“Some among us urge strongly for Independency”

In August 1822, Timothy Pickering invited John Adams to do something the retired President really liked doing: explaining how he was close to the center of the most important decisions of the American Revolution.

Just four days after Pickering sent his letter from Salem, Adams responded with a long account of how the Continental Congress came to declare independence 250 years ago.

He started with a vivid word picture of the Massachusetts delegation to the First Continental Congress being “met at Frankfort [Frankford] by Dr [Benjamin] Rush, Mr [Thomas] Mifflin, Mr [John] Bayard and several others of the most active Sons of Liberty, in Philadelphia.”

That meeting was on 29 Aug 1774, according to Adams’s diary. At that time he wrote:

A Number of Carriages and Gentlemen came out of Phyladelphia to meet us. Mr. Thomas Mifflin, Mr. [Thomas] McKean of the Lower Counties [Delaware], one of their Delegates, Mr. [Edward or John] Rutledge of Carolina, and a Number of Gentlemen from Philadelphia. Mr. [Nathaniel] Folsom and Mr. [John] Sullivan, the N. Hampshire Delegates. We were introduced to all these Gentlemen and most cordially wellcomed to Philadelphia.

We also have Dr. Rush’s recollection in his memoir:

I went as far as Frankford to meet the delegates from Massachusetts, and rode back into town in the same carriage with John Adams, and two of his colleagues. This gentleman’s dress and manners were at that time plain, and his conversation cold and reserved. He asked me many questions relative to the state of public opinion upon politicks, and the characters of the most active citizens on both sides of the controversy.

Rush evidently warned Adams and Robert Treat Paine “against two Gentlemen particularly,” one being the Rev. William Smith of the University of Pennsylvania and the other not. (Adams’s diary preserved only one name.)

In his letter almost fifty years later, Adams stated that the Philadelphia radicals had come out for that meeting to warn the Massachusetts men that people viewed them as “four desperate adventurers.” The locals advised the newcomers to:

• let Virginians and other southerners take the lead on radical measures. 
• “not utter the word Independence, nor give the least hint or insinuation of the idea, neither in Congress or any private conversation.” 

Yet Adams recorded no hint of that warning in 1774. And the presence of a South Carolina delegate in the party would surely have inhibited discussion of how to lead along the south.

Adams’s 1822 letter then skipped ahead to the spring of 1776 as if the same situation still prevailed. Of course, a lot had happened during those eighteen months. By 1776 the Second Continental Congress delegates were discussing independence openly, though they insisted they weren’t pushing for it—rather, the Crown was pushing them toward it.

On 9 Jan 1776, for example, Richard Smith of New Jersey wrote in his diary: “Several Members said that if a Foreign Force shall be sent here, they are willing to declare the Colonies in a State of Independent Sovereignity.”

Robert Morris told a colleague on 15 February:

America has long been charged by her Enemys in England with aiming at Independency. The charge was unjust, but we now plainly see, that the burning of Towns, seizing our Ships, with numerous acts of wanton barbarity & Cruelty perpetrated by the British Forces has prepared Men’s minds for an Independency, that were shock’d at the idea a few weeks ago. This you may depend on, and should this Campaign open with furious Acts of Parliament, you may bid adieu to the American Colonies. They will then assuredly declare for Independency…

Joseph Hewes of North Carolina wrote home on 20 March:

some among us urge strongly for Independency and eternal separation, others wish to wait a little longer and to have the opinion of their Constituents on that subject, you must give us the sentiment of your province when your Convention meets.

Carter Braxton of Virginia reported on 14 April:

Independency & total Seperation from Great Britain are the interesting Subjects of all ranks of Men & often agitate our Body.

Notably, Morris and Braxton both opposed independence that spring. But they weren’t averse to discussing it.

Nonetheless, the next part of Adams’s letter was an almost necessary part of his post-Presidency memories: everyone disliking him because of his far-sighted and courageous stances.

It soon became rumoured about the City that John Adams was for Independence; the Quakers & Proprietary Gentlemen, took the alarm; represented me as the worst of men, the true-blue Sons of Liberty pitied me; all put me under a kind of Coventry. I was avoided like a man infected with the Leprosy. I walked the streets of Philadelphia in solitude, born down by the weight of care and unpopularity. But every ship for the ensuing year, brought us fresh proof of the truth of my prophesies and one after another became convinced of the necessity of Independence. I did not sink under my discouragements; I had before experienced enough of the Wantonness of popularity in the trial of Preston and the Soldiers, in Boston.

I’ve previously noted how there’s actually no contemporaneous evidence of Bostonians shunning Adams in the early 1770s because he represented Capt. Thomas Preston and the soldiers after the Massacre. 

Likewise, documents from 1775 and early 1776 show that Adams’s fellow Congress delegates continued to put him on many committees and to dine with him. No doubt it was awkward when the royal authorities intercepted and published letters in which he criticized colleagues like John Dickinson, but really Adams brought that on himself.

TOMORROW: Drafting the Declaration at last.

Elbridge Gerry and the Signing

On 3 August 1776, Elbridge Gerry sent a second letter to his Continental Congress colleagues Samuel and John Adams.

Gerry wrote this time from Watertown, still the home of the Massachusetts legislature. He had traveled through Boston, seeing both Adams wives.

Gerry and the Adamses were among the Congress’s most radical delegates, resenting men who hung back from independence. In this letter, for instance, Gerry wrote of “our old Friend Mr. L—— or any other suspected Characters.”

Generally, the Marblehead merchant was optimistic about “the true State of Things in the eastern Colonies,” as people called New England. He had ideas about moving troops around and getting Benjamin Lincoln, then still a Massachusetts militia commander, a Continental commission. But he was confident in the militia system, concluding, “We have eastward of Hudson’s River at least 100000 Men well armed, a Force sufficient to repulse the Enemy if they were forty thousand strong at New York and Canada.”

One significant detail about this letter isn’t its text but its date. It shows that Gerry was in Massachusetts on 2 August when, as the Congress’s official record states, the delegates then present signed the engrossed (handsomely handwritten) Declaration of Independence. Gerry must therefore have added his signature later in the year.

In this article for the Journal of the American Revolution I discussed a story told about Gerry’s signing:

I am credibly informed that the following anecdote occurred on the day of signing the declaration. Mr. [Benjamin] Harrison, a delegate from Virginia, is a large portly man—Mr. Gerry of Massachusetts is slender and spare. A little time after the solemn transaction of signing the instrument, Mr. Harrison said smilingly to Mr. Gerry, “When the hanging scene comes to be exhibited I shall have the advantage over you on account of my size. All will be over with me in a moment, but you will be kicking in the air half an hour after I am gone.”

This anecdote comes to us in somewhat different forms from two seemingly independent sources: Dr. Benjamin Rush and Dr. James Thacher, both probably writing decades later. John Adams read both men’s words and didn’t quibble with the tale. I therefore concluded that this story was more reliable than other legends of the signing.

At the same time I wrote: “Of course it is possible that Rush’s recollection was not accurate. For example, Harrison could have come up with the witticism days later instead of at the dramatic moment of signing.” Or weeks before, when the delegates voted for independence. As Ray Raphael wrote earlier this summer, delegates conglomerated their memories of the vote and the signing.

We can therefore say the anecdote about Harrison and Gerry couldn’t have happened on 2 Aug 1776 when most Congress delegates lined up to sign the Declaration. But Harrison might still have shared his gallows humor sometime that year.

