“Aged SAM. in dotage frail”?

Yesterday I quoted some lines from Dr. Lemuel Hopkins’s poem welcoming the year 1795 for the Connecticut Courant.

Having praised Federalist heroes from Massachusetts, Hopkins turned to attacking the state’s Jeffersonians:

But still no flowers of greatness grow,
Where thorny plagues lurk not below:
There swarms Honestus’ rabble throng,
And Lawyer Incest joins the song;
While Jarvis with his bob-tail crew,
Retreats before great AMES’s view.

“Honestus” was a pen name of Benjamin Austin, Jr. “Lawyer Incest” referred to Perez Morton, who had been caught having an affair with his wife’s sister. “Jarvis” was Dr. Charles Jarvis. They were all Jeffersonian politicians. Against them, Hopkins favored the Federalist party of Fisher Ames.

And now, O Muse! throw Candour’s veil,
O’er aged SAM. in dotage frail;
And let past services atone,
For recent deeds of folly done;
When late aboard the Gallic ship,
Well fraught with democratic flip,
He praying fell on servile knees,
That France alone might rule the seas;
While Sense and Reason took a nap,
And snor’d in Jacobinic cap.

This political attack had to start out more delicately. No one could deny Samuel Adams’s leadership during the Revolution. He was still popular enough to have just been elected governor. Finally, though Adams was senior voice for limiting federal power in Massachusetts and still saw potential in the French Revolution, he didn’t oppose all of President George Washington’s policies like some of his younger colleagues.

On the other hand, on 3 Nov 1794 Gov. Adams had issued a proclamation reminding Massachusetts officials of their obligations under Article Seventeen of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between France and the U.S. of A. That agreement required American ports not to offer refuge to British naval vessels or formerly French ships that they had captured.

In doing so, Adams cited a recent message from Edmund Randolph, Secretary of State, who was struggling to maintain President Washington’s neutrality policy. Hopkins and his fellow New England Federalists revered Washington, but they leaned heavily toward Britain and disliked any accommodation of the French.

Therefore, Hopkins attacked Samuel Adams as “in dotage frail,” “on servile knees” about a “Gallic ship.” Because that’s the true spirit of the New Year.

“As they were not reasoned up, they cannot be reasoned down”

In 1721, the Rev. Jonathan Swift published A Letter to a Young Clergyman, Lately Enter’d Into Holy Orders, by a Person of Quality. It included this sentence about men wasting their college education by thinking in new ways and thus making such education look bad for everyone else:

It is from such seminaries as these, that the world is provided with the several tribes and denominations of freethinkers, who, in my judgment, are not to be reformed by arguments offered to prove the truth of the christian religion, because reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired: for in the course of things, men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers; but if you would once convince the town or country profligate, by topics drawn from the view of their own quiet, reputation, health, and advantage, their infidelity would soon drop off: This I confess is no easy task, because it is almost in a literal sense, to fight with beasts.

Eventually the clause “Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired” was pulled out of that sentence as wisdom on its own. Ironically, Swift wasn’t extolling reasoning so much as faith.

In the letter dated 21 Mar 1778 in The American Crisis, Thomas Paine offered a variation on that idea in a public letter to Gen. Sir William Howe:

To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture. Enjoy, sir, your insensibility of feeling and reflecting. It is the prerogative of animals. And no man will envy you these honors, in which a savage only can be your rival and a bear your master.

You always knew where you stood with Paine.

In the 12 Oct 1786 Independent Chronicle, young Fisher Ames (shown above) published an essay about the Shays’ Rebellion then roiling Massachusetts. He restated the same thought about the futility of reasoning with the unreasonable, this time calling that older wisdom.

It may be very proper to use arguments, to publish addresses, and fulminate proclamations, against high treason: but the man who expects to disperse a mob of a thousand men, by ten thousand arguments, has certainly never been in one. I have heard it remarked, that men are not to be reasoned out of an opinion that they have not reasoned themselves into. The case, though important, is simple. Government does not subsist by making proselytes to sound reason, or by compromise and arbitration with its members; but by the power of the community compelling the obedience of individuals.

Ten years later, on 28 Apr 1796, Ames was a member of the House of Representatives. He spoke in favor of the Jay Treaty, repeating the thought in new terms:

We hear it said, that this is a struggle for liberty, a manly resistance against the design to nullify this assembly, and to make it a cypher in the government: that the president and senate, the numerous meetings in the cities, and the influence of the general alarm of the country, are the agents and instruments of a scheme of coercion and terrour, to force the treaty down our throats, though we loath it, and in spite of the clearest convictions of duty and conscience.

It is necessary to pause here, and inquire, whether suggestions of this kind be not unfair in their very texture and fabrick, and pernicious in all their influences. They oppose an obstacle in the path of inquiry, not simply discouraging, but absolutely insurmountable. They will not yield to argument; for, as they were not reasoned up, they cannot be reasoned down. They are higher than a Chinese wall in truth’s way, and built of materials that are indestructible. While this remains, it is vain to say to this mountain, be thou cast into the sea.

Ames was known for his Federalist oratory, and that speech was reprinted many times in the nineteenth century. Several more American writers echoed Ames’s “reasoned up/reasoned down” phrase.

(This posting was aided by the inquiry at Quote Investigator.)

