What Do We Know about Gen. de Steuben’s Sexuality?

Last month The Nib published Josh Trujillo and Levi Hastings’s comic about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben as a gay man.

I found it inaccurate at several spots. Yet the core message—that Steuben was both important to the Continental Army’s success and sexually attracted to other men—is almost certainly correct. It’s just that a lot of the details, especially those supporting that conclusion, are wildly exaggerated.

Most of the evidence about the Baron de Steuben’s sexuality appears in John Macauley Palmer’s 1937 biography, General von Steuben. Palmer admired Steuben greatly and disliked the idea of the baron being gay, so he tried hard to refute the evidence, leaving logical circles in the ground as he spun. But he did publish the relevant sources in English translation.

Many of the original European documents were probably destroyed in World War 2, along with others that might have been helpful. It’s therefore unlikely that we’ll find new evidence from Steuben’s lifetime. But we can do a better job than Palmer of interpreting those documents and spotting the most likely conclusions.

This comic instead overstates the evidence in various ways. It doesn’t cite sources but appears to have been based on articles written for American newspapers, magazines, and websites over the past twenty-five years since Randy Shilts’s Conduct Unbecoming focused attention on Steuben as a gay man.

I’ll go through the statements I think are exaggerated.

“Steuben lived openly as a homosexual before the term was even invented.”

It’s true that the word “homosexual” was coined in 1868. More important (as Trujillo and Hastings later acknowledge), people’s understanding of sexuality and expectations of how gay men behave were different in the Baron de Steuben’s lifetime and in our own. So what does it mean to say he “lived openly as a homosexual”?

Gen. de Steuben was a lifelong bachelor. He didn’t marry a woman while having affairs with men, as it was and is said of his monarch Frederick the Great of Prussia, Frederick’s brother Prince Henry, and Lord George Germain in Britain. The baron’s title was too new, his estate too small, to make a direct heir necessary. In that respect, Steuben was more like Horace Walpole or Charles Paxton.

But neither is there any evidence of Gen. de Steuben claiming a longtime partner or expressing sexual interest in males. When he set up a household with a young man late in life, he presented that man as his secretary.

Some of Gen. de Steuben’s letters express affection for other men more plainly than 20th-century male correspondents did, but there are similar letters between eighteenth-century men who had active heterosexual lives. Even in the baron’s circle, there’s a lot of joshing about young ladies, whether sincere or not.

So the comic’s statement that Steuben “lived openly as a homosexual” is highly questionable at best.

“Steuben was expelled from Germany on charges of sodomy.”

There was of course no political entity called “Germany” in Steuben’s lifetime. He was born in Prussia, but in the late 1760s and early 1770s he was a powerful government minister in the small principality of Hohenzollern-Hechingen. And then suddenly he wasn’t.

The baron met with American envoys Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin in Paris in the summer of 1777, but they couldn’t promise him a rank and good pay in the Continental Army. He instead sought a position in Baden. An official from that small country wrote to the prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen on 13 Aug 1777:

It has come to me from different sources that M. de Steuben is accused of having taken familiarities with young boys which the laws forbid and punish severely. I have even been informed that that is the reason why M. de Steuben was obliged to leave Hechingen and that the clergy of your country intend to prosecute him by law as soon as he may establish himself anywhere.

That’s the principal contemporaneous evidence for Gen. de Steuben’s homosexuality. We might even say the baron wasn’t accused of “sodomy” but of molesting children (in the original French, “d’avoir pris avec de jeunes garçons des familiaritiés, que les Loix defendent & punissent sévérément”). Again, the period’s understanding of sexual behavior is significant: the Prussian court appears to have revived the classical Greek admiration of adolescent boys as a noble way of expressing homosexual desire.

About five days after this letter was drafted, Steuben was back in Paris, over 300 miles away. Now he was quite interested in the Americans’ offer. By 4 September the baron had signed on to their cause, on 10 September he left Paris for Marseilles, and on 26 September he sailed for America, never to return.

All that said, no one has found evidence that Baron de Steuben faced formal “charges of sodomy” or that he was officially “expelled” from any country. Palmer even argued that the real problem in Hohenzollern-Hechingen was a budget crunch, and that the accusations of sexual misconduct were trumped up by Steuben’s court enemies—though he offered no evidence for such enmity. But the most likely explanation is that Baron de Steuben left his post and then Europe under a cloud because of those accusations of sexual misconduct, thus removing himself in a bid to keep the scandal as quiet as possible.

