Both texts tell the same story with many of the same phrases and details, indicating that they both derive from a documentary source. The overlaps and similarities are too numerous for the texts to be independent manifestations of the same family tradition.
• At the same time, there are significant differences between the 1912/1926 text and the undated copy in the Library of Congress—differences larger than could be created by simple transcription errors.

Our conclusion is that someone edited the earliest text to produce the later version(s). Nevertheless, both available texts were presented as accurate copies of a historic original.

And next we turn to the internal evidence of the letter.

TOMORROW: Deborah Champion’s tale.

“I at one time came across a letter”

As I described yesterday, in the early 1900s the Deborah Champion Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which had been formed in Adams, New York, was the proud owner of a copy of a letter from its namesake describing her adventurous ride during the Revolutionary War.

The text of that letter was published at least three times in the early 1900s and continues to be reprinted. Its story caught the eye of Samuel Forman, biographer of Dr. Joseph Warren, because first-person accounts of any element of the siege of Boston from women are rare. Before publishing the story on his website, however, Sam asked a handful of research colleagues to help him assess the letter and find out more about it.

The earliest text of the Deborah Champion letter that we found appeared in the book The Pioneer Mothers of America (vol. 2, 1912), by Harry Clinton Green and Mary Walcott Green. Those authors implied it had been supplied by the Deborah Champion Chapter of the D.A.R. That chapter has now been inactive for decades, and no one knows where its document might be.

I also found the 29 Dec 1926 Jefferson County Journal, which served the town of Adams. In an article titled “Deborah Champion’s Famous Ride,” it printed the same letter and indicated that it had come to the chapter from Mary Rebecca Adams Squire, a descendant of Deborah Champion living in Pennsylvania. She described her discovery this way:

Searching among some long neglected archives (I had almost said rubbish) belonging to our family, I at one time came across a letter written in the long ago time. As there seems to be an interest attached to old records just now, I have thought it might possibly interest those, who, like ourselves, had ancestors whom they are proud to acknowledge, and whose memories are held in reverence. The letter seems to be a copy of one written at the age of 17, by Deborah Champion, daughter of Commissary General [Henry] Champion of the Continental Army, to her dear friend, Patience Gilbert of East Haddam [Connecticut].

I will herewith transcribe the same.

The newspaper printed the transcription that Squire had sent. Note that she didn’t claim to have the original, only “a copy,” but we don’t know where her property might have gone.

Sam found an item in the Yale Daily News for 16 May 1916 that also mentions the letter. An article headlined “Meeting of Historical Society” says:

A meeting of the New Haven Colony Historical Society will be held this evening at 8. . . . Mrs. Henry Champion will read a letter written by Deborah Champion, describing her ride from Westchester, Connecticut, to Boston, carrying dispatches to General Washington.

The historical society’s annual report states that the letter “gave a graphic description” of Deborah Champion’s ride but offered no more details.

The person who read that letter in New Haven was Sarah Elizabeth Booth Champion, widow of Henry Champion (1838-1867), leader of the Mary Clap Wooster Chapter of the D.A.R. (member #3392), and author of Our Flag: Its History and Changes from 1607 to 1910.

The letter published in 1912—apparently in Adams by this time—doesn’t mention Westchester as the start of Deborah Champion’s ride. Sarah might have read the published letter and added that detail based on her knowledge of the Champion family. Or she might have read from another copy of the letter.

TOMORROW: Another copy of the Deborah Champion letter, of course.

The D.A.R. and Deborah Champion

In 1890, one year before The Champion Genealogy was published (as described yesterday), eighteen women and four men met in Washington, D.C., to form the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution. That organization reflected several trends in American society: the Colonial Revival, British-Americans’ interest in tradition in the face of rising immigration from other parts of Europe and the world, and greater political activity by women, even if that didn’t go all the way to suffrage.

Among the women who joined the Daughters of the American Revolution in the group’s first decade were descendants of Henry Champion of Connecticut. He was a Continental Army commissary from 1776 to 1778 and then commissary general for the Eastern Department until 1780. He had particular responsibilities to supply cattle for the army. Any woman who could document descent from Henry Champion was therefore entitled to become a member of the D.A.R. The first two to join—Mary Deming Shipman (member #2312) and Martha Isham Mix Cone (#2838)—were from Connecticut, but the family had spread out over the eastern U.S. of A., and soon more far-flung relatives became members.

One of those descendants was Isabella Bryce Isham Thomas, born in Ohio. In 1897 the fourth volume of the D.A.R. Lineage Book listed her as member #3116 and added:

[Henry Champion’s] daughter, Deborah, at the age of seventeen bore despatches on horseback from her father to Washington, attended only by an old negro servant and at one time she carried money for the army through the lines of the enemy.