“Inn-keeping was a favorite occupation”

Earlier this month, Dr. Sam Foreman shared a draft of the Suffolk Resolves, written mostly by Dr. Joseph Warren. That document is headed:

At a Convention of the Representative Comtees of the Several Towns & Districts of the County of Suffolk in the Province of Massachusetts Bay in New England, on Tuesday the 6th day of Septemr 1774, at the House of Richard Woodward in Dedham,

The “House of Richard Woodward in Dedham” was a tavern at a major crossroads in the town, as shown in the map above from the Dedham Historical Register.

But does Richard Woodward deserve to have all the credit for hosting the Suffolk County Convention on that important day?

In the mid-1700s that tavern was owned by Dr. Nathaniel Ames, a physician and almanac-writer. He had won the property from relatives of his short-lived first wife in a long court battle. In 1740 he married Deborah Fisher, and they had five children, including boys named Nathaniel, Jr., and Fisher. Three of the five boys had gone or were going to Harvard when the doctor died in 1764. Deborah then became proprietor of the tavern.

Meanwhile, Richard Woodward’s wife had died in 1763, leaving him with sons of his own. The Woodwards and Ameses were both prominent Dedham families. In February 1772, eight years after the doctor’s death, Richard Woodward married Deborah Ames. A man named John Whiting wrote in his diary, “after a Long and Clost Siege, he took her.” That was how the tavern became “the House of Richard Woodward.”

In January 1773 Richard and Deborah Woodward carried on her first husband’s tradition by suing some of her relatives over an estate. Their lawyer was John Adams.

Shortly after Deborah Ames remarried, her son Nathaniel, by then a physician like his father, wrote in his diary: “Dick Woodward cuts a flash Bridegroom.” But soon his mentions of his new stepfather took a turn.

May 9 [1773]. Old Dick Woodward struck me with his saw.

May 12. Dick Woodward fined for striking me & bound to good Behavior.

On the flyleaf of a 1774 almanac:

Old Richard Woodward has declared that he will fleece our Estate as much as possible & accordingly Oct. 12 carried off several Loads of unthrashed Rye & carried off all the last years Corn & threatens to carry away the Hay out of the Barn In defiance of Law & Equity threatens to strip & waste as much as possible.

But Nathaniel fought back:

29 [Jan 1775]. Hay put into my Barn out of old Woodward’s way.

It was in that period that the Suffolk County Convention met at Woodward’s tavern—with Deborah Woodward probably doing a lot of the hosting. A Fisher family genealogy says of her:

She was a very shrewd and sensible woman, of a strong and singular cast of mind. She took a hearty interest in politics, and [in the early Federal period] hated the Jacobins devoutly. Inn-keeping was a favorite occupation with her, and she carried matters with a high hand.

Two items in the New-England Chronicle newspaper in February 1776, one an advertisement for two horses lost since “some time last September,” confirm that Richard Woodward was still officially keeping a public house in Dedham. But on 22 Mar 1784 the Independent Ledger referred to “the house of Mrs. Woodward, innholder in Dedham.”

What had happened to Richard? Over a century later Dr. Azel Ames wrote:

Deborah…had the bad taste and worst fortune to marry…one Richard Woodward, who succeeded, as there are only too many evidences, in making life miserable for her, himself and everyone else, until their separation.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found “too many evidences” of when that separation occurred, how legalized it was, or when Richard Woodward died. But by 1784 he was definitely out of the picture.

A biography of the two Dr. Nathaniel Ameses said Dedham’s oldest residents remembered Deborah Wooward’s tavern this way:

The room at the left of the entrance…was evidently the “tap room” in ancient times—the windows being screened on the inside with wooden shutters as would be proper—an heart-shaped opening being cut in each to admit the light. When the room was lighted at night, these “heart openings” were made more distinct, and “late-at-night” neighbors journeying homeward would remark, “See the light shine through Mrs. Woodward’s heart.”

Deborah Woodward continued to keep that inn, her sons living nearby as shown on the map above, until she died at the age of ninety-four. At that point the old building was torn down.

A Federalist Picture Book

Jacqueline Jules and Jef Czekaj’s picture book Unite or Die: How Thirteen States Became a Nation acknowledges Anti-Federalist sentiment in the U.S. of A. in the late 1780s. It describes, for example, how Rhode Island refused to participate in the constitutional convention and stayed out of the new Congress until 1790. (The tiny boy playing Rhode Island in the book’s school pageant gets to have other roles as well.)

Nevertheless, the book is clearly on the side of the Federalists. It presents the country’s needs in their terms, and downplays worries about a too-strong national government or encroachments on traditional rights. Even the title Unite or Die reflects the Federalist view, implying that creating a new constitution was a matter of national life or death.

Benjamin Franklin came up with the “Join, or Die” slogan in 1754, thinking about conflict between British and French colonies. American Whigs revived it, substituting the word “unite,” while organizing against new parliamentary taxes. The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union completed that unification process for the thirteen states. Legally, those states had already become a nation, and Anti-Federalists didn’t think the nation needed a stronger central government.

During the debate on ratifying the proposed new constitution of 1787, a couple of Federalists brought out the “Unite, or Die” slogan again. James Wilson quoted it during Pennsylvania’s ratifying convention, and Fisher Ames (shown above) appears to have done the same in Massachusetts. But really the issue of the day wasn’t whether to unite, but what the shape of “a more perfect Union” might be.

The title Unite or Die and the text inside say that the U.S. of A. was not in fact united until after 1787, and was in mortal peril. Though its characters act out arguments among the Federalists, the book doesn’t leave room for argument about the necessity of a new constitution at all. Which isn’t that surprising since the Federalists won.

TOMORROW: Sidestepping awkward subjects.