“Selwyn, whose constant flow of exquisite wit made him generally acceptable”

As described yesterday, on Christmas Eve in 1769 the brothers Patrick and Matthew Kennedy got drunk and stomped around the neighborhood of Westminter Bridge in London, clubbing people.

One of those people died: watchman George Bigby.

Within weeks, the Kennedys were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Matthew was about to step on the cart that would take him to the gallows when a reprieve arrived.

The brothers had a sister, Catherine or Kitty, who was one of London’s leading courtesans. (Many discussions of this case amalgamate Kitty Kennedy with another courtesan named Polly Kennedy, née Jones. There are some nice pictures of that woman, but I’m convinced by the historian Horace Bleackley that I shouldn’t use them because they show a different person.)

Kitty Kennedy’s closest gentleman friends were Lord Robert Spencer, brother of the Duke of Marlborough, and the Hon. John St. John, brother of Viscount Bolingbroke. Both men were members of Parliament. St. John, a barrister, actually testified at the brothers’ trial, claiming a prosecution witness had offered not to testify in exchange for £10; by implication, all the witnesses were dubious.

But Kitty had some prominent ex-lovers as well. And even more men who were won over by entreaties from her and her admirers. Among the aristocrats who publicly supported leniency for the Kennedys were the Duke of Manchester, until recently lord of the bedchamber to George III; the Earl of Carlisle; Viscount Palmerston; the Earl of Fife, who was in the British House of Commons because his peerage was Irish; and Sir George Savile, M.P.

But the Kennedy family’s most active champion was George Selwyn (1719–1791, shown above), yet another member of Parliament. Not because Selwyn was enamoured of Kitty Kennedy—he was gay. And not because he was against hanging—Selwyn was notorious for his fetish for watching people die. Rather, Kitty Kennedy’s admirers seem to have convinced Selwyn that her brothers were not the sort of young men who should be hanged.

There was an obvious class prejudice behind the campaign to keep the Kennedys from being executed. They weren’t street thugs, people said; they worked in an auction house, and had a sister who was a social celebrity. And hadn’t Matthew suffered enough in thinking he was about to be hanged?

Of course, other people thought the Kennedys had been drunk, cruel, and violent, and under the law of the day deserved their death sentence, even if only one could have struck the fatal blow.

Horace Walpole was among those who helped push for leniency while reveling in the insider nature of the campaign. For instance, sometime in 1770 Walpole wrote to Selwyn:

After you was gone last night, I heard it whispered about the room that a bad representation had been made at the Queen’s house against the unhappy young man. Do not mention this, as it might do hurt; but try privately, without talking of it, if you cannot get some of the ladies to mention the cruelty of the case; or what do you think of a hint by the German women [i.e., certain ladies in waiting], if you can get at them?

In his memoirs Walpole later described the case this way:

Two Kennedys, young Irishmen, had been charged with, and one of them had been condemned for, the murder of a watchman in a drunken riot. They had a handsome sister, who was kept by two young men of quality.

Out of friendship to them, Mr. George Selwyn had prevailed on six or seven of the jury to make an affidavit that, if some circumstances, which had really been neglected by the counsel for the prisoners, had appeared on the trial, they would not have brought in their verdict murder.

Mr. Selwyn applied for mercy, and the young convict was reprieved; but when the report was made in Council, Lord Mansfield prevailed to have him ordered for execution.

Mr. Selwyn, whose constant flow of exquisite wit made him generally acceptable, applied in person to the King, and represented that Lord Rochford, the Secretary of State, had under his hand assured the pardon; that such an act had always been deemed pardon, and that the prisoner had been made acquainted with it. The King immediately renewed his promise, the criminal was ordered for transportation…

That commutation was made on 17 April. Matthew Kennedy was put on a ship bound for America.

TOMORROW: Shipboard conditions.

Explaining the Summer of 1783

I looked up the Massachusetts newspaper coverage of Europe’s unusual atmosphere in 1783, quoted yesterday, after reading Katrin Kleemann’s online article from a few years back, “Speculating About the Weather: The Unusual Dry Fog of 1783.”

Kleemann wrote:

…in the summer of 1783, Europeans had more than enough reasons to be concerned with the weather. A peculiar dry fog with an odd sulfuric smell cloaked Europe and remained for months, with neither wind nor rain managing to disperse it. The fog was not the only oddity these individuals were facing that summer: The sun had a blood red color when it set and rose; an unusual number of thunderstorms seemed to pass through; meteors were visible over western Europe, earthquakes occurred in Italy, and a new island emerged from the sea off the coast of Iceland. Speculation was rife as to the cause of all this.

Hekla, an Icelandic volcano, known in Europe since medieval times as the gate to hell, was thought to be a potential culprit. When referring to historical maps of Iceland, Hekla is usually pictured as erupting. Famously, Benjamin Franklin suggested that Hekla or Nyey, the newly emerging island, might have caused the dry fog. However, what is often forgotten in this context is that in the same paragraph, Franklin suggested “great burning balls” (meteors) might alternatively have caused it.

At the time a very fashionable explanation was electricity: Lightning was believed to fertilize the soil when it hit the ground. The numerous thunderstorms of the summer quickened the spread of the lightning rod, which had not yet had its breakthrough. The lightning rod was believed to withdraw the beneficial electricity from the atmosphere, which—so the theory went—caused the dry fog, as sulfuric odor had previously been consumed by the “electrical fire.”

There was yet another story making its rounds in the newspapers in July 1783: Not just one but two volcanic eruptions were described within the German territories. The Cottaberg near Dresden as well as the Gleichberg mountains near Hildburghausen were said to have roared to life and to be spitting fire. Both mountains are actually of volcanic origin—however, their last eruptions occurred 25 and 15 million years ago, respectively. The reports were retracted a few weeks later.

The most popular theory of the time suggested that earthquakes in Italy and this dry fog were directly related: people believed the earthquakes had opened a crack in the Earth, which released sulfuric odor from the Earth’s interior into the air. The concept of a subterraneous revolution plausibly explained the sulfuric smell, the fog, the earthquakes, and the newly emerging island.

As Kleemann related, the answer to the atmospheric mystery did lie in Iceland, but it took a long time to come out. Eleven years after that odd summer, an Icelandic scientist named Sveinn Pálsson (1762-1840, shown above) described the volcanic fissure now called Laki. That system had erupted from June 1783 to February 1784, emitting huge amounts of basalt lava and poisonous clouds. The effects in continental Europe were nothing compared to what happened locally, as more than half of Iceland’s livestock died, followed by most of the crops, followed within a few years by about a quarter of the humans from famine.

Despite all those effects, Pálsson’s report wasn’t published by the Danish Society of Natural History but simply filed away. A century later, the eruption of Krakatoa confirmed that massive volcanic activity could affect the atmosphere all over the planet. People rediscovered what Pálsson had written. His manuscript was finally published in full in 1945, explaining the odd summer of 1783.

(Kleeman’s article appeared on the website of N.I.C.H.E., which is both the Network In Canadian History & Environment and the Nouvelle Initiative Canadienne en Histoire de l’Environnement. Coming up with a name to justify a good acronym is tough enough, but doing so in two languages at once is a real feat.)

The Death of Gen. Simon Fraser

During the fight at Bemis Heights, the second act of the Battle of Saratoga, an American rifleman picked off Simon Fraser, brigadier general and commander of His Majesty’s 24th Regiment of Foot.