The story in the privately-published Champion Genealogy thus reached an audience outside the family.

In the same year as that volume, the 27 October Saint Paul Globe published an article about the meeting of a Minnesota chapter of the D.A.R. headlined “Honor Mrs. Squires.” (Mary Smyth Squires, member #13507, was the chapter’s newly elected president.) The newspaper quoted the group’s historian, “Miss Greene,” who described Revolutionary exploits by several ancestors of the members present, including:

Deborah Champion was sent by her father, at the age of 17, to carry despatches from New London to General Washington, at Boston. She made the journey there and back on horseback, attended only by an old slave named Aristarchus. At another time she passed through the British lines carrying funds to pay the American army—her sex enabling her to pass without suspicion.

This statement is almost identical to what appeared in the 1891 Champion Genealogy except that it makes clear that Deborah had taken two trips. Evidently there was a Champion descendant out in St. Paul with a copy of that book.

Another branch of the Champion family had settled around Philadelphia and helped to found the Declaration of Independence Chapter of the D.A.R. in January 1902. The following year, the Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine reported on the inaugural gathering at the Germantown home of Mary Adams Brooks (#31835, born in Troy, New York—her married name sometimes reported as Brooke):

The friends sang “America,” Mrs. Squire, the mother of our hostess, read a charming tale entitled “Deborah Champion’s Night Ride,” a vivid picture of an episode in the life of an ancestress of Mrs. Squire’s.

“Mrs. Squire” was Mary Rebecca Adams Squire, D.A.R. member #43315, born in Ohio, and also living in Germantown as of 1904. (Mary Rebecca Adams Squire appears to have no relationship to Mary Smyth Squires of St. Paul, mentioned above.)

Yet a third group of Champion descendants was living around Adams, New York, and in 1902 they helped to form the Deborah Champion Chapter of the D.A.R. there. Perhaps those members read about Mary Rebecca Adams Squire’s presentation in the society’s magazine the next year, or perhaps they were already in touch with their distant cousins. However it happened, by 1912 Harry Clinton Green and Mary Walcott Green wrote in the second volume of The Pioneer Mothers of America:

One of the cherished treasures of the Deborah Champion Chapter, D. A. R., of Adams, N. Y., is a copy of a letter supposedly written by Deborah Champion herself, describing this adventure to her friend Patience Gilbert of Haddam and which was presented to the Chapter by a lineal descendant.

A publication of this same letter in the 29 Dec 1926 Jefferson County Journal indicates that that document came to the ladies in New York from Mary Rebecca Adams Squire.

TOMORROW: “A letter supposedly written by Deborah Champion herself.”

Introducing the Story of Deborah Champion

This is the story of two documents that Sam Forman, author of the recent biography Dr. Joseph Warren, just posted on his website. This story (and it’s a long story) is the product of work by a team that Sam assembled virtually late last year, including Rachel Smith, Tamesin Eustis, Derek W. Beck, and myself, along with helpful friends.

In 1891, Francis Bacon Trowbridge published The Champion Genealogy, tracing the descendants of Henry Champion of Connecticut. He was a militia colonel and commissary during the Revolutionary War. The book included this stirring story of a young woman during the Revolutionary War:

“Mrs. Deborah (Champion) Gilbert,” says a descendant, “was sent by her father at the age of seventeen to carry dispatches from New London to General Washington at Boston. She made the journey there and back on horseback, attended only by an old slave named Aristarchus. At one time she passed through the lines of the British soldiers carrying funds to pay the American army, her sex enabling her to pass without suspicion. I am proud to be able to remember her as a stately old lady of ninety-three years.”

That unnamed descendant’s account seems to describe two significant journeys: one by Deborah Champion as a seventeen-year-old from New London to Boston, and one through British lines carrying a Continental Army payroll.

The same genealogy—indeed, the same page—said that Deborah Gilbert was born in 1753 and died in 1845. Those dates appear on the Gilberts’ gravestone, shown above (courtesy of FindaGrave.com). That presents two glitches for the unnamed descendant’s story:

• Deborah Gilbert died at the age of ninety-two and thus was never “a stately old lady of ninety-three years.”
• When Deborah Champion was “at the age of seventeen,” the year was 1770, five years before she could have met “General Washington at Boston.” (Her sister Dorothy was seventeen in 1775, though that might just be coincidence.)

Clearly the details of this story had gotten foggy as it was passed along. Trowbridge the genealogist didn’t call attention to those discrepancies. After all, Champion descendants were the primary market for his book.

TOMORROW: Outside the family.