Dr. Benjamin Rush’s “Travels Through Life” Digitized

Here’s another source on the Revolution recently digitized: eight handwritten volumes of Dr. Benjamin Rush’s “Travels Through Life: or Account of Sundry Incidents and Events in the Life of Benjamin Rush…written for the use of his children.”

The American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia owns these volumes and has made them perusable over the web.

There’s a ninth and final volume nearby at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

George W. Corner transcribed and edited Rush’s memoir for publication by the A.P.S. in 1948, which was late for the first-person reminiscences of a noted Founder. The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush is still under copyright, therefore, and I haven’t come across any digitized edition on the web.

As a result, some of Rush’s anecdotes aren’t as well known and retold as one might expect. Here from near the start of handwritten volume 6, for example, is the doctor’s recollection of interactions with George Washington on 18 June 1775, right after he agreed to be the Continental Congress’s top general:

A few days after the appointment of General Washington to be commander in chief of the American Armies, I was invited by a party of Delegates and several citizens of Philada. to a dinner which was given to him at a tavern on the Banks of the Skuilkill below the city.

Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, Mr. [Thomas] Jefferson, James Wilson, Jno. Langdon of New Hampshire and about a dozen more, constituted the whole company. The first toast that was given after dinner was “The Commander in chief of the American Armies.” General Washington rose from his seat, and with some confusion thanked the company for the honor they did him. The whole company instantly rose, and drank the toast standing.

This scene so unexpected, was a Solemn one. A silence followed it, as if every heart was penetrated with the awful, but great events which were to follow the Use of the Sword of liberty which had just been put into general Washington’s hands by the unanimous voice of his country.

About this time, I saw Patrick Henry at his lodgings, who told me that general Washington had been with him, and informed him, that he was unequal to the station in which his country had placed him, and then added with tears in his eyes “Remember Mr. Henry what I now tell you,- From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, & the ruin of my reputation.”

My transcription differs from Corner’s in tiny details of punctuation and capitalization. But only by looking at the manuscript can we see, for example, that Rush:

• added the words “New Hampshire” because, I presume, he didn’t think his readers would remember who John Langdon was.
• started to write that Washington thanked his companions with “great confusion” before easing that down to “some confusion.”
• first quoted Henry as saying Washington spoke of “what I this day tell you” and changed that to “what I now tell you,” probably because the phrase “the day” appeared in the next clause.

Rush biographer Stephen Fried, whose tweet alerted me to this digital offering, noted that the digitization of Rush’s memoirs “even shows the parts his kids tried to cut out,” and that “his infamous riffs on his fellow signers is in Vol 7.” Have fun.

“A living body not only singed, but scorched all over”

The Philadelphia Packet published its first detailed report about the lightning strike on the French minister’s house on 2 Apr 1782.

Four days later, on 6 April, a second long article appeared, also perhaps written by Arthur Lee and Benjamin Rush, who both had medical training. The second story went into detail about the artillery lieutenant hit by that lightning, Albert Rémy de Meaux:

He was alone, seated near a window, his right arm resting on the window cill, the electrical matter, proceeding from conductor to conductor, fell upon his shoulder, descended along his right arm on the window-cill, where it made so great an explosion, that every thing near it was broken in pieces: the arm making but a weak resistance to the explosion, was not broken or fractured, but bruised and burnt all over in a terrible manner.

All his body, and particularly his right side, from the shoulder to the end of his foot, served as a conductor for another part of the electric matter, which set fire every where as it passed.

It was not till six or eight minutes after he was struck that any body knew of his misfortune, when upon entering the room, they saw this unfortunate person surrounded with flames. When they had stripped off what little cloaths the flames had not time to burn, and had restored him to life again, he exhibited a most terrible spectacle; a living body not only singed, but scorched all over, and the miserable object making the most lamentable groans.

The parts which have been the most damaged are the left hand, which was burnt in such a manner that it must have undergone an amputation if he had lived; all the lower part of his belly, the inside of his thigh, was burnt so as to lose all feeling; the other wounds caused him to suffer incessantly for three days the most excruciating pains, when the gangrene began to appear in several places, after which his body gradually perished, and finally he died on the 3d of April at two o’clock in the morning; he preserved his reason, senses and presence of mind to his last breath.

In 1796, in a footnote to his translation of Chastellux’s Travels, George Grieve stated: “his private parts [were] reduced to ashes.” Grieve also wrote that De Meaux “survived but a few hours,” and we know he actually lived for six and a half days, so his information might not be totally reliable.

Another footnote to the lieutenant’s death appears in the papers of the artist Pierre Eugène du Simitière, who was assembling a museum in Philadelphia. He recorded acquiring in March 1782:

a fine miniature picture on vellum, representing a young gentleman with a large flowing wig, a laced cravat, and scarlet cloak turned over the Shoulder Supposed by the dress to have been done in france in the begining of this century

[Donor’s name in red ink] by Monsr. De Meaux officer in the artillery of the french army of Count De Rochambeau who died in Phila., from the hurt received by the lightning that struckt the minister of France’s house March 1782.

It’s possible that De Meaux gave Du Simitière this miniature portrait earlier in the month, before the accident, and Du Simitère added the note later. But the officer may have disposed of this possession in the days after he was badly injured and understood he was dying.

The lightning strike on the French ambassador’s house raises one big question. It happened in Philadelphia, the city where Benjamin Franklin had invented the lightning rod thirty years before. That invention had become internationally famous, establishing Franklin, Philadelphia, and America in the world of Enlightenment science. So how could lightning cause so much fatal damage to a Philadelphia house?

TOMORROW: The landlord.

“Irritated by this obstacle, it broke the stove”

The Philadelphia Packet newspaper ran two long reports on the 27 Mar 1782 lightning strike on the Philadelphia house that the French diplomat De la Luzerne had rented, as I mentioned yesterday.

According to George Grieve, writing in a footnote to his 1796 translation of the Marquis de Chastellux’s Travels in North-America, “Mr. Arthur Lee, and Dr. [Benjamin] Rush, thought proper to publish a very long and curious account of” the calamity.

The newspaper articles are probably that account since there doesn’t seem to be any other candidate. Those articles also might show the signs of dual authorship with shifting tenses and sentence structures.

Both Lee and Rush had medical training, though only Rush was still a practicing physician. Lee (shown here) had spent most of the war in Europe as one of the Continental Congress’s diplomats, feuding with all the others. After he came back to Virginia, that state sent him to the Congress in 1782. Rush had left the Congress in 1778 but continued to be politically active in Philadelphia.

The 2 April Packet installment was an extremely detailed description of how the thunderstorm damaged the house:

The lightning struck it in three different places. The principal explosion was on the west side of the house. The chimney of monsieur le chevalier de la Luzerne was thrown down to the roof, and the bricks scattered to a great distance; the lightning descended down the chimney, attracted by a stove that stopped up the fire-place: irritated by this obstacle, it broke the stove in pieces, demolished entirely the mantle piece, split the funnel of the chimney, threw down and broke all the wainscotting near it, dispersed the bricks to the other end of the room, and cast pieces of the stove to the distance of ten or twelve feet, broke the furniture and glass, and the chamber was found covered with rubbish.

