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.

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.

Dr. Thacher’s Diagnoses

On 7 June 1780, Dr. James Thacher served as a Continental Army surgeon during the Battle of Springfield, New Jersey. In his diary, published decades later, Thacher described one casualty like this:

In the heat of the action, some soldiers brought to me in a blanket, Captain Lieutenant [Alexander] Thompson of the artillery, who had received a most formidable wound, a cannon ball having passed through both his thighs near the knee joint. With painful anxiety, the poor man inquired if I would amputate both his thighs; sparing his feelings, I evaded his inquiry, and directed him to be carried to the hospital tent in the rear, where he would receive the attention of the surgeons. "All that a man hath will he give for his life." He expired in a few hours.

After the battle, Gen. Nathanael Greene reported to the commander-in-chief: "The Artillery under the command of Lt Colonel [Thomas] Forest was well served—I have only to regret the loss of Capt. Lt Thompson who fell at the side of his piece by a cannon ball."

Dr. Thacher recalled having to leave another casualty of the British artillery fire:

While advancing against the enemy, my attention was directed to a wounded soldier in the field. I dismounted and left my horse at a rail fence, it was not long before a cannon ball shattered a rail within a few feet of my horse, and some soldiers were sent to take charge of the wounded man, and to tell me it was time to retire.

I now perceived that our party had retreated, and our regiment had passed me. I immediately mounted and applied spurs to my horse, that I might gain the front of our regiment. Colonel [Henry] Jackson being in the rear, smiled as I passed him; but as my duty did not require my exposure, I felt at liberty to seek a place of safety.

It may be considered a singular circumstance, that the soldier above mentioned was wounded by the wind of a cannon ball. His arm was fractured above the elbow, without the smallest perceptible injury to his clothes, or contusion or discoloration of the skin. He made no complaint, but I observed he was feeble and a little confused in his mind. He received proper attention, but expired the next day. The idea of injury by the wind of a ball, I learn, is not new, instances of the kind have, it is said, occured in naval battles, and are almost constantly attended with fatal effects.

As for other soldiers, Thacher noted another curious condition:

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. [William] 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.

As at summer camp, staying busy helped alleviate homesickness. As did the prospect of being hit, or even nearly hit, with a cannon ball.

“Remarkably stout and hardy men”

On Thursday, as I announced earlier, I’ll speak at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site about “Washington’s Riflemen: Heroes or Headaches?”

Here are extracts from two journals in the summer of 1775 showing both sides of those Continental soldiers from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland.

First, Dr. James Thacher, then a surgeon’s mate, under the date of August 1775:

Several companies of riflemen, amounting, it is said, to more than fourteen hundred men, have arrived here from Pennsylvania and Maryland; a distance of from five hundred to seven hundred miles. They are remarkably stout and hardy men; many of them exceeding six feet in height. They are dressed in white frocks, or rifle-shirts, and round hats.

These men are remarkable for the accuracy of their aim; striking a mark with great certainty at two hundred yards distance. At a review, a company of them, while on a quick advance, fired their balls into objects of seven inches diameter, at the distance of two hundred and fifty yards.

They are now stationed on our lines, and their shot have frequently proved fatal to British officers and soldiers who expose themselves to view, even at more than double the distance of common musket-shot.

Second, Pvt. Aaron Wright of Pennsylvania, a rifleman himself, on 10 September:

Great commotion on Prospect Hill among the riflemen, occasioned by the unreasonable confinement of a sergeant by the adjutant of [Col. William] Thompson’s regiment; and before it was over, 34 men were confined, and two of them put in irons at headquarters in Cambridge; on the 12th, they were tried by a court-martial, and one was whipped 17 lashes, for stealing, and drummed out of camp.

Tomorrow night, we’ll look at both sides of those troops.

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.

When Minutemen Marched into Marshfield

So in 1775 there were a hundred British soldiers stationed in Marshfield, mostly on the estate of Nathaniel Ray Thomas. Their commander was Capt. Nisbet Balfour of the 4th Regiment.

And on the morning of 20 April, according to Isaac Thomas (who was nine years old at the time), the Marshfield militia was summoned by musket shots and drum.

I wouldn’t just leave the story there, would I?

The colonel of the Plymouth County militia was Theophilus Cotton (detail of his gravestone shown above, courtesy of Find-a-Grave). We have many documents about militia companies that he commanded that day, such as this roster from Hanson. That’s because the men who turned out in April 1775 expected to be paid, so the Massachusetts government asked for and kept paperwork with their names and days of service.