So again, The Nib’s comic takes the incomplete, somewhat murky evidence from Steuben’s lifetime and offers readers a definite statement reflecting modern expectations.

TOMORROW: What Franklin, Washington, and others knew.

The Hourglass Effect and Its Discontents

Last month the Panorama, the blog of the Journal of the American Republic, shared Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s essay “The Hourglass Effect in Teaching the American Revolution.”

Perl-Rosenthal, a professor at the University of Southern California, wrote:

The hourglass problem arises from trying to synthesize old and new ways of seeing the American Revolution in a single course. You probably start your class with a wide-angle early modern frame: Big, oceanic topics like global empire, Atlantic slavery, and the consumer revolution are good for framing and explaining the coming imperial crisis.

But before long, the course’s terrain contracts as you turn to the traditional chronology of the Revolution. One feels the squeeze already with the Sugar, Stamp, and Townshend Acts. After early 1770, it gets hard to leave eastern North America. First one is in Boston for the Massacre, then explaining the local politics of the Coercive Acts, followed by Lexington and Concord, and the debate over independence. The same goes for the war years and the critical period. A reopening outward typically only gets underway in the 1790s. . . .

The geographic cinching-up of the 1760s and 1770s, by temporarily shutting out events anywhere but North America, paradoxically ends up reinforcing the very exceptionalist narrative of the Revolution that a wider lens is supposed to help us avoid. The wider world may play its part in the revolutionary era, this approach implies, but during the crucial period of the 1770s and 1780s there is a particular and special North American story that must be told.

Perl-Rosenthal then tries to sketch out (with sketches!) how a course might “tell the story of the revolutionary decades in parallel with simultaneous developments elsewhere in the continent and the world.”

What would a course on the American Revolution look like with this approach in mind? First, it would begin by sketching out the common traits of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world—not just in the British empire but across imperial boundaries. . . .

Second, you would want to use these shared traits to constantly relativize and contextualize the American experience. . . .

Third, those shared elements would provide a basis for incorporating contemporaneous revolutions into the course, starting in the 1780s. The idea would be to see these revolutions not as disparate phenomena in distant regions, but as branches off of the same trunk in constant interaction. . . .

I’ll conclude by going back to Lexington and Concord, a particularly tricky point in the course if one wants to avoid the hourglass effect. Where are the “Atlantic cultures” to be found in this story of British regulars marching into a provincial burgh? Not far off at all. Civic militia were an almost universal feature of the Euro-American world, who generally defended local interests—as the American militiamen did. The British regulars’ tactics had much in common with those of career soldiers elsewhere in the Atlantic, from Prussia to Cape Colony. And the confrontation between the two was hardly unusual. The Dutch patriot revolt, the early French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution—to name just a few—were also set off in part by similar clashes. 

John Fea, professor at Messiah College, responded briefly on his own blog:

As I read Perl-Rosenthal’s post I was struck by the presuppositions that guided the piece. It is assumed that any discussion of local narratives is bad or somehow contributing to American exceptionalism. He uses terms like “traditional chronology” as if that is a bad thing. Those who get too caught-up in this narrative “feel the squeeze.” And, of course, the word “exceptionalism” is a very loaded term with negative connotations in the academy. (In some ways, I would argue, the American Revolution was an exceptional event, even as it was shaped by global forces).

Perl-Rosenthal himself acknowledges the outsized influence of events in the thirteen colonies, but only parenthetically: “This emphatically does not mean denying the American Revolution’s transformative power in the region, nor its wider global significance.”

All of which suggests to me that some hourglass effect might be inevitable, especially if one is teaching American history at an American university to American students.

Soldiers and the King’s Half-Penny

Last month Alex Burns, currently doing doctoral work on the Seven Years’ War at West Virginia University, shared his research on how well—or how poorly—ordinary soldiers were paid in the eighteenth century.

Some extracts:

Their pay certainly ranked in the lower strata of eighteenth-century incomes but was above or roughly the same as other groups in a similar social class: such day laborers or husbandmen. Pay varied between states. For example: the Austrians paid their common soldiers 5 or 6 creutzer, British paid their men six-pence a day, when adjusted for stoppages [i.e., deductions to pay for uniforms and other goods supplied to the soldiers], while the Prussian army paid their men 8 groschen a day. Yearly pay ranged from 12-14 Pounds a year in the British army to 24 Thaler a year in the Prussian Army. Soldiers in the Continental Army were promised a bit more, around $29 per year, but in practice, this was the equivalent of a few Spanish milled dollars. The average soldier earned around $1,500 per year, when adjusted to today's currency. . . .