Frederika von Massow Riedesel left a dramatic account of Fraser’s last hours. Wife of the officer commanding the Crown’s German-speaking hired regiments, she had traveled to North America with their young children.

This is from the 1827 translation of Riedesel’s memoir of the war:

About 3 o’clock in the afternoon, instead of the guests whom I expected, I saw one of them, poor general Fraser, brought upon a hand-barrow, mortally wounded. The table, which was already prepared for dinner, was immediately removed, and a bed placed in its stead for the general. I sat terrified and trembling in a corner. The noise grew more alarming, and I was in a continual agony and tremour, while thinking that my husband might soon also be brought in, wounded like general Fraser.

That poor general said to the surgeon, “tell me the truth: is there no hope?” . . . the ball had passed through his body, but unhappily for the general, he had that morning eaten a full breakfast, by which the stomach was distended, and the ball, as the surgeon remarked, passed directly through it. I heard often amidst his groans, such words as these, “O bad ambition! poor general Burgoyne! poor Mistress Fraser.” Prayers were read, after which he desired that general [John] Burgoyne should be requested to have him buried on the next day at 6 o’clock in the evening, on a hill where a breastwork had been constructed.

I knew not what to do: the entrance and all the rooms were full of sick, in consequence of the dysentery which prevailed in the camp. At length, towards evening, my husband came, and from that moment my affection was much soothed, and I breathed thanks to God. He dined with me and the aids-de-camp in great haste, in an open space in the rear of the house. We poor females had been told, that our troops had been victorious; but I well saw, by the melancholy countenance of my husband, that it was quite the contrary. On going away, he took me aside, to tell me every went badly, and that I should prepare myself to depart, but without saying any thing to any body. Under the pretence of removing the next day to my new lodgings, I ordered the baggage to be packed up. . . .

my children…were asleep, but…, I feared, might disturb the poor dying general. He sent me several messages to beg my pardon for the trouble he thought he gave me. About 3 o’clock, I was informed that he could not hold out much longer, and as I did not wish to be present at his last struggle, I wrapped my children in blankets, and retired into the entrance hall. About 8 o’clock in the morning he expired.

The 1827 translation says that the words in boldface above appeared in English in the original German publication of Riedesel’s memoir. In other words, they were supposedly the general’s exact words. Nonetheless, a later translation presented Fraser’s words as, “Oh, fatal ambition! Poor General Burgoyne! My poor wife!” 

TOMORROW: A memorable burial.

The Record of a Pennsylvania Dutch Midwife

Pennsylvania Heritage shares an interesting article by Patrick J. Donmoyer of Kutztown University on the “Hebamme Büchlein” or work record of the midwife Rosina Heydrich (1737–1828).

Heydrich was part of the Schwenkfelder community, a religious sect that immigrated from Lower Silesia to the Perkiomen Valley of Pennsylvania in the decade before she was born. That area is now part of Montgomery County. Her parents’ marriage had been the occasion for those immigrants to choose a minister and establish a meeting.

Heydrich began her notebook by copying out more than a hundred herbal remedies. Donmoyer writes, “Some remedies are notably ritual in nature, describing the use of healing objects or procedures enacted in a particular manner or at certain times.”

On 1 Aug 1770, Heydrich recorded her first delivery in the book. That was also her only delivery that year, so perhaps she was still in training, or busy with her own family. In 1771 Heydrich attended at two births, and the next years at three, and during the war years she appears to have become her community’s principal midwife.

Over the next 84 pages, and the next 49 years, Heydrich and her assistant (who Donmoyer suggests was a daughter) set down the basic details of more then 1,700 more births. That’s more babies than in the similar journal that Martha Ballard kept in Maine, but Heydrich didn’t also mention local events.

It’s clear Heydrich and her assistant maintained this record for their own use, not as a public record. “Passages freely combine German and Latin script, fraktur calligraphy, and Latin printing in varying degrees on a single page and even sometimes in a single inscription.” That made the document a challenging read.

Heydrich’s manuscript was held for decades by the Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center in Pennsburg. Under a grant from state agencies, specialists have transcribed, translated, and digitized the pages, and the notebook is now available for anyone to read through the P.O.W.E.R. Library.

The Prize Papers Project’s Peri

The Prize Papers Project is a largely German research endeavor exploring documents at the British National Archives.

Between 1582 and 1817, the English and then British government authorized the country’s naval ships and privateers to capture enemy vessels during war—and there were a lot of wars.

The crews of those naval ships and privateers, the privateers’ investors, and the Crown could claim shares of the value of the captured ships and the cargo they carried. But to keep that practice respectable, the governments established prize courts to value the captures and adjudicate disputes over them.

The project website explains:

For the seafarers setting out to take prizes, this meant that they had to swear and adhere to a strict legal procedure, which included making sure that every last scrap of paper travelling on board the captured ship was confiscated as evidence for the ensuing court process. The confiscated documents that were deemed part of a legal capture were then stored in the Admiralty’s archives, along with all juridical documents emerging from the respective captures.

Once those documents went into the files, they usually stayed there, unread. Ultimately the British government built up “documents from more than 35,000 captured ships, held in around 4088 boxes and 71 printed volumes.”

These include “at least 160,000 undelivered letters,” each a peephole into the lives of two people—mercantile partners, relatives, bureaucrats—who were trying to maintain some sort of link in wartime. Those letters never got to the intended recipients. Most have never been opened. They are in at least nineteen different languages, showing how many enemies the British Empire had over time.

The Prize Papers Project has publicized some of the stories scholars have found in that archive, hoping to attract more researchers. Yesterday’s Guardian newspaper, however, ran an article that might make scholars less interested in being the first to open those bundles.

This photo shows a page from the ledger of a slave-trading vessel that sailed from La Rochelle, France, to the Guinea coast and then Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in 1743. The ledger then moved with some crew members onto a different ship headed back to France. But this happened during the War of the Austrian Succession. British privateers captured the vessel and confiscated the ledger.

As National Archives specialist Oliver Finnegan found when he opened the volume to digitize it, it also contained a large dead cockroach.

This insect was very much part of the Atlantic world. The species is native to Africa but during the slave trade was brought to the Americas, where it thrived so much that it’s called Periplaneta americana. Since the species is uncommon in Britain, the archivists could feel confident that this bug hadn’t crawled into the volume in recent decades.

The Guardian states that the National Archives staff have now nicknamed and catalogued the roach:

Peri, now pinned and mounted in a box with a Perspex lid, will have his own reference number, and will be kept in a drawer available to order up for anyone wishing to inspect him further in a special room at the National Archives.

Book your trips to London now.

“A great part of my disease immediately gave way to your Chemical Essences”

When the historian Catharine Macaulay contacted Dr. James Graham, he was changing his field of medical practice.

In his advertisements in American newspapers, similar notices in Bristol, and his 1775 London pamphlet, Graham presented himself as a specialist in problems of the eyes and ears.

But in 1776 he published another pamphlet whose title suggested new treatments for many more ailments:

A Short Inquiry into the Present State of Medical Practice, in Consumption, Asthmas, Gout in the Head or Stomach, Hysterical, Spasmodic, or Paralytic Affections of the Nerves in Every Species of Nervous Weakness and in Cancerous and Other Obstinate Ulcers and a More Elegant Speedy and Certain Method of Cure by Means of Certain Chemical Essences, and Aërial, Ætherial, Magnetic, and Electric Vapours, Medicines, and Applications—Recommended.