However, we don’t have, to my knowledge, contemporaneous narratives of what happened in Marshfield, from either the locals or the British troops. Instead, we have accounts written decades later by the historians of nearby towns, based and focused on the activities of men from those towns.

Dr. James Thacher’s History of the Town of Plymouth (1832) relates two detailed and flattering anecdotes about how Plymouth’s “watchful sons of liberty” intimidated British officers visiting from Marshfield. As for the military activity in Marshfield, he wrote:

Capt. Balfour, with his company remained at Marshfield for several weeks unmolested, but the day after Lexington battle, governor [Thomas] Gage, apprised of their danger, took off his troops, by water, to Boston.

At this period minute companies were organized in town, and immediately on hearing of the bloodshed at Lexington, Col. Theophilus Cotton, of this town, marched to Marshfield with a detachment of militia under his command. There were at the same time about sixty fishing vessels with their crews on board at anchor in Plymouth harbor. The fishermen voluntarily left their vessels, and speedily marched to Marshfield with their arms, resolutely determined to attack the company of British troops. When arrived at Marshfield, their numbers had increased to near one thousand men, collected from the different towns, burning with the feelings of revenge: they might have surrounded and captured the whole company before they could get to their vessels, but were restrained by Col. Cotton, who it is said had received no orders for the attack.

A more detailed account appeared seventeen more years on in Justin Winsor’s History of Duxbury (1849):

Immediately after the news arrived of the bloodshed at Lexington, Col. Cotton with his regiment formed for an attack on Balfour’s party. On the 20th Col. Cotton and Maj. [Ebenezer] Sprout met in Duxbury, at Col. Briggs Alden’s for consultation. Maj. Judah Alden, who was in Rhode Island when the news came of the fight, had just returned, having ridden all day on horseback, and soon after learning the circumstances of the case, he met Cato, a negro who had been sent by Capt. Balfour to ascertain the numbers of the men who were marching against him. Maj. Alden suspecting his design, told him to tell Balfour, they were coming in a host after him, and dismissed him.

Col. Cotton again returned to Plymouth; and, about 7 o’clock, on the morning of the 21st, marched for Marshfield with a portion of his regiment, consisting of the Plymouth company under Capt. [Thomas] Mayhew, the Kingston under Capt. Peleg Wadsworth, and the Duxbury under Capt. Geo. Partridge. They proceeded to Col. Anthony Thomas’ [sic], about a mile N. W. of Capt. John Thomas’, where were Balfour’s troops.

At this juncture Col. Cotton and Lt. Col. Alden held a long conference, as to the course to be taken. At noon there were assembled about 500 men, including the crews of many fishing vessels in the harbor. In the afternoon Capt. [Earl] Clapp’s company from Rochester and Capt. [Jesse] Harlow’s from Plympton arrived. Capt. Peleg Wadsworth was greatly dissatisfied with the delay, and moved forward his company until within a short distance of the enemy, and then halted as his numbers were too small to venture an attack.

About 3 o’clock, P. M., two sloops hove in sight and anchored off the Brant rock. Balfour then conveyed his company through the Cut river [Green Harbor] in boats, and reaching the sloops soon sailed for Boston, leaving however several sentinels behind to watch the movements of the Americans, who also set guards for the night.

The British watch finally left and in going to their boats, they passed one of the American sentry posts, where were stationed Blanie Phillips, and Jacob Dingley, both of Duxbury. Dingley was seized, and conveyed to their boat, when they concluded to release him. Phillips escaped, fired his gun, and gave an alarm, which roused the country for many miles around.

Balfour, it is reported, said that if he had been attacked, he should have surrendered without a gun. In their hurry to escape they left much of their camp equipage behind.

That final detail is the sort that always makes me skeptical: no source for information from the other side of the war, flattering to the author and readers as local descendants. In the following sentences Winsor cited “an inhabitant of Duxbury” whom Balfour spoke with in New York later in the war, so it’s possible the captain told that person. But it’s also possible that’s what the Plymouth County men told themselves.

With Capt. Balfour and the regulars went Nathaniel Ray Thomas, who settled in Nova Scotia, and possibly some other Marshfield Loyalists. His Patriot son John regained the mansion at the center of the estate after the war. Later Daniel Webster bought that house and enlarged it, creating the Victorian structure which (after a fire) is now reproduced on the property. Locals point out that could have been the site of the second battle of the Revolutionary War.