The electric matter appears to have scattered, by traces left on the wall at the front of the house, in returning upwards towards the roof, where the lead of the gutters attracted it without doubt. The same explosion which struck the chimney followed the course of the gutters and descended by a leaden pipe, the end of which terminated on the outside of the wall of the bedchamber of the chevalier: attracted by an iron bedstead in the chamber, it penetrated the wall and tore two bricks out of it, leaving a long black trace on the wall and collected by the iron bedstead set the curtains and bedcloaths on fire; it has started the flooring and made its way into the dining room, underneath this chamber, by a breach in the ceiling of the dining room of about six feet long and two feet broad; gliding along the wainscoting has fallen upon the window-leads and hinges of the shutters, which were all torn off, and has cast the window shutters to the other side of the room; split in several places a mahogany buffet and broke all the china within: the chairs were all broken by the force of the commotion, after which it passed out at a window of the court, without any other consequences.

The lightning struck also the eastern side of the house…

And so on. The electricity “broke a china jug of milk, and reduced the milk to smoke.” It “went off in an iron cilender full of live coals, placed in the middle of a tray of water: it dispersed the coal in all directions.” And “there is scarcely a nail but what has been removed by the shock upon the house.”

There were actually people inside the house at the time to witness the damage.

Two persons who were in [De la Luzerne’s bed-chamber] saw the [iron] bedposts dart abundance of flashes of fire in the midst of a thick black smoke, which had a sulphurous smell; it has torn up all the flooring under the bedstead, and has opened a large passage into a parlour on the ground floor, by breaking away the intermediate boards, and removing joices four inches thick.

Only a couple of sentences within that scientific report stated that a person had been injured:

Unfortunately a French officer was near this window; the shock threw him into a swoon on a chair, and set fire to his cloaths. He was alone, and no one coming to his assistance for some minutes, he was terribly and dangerously burnt; his clothes were almost wholly consumed about him.

That French officer, unnamed in this account, was Lt. Albert Rémy de Meaux.

TOMORROW: The lieutenant’s injuries.

Spreading the Story of Benjamin Lay

Benjamin Lay (1682-1759) was one of the most unusual people in Britain’s early eighteenth-century American colonies.

Lay was only a little over four feet tall and hunchbacked, though fit enough to work as a sailor. He became a vegetarian and lived in caves. He owned hundreds of books, and he published scores of pamphlets, mostly jeremiads about social ills.

Born into an English Quaker family, Lay first encountered slavery on a large scale on Barbados. After that, he became a vocal abolitionist. At the time, the Society of Friends hadn’t yet adopted that position, much less Lay’s unwillingness to compromise on or shut up about it. 

After moving to Pennsylvania in 1731, Lay joined the Abington Friends Meeting, but that didn’t last. In 1737 he had Benjamin Franklin print his pamphlet All Slave Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. As the modern meeting says on its website:

Benjamin Lay was written out of membership at Abington Monthly Meeting on the thirtieth day, eleventh month, 1737 (which by the Quaker calendar, while the Julian calendar was in use, would have been January 30, 1738), because his zealous actions were considered disruptive.

It is now known that at least two of the Friends who led the discernment about writing Benjamin Lay out of membership in the Society of Friends were slave-owners and were likely targeted by Benjamin Lay’s anti-slavery activism. Benjamin Lay was disowned decades before Quakers were disowned for being slave-owners.

Abolitionists such as Dr. Benjamin Rush, Roberts Vaux, and Lydia Maria Child wrote biographies of Lay in the early 1800s. Many featured portraits ultimately derived from a painting, shown above, that Deborah Franklin commissioned from William Williams (1727-1791) as a gift for her husband. But when slavery was no longer a burning political issue, Benjamin Lay became obscure again.

During the Bicentennial, that portrait was spotted at an auction and recognized. It was restored for the National Portrait Gallery. Nonetheless, Lay remained a footnote, occasionally profiled in an article or short entry in a larger book.

In 2010 Alexander Lagos, Joseph Lagos, and Steve Walker made Benjamin Lay a character in their two-volume Sons of Liberty graphic novel, a superhero story set in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania. Frankly, I didn’t think it was a good comic, but an uncompromising abolitionist dwarf mentor fit right into the genre.

Seven years later, Marcus Rediker published the first modern scholarly biography of the man, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist. He spoke at the Abington Friends Meeting, part of an effort coordinated with the organization to repudiate the disowning of 1737 and honor Lay for his egalitarianism. The meeting’s website details the results.

Rediker has now collaborated with David Lester and Paul Buhle to produce a graphic biography, Prophet Against Slavery, ensuring the memory of Benjamin Lay will continue to spread.

Nostalgia “a frequent disease in the American army”

The words “nostalgia” and “nostalgic” don’t appear in any of the letters and other sources available at Founders Online. But of course most of those writers weren’t physicians.

American doctors did use the diagnosis of nostalgia, learning it from European medical authorities. Their uses reflected the original meaning of the word as homesickness rather than how we use the term today.

In “An Account of the Influence of the Military and Political Events of the American Revolution upon the Human Body” (published with other essays in 1789), Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote:

THE NOSTALGIA of Doctor [William] Cullen, or the homesickness, was a frequent disease in the American army, more especially among the soldiers of the New-England states. But this disease was suspended by the superior action of the mind under the influence of the principles which governed common soldiers in the American army.

Of this General [Horatio] Gates furnished me with a remarkable instance in 1776, soon after his return from the command of a large body of regular troops and militia at Ticonderoga. From the effects of the nostalgia, and the feebleness of the discipline, which was exercised over the militia, desertions were very frequent and numerous in his army, in the latter part of the campaign; and yet during the three weeks in which the general expected every hour an attack to be made upon him by General [John] Burgoyne, there was not a single desertion from his army, which consisted at that time of 10,000 men.

Rush’s essay was as much political as medical. He wanted to make the case that, while the disruptions of revolution and war caused stress and illness, the best remedy was more republicanism. Nothing cured the New Englanders’ nostalgia quicker than the imminent prospect of being hanged as traitors by an invading monarchical army.

Rush’s memory may have been faulty about dates. He said Gen. Gates told him in 1776 that nostalgia cleared up because of the threat from Gen. Burgoyne. In that year, Gen. Guy Carleton was in command, with Burgoyne serving under him. Burgoyne led the bigger advance from Canada in 1777. Rush may have amalgamated the events in his mind, but such detail doesn’t matter much to how Rush understood nostalgia.

Dr. James Thacher of Plymouth served the entire war as a surgeon’s mate and military surgeon for the Continental Army. Decades later, in 1823, he adapted his wartime diaries into A Military Journal During the American Revolutionary War.

In that book Thacher wrote under the date of late June 1780:

Our troops in camp are in general healthy, but we are troubled with many perplexing instances of indisposition, occasioned by absence from home, called by Dr. Cullen nostalgia, or home sickness. This complaint is frequent among the militia, and recruits from New England. They become dull and melancholy, with loss of appetite, restless nights, and great weakness. In some instances they become so hypochondriacal as to be proper subjects for the hospital.

This disease is in many instances cured by the raillery of the old soldiers, but is generally suspended by a constant and active engagement of the mind, as by the drill exercise, camp discipline, and by uncommon anxiety, occasioned by the prospect of a battle. 

Rush and Thacher didn’t use the term “nostalgia” in a way that we can easily map onto the modern diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Thacher definitely saw signs of anxiety and depression with physical manifestations. Rush linked the condition to desertions. But they didn’t see nostalgia as a reaction to combat.