To which is added an Appendix on the Management and Diseases of the Teeth and Gums

In this pamphlet Graham declared that the electrical lectures he had attended in Philadelphia had inspired him to develop new methods of curing people. (He also mentioned trips to Germany and Russia, which must have been very short because I have no idea when he fit them in.)

This essay may well have been what prompted Macaulay to consult with Graham. And she was pleased with the results. On 18 Jan 1777 she wrote to the doctor from the home she shared with the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson in Bath:

…I was unfortunately born with a very delicate constitution, and a weak system of nerves; that from my earliest infancy to the age of maturity, my health was continually disturbed with almost every species of fever, with violent colds, sore throats, and pains in the ears, attended with all the variety of symptoms which accompany a relaxed habit, and an irritable state of nerves.

In this very weak state of health, I undertook the writing the History of the Stewarts; and I do not know whether it is not impertinent to add, that seven years severe application reduced an originally tender frame to a state of insupportable weakness and debility: continual pains in the stomach, indigestion, tremblings of the nerves, shivering fits, repeated pains in the ears and throat, kept my mind and body in continual agitation; and marked, those which would otherwise have been the brightest of my days, with sorrow and despair.

In one of these fits of despair, your pamphlet came to my hands. Its contents awakened my curiosity; I sent for you; you undertook my cure with alacrity, and gave me the pleasing hope of a restoration of health, or rather a new state of constitution; and I have the happiness to declare, that a great part of my disease immediately gave way to your Chemical Essences, your Ætherial, Magnetic, and Electric Applications; the pains in my ears and throat subsided, the fevers and irritations of my nerves left me, and my spirits were sufficiently invigorated to break from a confinement of six weeks, and to exercise in the open air.

Macaulay told Graham that she gave him “full liberty to publish this declaration,” and he seized the opportunity. He included the letter in a second edition of his Short Inquiry pamphlet and put her name on its title page, twice.

For that 1777 edition Dr. Graham also added an effusive 31 March letter back to Macaulay that filled seven printed pages, addressed her as “Madam” nine times, and used fifteen exclamation points (as well as slipping in “most hearty acknowledgements” to “the Revd. Dr. Wilson”).

In April 1777, as I wrote before, Wilson organized a grand celebration of Macaulay’s birthday. As a gift he gave her a gold medal that Queen Anne had presented to one of her negotiators at the Treaty of Utrecht—a historical artifact for a historian. The published description of that event then went on:

Next advanced the ingenious Dr. GRAHAM, to whom the world is so much indebted for restoring health to the Guardian of our Liberties, and thereby enabling her to proceed in her inimitable History;—he with great modesty and diffidence presented her with a copy of his works, containing his surprising discoveries and cures…

Furthermore, one of the odes presented to the lady that day and then printed was titled “On reading Mrs. Macaulay’s Letter to Dr. Graham.” It described Clio, “Th’ HISTORIC MUSE,” worrying about the lady’s health, even seeing the statue of her Wilson sent to his church in Walbrook as a “marble tomb.” But finally the god of healing Apollo promises:

“To stop the ravage of the foe,
My GRAHAM instantly shall go,
And set thy Fav’rite free;
No more let sorrow still thine eye—
On GRAHAM’s skill secure rely,
For he was taught by me.”

Those two 1777 publications—the doctor’s pamphlet and the birthday odes—publicly linked Graham and Macaulay. As he always acknowledged, her celebrity helped his pioneering ideas about “Chemical Essences, and Aërial, Aetherial, Magnetic, and Electric Vapours, Medicines, and Applications” reach a wider audience.

Later in the year, however, Catharine Macaulay took ill again.

COMING UP: Search for a cure.

The Mysterious Mezzotints of Thomas Hart

In October the American Revolution Institute published an intriguing article about a British print in its collection, one of only two known copies. (The other copy is at the Yale University Art Gallery.)

The image is titled “The Hero returned from Boston,” and its stated origin is: “London. Printed for Thos. Hart, as Act directs, 7th Sepr. 1776.”

The blog post adds more nuance:

The name of the publisher, Thomas Hart, is associated with a series of fictitious portraits of American leaders, including George Washington (including one on horseback and one on foot), John Hancock, Israel Putnam, David Wooster, Horatio Gates, Charles Lee, Esek Hopkins, Benedict Arnold, John Sullivan, and John Paul Jones, dated between 1775 and 1779. These prints, all of which are mezzotints, are attributed to publishers Thomas Hart, C. Shepherd, and John Morris.

None of these prints bears any real resemblance to its subject, despite the publishers’ effort to persuade customers that they were authentic likenesses. . . . The portraits were mostly fraudulent, turned out quickly to meet public demand for images of the leaders of the American rebellion. All of the prints may, in fact, have been produced for the London market in Augsburg, a German city that was a center of commercial print production. Their style—the markedly heavy features, large eyes, dark shadows, and treatment of details of clothing and accoutrements—is characteristic of Augsburg engravings.

Even more curious, the names of Thomas Hart, C. Shepherd, and John Morris seem to be fictitious as well. With one exception, their names are not associated with any other prints. The only plausible explanation for the use of these fictitious names is that the true publishers wanted to profit by selling images of the American Revolutionaries but preferred not to be closely associated with these products, which were, after all, heroic images of traitors who had taken up arms against the king.

The Hero returned from Boston is the outlier among the odd prints published by the fictitious Thomas Hart. It is the only etching, with aquatint or otherwise, associated with Hart’s name. The Hero returned from Boston is also the only one of the Hart prints in which the subjects are not named. Who is the hero returned from Boston? And who is the woman clinging so provocatively to him?

Before we go on to that mystery, I want to pause to consider the implications of the Hart/Shepherd/Morris portraits being unreliable.

We have multiple images of some of those American Patriots, such as Washington, Hancock, and Gates. In those cases, scholars have no trouble looking at a picture from the same period by Charles Willson Peale or John Singleton Copley and seeing how little the European prints resemble them. Take a look for yourself.

But in other cases, such as Hopkins, Wooster, and Charles Lee (shown above), we have so few portraits that for many decades people have copied or reprinted what are clearly unreliable pictures. I may well have done so myself (except I rarely have anything to say about Hopkins and Wooster, and I like the caricature of Lee with his dog better).

After all, some period image may seem better than nothing at all. But is it?

TOMORROW: Interpreting the oddball etching.

Music to Enjoy over the Holidays

Here are some links to music with colonial connections to enjoy at home over the upcoming holidays.

During last year’s stay-at-home holiday, the Middlesex County Volunteers Fifes and Drums recorded a version of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” on a multitude of fifes to a multitude of cameras, expertly arranged together.

Also from last year, the original cast of Hamilton reunited on video to perform some modern Christmas songs together. Top-notch singing. 

In an older vein, the Sons of Liberty (shown above) are three Smith brothers from Virginia who, at least until they went off to separate colleges, played period music at historic sites and reenactments. They, too, recorded a video at the end of last year; the eighteenth-century music starts at about 4:30. Here’s a half-hour concert commemorating the Battle of Cowpens.

Finally, the Museum of the American Revolution is hosting a live concert of period music that people can enjoy in their homes.

Tuesday, 28 December, 6:00 to 7:30 P.M.
A Hessian Holiday Concert
Museum of the American Revolution

The museum says:

Join us for this live concert and discussion exploring the surprising German influence on early American music performed by ensemble members of Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra Tempesta di Mare, hosted by Museum Curator of Exhibitions Matthew Skic with illustrated comments from Ulrike Shapiro, Executive Director at Tempesta di Mare. . . .