The New York Doctors’ Riot of 1788

In January 2011 the Lancet published a brief article about protests in 1788 over how medical students in New York dug up corpses from the burying-grounds for dissection training.

Through juxtaposition that article suggests that the city’s African-American community, their petitions and newspaper letters ignored, finally rioted over the practice in April 1788. But this New York Magazine article on the same events makes clear that the riot occurred only after “students began digging up white graves, too.”

From the Lancet:

In April, 1788, a group of children playing outside the New York Hospital ventured near [Dr. Richard] Bayley’s rooms where a student named John Hicks was dissecting an arm. Hicks is said to have waved the arm out the window at the children, including one small boy who had recently lost his mother. Hicks supposedly called to the child: “This is your mother’s arm! I just dug it up!” The youngster ran home, his father enlisted help to exhume his wife’s coffin, which was found to be empty—and the riot was on.

Citizens began to mass around the hospital building. Hicks, with other medical students and professors, beat a hasty retreat. By the time the mob broke in, the hospital was abandoned except for [Dr. Wright] Post and four senior medical students, all determined to save a valuable collection of anatomy specimens accumulated over many years. But they were outnumbered, and although not harmed themselves all the specimens were taken and destroyed.

James Thacher, a physician who witnessed the riot, described it in his memoirs: “The concourse assembled on this occasion was immense, and some of the mob having forced their way into the dissecting-room, several human bodies were found in various states of mutilation. Enraged at this discovery, they seized upon the fragments, as heads, legs and arms, and exposed them from the windows and doors to public view, with horrid imprecations.”

Though the article doesn’t note this fact, most of its details about the start of the riot ultimately come from William Alexander Duer’s New-York as it Was, During the Latter Part of the Last Century, published in 1849.

Dr. James Thacher didn’t in fact witness the riot; he was home in Plymouth in 1788. Thacher wrote the passage quoted above for the section on the history of medicine in New York in his American Medical Biography (1828). That book includes the word “memoirs” in its subtitle because it contains memoirs—i.e., profiles—of eminent American physicians.

In that book Thacher described the career of Dr. Richard Bayley, in whose rooms the controversial dissection took place. Not only did Bayley train in Britain, but he returned there in the autumn of 1775 and then came back to America as a British army surgeon. Thacher wrote that taking that position had been “a step of necessity rather than of inclination,” and that Bayley resigned in 1777. Nevertheless, Dr. Bayley stayed in British-occupied New York throughout the war.

Evidently an experienced surgeon (known particularly for his treatment of the croup) was valuable enough to the community that Bayley felt he could stay in New York at the end of the war. His reputation also survived the doctors’ riot, and he became a Columbia University medical professor. Dr. Bayley died in 1801 of yellow fever. (His daughter Elizabeth Ann is better known as Mother Seton.)

TOMORROW: A real eyewitness account from April 1788.

Examined by the Medical Committee

In 1775, James Thacher of Barnstable was a twenty-one-year-old medical trainee eager to work for the provincial army (just as it was officially becoming the Continental Army). Years later, he adapted his journal into a memoir and left this recollection of how he applied for the position of regimental surgeon’s mate:

I proceeded, July the 3d, with alacrity to the seat of [the Massachusetts Provincial] Congress [in Watertown]. I was not disappointed in my interview with Mr. [James] Warren; my letter procured for me a favorable and polite reception. He honored me with his friendship and kind assistance, and introduced me to his lady, whose father’s family and my own have for many years been on terms of friendly intercourse.

The office which I solicit is one in the medical department, in the provincial hospital at Cambridge. A medical board, consisting of Drs. [Samuel] Holton [of Danvers, 1738-1816] and [John] Taylor [of Lunenberg and Fitchburg, born about 1734], are appointed to examine the candidates; and they added my name to the list for examination, on the 10th instant [i.e., of this month]. This state of suspense continuing several days, excites in my mind much anxiety and solicitude, apprehending that my stock of medical knowledge, when scanned by a learned committee, may be deemed inadequate, and all my hopes be blasted. . . .

On the day appointed, the medical candidates, sixteen in number, were summoned before the board for examination. This business occupied about four hours; the subjects were anatomy, physiology, surgery and medicine. It was not long after, that I was happily relieved from suspense, by receiving the sanction and acceptance of the board, with some acceptable instructions relative to the faithful discharge of duty, and the humane treatment of those soldiers who may have the misfortune to require my assistance.