Both of these doctors described nostalgia as prevalent in soldiers away from home (particularly from New England), not in those soldiers who had been through hard fighting. In fact, both of these American doctors saw “the prospect of a battle” as dispelling nostalgia, and Thacher viewed “old soldiers” as less prone to it than fresh militiamen.

It’s possible that other American doctors diagnosed Revolutionary soldiers or veterans with nostalgia based on symptoms and circumstances that correspond better with what we call P.T.S.D. I’ve looked for such cases, haven’t found any, and would welcome references.

TOMORROW: A British case study.

S.H.E.A.R. Comes to Cambridge, 18-21 July

On 18-21 July, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic will have its annual meeting in Cambridge.

S.H.E.A.R. was founded in 1977 as “an association of scholars dedicated to exploring events and meanings of United States history between 1776 and 1861.” Or, as one of the founders put it, “the group between the William and Mary Quarterly and Civil War History.”

Anyone who studies “the long eighteenth century” knows the natural pressure to stretch chronological boundaries. Furthermore, while the Omohundro Institute’s conferences and journal cover colonial and Revolutionary America, it doesn’t function as an academic society affiliated with the American Historical Association. The only such society covering the period that includes the Revolution is the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and that emphasizes the interdisciplinary study of the culture of the “long eighteenth.”

As a result, the S.H.E.A.R. conference now tends to extend over the Revolutionary period. The titles of papers at this conference show they span the period of 1750 to 1874 at least. Look through the conference program (P.D.F. download) booklet for information about all the paper sessions, panel discussions, and keynote talks.

Here are some of the paper and session titles that caught my eye:

• “Angelica Church and Caesar’s Daughter: Family and Faction in Federalist New York,” Tom Cutterham
• “’Independence within Independence’: The Vermont Republic in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” Jacqueline Reynoso
• “Death, Resistance, and Public Order: State Reactions to Slave Suicide in Eighteenth-Century New York,” Sarah Pearlman Shapiro
• “The Rise and Fall of the American Fop: From John Adams to Washington [Irving?],” Irving Eran Zelnik
• “The Modernity and Morality of the American Revolution and Early Republic as Displayed by Gouverneur Morris in France,” Emilie Mitran
• “‘Government of the Slaves’: Recaptured Black Loyalists and the Birth of the Virginian State at the Chiswell Lead Mines, 1775-1785,” Sean Gallagher
• “‘Out of the Jawbones of Scotch Grampius’: Scottish Merchants and Personal Identities and Personal Identities in Revolutionary North Carolina, c. 1770-1780,” Kimberly Sherman
• “North American Quiet, West Indian Storm: The Constitutional Politics and Legacy of the Somerset Decision,” Matthew Mason
• ”Tenacious American Indian Women: Thwarting Federal Treaty Policies and Dispossession Along the Wabash in the 1790s,” Susan Sleeper-Smith
• “The Mother Of: Memorializing Mary Washington in Antebellum Virginia,” Kate Haulman
• “Servants of General Washington?: Free Blacks and the Power of Imagined Social Capital,” Cassandra Good
• “Jefferson Matters: Situating and Eighteenth-Century Founder in Twenty-First-Century America,” Annette Gordon-Reed
• “Benjamin Rush and the Enlightenment Critique of Habit,” Joseph M. Gabriel
• “Benjamin Banneker: Avid Astronomer, Ambivalent Abolitionist,” Eric Herschthal

Plus, there are roundtable discussions on “New Directions of Military History in the Early Republic,” “Telling the Republic’s Founding Story in Its Moment of Peril,” and “The Culture of Confederation: How Did the 1780s Make America?” Not to mention a whole three-paper session on “Vampirism, Healing, and Consumption in the Early National Era.”

Registration for the four-day conference costs $78 for members of professorial rank, $114 for non-members, and $52 for graduate students, independent scholars, and the like.

Speakers at 2019 Revolutionary War Conferences

Here are the line-ups of speakers and topics at two conferences on the Revolutionary War coming later this year.

Though some of the speakers are academics and they’re presenting high-quality research, these aren’t academic gatherings. The focus is sharing stories with other researchers and the interested public rather than developing papers for journals.

Eighth Annual Conference of the American Revolution, America’s History L.L.C., Williamsburg, Virginia, 22-24 Mar 2019

• Rick Atkinson, “The British Are Coming: Waging Expeditionary War in the Age of Sail”
• Rod Andrew, Jr.: “Not the Swamp Fox: South Carolina’s Andrew Pickens in the Revolutionary War”
• Jack Buchanan, “The Road to Charleston: How Nathanael Greene Dealt with Logistics, Civil War and Politics in South Carolina and Georgia”
• Larrie Ferriro, “Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It”
• Stephen Fried, “Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father”
• Don Hagist, “A Thousand Lashes: Discipline in the British Army by the Cat o’ Nine Tails”
• James Kirby Martin, “‘In a Wanton and Barbarous Manner’: Benedict Arnold’s New London Raid and the Fort Griswold ‘Massacre’”
• Eric Schnitzer, “The Hessians are Also Coming: Who Were King George’s Hirelings and Where Did They Come From?”
• Lt. Col. Sean Sculley, “The Contest for Liberty: Military Leadership in the Continental Army, 1775-1783”
• Richard J. Sommers, “Founding Fathers and Fighting Sons: The Revolutionary War Forebears of Civil War Soldiers and Statesmen”

Sixteenth Annual Fort Ticonderoga Seminar on the American Revolution, Fort Ticonderoga, Ticonderoga, New York, 20-22 Sept 2019

• John Buchanan, “Nathanael Greene and the Road to Charleston”
• Mark R. Anderson, “Our Kahnawake Friends: America’s Essential Indian Allies in the Canadian Campaign”
• Phillip Hamilton, “Loyalty and Loyalism: Henry Knox and the American Revolution as a Transatlantic Family Struggle”
• Patrick Lacroix, “Promises to Keep: French-Canadian Soldiers of the Revolution, 1775-1783”
• Bryan C. Rindfleisch, “‘’Twas a Duty Incumbent on Me’: The Indigenous & Transatlantic Intimacies of George Galphin, the American Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the South”
• John Ruddiman, “German Auxiliaries’ Reactions to American Slavery and Relationships with Enslaved Americans”
• Jessica J. Sheets, “‘I Hope…We Shall Ever Be on Terms of Friendship’: The Politically Divided Tilghman Family”
• Alisa Wade, “‘To Live a Widow’: Personal Sacrifice and Self-Sufficiency in the American Revolution”

In addition, the Fort Plain Museum’s annual conference is scheduled for 6-9 June. The preliminary announcement lists speakers, including some of the people above, but the full line-up of topics will come next month.

A Season of Talks at the David Library

Here’s the lineup of upcoming talks at the David Library of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania. That’s a striking venue with a loyal audience, and its offerings cover the entire war—note how many different people and events proved absolutely crucial to the Revolution.

Thursday, 20 September, 7:30
John Oller, “A Patriot (But Not THE Patriot)”
The author of The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution will explore the life and military campaigns of Francis Marion. Like Robin Hood of legend, Marion and his men attacked from secret hideaways before melting back into the forest or swamp, confounding the British. Although Marion bore little resemblance to the fictionalized portrayals in television and film, his exploits were no less heroic. He and his band of militia freedom fighters kept hope alive for the patriot cause in one of its darkest hours, and helped win the Revolution.