At the Battle of Trenton on Dec. 26, 1776, Washington’s army defeated a force of Hessian troops, German soldiers who fought alongside the British in America. Included among the 900 captured Hessians was a group of oboists (or “hautboists”), the favorite entertainment of Colonel Johann Rall, who was mortally wounded at Trenton. Accompanied by regimental drummers, these 10 oboists marched into Philadelphia as prisoners of war following the battle.

Less than a year later, the Continental Congress hired these musicians to provide entertainment for the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1777. John Adams wrote that the festivities included “fine music from the band of Hessians taken at Trenton.”

Some of these Hessian musicians returned to Hesse-Cassel following the end of the Revolutionary War, but some of them stayed. One of them, Philipp Pfeil, moved to Philadelphia and became “Philip Phile, music master,” later composing the march we know today as the ceremonial march of the Vice President of the United States.

The concert will include both German music and early American patriotic songs, performed by five members of Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra Tempesta di Mare.

Online access to this concert costs $15, $10 for museum members. Purchase tickets here.

“After what is past, a reconciliation is impossible.”

By the first anniversary of his marriage to Marie Anne Lavoisier, Count Rumford was calling her “a female Dragon.” (Though, as quoted yesterday, he insisted that was a “gentle name.”)

We have only a couple of samples of what Madame de Rumford called her husband. The Countess de Bassanville wrote that Rumford’s “conversation was largely made up of his own experiences,” rather than anyone else’s concerns. His wife would whisper to her guests that he “was a veritable sample card.”

But that wore thin. The count’s daughter Sally, of all people, reported her stepmother saying, “My Rumford would make me very happy could he but keep quiet.”

Around the second anniversary of the marriage, in October 1807, Rumford sent his daughter this story:

A large party had been invited I neither liked nor approved of, and invited for the sole purpose of vexing me. Our house being in the centre of the garden, walled around, with iron gates, I put on my hat, walked down to the porter’s lodge and gave him orders, on his peril, not to let anyone in. Besides, I took away the keys.

Madame went down, and when the company arrived she talked with them, she on one side, they on the other, of the high brick wall. After that she goes and pours boiling water on some of my beautiful flowers.

By April 1808, Rumford was looking for someplace else to live. But he didn’t leave. It appears the couple disagreed over the financial terms of a separation, which probably meant the count wanted more money. He wrote, “I have the misfortune to be married to one of the most imperious, tyrannical, unfeeling women that ever existed, and whose perseverance in pursuing an object is equal to her profound cunning and wickedness in framing it.”

Madame de Rumford’s many friends, however, felt the count was behaving like “a domestic tyrant” while she remained “the most amiable woman in the world.”

As of late 1808, Count Rumford was taking most of his breakfasts and dinners in his room, his only companion Mary Sarah Aichner, the little servant girl he’d brought from Bavaria, who ate at a sideboard. But Madame was still entertaining regularly, as the count complained:

Three evenings in the week she has small tea-parties in her apartment, at which I am sometimes present, but where I find little to amuse me. This strange manner of living has not been adopted or continued by my choice, but much against my inclinations. I have waited with great, I may say unexampled, patience for a return of reason and a change of conduct. But I am firmly resolved not to be driven from my ground, not even by disgust.

A separation is unavoidable, for it would be highly improper for me to continue with a person who has given me so many proofs of her implacable hatred and malice.

But still he continued to live in the Lavoisier mansion.

By 1809 the strain of fighting with his wife and not winning had made Rumford ill. The couple finally separated with a legal agreement on 30 June. The count declared those last six months to be “a purgatory sufficiently painful to do away the sins of a thousand.” He continued to complain about his ex:

• “that tyrannical, avaricious, unfeeling woman.”
• “Never were there two more distinct beings than this woman (for I cannot call her a lady) before and after marriage.”
• “She is the most avaricious woman I ever saw, and the most cunning—things which I could not possibly know before marriage.”

Rumford moved to a rented house in the Auteuil neighborhood of Paris. In one letter he told his daughter, “Madame de Rumford is well. I see her sometimes, though very seldom. After what is past, a reconciliation is impossible. She now repents of her conduct, but it is too late.” I’m not convinced that’s reliable.

All this time, Rumford had continued to report on his scientific investigations into heat and light. He became convinced that white clothing retained heat better than dark, so in the winters he dressed head to toe in white. He equipped his carriages with wheels six times wider than usual, again on scientific principles. In 1813 he fathered another child out of wedlock, a son.

Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, died in Paris in 1814, sixty-one years after his birth in Woburn. Among the witnesses to his will was Lafayette; the two men had fought on opposite sides in the Revolutionary War. Rumford left an annuity to his daughter, on top of the pension she was receiving from Bavaria, and a larger bequest to Harvard College, where he had sat in on lectures as a curious teenager.

Far from being avaricious, Madame de Rumford signed over the count’s London mansion, which came to her under their marriage contract, to his daughter Sally. She provided Mary Sarah Aichner with a wedding present of twenty thousand francs. She continued to host friends and notables in her salon, and everyone remembered her as charming.

Marie Anne Paulze Lavoisier de Rumford died in 1836 at the age of seventy-eight. Born under Louis XV, she had outlasted France’s Revolutionary governments, Napoleon’s Empire, the senior branch of the House of Bourbon, and her second husband.

“Never ought to have thought of marrying”

Only three months after marrying Marie Anne Paulze de Lavoisier, Count Rumford told his daughter in America there were problems in the marriage.

The first bone of contention was: “Already I am obliged to send my good Germans home—a great discomfort to me and wrong to them.” In another letter Rumford elaborated on those servants:

Aichner and his family have returned to Munich. I was obliged to hire a place for them some time before they went away. They did not agree with Madame de Rumford’s servants, though mine were not in the least to blame, for never were there more honest people than Aichner and his wife. It would have been a great comfort to me to have kept them to the end of my life.

Obviously there was some sort of dispute between Rumford’s Bavarian servants and Lavoisier’s French staff, but was one side really blameless?

Earlier the count had described one of the Aichners’ daughters, Mary Sarah, as “very small of her age, considered a dwarf. But she is very clever and interesting, and excites universal attention. Madame seems to take quite a fancy to her, allowing her to dine with us at a sideboard when we have no company.” That little girl stayed on in the Paris household. So whatever happened seems more complex than Rumford’s complaint about the French servants driving his away.

We have the count’s side of the story in letters to his daughter, but few equivalent remarks from Madame. We therefore need extra work to imagine her side. For example, Rumford was very proud of making improvements to the Lavoisier house as soon as he moved in, and later emphasized how much he had spent on those. But had she asked him to change her house? Did the results benefit her?

In the marriage arrangements Lavoisier had specified that she could keep her first husband’s name, becoming Mme. Lavoisier de Rumford. Some observers later suggested that was a cause for friction. However, the couple’s friends were soon calling her Mme. de Rumford, and she used that name for the rest of her life, so that couldn’t have been a lasting issue.