Indeed, when measuring these sums, it may be easier to understand eighteenth-century wages through the lens of purchasing power, or labor value. When measured in these ways, the £12 is more like a yearly wage of around £20,000 in 2018 currency. So, while not rich by any standard of measure, these soldiers were not exactly destitute either. . . .

It may be more illuminating to see what a daily soldier’s wage could purchase. 1 pence could purchase a measure of gin, enough coal to heat a room for a day, or a enough firewood to heat a home for a day. 1.5 pence could purchase a pound of soap. For half of day’s wages (3 pence), you could purchase a dinner of bread, cheese and beer. Items priced about sixpence in eighteenth-century London included: a pound of cheese, a pound of hair powder, a lower-class dinner out consisting of meat, bread, and alcohol. Amenities available for 8 pence included:, a middle-class dinner out and a pound of butter. If able to save for five days, a soldier could afford to buy a pig.

Understandably, soldiers complained that they were paid very little. However, unless they had some sort of lucrative skill or pension, civilian life paid even less.

[The photograph above shows a half-penny coin issued in Britain in 1770, courtesy of Tony Clayton’s Coins of the U.K.]

A Checklist of Carrier Verses

It’s a Boston 1775 tradition at the turn of each year to share at least one carrier verse or address.

Back in eighteenth-century America, apprentice printers would make those flyers and distribute them to customers around New Year’s Day as a way of asking for tips. The flyers offered a poetic review of the past year’s news, wishes for the customers’ prosperity, and reminders of the tough life of a newspaper carrier.

In 2000, Gerald D. McDonald (who that year turned ninety-five), Stuart C. Sherman, and Mary T. Russo published A Checklist of American Newspaper Carriers’ Addresses, 1720-1820. I treated myself to a copy this holiday season.

This book lists 1,001 carrier verses known from broadsides or republication in newspapers or books. The earliest appeared in New York in 1720, copying an English tradition. The custom continued after 1820, at least as late as the U.S. Civil War. The German-language newspapers of Pennsylvania provided their own examples. The book also lists 61 examples from Canada in both English and French.

As a bibliographic checklist, this book gives the basic details of each carrier address, including first lines if the text survives, but no more. Illustrations show several examples in full. That doesn’t replace the Readex Early American Imprints database that I used to be able to mine for interesting addresses, but it’s given me enough leads to fill a few more years.

A fraction of the addresses name the newspaper carriers who delivered them, and may have written them as well. Seven years ago I quoted the example from the Essex Gazette’s Job Weeden and traced his subsequent career. Five years ago I explored the life of Polly Beach of the American Telegraphe. Alas, I couldn’t find out anything more about Tobias Bond and Benjamin Welch, who delivered the Maryland Journal in 1780.

In a few cases, this checklist told me, famous authors wrote the verses for the carriers. Not just printers who became well known like Benjamin Franklin (he gets credit for the early Pennsylvania Gazette verses, but of course we give him credit for everything). Rather, gentleman poets like John Trumbull and Joel Barlow tried out the form. So I’m going to share one of those examples.

TOMORROW: A New Year’s greeting from the “Poet of the Revolution.”

Fake News from Overseas in 1777

On 17 June 1777, the young Rev. John Eliot wrote from Boston to his New Hampshire friend and colleague, the Rev. Jeremy Belknap.

Eliot’s letter discussed, among other topics, foreign press coverage of the ongoing Revolution:

We have here among us some Irish Magazines which Capt [Samuel] Smedly took lately [in a naval capture]. I wish you could see them. There is plenty of matter edifying & entertaining. Your brother & I think them far beyond any thing of the kind that we have seen. But ye reason of my mentioning them at this time is to let you know how they speak of our politicians & hero’s. They appear to be friend[s] to America & say much in our praise; but they seem to be very much mistaken in ye Characters, or else speak contrary, from their Hibernian dialect.

The frontispiece is the President of our Continental Congress [John Hancock]. It is said he is a person of surprising eloquence, a fine writer, argumentative & cool, as may be seen in the addresses of the Congress, all which were penned by him; that he hath lately married one of the most accomplished ladies on the continent, who has bro’t him a great addition to his paternal fortune. So much for him.

Okay, to get the joke you really had to be there—in Revolutionary Boston. Because Eliot, Belknap, and all the other learned young gentlemen in their circle knew that Hancock was no writer. The biggest piece of eloquence in his name was his Massacre oration of 1774, which the Rev. Samuel Cooper and others had written for him. As chairman of the Congress, Hancock simply signed what other delegates wrote. Furthermore, his father had left no fortune (he inherited from an uncle), and his wife was from the poorer branch of the Quincy family.