Thursday, 4 October, 7:30
Bob Drury, “The Existential Moment: How The Valley Forge Winter Saved the Revolution, Created the United States, and Changed the World”
Bob Drury is co-author (with Tom Clavin) of the new book Valley Forge. In his talk, he will outline how George Washington and his closest advisers spent six months on a barren plateau 23 miles from enemy-held Philadelphia fighting a war on two fronts—militarily against the British, and politically against a Continental faction attempting to depose him as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army. How he deftly prevailed on both of these fronts shaped the world as we know it today.

Sunday, 7 October, 3:00
Robert Selig, “The Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route National Historic Trail in the State of Pennsylvania”
In 2008, President Obama signed legislation establishing the land and water routes that were traveled by the allied French and American armies to and from Yorktown in the summer of 1781 as a National Historic Trail. That trail stretches from Newport, Rhode Island, and Newburgh, New York, and includes Pennsylvania from Trenton south to Marcus Hook. Yet the very existence of this trail is still largely unknown. Robert Selig, Ph.D., serves as project historian to the National Park Service for the Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route National Historic Trail Project. His lecture will introduce the trail and its historic significance, showing contemporary and modern maps, and important sites he has identified in his research, some of which was conducted at the David Library!

Wednesday, 17 October, 7:30
An Evening with Nathaniel Philbrick
This program comes in cooperation with nearby Washington Crossing Historic Park, which will host the event. The New York Times best-selling author, hailed by the Wall Street Journal as “one of America’s foremost practitioners of narrative nonfiction,” will give a talk about his newest book, In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown. Tickets are $50 for a single seat, and $80 for two. Each individual or couple admission price includes an autographed copy of In the Hurricane’s Eye. Proceeds benefit the David Library and the Friends of Washington Crossing Historic Park. Visit this site to buy tickets in advance.

Thursday, 25 October, 7:30
Stephen Fried, “Reclaiming Dr. Benjamin Rush, Our ‘Lost’ Founding Father”
Bestselling author Stephen Fried, whose latest book is Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father, will help us see the American Revolution, the Federal Period and the human saga of the entire birth of our nation from the unique, fascinating perspective of founding father, physician, philosopher and confidant Benjamin Rush.

Thursday, 1 November, 7:30
Ricardo A. Herrera, “American Citizens, American Soldiers: Civic Identity and Military Service from the War of Independence to the Civil War”
From 1775 through 1861, American soldiers defined and demonstrated their beliefs about the nature of the American republic and how they, as citizens and soldiers, were part of the republican experiment. Despite uniquely martial customs, organizations, and behaviors, the United States Army, the states’ militias, and the war-time volunteers were the products of their parent society. Understanding American soldiers of all ranks, in war and in peace, helps us understand more about American society writ large and how that society shaped its armed forces in the years of the Early Republic. A former David Library Fellow, and currently Professor of Military History at the School of Advanced Military Studies in Kansas, Ricardo A. Herrera, Ph.D., is the author of For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775-1861.

Thursday, 8 November, 7:30
Christopher S. Wren, “Vermont: The Most Rebellious Race”
Before Vermont was Vermont, it was a British territory fought over by such figures as Ethan Allen, who helped form the American Revolutionary War militia known as the Green Mountain Boys. This lecture, by the author of Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom: Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys and the American Revolution, will consider the story of the tough, brave, and wild crew of characters who faced some of the harshest combat in the American Revolution, and made their own rules to create an independent Vermont.

Sunday, 18 November, 3:00
Tilar J. Mazzeo, “The Private Lives and Loves of the Schuyler Sisters”
Mazzeo is the author of the new biography Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton. Her lecture will take a lively look into the lives of Eliza, Angelica and Peggy, the daughters of Philip Schuyler, and the context of colonial and early national women’s lives in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The lecture will draw on information from private family letters and documents, and will cover everything from Eliza Hamilton’s first crushes to the Schuyler family wedding cake recipe to how colonial women leveraged coterie networks to support spy rings in the Revolution.

Thursday, 6 December, 7:30
Christian di Spigna, “‘The Greatest Incendiary in all America’: The Rise and Fall of Dr. Joseph Warren”
Joseph Warren was the Boston physician who played a prominent role in the earliest days of the Revolution. As president of the revolutionary Massachusetts Provincial Congress, it was he who enlisted Paul Revere and William Dawes on April 18, 1775, to leave Boston and spread the alarm that the British garrison in Boston was setting out to raid the town of Concord. Christian di Spigna is the author of Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution's Lost Hero. His lecture will trace Warren’s rise from humble beginnings to his bloody death at Bunker Hill, and examine Warren’s postmortem journey over the years from Revolutionary hero to relative obscurity.

(My own talk at the David Library a couple of years back can be viewed here.)

Political Science in Fever-Stricken Philadelphia

H-Net just ran Jan Golinski’s review of Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic by Thomas A. Apel.

As Golinski explains, no one in 1790s Philadelphia understood the cause of the epidemic that emptied the new national capital, but that didn’t stop two schools of thought from forming:

Broadly speaking, the “localist” side of the dispute traced the disease’s origins to bad air in the affected area, due to the presence of corrupt or putrefying matter or to a change in what they called the “atmospheric constitution.” Against them were ranged the “contagionists,” who believed the disease had originated elsewhere, brought by migrants—such as the refugees who fled to Philadelphia from the revolution in Haiti—and subsequently communicated from one individual to another.

From a modern perspective, one might be inclined to dismiss the whole debate as founded on ignorance and mistaken assumptions. Nobody at the time had any knowledge of the virus that causes yellow fever, and nor did anyone recognize the role of the female Aedes aegypti mosquito in transmitting it from person to person. We now know that the disease is not directly infectious, though it is so through the medium of the insect vector; it is not caused by putrefying organic matter, but stagnant water does provide an environment in which the mosquito can easily breed. Both localists and contagionists could therefore muster facts to support their case, but neither side could decisively disprove the other’s claims.

Like many medical controversies in the eighteenth century, therefore, we don’t really want to take either side. It would be so much easier if any of the debating doctors of the period just washed his hands.

In his final chapter, Apel examines the political dimension of the controversy. He rightly declines to map the two sides directly onto the political divisions of the time. On the other hand, he suggests that the fierceness of the dispute did reflect the political factionalism of the 1790s. This was the era when the Enlightenment public sphere fissured into contending groups, and when conspiracy theories abounded on both sides of the Atlantic. Participants in the yellow fever debates frequently alleged their opponents were lying or conspiring against the public interest.

[Dr. Benjamin] Rush, in particular, exhibited a high degree of paranoia, likening himself to the early Christian martyrs persecuted under the Roman Empire. Simultaneously, he insisted that his opinions were the undeniable outcome of reason and truth. Apel reminds his readers that twentieth-century critics of the Enlightenment identified this combination of paranoia, conspiracy theories, and dogmatic insistence on one’s own rationality as symptomatic of the last phase of the movement.

The epidemic occurred at the same time as the French Revolution, after all, and the harsh British reaction to its radicalness.

The Tale of Benjamin Harrison and Elbridge Gerry’s Signatures

In its description of the Continental Congress’s main signing of the Declaration of Independence on 2 Aug 1776, the Course of Human Events blog listed “a number of quotations from the signing for which we have no evidence.” Among them is a story about Benjamin Harrison joking with Elbridge Gerry about long it would take each of them to hang.

Likewise, in a recent Weekly Standard essay Richard Samuelson repeated that same story (it’s too good to ignore) but called it “probably apocryphal.”