Six of our number were privately rejected as being found unqualified. The examination was in a considerable degree close and severe, which occasioned not a little agitation in our ranks. But it was on another occasion, as I am told, that a candidate under examination was agitated into a state of perspiration, and being required to describe the mode of treatment in rheumatism, among other remedies he would promote a sweat, and being asked how he would effect this with his patient, after some hesitation he replied, “I would have him examined by a medical committee.”

On 15 July Thacher started work under Dr. John Warren, brother of the late Dr. Joseph Warren, at the main army hospital. That building is shown above in photo by Roger Wollstadt, via Flickr under a Creative Commons license. It was still legally owned by Penelope Vassall, a Loyalist widow. (The cars are from a more recent century.) For more on that house, see Historic Buildings of Massachusetts.

“This speech procured a transient smile…”

Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) was a Pennsylvania Patriot who lived a long time and seemed to know everyone. He was a member of the Continental Congress who signed the Declaration of Independence, Surgeon-General of the main part of the Continental Army for a while, treasurer of the U.S. Mint, and probably the most famous physician of early America.

Rush was an energetic reformer in such causes as anti-slavery and better treatment of the mentally ill. The year before he died, Rush even got John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to write to each other again.

Despite being in the middle of so much action, Rush’s own papers weren’t published for a long time. He drafted an autobiography full of close observations about his fellow Patriots, but it wasn’t published until 1948. Rush’s Letters came out in two volumes in 1951.

And in one of those letters, dated 2 Aug 1811, Rush wrote to Adams:

Do you recollect your memorable speech upon the day on which the vote [for independence] was taken? 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 and the gloom of the morning were interrupted, I well recollect, only for a moment by Colonel [Benjamin] Harrison of Virginia, who said to Mr. [Elbridge] 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.

When Dr. James Thacher of Plymouth published a version of that anecdote in his Military Journal in 1823, he could have heard it in two ways. Adams could have told him (while probably grumbling about Harrison). Or Thacher could have heard it from Rush himself; he corresponded with the older doctor for decades, and included an admiring 42-page profile of him in his American Medical Biography.

But because Thacher didn’t specify how he was “credibly informed” about the Harrison-Gerry anecdote, generations of authors have set it aside as most likely a later invention, too good to be true. That’s certainly how I first heard it described.

The Harrison-Gerry Anecdote

In his Military Journal, published in 1823, Dr. James Thacher inserted this anecdote into his entry for 18 July 1776, which described the reading of the Declaration of Independence at Boston’s Town House:

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. [Elbridge] Gerry of Massachusetts is slender and spare [as shown here]. 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.”

Obviously, Thacher couldn’t have heard that story on 18 July 1776 since the calligraphic copy of the Declaration we know so well wasn’t ready for anyone to sign until early August. But his Military Journal is really a memoir aided by a contemporaneous journal and hindsight.

Thacher appears to have been the first man to publish that story. Niles’s Weekly Register picked it up in its 20 Sept 1823 issue, and it was reprinted in the 1825 Memoir of the Life of Richard Henry Lee and in an 1832 issue of the magazine Atkinson’s Casket of Gems of Literature, Wit and Sentiment.

Just as quickly, however, some critics attacked the tale as preposterous. A review of Thacher’s book in the 18 October Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, published in London, cited it a “specimen of his ‘historical facts.’” However, the other example it provided, about the attack on Charlestown during the staging of The Blockade of Boston on 8 Jan 1776, was absolutely true, with contemporaneous reports from both sides of the conflict.

TOMORROW: Thacher’s source, published at last?

“About the Time the prophetic Egg was laid in the Town of Plymouth”

After reading the nineteenth-century reports of a pro-William Howe message appearing mysteriously on an egg in Plymouth during the Revolution, I went looking for contemporaneous sources. I found only one reference in the America’s Historical Newspapers database.

That calls into question Dr. James Thacher’s statement in 1832 that “the story of the egg was the subject of newspaper speculation in various parts of the country.” Of course, there might be other articles not picked up by that system, or I may not have searched for the right terms. (Additional mentions welcome!)

The lone response to the egg appeared in The Freeman’s Journal, or New-Hampshire Gazette, published in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on 28 Jan 1777. That date supports Elkanah Watson’s memory of this event occurring at the same time that Plymouth received word of the American victory at Trenton in late December 1776.