Probably the best diagnosis of the problem came from Count Rumford himself, in a letter he sent to his daughter in October 1806, one year after the marriage:

I am sorry to say that experience only serves to confirm me in the belief that in character and natural propensities Madame de Rumford and myself are totally unalike, and never ought to have thought of marrying. We are, besides, both too independent, both in our sentiments and habits of life, to live peaceably together—she having been mistress all her days of her actions, and I, with no less liberty, leading for the most part the life of a bachelor. Very likely she is as much disaffected towards me, but I call her a female Dragon—simply by that gentle name! We have got to the pitch of my insisting on one thing and she on another.

Even though the couple had known each other for almost four years before their wedding, and had discussed and prepared for their marriage for years, they hadn’t lived together in Paris during that time. Instead, they had been traveling in the German states or Switzerland.

Once they settled in Mme. Lavoisier de Rumford’s house, she returned to living the way she had before, with crowded dinners, afternoon teas, and soirées. But the count had decided that he was done with social climbing and wanted to spend all his time on scientific investigations of heat.

One might think that work could have brought the couple together. After all, Marie Anne Lavoisier had worked closely with her first husband—taking notes on experiments, sketching equipment and set-ups, preparing work for publication. Instead, Count Rumford kept his wife out of his laboratory. So naturally she spent even more time with her friends.

TOMORROW: From bad to worse.

“I have the best-founded hopes”

By the middle of 1804, as I recounted yesterday, Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (shown here), and Marie Anne Lavoisier had agreed to marry.

But under the new emperor Napoleon’s new law code, the fifty-one-year-old count had to secure certificates from America attesting to his birth, his first wife’s death, and his mother’s permission for him to marry. That took a while.

In the meantime, international affairs swirled around them. France and Britain had been at war for more than a year. In 1804 British prime minister William Pitt started signing up allies. Eventually this coalition included Sweden, Russia, the Holy Roman Empire/Austria, Naples, and Sicily.

France was also seeking allies. The Elector of Bavaria decided that Austria was being too pushy and elected to side with Napoleon.

That made it possible for Rumford to easily return to Bavaria in August 1804 and consult with the Elector—son of the man he’d worked for in the 1780s and ’90s—about setting up a Bavarian Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Rumford had helped to establish a similar organization, the Royal Institution, in London in the late 1790s. But by this time he had quarreled with most of his colleagues in that enterprise and, by living in France while it threatened Britain, made himself generally unpopular with his own countrymen. So it was time for something new.

The count was in Munich for about a year, returning to Paris by September 1805. He brought with him a longtime servant named Aichner, his wife, and four of their children. Rumford declared, “I succeeded in so winding up my affairs in Bavaria as in the future to be able to live where I please.” 

That same month, France (and Bavaria) attacked Austria. Napoleon won a major victory at Ulm in October and another an Austerlitz in December.

From Paris, Count Rumford announced to his daughter on 25 October that he and Mme. Lavoisier had finally married the day before. “I have the best-founded hopes of passing my days in peace and quiet in this paradise of a place, made what it is by me—my money, skill, and directions.” Of course, that place was Lavoisier’s home.

Two months later, on 20 December, the count wrote:

You will wish to know what sort of a place we live in. The house is rather an old-fashioned concern, but in a plot of over two acres of land, in the very centre and finest part of Paris, near the Champs Elysées and the Tuileries and principal boulevards. I have already made great alterations in our place, and shall do a vast deal more. When these are done I think Madame de Rumford will find it in a very different condition from that in which it was, that being very pitiful with all her riches.

Our style of living is really magnificent. Madame is exceedingly fond of company, and makes a splendid figure in it herself. But she seldom goes out, keeping open doors; that is to say, to all the great and worthy, such as the philosophers, members of the Institute, ladies of celebrity, &c.

On Mondays we have eight or ten of the most noted of our associates to dinner. Thursdays are devoted to evening company, of ladies and gentlemen, without regard to numbers. Tea and fruits are given, the guests continuing till twelve or after. Often superb concerts are given with the finest vocal and instrumental performers.

That doesn’t sound like “peace and quiet” at all.

On 6 January, two and a half months after the wedding, Count Rumford told his daughter:

Between you and myself, as a family secret, I am not at all sure that two certain persons were not wholly mistaken, in their marriage, as to each other’s characters. Time will show.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

“To complete in a legal manner some domestic arrangements”

In late 1801, as I’ve been relating, Woburn native Benjamin Thompson, now a knight of the British Empire and Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire, traveled to Paris and made the acquaintance of the widow Marie Anne Lavoisier.

At the time, his country of Britain and hers of France were at war but talking peace. In March 1802, the two governments signed the Treaty of Amiens, ending the wars that had started with the French Revolution.

By that point Napoleon Bonaparte was firmly in control of France, and a bit more beyond. In August the country adopted a new constitution and made him First Consul for life.

In May 1803, however, Britain declared war on France again. Bonaparte quickly invaded Hanover, George III’s other kingdom. International affairs once again made Rumford and Lavoisier’s personal affair awkward.

Late in 1803 their friend Sir Charles Blagden (1748-1820, shown above) wrote to a colleague:

Count Rumford has sent me a letter from Mannheim dated the 13th of September. He had applied for leave to pass through France to England, but was refused. I suppose the French Government thought that he…would act the spy.

Rumford had indeed spied for the British army back in 1775.

In December 1803 Blagden told Rumford’s daughter Sally Thompson in New Hampshire:

Your father had applied to the French Government for leave to come to England through France, but was refused. In consequence he remained at Mannheim till the middle of October when, having by some means, I do not know how, induced the French Government to change their resolution, and allow him to travel in France, he set out for Paris; and I know that he was in that city on the 1st of November.

In the last letter I received from him, which was written the day before he set out from Mannheim, he said that he had great hopes of being in England before the end of this year. Since that time I have heard nothing from him.

This was the same letter in which Blagden told Sally Thompson that her father planned to “marry the French lady.” In January 1804 the count told her himself, as I quoted back here.

But of course the lady had a say in the matter. Blagden’s next letter to Sally was dated 12 Mar 1804:

The last account I received of your father was dated the 19th of January. He was then at Paris very assiduous in his attentions to the French lady, with whom, indeed, he spent most of his time. But I believe she had not then determined to marry him, and I am still inclined to think she never will.

In the meantime he is entirely losing his interest in the country [i.e., his standing in Britain]. His residence at Paris this winter, whilst we were threatened with an invasion, is considered by everyone as very improper conduct, and his numerous enemies do not fail to make the most of it. He has quarrelled with Mr Bernard and others of his old friends at the Royal Institution, and they do all they can to render him unpopular.

The fact that Lavoisier had turned down a proposal from Blagden himself may be one reason he believed she’d never remarry. He was also in the process of falling out with the count.

Unknown to Blagden, in February Count Rumford and Mms. Lavoisier had begun to spell out legal arrangements for a marriage. She ensured her financial independence by establishing an annuity for herself of 6,000 livres per year. She put another 120,000 livres in an interest-bearing account to go to whoever lived longest—herself, the count, or Sally in New Hampshire. Her house in Paris and his near London were likewise to go to the surviving spouse.

But then Napoleon Bonaparte came back into the picture. On 21 Mar 1804 he instituted a new Civil Code for France, what we call the Napoleonic Code. That gave Count Rumford more hoops to jump through. In a bit of a pet he wrote to his daughter on 2 July:

In order to be able to complete in a legal manner some domestic arrangements of great importance to me and to you, I have lately found, to my no small surprise, that certificates of my birth and of the death of my former wife are indispensably necessary. You can no doubt very easily procure them—the one from the town clerk of Woburn, the other from the town clerk of Concord. And I request that you would do it without loss of time, and send them to me under cover, or rather in a letter addressed to me and sent to the care of my bankers in London.