In fact, we have strong evidence that anecdote is true. As I noted a few years back, Dr. Benjamin Rush recounted that story in a letter to John Adams dated 20 July 1811:

Do you recollect the pensive and awful silence which pervaded the house when we were called up, one after another, to the table of the President of Congress, to subscribe what was believed by many at that time to be our own death warrants? The Silence & the gloom of the morning were interrupted I well recollect only for a moment by Col: Harrison of Virginia who said to Mr Gerry at the table, “I shall have a great advantage over you Mr: Gerry when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.” This Speech procured a transient smile, but it was soon succeeded by the Solemnity with which the whole business was conducted.

Rush and Adams were both at the signing. Adams’s reply took no issue with the tale (though he disliked Harrison and came to see Gerry as a political foe).

In addition, Dr. James Thacher published a version of the story in 1823 in his Military Journal, which appears to combine his actual notes from the war years with later recollections and material from other sources. In a 1776 entry Thacher wrote:

I am credibly informed that the following anecdote occurred on the day of signing the declaration. Mr. Harrison, a delegate from Virginia, is a large portly man—Mr. Gerry of Massachusetts is slender and spare. A little time after the solemn transaction of signing the instrument, Mr. Harrison said smilingly to Mr. Gerry, “When the hanging scene comes to be exhibited I shall have the advantage over you on account of my size. All will be over with me in a moment, but you will be kicking in the air half an hour after I am gone.“

Thacher might well have heard the story from Rush, with whom he corresponded. In 1824 Adams told Thacher: “I have had read to me, your valuable Journal of your Campaigns in the American revolutionary war, and I have no hesitation in saying, that it is the most natural, simple, and faithful narration of facts, that I have seen in any history of that period.” Once again, Adams didn’t quibble with this anecdote.

Christopher Ludwick and the Prisoners of War

Yesterday I spotlighted a new picture book called Gingerbread for Liberty!, about a baker named Christopher Ludwick and his activity during the Revolutionary War. Author Mara Rockliff’s main source for that book was Dr. Benjamin Rush’s friendly short biography written shortly after Ludwick died, so how much documentary support is there for his feats?

In fact, Ludwick shows up a bunch of times in the papers of the Continental Congress and Gen. George Washington’s headquarters. He had served in the Austrian and Prussian armies before settling in Philadelphia, so he could speak to the Crown’s Hessian soldiers in their native German language and with some shared experience.

In August 1776, Ludwick was with the Continental forces in New Jersey, perhaps observing the system for supplying the men with bread. On the 14th the Congress resolved to offer fifty acres of land and guaranteed religious freedom to any foreigner who deserted from the British army. That offer was translated into German and copied for distribution among the Hessian troops. But who would pass out those handbills?

Gen. Hugh Mercer summoned Ludwick and on 19 August sent him to Washington’s headquarters. Later that day quartermaster general Joseph Reed, who had (badly) handled Washington’s first espionage efforts back in Massachusetts, passed Ludwick on to William Livingston, about to be governor of New Jersey, writing:

Mr. Ludwig the bearer of this, puts his Life in his Hand on this Occasion in order to serve the Interests of America. We cannot doubt your kind Advice & Assistance as to Mode but must beg it may not be communicated farther least a Discovery may be made which must prove fatal to Mr. Ludwig

Ludwick crossed the Raritan River to Staten Island late on 22 August and returned the next day. Livingston told Mercer, “Ludwig is just now returned disappointed.” But the baker apparently tried again. On 26 August Gen. Washington reported to the Congress: “The papers designed for the Foreign Troops have been put into several Channels in order that they might be conveyed to ’em, and from the Information I had yesterday, I have reason to beleive many have fallen into their Hands.”

A couple of days later, Ludwick was on his way back to Philadelphia, carrying a letter to John Adams complaining about the bread supply—a hint he may have already been lobbying for that business.

The following months didn’t go well for the Continental Army, but they did take some German-speaking prisoners. Ludwick ended up overseeing eight such men. In November Gen. Washington wrote to the Congress “to request you will negotiate an Exchange of the Hessian Prisoners at Elizabeth Town under the Care of Mr Ludwick as soon as possible. They have been treated in such a Manner during their Stay in this City, that it is apprehended, their going back among their Countrymen, will be attended with some good Consequences.”

Ludwick argued that treating Hessians well before exchanging them would make those men eager to desert at their next opportunity, and to bring others with them. Rush’s biography of Ludwick suggested that tactic was sucessful. However, Daniel Krebs’s recent study A Generous and Merciful Enemy: Life for German Prisoners of War During the American Revolution (its title taken from Ludwick’s writing) states that none of the eight Hessian men exchanged in late 1776 ever deserted.

In March 1777 Ludwick was still making that argument to Congress, recommending that it designate a “discreet & humane German Person” as “Guardian of the German Prisoners” to be “their Counsel & solemn Witness in Contracts which they may make with their Employers.” He assured the Congress that

Many of the Hessians and Waldeckish Prisoners of War especially single men are so well pleased with this Country and the Way of its Inhabitants that at all Events they would rather prefer to settle here than to return to the dreary abodes of Bondage from whence they came.

Krebs notes that Ludwick might have been hoping to gain the labor of these prisoners for little money. But he also seems to have been genuinely motivated by charity and enthusiasm for life in America. In the end, the Congress didn’t adopt that plan, and few of the German-speaking soldiers captured in that campaign defected to the U.S. of A.

Instead, the Congress asked Ludwick to take on another position.

TOMORROW: “Baker General.”

Behind Gingerbread for Liberty!

Gingerbread for Liberty!: How a German Baker Helped Win the American Revolution is a picture book due to be released next month. Author Mara Rockliff tells the story of the Philadelphia baker Christopher Ludwick, whom the Continental Congress appointed “Superintendent of Bakers, and Director of Baking” in May 1777.

As Publishers Weekly reports, the artist Vincent X. Kirsch, a former food stylist, created watercolor illustrations inspired by gingerbread cookies. Ludwick was known in Philadelphia for his gingerbread; indeed, it looks like he had made a tidy fortune between arriving in that growing city in the early 1750s and the Revolutionary War.

Rockliff told that magazine about her challenges in finding sources on Ludwick: “It turned out that pretty much everything anyone knows about Ludwick comes from a short biography first published in 1801, the year he died, by his friend Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.”

Rush sent an early copy of that pamphlet to Abigail Adams, writing on 23 July 1801:

The Account of Christr: Ludwick was written to fulfil an Old promise made many years ago, in case I should survive him. You will feel the patriotic Sentiments uttered by him. To the present calculating generation, they appear fanatical, and unintelligible.—

(Subtext: Young people today.)

Adams replied:

The Life of Christopher Ludwick will be read with pleasure by all Lovers of virtue, honor and patriotism; it is a model for the Youth, but my dear Sir these days of prosperity, Luxury and dissipation are not those in which such characters flourish; we have an intire new Theory in Religion, Morals & politicks, corresponding with our State of Society.

(Subtext: It’s all Jefferson’s fault.)

Rush’s pamphlet was reprinted throughout the 1800s by the charitable organization Ludwick had funded. It naturally portrayed him in a good light.

TOMORROW: How much did Ludwick really do during the war?

John Hancock and the Bombarding of Boston

On 4 July 1812, the young Attorney General of the United States, Richard Rush, delivered an Independence Day oration to the House of Representatives. His main message was about how wise it was to go to war with Great Britain again.