The item started by dismissing superstition—but then it went on to both parody and exploit that credulity:

To the PRINTER.

SIR,

As the Superstition and Weakness of human Nature is such, that sometimes the most trivial Circumstance or grossest Absurdity, is attended with serious Consequences; you are desired to acquaint the Timid & Credulous, that Characters inscribed on Adamant are much more durable than when wrote only on an Egg-Shell. And also to inform the Public, that about the Time the prophetic Egg was laid in the Town of Plymouth, with this wonderful Prediction wrote on its Shell, “Oh, oh, America Howe shall be thy Conqueror,” a Hermit resembling the Genius of America, who had resided in a certain Forest from the first Settlement of the Country, found the following Lines inscribed on a Fragment of Marble near his Cave, visited by the Curious from all Parts of Europe, for the remarkable Eccho which oft reverberated in loud Peals, heard beyond the Atlantic,

TOMORROW: The following lines.

Dr. James Thacher’s Story of the Egg

In 1832, Revolutionary War veteran Dr. James Thacher (1754-1844) published a History of the Town of Plymouth that included this anecdote:

An innocent trick was devised by some persons in this town, which occasioned at that time a general surprise and agitation. An egg was produced with the following words imprinted on the shell by the artifice of some tories. ‘O America, America, Howe shall be thy conqueror.’

The egg being taken from the hen roost of Mr. H. on Sunday morning, and exhibited to a concourse of people assembled for public worship excited the greatest agitation, and the meeting was for some time suspended. The tories affected to believe that the phenomenon was supernatural, and a revelation from heaven favoring their cause and predictions; and some whigs were ready to fall into the delusion, when one less credulous, observed that it was absurd to suppose that the Almighty would reveal his decrees to man through the medium of an old hen.

Thus ended the farce; but the story of the egg was the subject of newspaper speculation in various parts of the country, and the alarm which it occasioned in the minds of some people here was truly astonishing.

This story appears to be independent of the first-hand account I quoted yesterday from Elkanah Watson. Thacher inserted the story among anecdotes from before the war while Watson linked it to a Sunday in late 1776 or early 1777 when word of the Battle of Trenton reached Plymouth. Watson misspelled the name of the town’s Whig minister, which appears several times in Thacher’s book: Chandler Robbins.

The two writers also show different attitudes toward the event. Watson had to be convinced by “an ingenious painter” that the message could have been put onto the egg artificially. Thacher, on the other hand, suggested the notion of divine messages by that channel was prima facie “absurd” and a “farce.” Watson and his friends thought the egg was a Tory’s dirty trick. Thacher called it “an innocent trick.”

Both authors independently agreed on one detail: that the egg came from a hen owned by a family with the initial H.

TOMORROW: Tracking back to 1777.

David Kinnison: “not credible”

I’ve been exploring the stories of David Kinnison or Kennison, hailed after 1848 as the last survivor of the Boston Tea Party. Yesterday I quoted his description of that event, and the day before his first detailed account of Revolutionary War service.

You can read more of both those documents on Pamela Bannos’s excellent “Hidden Truths” website from Northwestern University. That was my source for the Chicago newspaper quotations about Kinnison’s fund-raising and death on Friday.

Bannos’s site also details the refutations of Kinnison’s stories. Because he was a nearly complete fraud.

Kinnison’s name pops on and off U.S. pension rolls through the mid-1800s, usually spelled Kenniston or Keniston, when he was living in New Hampshire and Maine. He is reported as being 59 in 1835 (i.e., born about 1776) and 82 in 1840 (born about 1758). Only when he arrived in Chicago in 1848 did Kinnison start to state he’d been born in 1736.

Likewise, Kinnison’s war stories don’t add up. In 1848 he told a Chicago newspaper that he’d seen Cornwallis surrender in October 1781. Yet a couple of years later he told magazine journalist Benson J. Lossing that “in a skirmish at Saratoga Springs,...his company (scouts) were surrounded and captured by about three hundred Mohawk Indians. He remained a prisoner with them one year and seven months, about the end of which time peace was declared,” which leaves him no time to have been at Yorktown.

Kinnison claimed to have fought under a general named “Montgomery.” That must be Richard Montgomery, who died leading the American invasion of Canada in 1775. Yet Kinnison didn’t claim to have been involved in any of that memorable campaign.

