Solving the Mystery of “Lilley P.”

I’m taking the liberty of sharing a collaborative exchange between two Revolutionary War reenactors dedicated to studying the daily lives of Continental Army soldiers.

Earlier this year, John U. Rees, author of ‘They Were Good Soldiers:’ African-Americans Serving in the Continental Army, 1775-1783 and many detailed articles, posted on Facebook:

This is for the New England foodies out there. I was asked what “Lilley P.” was…and have come up short. I’ve checked the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, the book Saltwater Foodways, and tried Google search in various forms.

The quote comes from Lt. Samuel Armstrong [1754-1810], 8th Mass. Regiment, who wrote on 19 December 1777, the day the army marched to Valley Forge, “our Boy[s] went to work to Bake Bread and of this we Eat like Insatiate Monsters ’till they had made some Lilley P., of which we [eat?] ’till our Guts began to Ake…”

The Armstrong diary was transcribed and published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1997. The New England Historic Genealogical Society has digitized it here, and the page with the passage in question is here with a detail shown above.

A fellow researcher and reenactor, Steve Rayner, soon provided Rees with the answer from the journal that Dr. Isaac Senter (1753-1799) wrote out to record Col. Benedict Arnold’s expedition against Québec. It was first published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1846, and the manuscript is now at Fordham University.

Dr. Senter wrote:

Wednesday, Nov. 1st. – Our greatest luxuries now consisted in a little water, stiffened with flour, in imitation of shoemakers’ paste, which was christened with the name of Lillipu.

Instead of the diarrhea, which tried our men most shockingly in the former part of our march, the reverse was now the complaint, which continued for many days.

The use of the same term (in two forms) two years apart in different campaigns suggests that this soldiers’ slang had staying power. Perhaps almost as long as the Lillipu itself.

I should note that there’s another diary manuscript from Dr. Senter, now at the Rhode Island Historical Society, first transcribed and published by Stephen Darley in Voices from a Wilderness Expedition. It appears to be part of the manuscript that Senter actually wrote during the expedition and later copied and expanded into the journal published in 1846.

Those surviving pages don’t cover 1 November. Therefore, we can’t confirm Senter wrote “Lillipu” in 1775. It’s possible that he added the term to his original entry while expanding the text. However, since Dr. Senter wasn’t in the army after 1776, he was unlikely to have picked up short-lived Valley Forge soldiers’ slang.

New Voices from the Arnold Expedition Brought to Light

Yesterday’s quotations from diaries of the American attack on Québec in late 1775 came from Voices from a Wilderness Expedition: The Journals and Men of Benedict Arnold’s Expedition to Quebec in 1775, a new book on Col. Benedict Arnold’s advance from Massachusetts through the Maine wilderness to Canada by Stephen Darley.

This book is not a narrative history of Arnold’s expedition, like Thomas A. Desjardin’s Through a Howling Wilderness or Arthur S. Lefkowitz’s Benedict Arnold’s Army. Rather, it’s a study of the diaries that survive from that expedition, and as such a necessary supplement to the third edition of Kenneth Roberts’s March to Quebec.

Darley self-published through AuthorHouse to make his research available. Voices from a Wilderness Expedition contains the first published transcriptions of several first-person accounts of the campaign, as well as research on the full careers of several notable officers, including Col. Roger Enos, Capt. William Goodrich, and Capt. Scott, first name usually left blank.

Darley found three of those first-person accounts in the University of Glasgow Library, catalogued as “Durben Journal.” He argues that the main document is a copy of Capt. Henry Dearborn’s original diary before it was expanded and edited into the version we know (now housed at the Boston Public Library), and hypothesizes about how that collection got to Glasgow.

The volume contains a transcription of the version of Dr. Isaac Senter’s journal at the Rhode Island Historical Society, which differs significantly from the published version, and first full appearances of journals by Pvt. Samuel Barney and Pvt. Moses Kimball.

As Darley notes, the Arnold expedition must have been one of the most minutely documented of the period, with thirty journals and detailed memoirs surviving and more known to have existed but lost. That might reflect how many of its participants came from New England, with its emphasis on literacy. But it also suggests that men understood they were trying something important that deserved to be recorded for their families and friends. Pvt. Barney, for example, bought his blank book (“for nine Coppers”) just a few days after agreeing to go on the expedition.

The prose in Voices from a Wilderness Expedition is somewhat old-fashioned, but that’s not inappropriate for discussions of document provenance and authenticity. This is not supposed to be an entertaining adventure tale. But it should be a necessary resource for anyone researching Arnold’s campaign.

I bought the book in ePub form through Barnes & Noble, partly for the convenience and partly to test that format. I’ve looked at the file now on three devices, including a Simple Touch Nook, an iPad, and my desktop computer. There are some oddities of typography and formatting, and I can’t tell whether those appear in the print edition or surfaced during the transition to ePub format; for self-publishing authors, multiple electronic formats are just one more thing to worry about.

Unfortunately, in all three formats I can’t read Appendix II, which consists of tables listing all the men on Arnold’s expedition. Evidently they were formatted for the printed page as images of a spreadsheet rather than as text, and the images don’t get any bigger on my screens. I don’t know if other electronic formats will work the same way, but if you’re interested in the complete record I recommend a print version.