For that speech Rush had consulted notes of his father, Dr. Benjamin Rush, about details of the last war with Great Britain, which had gone so well. According to Henry A. Hawken’s study of Fourth of July orations, Trumpets of Glory, the elder Rush wasn’t pleased that his son pulled him into the debate over the new war, even obliquely.

Coyly crediting his father as “one of the surviving patriots of our revolution,” Rush told this story about John Hancock, as quoted in the 7 August City Gazette of Charleston, South Carolina:

During the siege of Boston, General [George] Washington consulted Congress upon the propriety of bombarding the town. Mr. Hancock was then President of [the Continental] Congress. After General Washington’s letter was read, a solemn silence ensued. This was broken by a member making a motion that the House should resolve itself into a committee of the whole, in order that Mr. Hancock might give his opinion upon the important subject, as he was so deeply interested, from having all his estate in Boston.

After he left the chair, he addressed the chairman of the committee of the whole in the following words: “It is true, sir, nearly all the property I have in the world is in houses and other real estate in the town of Boston; but if the expulsion of the British army from it, and the liberties of our country require their being burnt to ashes—issue the order for that purpose immediately!”

Rush sent a copy of his oration to John Adams, among others. Adams replied, “When will the Character of Hancock be understood? Never. I could melt into Tears when I hear his Name.” He did not, however, confirm that he had heard Hancock deliver that remark.

While extracts of Rush’s speech appeared in collections of American oratory over the next several decades, that story didn’t make the cut. Instead, it followed a different route into popular lore. On 9 Sept 1822 the American Mercury newspaper of Hartford reprinted the anecdote without attribution to Rush. On 14 September the Independent Chronicle and Boston Patriot picked it up, and on 21 September Niles’s Weekly Register quoted the “Boston Patriot.”

Freeman Hunt’s American Anecdotes, published in Boston in 1830, included the story as item 88, “Disinterested Patriotism of Hancock.” Again, there was no source given. The same story then appeared in other American collections of inspiring anecdotes, of which there were a lot. They seem to have operated rather like quotation websites today, with the same rigorous standards.

Not surprisingly, the story changed a bit along the way. Authors gave Hancock more dramatic words than “issue the order for that purpose immediately!” Examples include:

• “If the country demand the sacrifice, let the torch be applied. To other causes you must look.” —Horace Mann, The Bible, the Rod, and Religion, in Common Schools (1847).
• “Burn Boston, and make John Hancock a beggar, if necessary to accomplish this object!” —Benjamin Cowell, Spirit of ’76 in Rhode Island (1850).
• “Burn Boston, and make John Hancock a beggar, if the public good requires it!” —James Spear Loring, The Hundred Boston Orators (1852). Loring also claimed that Hancock said those words during a North End Caucus meeting at Boston’s Salutation Tavern.

“Burn Boston, and make John Hancock a beggar!” became the standard punch line for this story, repeated in many more books and magazines. One can argue that there’s evidence Hancock expressed that general sentiment to the Congress’s committee of the whole, but it’s clear he didn’t use those words.

Why Charles Lee Loved Dogs

Earlier this year I wrote about how John Adams was discovered to have written some indiscreet comments about Gen. Charles Lee: “you must love his Dogs if you love him, and forgive a Thousand Whims for the Sake of the Soldier and the Scholar.”

On 19 Sept 1775, Lee told Dr. Benjamin Rush his view of the situation:

I am much pleas’d that my laughing at Mr Adams's description of me in his intercepted Letter has met with approbation—but I cannot conceive how any man who has any share of understanding cou’d be offended at it.

I am called whimsical and a lover of Dogs. As to the former charge, I am heartily glad that it is my character, for untill the common rotine of mankind is somewhat mended I shall wish to remain and be thought eccentric—and when my honest quadruped Friends are equal’d by the bipeds in fidelity, gratitude, or even good sense I will promise to become as warm a philanthropist as Mr. Addison himself affected to be—to say the truth I think the strongest proof of a good heart is to love Dogs and dislike Mankind.

I know very well that it is hazarding a great deal to profess a dislike to mankind in general, but if you are generous, undesigning and public spirited yourself, you will naturally expect the same in others; and the frequent disappointments We meet with as naturally sours us against the whole species—it certainly appears paradoxical, but if you will examine history you will find all or almost all the Enthusiasts for general liberty had the reputation of being cynically dispos’d—now I chuse to construe a cynical disposition a love of Dogs, in preference to some other animals who are pleas’d to think their convenience, pleasures, and dignity were the only objects of the great Creator of all things.

So much for Dogs and myself.

The Mifflins’ Marriage

Yesterday, when we looked in on the Brattle House in Cambridge in August 1775, Continental Army quartermaster general Thomas Mifflin had taken it as his home and office during the siege of Boston.

Three women were already living there: the widow Katherine Wendell, daughter of the house’s Loyalist legal owner; her thirteen-year-old daughter, Martha-Fitch Wendell; and their eighteen-year-old guest, Abigail Collins of Rhode Island.

After a visit to the house in August, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband in Philadelphia with a hint for Mifflin’s wife Sarah:

tell her I do not know whether her Husband is safe here. . . . You hear nothing from the Ladies, but about Major Mifflins easy address, politeness, complasance &c. &c.

Sarah Mifflin set out for Cambridge in the next month.

The Mifflins lived together in the Brattle house over the winter. They hosted Dr. John and Mary Morgan, another Philadelphia couple. They held dinner parties. In fact, it looks like the Mifflins entertained visiting officials in genteel style while dinner at Gen. George Washington’s headquarters down the street was more of a “pot-luck” military affair.

So did that togetherness fend off any rifts in the Mifflins’ marriage? Not for long. By the end of the war, Thomas Mifflin was known for his sexual affairs. After Mifflin was elected governor of Pennsylvania in 1790, Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote:

This man was known to be of a very immoral character. He had lived in a state of adultery with many women during the life of his wife, and had children by some of them, whom he educated in his own family. It is said his wife died last summer of a broken heart in consequence of this conduct towards her.

Rush had other reasons to dislike the man, but everyone seems to agree that Mifflin led a “dissipated” later life while also serving as his state’s highest official.

However, the Brattle House was a happier rendezvous for other couples. Abigail Collins met her future husband, Dr. John Warren, when he was working down the street at the army hospital. Martha-Fitch Wendell later married a tutor from Harvard College nearby. And her mother, by keeping on the good side of both military and local officials, kept the estate from being confiscated as the property of a Loyalist.

I’ll have stories of other women in other mansions along Brattle Street in my “Women of Tory Row” walking tour on Saturday afternoon, part of this year’s Cambridge Discovery Day.

“An object of nearly universal detestation”

After the royal authorities published the private letters they had captured on Benjamin Hichborn in August 1775, what was the fallout for the men who had written those letters?

Unfortunately for unabashed gossips, there aren’t a lot of good sources on Benjamin Harrison’s reaction. We can imagine that he quickly wrote another letter to Gen. George Washington promising that his earlier one had never really hinted that they might both enjoy a pretty washerwoman’s daughter. (If so, that follow-up letter doesn’t survive.)

It’s conceivable that Harrison volunteered to be part of the Continental Congress committee that met with Washington in Cambridge in October in order to confirm their personal relationship.

In November, Harrison was very insistent on having a ball in Philadelphia to honor Martha Washington, passing through the city on her way north. Was he so passionate because he wanted to make up for embarrassing her? That’s possible, but it’s also possible that Harrison had laughed off the publication of the falsified letter and just liked parties.