Kinnison wrote that during the Battle of Bunker Hill “I also helped roll the barrels, filled with sand and stone, down the hill as the British came up.” Those barrels come from Dr. James Thacher’s account of the fortification of Dorchester heights, months later, and they never had to be rolled.

Kinnison’s name apparently does appear on a list of soldiers at Fort Dearborn in the early 1800s, but there’s no evidence he was there when the fort fell in 1812. Fort Dearborn later became the city of Chicago, so that might explain why Kinnison made his way back out there in 1848, hoping to find support in his old age.

In 1914, Dr. Charles Josiah Lewis dismantled many of Kinnison’s claims, as reported in the local paper. But seven years later a local chapter of the D.A.R. named itself after the man. In 1973, Albert G. Overton did a thorough analysis of Kinnison’s stories; he titled his essay “David Kennison and the Chicago Sting,” and to my knowledge it hasn’t been published, though it’s available in some research libraries.

There’s still a big stone monument to Kinnison in the Windy City, dating from 1903, but the online Encyclopedia of Chicago says he was a fraud. The Chicago History Museum keeps some artifacts associated with Kinnison, but identifies him as a hoaxer. The Chicago Tribune detailed the lies in 2003.

Which brings me back to MassMoments, where I started this series of postings. Whoever wrote its 17 November essay about Kinnison obviously hadn’t gotten the memo. (That essay also repeats an error in saying Kinnison was born in Maine; he said he was born in Kingston, New Hampshire, near Maine.)

Remarkably, the MassMoments webpage cites Alfred F. Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party as its sole source. Yet Prof. Young helped write the catalog for the Chicago History Museum’s “We the People” exhibit, which announced that Kinnison was a fraud. And Young’s book actually says:

In 1848, Chicagoans were so desperate for a link to the Revolution and so credulous that they embraced Kennison, who migrated to the burgeoning city advertising himself as 112 years old, a participant at the Tea Party, and a veteran of every battle from Lexington to Yorktown. In reality, Kennison was only nine or so in 1773 (which put him in his eighties in the late 1840s)...

Elsewhere The Shoemaker and the Tea Party states simply that Kinnison’s claim was “not credible.” (Ben Carp’s new Defiance of the Patriots calls him a “Chicago huckster.”)

I think it’s time for MassMoments to edit its 17 November entry to acknowledge that David Kinnison claimed to be at the Boston Tea Party, but was no more authentic than this John Howe.

“Not Cutting the Flesh”

While searching for examples of Continental soldiers losing feet to rolling cannon balls (none found so far), I came across some interesting examples of other curious cannon-ball injuries from volume 17 of the Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association.

According to this volume, Ephraim Abbott (1752-1778) was a volunteer at the Battle of Bennington on 16 Aug 1777. “A cannon ball wrenched his body, not cutting the flesh, and made him lame for life.” Or what few months were left of it.

Gen. John Nixon (1725-1815) was likewise bloodlessly wounded at the first battle of Saratoga on 19 Sept 1777. “A cannon ball passed so near his head as to permanently impair the eye and ear on one side.”

After the second battle of Saratoga, surgeon James Thacher described treating this even more curious injury:

A brave soldier received a musket ball in his forehead, between his eyebrows; observing that it did not penetrate the bone, it was imagined that the force of the ball being partly spent, it rebounded and fell out, but on close examination by the probe, the ball was detected, spread entirely flat on the bone under the skin, which I extracted with the forceps.

No one can doubt but he received his wound while facing the enemy, and it is fortunate for the brave fellow, that his skull proved too thick for the ball to penetrate.

Thacher’s journal entry for 24 Oct 1777 discusses other unusual wounds.

(Photo of the Saratoga Monument by Samantha Decker, via Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

The Warren Family and Other People’s Bodies

Dr. John Warren (shown here, courtesy of the Countway Medical Library) was the younger brother of the much-disinterred Dr. Joseph Warren. He became a Continental Army surgeon after his brother’s death.

Dr. John Warren didn’t hold with sentimental ideas about preserving the human body. At Harvard he was part of the club of Spunkers, introduced here, who sought corpses for research and practice. And apparently he had a strong opinion about the incident, described yesterday, when soldiers from Woodbridge’s regiment noticed that one of their recently deceased comrades had been dug up.