Rumford then wrote out how he thought each certificate should be worded. Plus, he needed to show the authorities “the consent of my Mother,” then seventy-four years old. He enclosed a form for her to sign in duplicate. I imagine him gritting his teeth as he wrote, “The new French Civil Code renders these formalities necessary.”

I suspect that Sally Thompson’s feelings were mixed. Her father had deserted her mother (“my former wife”) when she was an infant, and now he was asking Sally to obtain a death certificate so he could marry someone else. But Sally had come to admire her father. Once the letter reached her from across the Atlantic, she set about collecting all that paperwork.

TOMORROW: Second marriages and the Third Coalition.

A Suitable Suitor for the Widow Lavoisier?

On a very bad day in May 1794, Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze Lavoisier lost both her husband and her father to the guillotine.

Within a couple of years, however, more moderate French governments were restoring her property and clearing those men’s names.

Lavoisier kept busy editing her late husband Antoine’s scientific papers into an authoritative collection. She also wrote a denunciation of one of the officials who had sent her relatives to their execution, though she didn’t publish that under her name.

Multiple men proposed marriage to the wealthy, intelligent widow, including Pierre du Pont, who in 1799 emigrated to the U.S. of A. with his family, and Sir Charles Blagden, secretary of the Royal Society. However, it would take an exceptionally talented and determined man to win Mme. Lavoisier’s hand.

One candidate arrived in Paris in 1801. He had spent eleven years, from 1785 to 1796, as a minister of all trades for Prince Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria and Count Palatine. While in Munich he had reorganized the state’s army, reformed its poorhouses, invented a cheap but nourishing soup, designed public parks, developed a way to calculate a substance’s specific heat, and made other breakthroughs in thermodynamics (refuting some of Antoine Lavoisier’s ideas). For such services and feats the prince had named him Reichsgraf von Rumford, or Imperial Count Rumford.

Before that job in Germany, the count had served as an officer in the British army, commanding Loyalist cavalrymen on Long Island in the last years of the American War. Before that, he was secretary to Lord George Germain, Britain’s Colonial Secretary and the chief architect of the empire’s military policy from 1775 to 1782. Those activities had won him a British knighthood.

And before attaching himself to Germain, the count had been a young man from Woburn, Massachusetts, who through brains, hard study, ambition, a lucky marriage, and minimal scruples had transformed himself into a New Hampshire country gentleman with a wealthy wife by the time he turned twenty years old. Yes, it was our old friend Benjamin Thompson (shown above in 1783).

Thompson had left his wife and infant daughter Sally in New Hampshire when he ducked behind British lines in the fall of 1775, worried that he’d be outed as one of Gen. Thomas Gage’s spies. (Remarkably, Americans didn’t tumble to this aspect of Thompson’s career until the 1920s.) In the 1780s Thompson resumed correspondence with some of his American connections, including his mother and his friend Loammi Baldwin, but he was adamant they not tell his wife where he was.

In 1789 Thompson had a second daughter with the Countess Baumgarten, also mistress of Prince Carl Theodore. The count also had a long sexual relationship and friendship with Countess Baumgarten’s sister, Countess Nogarola. In the 1790s Rumford had an affair with Lady Palmerston while Viscount Palmerston had an affair with Emma, Lady Hamilton, later the love of Lord Horatio Nelson. In other words, Count Rumford had entered an aristocratic circle that wasn’t really committed to the traditions of marriage.

Even Count Rumford’s presence in France raised some eyebrows. After all, he was a former British army officer, still on half-pay, and Britain and France were technically at war. The armies of Revolutionary France had also invaded Carl Theodore’s territory twice while Rumford worked for the prince. But First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte was busy consolidating his victories with peace treaties. Starting in March 1802, everyone was supposed to be friendly.

Count Rumford met Marie Anne Lavoisier in Paris on 19 Nov 1801. In the spring of 1802 he made a brief visit back to Britain, then traveled to Bavaria with Sir Charles Blagden. There the new Elector offered him government jobs. On 30 November the count sent a letter to his daughter Sarah in New Hampshire that she summarized like this:

he alludes to his love concern; says he has got into full employment at Munich, but would rather be in Paris; and the certain lady would rather have him there.

In 1803, Mme. Lavoisier joined the count in Munich.

TOMORROW: To marry or not to marry?

Cooking Up a Language in Central Europe

Earlier this summer Atlas Obscura published an interesting article by Kaja Seruga titled “The 18th-Century Cookbook That Helped Save the Slovene Language.”

The cookbook in question came from an unlikely author, though he wasn’t alone in his path from the Enlightenment movement into early nationalism:

Valentin Vodnik was born in 1758 near Ljubljana, today the capital of Slovenia and then part of the Habsburg empire. He was a man of boundless energy, curiosity, and drive: Besides his work as a priest and later a high-school teacher and headmaster, he was fluent in half a dozen languages, wrote some of the first Slovene poetry, published the first Slovene newspaper, and began corresponding with intellectuals in Slovene.

Vodnik’s mission was popularizing and elevating the reputation of the language at a time when educated Slovenes mostly spoke German, considering their native tongue to be the vernacular of poor illiterate farmers, unfit for polite society and incapable of expressing complex ideas.

Vodnik set out to publish a cookbook in the Slovene language using as few words with German roots as possible. Creating what he titled The Cookbook (Kuharske bukve) was a challenge, for three reasons:

• “Vodnik had probably never cooked a meal in his life.”
• His sources were all German cookbooks and chefs, not Slovene kitchens.
• The recipes reflected the upper-class cuisine of Vienna rather than the plain fare of most Slovene speakers.

Nonetheless, Seruga writes, The Cookbook caught on and eventually sparked a more practical literature in Slovene.

Even though the largely illiterate, poor Slovenes living in rural areas had little use for Vodnik’s decadent recipes, the book was popular with presbytery cooks working for village priests. These cooks were an important source of new cooking techniques and ideas for small village communities and, with their help, some of Vodnik’s simpler recipes and cooking methods found a wider audience.

In 1868, Vodnik’s recipes served as an important touchstone for Magdalena Pleiweis, who wrote The Slovene Cookbook. This new cooking guide, finally written by a woman who knew her way around the kitchen, included updated versions of Vodnik’s recipes and complemented them with the types of traditional Slovene dishes that he had pointedly ignored, such as buckwheat žganci—once traditional “poor man’s food”—and potica pastry, which comes in more than 100 regional variations.

By then there was enough published in Slovene to codify a language out of several dialects and make it distinct from the related tongues of neighboring regions. It wasn’t until 1991, however, that Slovenia became an independent country to go with Slovene.

A Peek at Peale’s Mastodon

Earlier this month, Ben at Extinct Monsters shared a report on Charles Willson Peale’s mounted mastodon skeleton, now on exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

Ben wrote:

Exhumed in 1799 near the banks of the Hudson River and unveiled to the public on Christmas Eve, 1801, this was the very first mounted skeleton of a prehistoric animal ever exhibited in the United States. . . .

After Peale’s Philadelphia museum closed in 1848, the mastodon was sold and wound up at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany. There it remained for over 170 years, largely forgotten in its home country, until SAAM senior curator Eleanor Harvey had the idea to include it in a new exhibition. . . .