As for John Adams, the letters published over his initials had managed to denigrate most of the Congress in general, John Dickinson (shown above) in particular, and Gen. Charles Lee in passing. Printers in Philadelphia chose not to reprint the letters from the Boston News-Letter, but things were still pretty bad for a while. On 16 September Adams wrote in his diary:

Walking to the Statehouse this Morning, I met Mr. Dickinson, on Foot in Chesnut Street. We met, and passed near enough to touch Elbows. He passed without moving his Hat, or Head or Hand. I bowed and pulled off my Hat. He passed hautily by. The Cause of his Offence, is the Letter no doubt which Gage has printed in Drapers Paper.

And Dickinson wasn’t the only one snubbing Adams, according to the memoir of his friend Dr. Benjamin Rush:

It exposed him to the execrations of all the prudent and moderate people in America, insomuch that he was treated with neglect by many of his old friends. I saw this profound and enlightened patriot…walk our streets alone after the publication of his intercepted letter in our newspapers in 1775 an object of nearly universal detestation.

A British spy in Philadelphia named Gilbert Barkly reported that local Quakers had decided that Adams was dangerous to America; he also planned to push that sentiment along by circulating his own copies of the letters.

Adams might have told people he hadn’t written exactly what was published. In his autobiography decades later he said: “Irritated with the Unpoliteness of Mr. Dickinson and more mortified with his Success in Congress, I wrote something like what has been published. But not exactly. The British Printers made it worse, than it was in the Original.” And the originals are gone, so there’s no proof one way or the other.

But historians generally think that the Boston News-Letter quoted Adams accurately. Unlike the Harrison letter, there are no copies without the embarrassing lines. Adams never identified what bits he hadn’t written, but instead tried to justify one of the more controversial parts (as I quoted yesterday). Most tellingly, Adams had written quite similar things in previous letters, including two he’d sent the previous day.

Looking back, Adams claimed that the publication of his letters had actually benefited him, and he may have been right. For one thing, he liked to think of himself as unpopular because of his principled stands. At times he exaggerated the criticism and downplayed the support he received to justify that feeling. But in the summer of 1775, he could feel that way naturally.

Furthermore, the publication of the letters opened a public discussion on the possibility of independence, and raised his profile as an advocate for it. In his autobiography Adams even wrote that Joseph Reed had told him, “Providence seemed to have thrown these Letters before the Public for our good.”

Meanwhile, events were bending Adams’s way. Before copies of his letters arrived in London, the royal government had already declared all the colonies at the Congress to be in rebellion and rejected the Olive Branch petition. Thus, by the end of the year Dickinson’s moderate position had lost some credit and Adams’s advocacy of independent governments seemed smart.

In fact, on 1 Jan 1776, while Adams was back home in Massachusetts, the Boston Gazette reprinted the letters. Obviously, printer Benjamin Edes, working out of his temporary quarters in Watertown, didn’t view those documents as too awkward or scandalous to share with the world.

But there was still that comment about the “Oddity” of Gen. Lee.

TOMORROW: Abigail Adams extends the hand of friendship.

Dr. Benjamin Rush Goes to a Jewish Wedding

Back in April 2010, novelist and comics scripter Greg Rucka wrote:

Ok, so...anyone out there have information on Sephardic wedding customs in 1770s America?

Out of gratitude for Gotham Central, I sprang into action.

Finding websites and books stating that the only surviving description of a Jewish wedding in early America came from Dr. Benjamin Rush, I tweeted back that lead.

I didn’t follow that path myself until recently, but here at last is the doctor’s account for his wife of attending Rachel Phillips’s wedding to Michael Levy in Philadelphia in June 1787:

I accepted the invitation with great pleasure, for you know I love to be in the way of adding to my stock of ideas upon all subjects. At 1 o’clock the company, consisting of 30 or 40 men, assembled in Mr. [Jonas] Philips’ common parlor, which was accommodated with benches for the purpose. The ceremony began with prayers in the Hebrew language, which were chaunted by an old rabbi and in which he was followed by the whole company. As I did not understand a word except now and then an Amen or Hallelujah, my attention was directed to the haste with which they covered their heads with their hats as soon as the prayers began, and to the freedom with which some of them conversed with each other during the whole time of this part of their worship.

As soon as these prayers were ended, which took up about 20 minutes, a small piece of parchment was produced, written in Hebrew, which contained a deed of settlement and which the groom subscribed in the presence of four witnesses. In this deed he conveyed a part of his fortune to his bride, by which she was provided for after his death in case she survived him.

This ceremony was followed by the erection of a beautiful canopy composed of white and red silk in the middle of the floor. It was supported by four young men (by means of four poles), who put on white gloves for the purpose. As soon as this canopy was fixed, the bride, accompanied with her mother, sister, and a long train of female relations, came downstairs. Her face was covered with a veil which reached halfways down her body. She was handsome at all times, but the occasion and her dress rendered her in a peculiar manner a most lovely and affecting object. I gazed with delight upon her. Innocence, modesty, fear, respect, and devotion appeared all at once in her countenance.

She was led by her two bridesmaids under the canopy. Two young men led the bridegroom after her and placed him, not by her side, but directly opposite to her. The priest now began again to chaunt an Hebrew prayer, in which he was followed by part of the company. After this he gave to the groom and bride a glass full of wine, from which they each sipped about a teaspoonful. Another prayer followed this act, after which he took a ring and directed the groom to place it upon the finger of his bride in the same manner as is practised in the marriage service of the Church of England. This ceremony was followed by handing the wine to the father of the bride and then a second time to the bride and groom. The groom after sipping the wine took the glass in his hand and threw it upon a large pewter dish which was suddenly placed at his feet. Upon its breaking into a number of small pieces, there was a general shout of joy and a declaration that the ceremony was over. The groom now saluted his bride, and kisses and congratulations became general through the room.

I asked the meaning, after the ceremony was over, of the canopy and of the drinking of the wine and breaking of the glass. I was told by one of the company that in Europe they generally marry in the open air, and that the canopy was introduced to defend the bride and groom from the action of the sun and from rain. Their mutually partaking of the same glass of wine was intended to denote the mutuality of their goods, and the breaking of the glass at the conclusion of the business was designed to teach them the brittleness and uncertainty of human life and the certainty of death, and thereby to temper and moderate their present joys.

Mr. Phillips pressed me to stay and dine with the company, but business and [junior partner] Dr. [James] Hall’s departure, which was to take place in the afternoon, forbade it. I stayed, however, to eat some wedding cake and to drink a glass of wine with the guests. Upon going into one of the rooms upstairs to ask how Mrs. [Rebecca] Philips did, who had fainted downstairs under the pressure of the heat (for she was weak from a previous indisposition), I discovered the bride and groom supping a bowl of broth together. Mrs. Phillips apologized for them by telling me they had eaten nothing (agreeably to the custom prescribed by their religion) since the night before.

Upon my taking leave of the company, Mrs. Phillips put a large piece of cake into my pocket for you, which she begged I would present to you with her best compliments. She says you are an old New York acquaintance of hers.

The bride’s father was actually from Germany, thus perhaps not Sephardic. (He was fluent in Yiddish, and when British authorities intercepted his letters during the war, they reportedly concluded he had written in code.) But the mother of the bride was a Machado, and the groom’s family (from what little we know) were also Sephardic.

Eventually this couple’s descendants would own and restore Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.