This is from Dr. Edward Warren’s biography of his father John (which probably dated the event based on Dr. James Thacher’s published journal):

In November, 1775, the body of a soldier was taken from a grave, as was supposed for the purposes of dissection. Much general indignation was excited, and the practice was forbidden for the future, with stern reprobation by the Commander-in-chief. It was done with so little decency and caution, that the empty coffin was left exposed.

It need scarcely be said that it could not have been the work of any of our friends of the Sp——r Club. It must have been the act of a reckless agent or a novice. In cases of this kind, where the necessities of society are in conflict with the law, and with public opinion, the crime consists, like theft among the Spartan boys, not in the deed, but in permitting its discovery.

In other words, Dr. John Warren felt that the real problem was how the grave-robbers had let people see they’d taken the body!

Dr. John Warren himself wrote of the challenges of anatomical training before the war:

In some of the more populous towns students were sometimes indulged with the privilege of examining the bodies of those who had died from any extraordinary diseases, and in a few instances associations were formed for pursuing the business of dissection, where opportunities offered from casualties, or from public executions, for doing it in decency and safety.

But the Revolution was the era to which the first medical school east of Philadelphia owes its birth. The military hospitals of the United States furnished a large field for observation and experiment in the various branches of the healing art, as well as an opportunity for anatomical investigations.

Like many other wars, the Revolutionary War was a boon to medical training. It inured people to death, provided a larger than usual number of anonymous corpses to work on, and gave regimental surgeons and their assistants lots of practice.

Dr. John Warren went on to be a leader in educating and training American doctors. In 1783, he offered a series of anatomical lectures at the house that had belonged to radical leader William Molineux; the tickets for those lectures were engraved by Paul Revere. Later this Warren helped to found the Harvard Medical School.

TOMORROW: Peacetime brings a shortage of corpses. What could Dr. Warren’s son find to practice on?

“Alarming Apprehensions” and the Mysterious Dr. Gilson

Boston selectman Timothy Newell must have been nervous when he started his last diary entry for February 1776 with “Thursday 25th.” As the person who transcribed this document for the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Collections series noted, the 25th was a Sunday. Context indicates that Newell probably wrote this entry on Thursday the 29th:

From the accounts of Dr. Gilson, and some others Deserters from the Continental army, great preparations were making to attack the Town,—caused very alarming apprehensions and distress of the Inhabitants.

Newell had stayed in Boston not because he supported the Crown but because he felt a responsibility to guard the town from the damages of war. Now the Continental artillery was preparing to bombard Boston, as Gen. George Washington had described days before.

After reading this diary entry, I wondered who “Dr. Gilson” was. Newell called him a deserter, and deserters are always interesting. But it took a lot of digging to find even a little about the man. His name doesn’t appear on the list of colonial Boston’s physicians published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, for example. Fortunately, we now have Google.

On 19 Apr 1764, while Boston was under threat from a smallpox epidemic, the selectmen summoned every physician in the area to discuss how they were treating patients and inoculating people safely. “Dr. Samuel Gilston” was one of the doctors who did not attend that meeting.

Jacob Rader Marcus’s compilation of documents from the eighteenth century on the topic of American Jewry offers a very good clue about the man. (Only Google Books allowed me to find this.) In 1770 Aaron Isaacs of East Hampton, Long Island, wrote to a Newport businessman that “Docter Gilston” owed him money. He added, “He is a docter and neavel offesur at Nantucket.” Gilson might therefore have been working as a ship’s doctor for the Royal Navy.

Isaacs (1724-1798) was born in Hamburg, moved to Long Island, and eventually converted from Judaism to Presbyterianism. His daughter Sarah married a Cape Cod man named William Payne, and their son John Howard Payne wrote “Home, Sweet Home.” But I digress.

Then the war broke out. If Dr. Gilston had ties to the navy and to Nantucket, which was known for its Loyalism, the Whig authorities in Massachusetts might well have seen him as an enemy. So they locked him up. William Pynchon of Salem wrote in his diary on 29 Feb 1776, the same day Newell heard the upsetting rumors:

News came that Dr. Gilson and others broke out of Plymouth jail and got into Boston; and by advices from Dr. Eliot and Mr. Payson that the Regulars at B[oston]. are preparing to quit the town; and from others that the Provincials are busy in preparing to bombard the town, and to erect works for that end on the hill at Dorchester, near the Neck.

Dr. Eliot was probably the Rev. Dr. Andrew Eliot, one of the Congregationalist ministers who had stayed in occupied Boston. Mr. Payson was probably the Rev. Phillips Payson of Chelsea.