Likewise:

Mr S[amuel]. Adams is a gentleman who hath sacrificed an immense fortune in the service of his country. He is an orator likewise, & there is a famous oration upon the independance of America, which, it is said, he delivered at Philadelphia, January, 1776, but which was never seen in America before.

Adams never had “an immense fortune,” and his moderate inheritance was gone long before the Revolutionary turmoil. He also wasn’t a great public speaker because of a tremor that could affect his throat; I discussed that putative oration last month.

General [George] Washington, they say, was first a private in the King’s Guards, & fought against the Rebels in [the Jacobite uprising of] 1745. Afterwards he went to America, & was promoted till he rose to be the accomplished gentleman the world now views him.

We all know Washington was born in Virginia, never went to Britain, never served in the regular British army, and never was a private past the age of eighteen.

Old [Israel] Putnam was a long time in the service of the King of Prussia.

Putnam had seen military action from Fort Detroit to Cuba, but never under the Prussian king.

In short, if you had nothing to judge from but the Characters, you would suppose it to be entirely burlesque. But from the whole of the Magazine you must impute it to ignorance. It is my own opinion that some Irishmen set down & conjectured what might be the characters of the American worthies, & dealt them out according to his own sentiments.

The most surprising circumstance is that they suppose Major [Robert] Rogers is a general in our army, & that he left the British service upon the disgust he took at his treatment some years ago. After giving his general character, they enlarge upon the ingratitude of Britain in treating such men as he, [Charles] Lee, [Richard] Montgomery, &c., in such a manner.

At the start of the war Rogers concealed his loyalties, but by 1777 Americans knew he was back with the British. Evidently the editors of this Irish magazine didn’t.

Finally, Eliot closed with a little personal news:

These things have diverted me during my confinement, which has been off & on these three weeks, owing to lameness. I was so terribly galled by a hard trotting horse sometimes that I could scarcely walk for a week, & when I did walk it was in such a manner that I was obliged to tie a handkerchief round my leg to save appearances. The next week a bad sore came in that very place where the hankerchief was tied. And last night, when my leg had got pretty well, I sprained my knee, & am unable to stir out of my chair today, & am in great pain. It would divert you to see me, however.

The picture above is a portrait of Gen. Washington, not taken from life at all but published in Germany during the war to satisfy public interest, courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Thomas on Louisa Catherine Adams in Quincy, 8 March

I’m breaking into the wall-to-wall Boston Massacre coverage for an extra posting about an event coming up in Quincy.

On Wednesday, 8 March, the Adams National Historical Park will host Louisa Thomas, author of Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams, the first full biography of Louisa Catherine Adams, the sixth U.S. First Lady.

The event description:

Born in London to an American father and a British mother on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Louisa Catherine Johnson was raised in circumstances very different from the New England upbringing of the future president. She was taught to consider herself an American and, more important, to marry one. John Quincy’s life had been dedicated to public service from the earliest age. They had a tempestuous courting yet fell in love despite their differences.

No longer residing in gilded England, she was on the road–a diplomat’s wife on a diplomat’s small stipend. Louisa and John Quincy lived in Prussia where they were viewed suspiciously as upstart rebels and in Tsarist Russia where Louisa was favored at the royal court by Alexander I. They experienced the height of the Napoleonic Wars, and Louisa famously traveled with her young son from wintry Russia to France, encountering hostile troops on the voyage. This lifestyle of traveling back and forth from America and country to country was difficult to bear; she suffered miscarriages, the death of her infant daughter, separation from her two eldest sons, and many illnesses.

Later, when permanently back in the United States, she began to form her own public persona by paying close attention to politics and the actions of former first ladies while keeping in mind John Quincy’s presidential aspirations. She supported his crusade and focused her own efforts on what she called “my campaigne”–hosting parties to promote her husband’s popularity. His presidency was a trying time for them yet it strengthened their already deeply close marriage, which would last half a century.

In her unpublished diaries and memoirs, Louisa writes not only the details of her days but also of, more significantly, her rich inner life, her thoughts and feelings, and her thirst for knowledge. Throughout her life Louisa often felt isolated. This was deepened by her views on gender equality, which were formed early and ripened over time. “I cannot believe that there is any inferiority in the sexes, as far as mind and intellect are concerned,” she wrote.

This program will start at 12:00 noon at the park visitor center, and a book signing will follow. Validated parking is available in the garage at Presidents Place Galleria on Hancock Street. The program itself is free and open to the public.