I spoke to Advait Jukar, a Research Associate with the National Museum of Natural History, about his involvement with the mastodon. He inspected the skeleton in early 2020, shortly after it arrived in Washington, DC. As a fossil elephant specialist, Jukar was able to determine that the mastodon was an adult male, and that about 50% of the mount was composed of real, partially mineralized bone.

Fascinatingly, most of the reconstructed bones were carved from wood. This was the handiwork of Rembrandt Peale (Charles’ son), William Rush, and Moses Williams. Most of the wooden bones were carved in multiple pieces, which were locked together with nails and pegs. The craftsmanship is exquisite, and the joins are difficult to make out unless you stand quite close. The mandible is entirely wood, but the teeth are real. These teeth probably came from a different individual—one tooth on the right side didn’t fit properly and was inserted sideways!

The mastodon at SAAM differs from the original presentation at Peale’s museum in a few ways. The missing top of the skull was once modeled in papier-mâché, but this reconstruction was destroyed when the Landesmuseum was bombed during the second world war. It has since been remodeled in plaster.

While the mastodon was never mounted with real tusks, the mount has traditionally sported strongly curved replica tusks, more reminiscent of a mammoth. While Rembrandt Peale published a pamphlet in 1803 suggesting that the mastodon’s tusks should be positioned downward, like a pair of predatory fangs [shown above], it’s unclear if the tusks on the skeleton were ever mounted this way. At SAAM, the mastodon correctly sports a pair of nearly straight replicated tusks, which curve gently upward. 

The exhibit that includes this mastodon, which is actually about the scientist Alexander Humboldt, will be up at the Smithsonian American Art Museum only until 11 July.

Founders Feeling Homesick—and Using That Word

At this posting earlier in the month, I said that the first documented use of the English word “homesickness” was in 1756 and that the adjective “homesick” followed.

I was relying on Etymology Online, but that turns out to be mistaken.

The Oxford English Dictionary states that “homesick” first appeared in 1748 in a collection of Moravian Brethren hymns printed in London. That word was a direct translation of the German “heimweh.”

Likewise, the earliest appearance of “homesickness” in 1756 was a direct translation of “heimweh” in an edition of the travel writings of Johann Georg Keyssler.

One might assume the word was still working its way into English at that time, starting in the imperial capital. But I came across an example of the word being used in a remote corner of the British Empire. On 2 Dec 1756, none other than Col. George Washington reported to Gov. Robert Dinwiddie about provincial conscripts under his command:

I have used every endeavour to detain the Drafts, but all in vain. They are home-sick, and tired of work.

The young colonel wrote from Fort Loudoun (recreation shown above) in what in now south-central Pennsylvania. He obviously expected his superior to understand the word.

In addition (and this example is noted in the O.E.D.), in November 1759 Gen. Jeffery Amherst wrote in his journal: “As soon as the homesick were getting in the boats they were immediately half recovered.”

The second appearance of “home-sick” listed in the O.E.D. is from the journal of Philip Vickers Fithian on 21 Nov 1773. By that point some familiar correspondents were also using the term:

• Benjamin Franklin to his son William, 30 Jan 1772: “I have of late great Debates with my self whether or not I should continue here any longer. I grow homesick, and being now in my 67th. Year, I begin to apprehend some Infirmity of Age may attack me, and make my Return impracticable.”
• Franklin to Jonathan Shipley, June 1773?: “But I grow exceedingly homesick. I long to see my own Family once more. I draw towards the Conclusion of Life, and am afraid of being prevented that Pleasure.”
• Abigail Adams to John, from Weymouth, 30 Dec 1773: “The Time I proposed to tarry has Elapsed. I shall soon be home sick. The Roads at present are impassible with any carriage. I shall not know how to content myself longer than the begining of Next week.”

One last tidbit: That Keyssler translation from 1756 said people from “Bern are especially afflicted” with homesickness or nostalgia. As I wrote before, the earliest medical description of the condition came from a Swiss medical graduate, and physicians from his country were among the first to discuss it. That gave rise to the belief that the Swiss were especially subject to homesickness.

We see that idea reflected in the way John Adams wrote of his own homesickness on 28 Mar 1783.

• To Abigail: “No Swiss ever longed for home more than I do.”
• To C. W. F. Dumas: “No Swiss was ever more homesick than I am.”

A Mistaken Idea of Nostalgia’s Origin

As I discussed yesterday, in 1688 the medical school graduate Johannes Hofer (1669-1752) published a dissertation proposing a new diagnostic term: nostalgia.

The symptoms of this condition, Hofer wrote, included:

continued sadness, meditation only of the Fatherland, disturbed sleep either wakeful or continuous, decrease of strength, hunger, thirst, senses diminished, and cares or even palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, also stupidity of the mind—attending to nothing hardly, other than an idea of the Fatherland

The young doctor medicalized (and Hellenized) a condition that his fellow German-speaking Swiss were already calling Heimweh.

Over the next few decades other Swiss physicians wrote about the same condition. Some of them described spotting those symptoms in Swiss soldiers working far from home as mercenaries. They debated causes, with J. J. Scheuchzer (1672-1733) theorizing that the problem was the change in altitude from the Alps. No one appears to have blamed the experience of war, however.

Eventually the concept of nostalgia or Heimweh traveled to other European countries. It became mal du pays in French-speaking Switzerland and then France, listed in a French medical manual by 1754.

The word “homesickness” appeared in English in 1756, just a little too late for Dr. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. The Scottish physician and professor William Cullen (1710-1790, shown above) eventually included two forms of nostalgia, simplex and complicata, in his Synopsis Nosologiae Methodicae. Again, doctors saw this problem arising from being away from home, not from experiencing trauma.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century, Revolutionary and Imperial France produced armies larger than Europe had ever seen, armies that swept across other countries as far as Moscow. When some of those soldiers began to demonstrate signs of anxiety and depression, and—what militaries most care about—stopped being able to fight, physicians looked for reasons. Nostalgia was one diagnosis they discussed, hypothesizing that the symptoms would disappear when the men returned home. Today we might instead suspect those soldiers were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Over the next century, nostalgia evolved to mean something separate from homesickness. It came to refer to yearning for another time more than another place. It became a cultural condition, not a psychological or physical malady. By 1975 the origin of the term was so obscure that George Rosen published a paper titled “Nostalgia: A ‘Forgotten’ Psychological Disorder” in Psychological Medicine.

I don’t have access to that paper, so I can’t assess how Rosen described the original characterization of the condition. Four years later Fred Davis wrote in A Sociology of Nostalgia:

Coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in the late seventeenth century, the term was meant to designate a familiar, if not especially frequent, condition of extreme homesickness among Swiss mercenaries fighting far from their native land in the legions of one or another European despot. The “symptoms” of those so afflicted were said by Hofer and other learned physicians of the time to be despondency, melancholia, lability of emotion, including profound bouts of weeping, anorexia, a generalized “wasting away,” and, not infrequently, attempts at suicide.

As reported yesterday, Hofer’s dissertation defining nostalgia did not address “extreme homesickness among Swiss mercenaries.” His case studies involved civilians. Davis, and perhaps others before him, projected back from the interest in nostalgia among Swiss and later French military physicians in the 1700s to make soldiers part of the condition’s 1688 origin story, a crucial element of the diagnosis.