Dr. Gilston was not on the list of civilians evacuated from Boston in 1776, nor was he listed as an absentee by the state in 1778. Instead of leaving, he appears to have returned to Nantucket and become part of that community’s struggle to stay out of the fighting that followed.

I found two more glimpses of the doctor during the war. In 1779, a Nantucket man named Thomas Jenkins complained to the Massachusetts Council about five islanders trying to aid the British military and summoning their “predatory fleet” to the island. Jenkins wrote, “Dr. Samuel Gilston will prove this confession.” Gilston signed this complaint as a witness.

In addition, Dr. James Thacher’s Military Journal recorded some gossip about the British general Richard Prescott, who had been captured and exchanged:

After the general was exchanged, and he resumed his command on the island, the inhabitants of Nantucket deputed Dr. Gilston to negotiate some concerns with General Prescott, in behalf of the town. Prescott treated the Doctor very cavalierly, and gave as the cause, that the Doctor looked so like that d—d landlord, who horsewhipped him in Connecticut, that he could not treat him with civility.

The islanders might have chosen Dr. Gilston to be their liaison with Gen. Prescott because he had old ties with the British military.

I’ve also found indications that a boy named “Gilson” entered Boston’s South Latin School in July 1773, as noted by assistant teacher James Lovell, and that Roland Gilson was later a physician on Nantucket. Was this Dr. Samuel Gilston’s son, sent to Boston for a classical education and then taking over his father’s practice?

(Thumbnail map of Nantucket above, actually drawn in the 1940s, courtesy of Rev. A. K. M. Adam’s blog.)

ADDENDUM: Thanks to reader Tom Macy, I’ve found much more about this doctor. It turns out he preferred to spell his last name “Gelston.”

What the Americans Found on the Nancy

Yesterday I described the capture of the British brig Nancy by a New England privateer in late November 1775. When the Americans discovered the weapons on that ship, “jubilant” is not too strong a word for their reaction. Gen. William Heath wrote in his diary on 30 Nov 1775:

Intelligence was received from Cape Ann, that a vessel from England, laden with warlike stores, had been taken and brought into that place. There was on board one 13 inch brass mortar, 2000 stand of arms, 100,000 flints, 32 tons of leaden ball, &c. &c. A fortunate capture for the Americans!

Those weapons were soon moved to Cambridge, and Col. Stephen Moylan wrote:

Such universal joy ran through the whole camp as if each grasped victory in his hand; to crown the glorious scene, there intervened one truly ridiculous, which was Old Put [Gen. Israel Putnam] mounted on the large mortar, which was fixed in its bed for the occasion, with a bottle of rum in his hand, standing parson to christen, while god-father Mifflin gave it the name of Congress.

Thomas Mifflin (shown above, courtesy of the U.S. Army Transportation Museum) was then Quartermaster-General of the Continental Army. In June 1776, he would be succeeded by none other than Col. Moylan.

Dr. James Thacher, an army surgeon, later explained the reason for such excitement:

Before our privateers had fortunately captured some prizes with cannon and other ordnance, our army before Boston had, I believe, only four small brass cannon, and a few old honey-comb iron pieces, with their trunnions broken off. . . . Had the enemy been made acquainted with our situation, the consequences might have been exceedingly distressing.

By the day after Heath heard about the Nancy, news of the capture had filtered into Boston, where selectman Timothy Newell recorded:

A large Brigt. with ordnance stores, a very valuable prize from London taken by Captn. [John] Manly in a Schooner Privateer from Beverly.

Lt. William Feilding wrote to his relative and patron, the 6th Earl of Denbigh, on 12 Dec 1775:

In my last I informed your Lordship the apprehension we were in for fear of the Ordnance Brigg was taken and am sorry to Acquaint your Lordship that by Accounts from the Rebels, she was Taken a few days before the Boyne sail’d. . . .

The Captain [of a privateer captured in the first week of December] says he saw the sea Morter (which was on Board the Ordnance Brigg) at Cambridge Common the Thursday before he was taken; and that from the Information of the Master, he was sent out to sea for a Powder Ship, which we have heard nothing of as yet. A deserter who came in a few days since, Says he saw all the Ordnance Stores safe Lodg’d at Cambridge last week.

On 19 Jan 1776, Feilding added that British officers expected the Americans to mount their new mortars on high ground at Phipps’ Farm, across the Charles River from Boston, “and endeavour to Burn the Town.”