Meanwhile, in post-Vietnam War America, psychiatrists were recognizing what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. And historians of medicine were recognizing that earlier generations of doctors had viewed much the same symptoms in earlier generations of war veterans, coming up with such diagnoses as soldier’s heart, shell shock, and combat fatigue.

We thus had two concepts that appeared to fit together perfectly:

• Seventeenth-century doctors coining the term “nostalgia” to describe signs of anxiety and depression in Swiss soldiers.
• A pattern of war-related P.T.S.D. cases lurking in the medical literature under other names.

It thus seemed logical to conclude that “nostalgia” was one of those names. Since the 1990s at least, that statement is common in discussions of both P.T.S.D. through history and the changing ideas of nostalgia. And for American authors, an eighteenth-century medical term must have been applied during the Revolutionary War.

But a look at Johannes Hofer’s dissertation shows that the first of those two concepts is mistaken. There is no link between his original diagnosis of nostalgia and military service. Hofer’s description didn’t go beyond what we now consider homesickness to mention soldiers or other people who had suffered trauma. It may well be that eighteenth-century war veterans suffered from P.T.S.D. and were diagnosed with nostalgia, but that doesn’t mean all or even most cases of nostalgia from that time were triggered by military trauma.

TOMORROW: Three Revolutionary War discussions of nostalgia.

The Adventures of a Steel Dress Sword

I’ve been discussing myths of Frederick the Great’s admiration for George Washington—claims that he had the highest praise for the Continental Army’s maneuvers around Trenton and that he sent the American general a picture of himself with a laudatory description. Here’s another.

When George Washington died in 1799, his will included this clause:

To each of my Nephews, William Augustine Washington, George Lewis, George Steptoe Washington, Bushrod Washington and Samuel Washington, I give one of the Swords or Cutteaux of which I may die possessed; and they are to chuse in the order they are named. These Swords are accompanied with an injunction not to unsheath them for the purpose of shedding blood, except it be for self defence, or in defence of their Country and its rights; and in the latter case, to keep them unsheathed, and prefer falling with them in their hands, to the relinquishment thereof.

Bushrod Washington chose a dress sword, and after 1810 it passed to his brother, George C. Washington.

On 28 Feb 1832, as the U.S. of A. celebrated the centennial of Washington’s birth, the Connecticut Courant reprinted a letter that had just appeared in the New-York Mercantile Advertiser. It was from George C. Washington (misprinted as “George V. Washington”) to Silas E. Burrows, an organizer of New York’s celebration, and dated 18 February:

I take pleasure in complying with your request to be permitted to take with you to New York for the Centennial Birthday, the sword and pistols of Gen. Washington, and I accordingly commit to your care those valued relics of my venerated relative.

My Father, by the will of Gen. Washington, had the first choice of the swords bequeathed by him to his nephews, with the injunction “never to draw them except in self defence, or in defence of their country.” The sword which I have placed in your hands was presented by Frederick the 2d King of Prussia, accompanied by the compliment, “From the oldest General in the world to the greatest.”

Again, there’s no documentation of Frederick II ever sending a letter to Washington, much less a sword. But the Washington family had attached the 1780 anecdote about the Prussian king’s praise to this particular dress sword.

George C. Washington died in 1854 and passed the family relic to his son Lewis W. Washington, who lived on a family plantation about five miles outside Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

In the summer of 1859, Washington was walking in the town when a man he didn’t know greeted him and said, “I believe you have a great many interesting relics at your house; could I have permission to see them if I should walk out some day?” Assuming this stranger worked at the federal armory, Washington said yes.

The man made the promised visit in September. Washington showed him “The sword presented by Frederick the Great to General Washington, which he used as his dress sword, and one of the pistols presented to him by Lafayette.” They went outside and shot some guns. Washington noticed the name “John E. Cook” engraved on one of the stranger’s pistols. Cook acknowledged that was his name, and on parting said he planned to go to Kansas soon.

On the night of Sunday, 16 October, Washington heard someone call his name through his bedroom door. Wearing “night-shirt and slippers,” he opened the door to find five men pointing guns at him. As an added surprise, one of the men was Cook, who hadn’t gone to Kansas at all.

In fact, John Edwin Cook had been scouting the area for the radical abolitionist John Brown, who had just taken over the Harpers Ferry armory. Seeking valuable hostages, Brown had sent this detachment to collect prominent local slaveholders, and he also wanted the Washington family’s relics of the first President.

The raiders brought Washington, the weapons, and some of his enslaved workers to the engine house at Harpers Ferry, along with other locals. On 18 October the U.S. military, led by Gen. Henry Lee’s son Robert, attacked the building. Meanwhile, Lewis Washington was keeping his eye on the family sword. He later testified: “Brown carried that in his hand all day Monday, and when the attacking party came on he laid it on a fire engine, and after the rescue I got it.” Washington also pointed out Brown to the first U.S. Marine officer to break into the building.

That raid led to the execution of Brown, Cook, and five other men. It increased the sectional tensions that led to the U.S. Civil War within two years. And it made the sword supposedly sent by Frederick the Great more famous. Some authors claimed Brown had developed a superstitious attachment to that weapon “because it has been used by two successful generals.”

Lewis W. Washington sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War. I’ve found two accounts of what happened to his treasures in that time: either a poor neighbor hid them, or they were confiscated by the U.S. government and put on display at the Patent Office in the capital.

Washington died in October 1871. Already the family had arranged to sell several of his George Washington relics to the New York State Library; the state legislature approved the $20,000 purchase in April. Among those items was the steel dress sword.

In April 1901, the iconoclastic Virginian native Moncure D. Conway published an article in Century Magazine called “Washington and Frederick the Great, with the Story of a Mythical Sword.” By then it was being reported that the line “From the oldest General in the world to the greatest” was actually engraved on Washington’s dress sword——but it wasn’t. That discrepancy led Conway to research more deeply and discover there was no documentation at all to support the tradition of Frederick II’s gift.

The New York State Library staff still believed in its treasure, of course. In the winter of 1902, Prince Henry, brother of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, visited Albany. The librarians and Gov. Benjamin Odell proudly showed the Washington sword to him. “Prince Henry drew the sword from the scabbard,” state historian Hugh Hastings later wrote, ”and vainly scrutinized it for a mark of identification to establish the place where the weapon was manufactured. It is needless to say that all marks had been obliterated by constant polishing.”

Spurred by Conway’s doubts and “considerable discussion” in the newspapers, Hastings wrote to the U.S. embassy in Berlin asking if they could find any papers about the sword. After a few letters back and forth, the secretary of the embassy reported on 23 Sept 1902: “the Foreign Office states that no record can be found of the matter in question,—the presentation of a sword to General Washington, by Frederick the Great of Prussia. Consequently, I am afraid that the tradition that such was the case, was not founded on fact.”

Hastings included that correspondence in his 1903 report, formally titled New York and the War with Spain. (Not, of course, the place one would look for information about an eighteenth-century German sword.) The next year, the American Historical Review published the article by Paul Leland Haworth that I mentioned back here, “Frederick the Great and the American Revolution”; that showed how little Frederick II cared about Washington. In 1911 Francis Vinton Greene’s The Revolutionary War and the Military Policy of the United States summed up and dismissed all the Frederick the Great–General Washington myths in one footnote (vol. 1, p. 73).

Nonetheless, one can visit the website of the New York State Library today and see a photograph of the dress sword with the caption, “This is one of Washington's dress swords, alleged to have been given to him by Frederick the Great of Germany.” Celebrity myths die hard.