In Our Time, If You’ve Got the Time

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite podcasts is the B.B.C. Radio 4 discussion show In Our Time. In each episode, novelist and television host Melvyn Bragg discusses a particular topic with three experts drawn from Britain’s universities.

For the podcast, the forty-five minutes of discussion recorded live is augmented with the few extra minutes of “what did we miss?” chat.

Here are some episodes over the past year that have improved my understanding of the British Empire of the 1700s:

• Fanny Burney
• Frederick the Great
• Emma
• Salem Witch Trials
• Voyages of James Cook
• Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
• Titus Oates and the “Popish Plot”
• Songs of Innocence and Experience
• The Gin Craze

As I recall, the Emma discussion eventually came down to the academics reading out their favorite bits. And who can blame them?

“Instructions for my Son George”

Among the documents made public in the Georgian Papers Programme is a little booklet, bound with red string, titled “Instructions for my Son George, drawn by my-Self, for His good, that of my Familys, and for that of His People, according to the Ideas of my Grand-Father, and best Friend, George I.”

This document was signed by Frederick, Prince of Wales, on 13 Jan 1749, two years before his death. The wording suggests the prince already suspected he would not survive his own father, George II, and thus never succeed to the throne of Great Britain. Instead, his “Son George” would become George III.

The pages begin:

As I allways have had the tenderest Paternal Affection for you, I cannot give you a Stronger proof of it, than in leaving this Paper for your in your Mother’s hands, Who will read it to you from time to time and will give it to you when you come of age or when you get the Crown.

What is the main advice? Prince Frederick urged his son to “try never to spend more in the Year, than the Malt and two Shillings in the Land Tax.”

Britain’s malt duty was six shillings per bushel of malt from 1697. In 1760, the year George III ascended the throne, it was reduced to three shillings per bushel, which would have thrown off his father’s calculations. The land tax was likewise revised in George III’s reign; Charles Townshend hoped that the new duties on imports to America in 1767 would allow the government to reduce the tax paid by landowners in Britain.

By living within his royal means, Prince Frederick hoped his son would achieve two important related goals: “to reduce the National Debt” and to “lower interest.” One of the biggest impediments to that program, he warned, would be sycophants urging the king to live more lavishly. (To be sure, Frederick had been a bit of wastrel in his own youth, but now he was in advice-giving mode.)

The prince provided counsel useful for anyone in a position of power:

Flatterers, Courtiers or Ministers, are easy to be got, but a true Friend is difficult to be found. The only rule I can give You to try them by, is, if they will tell you the Truth, and will venture for Your Sake that of your Family or that of Your People (which three things I hope you will never Separate, nor ought they ever to be Separated) to risk some moments of disagreeable Constructions to your Passions, through which they may lose your Favour, if you are a Weak Prince; but will settle themselves firmer in it, if you turn out that man, which I hope God will make you.

This document reflects some other conflicts, or potential conflicts, that we don’t hear much about. One was the possible competing interests of Britain and the family’s other realm of Hanover. Prince Frederick urged his son to separate the two monarchies, which wouldn’t happen until Victoria became queen of Great Britain while a male relative took over in the German state.

The other conflict was the bitter feud between the Prince of Wales and his own father, George II. Frederick told young George that “unsteady measures, you see, my son, have Sullied and hurt the Reign of your Grand Father.”

Combined with his mother’s alleged advice to be a strong ruler, we can see the roots of George III’s insistence on a bigger revenue stream from America and firmer measures against the resistance there. His father wrote:

If you can be without War, let not your Ambition draw you into it. A good deal of the National Debt must be pay’d off, before England enters into a War. At the same time never give up your Honour nor that of the Nation.

As it turned out, George III’s long reign from 1760 to 1820 began during one war with France, then continued through more conflicts with the French in the American War, the wars of the French Revolution, and Napoleon’s wars—which sparked another American war.

(Above is a sketch from the Royal Collection Trust showing the future George III at about age nine, two years before his father dictated these instructions.)

“Even the Carters could not shut their hearts against us”

As I described yesterday, John and Angelica Carter moved from Albany, New York, to Boston in late 1777, John aiming to go into the business of supplying the Continental Army.

Another large group of people made a similar journey a few weeks later: the “Convention Army” of British and Hessian prisoners of war after the Battles of Saratoga. Gen. John Burgoyne and his troops marched to the outskirts of Boston, where Gen. William Heath and the civil authorities scrambled to find them housing.

Among those prisoners was Baroness Frederika von Massow Riedesel (shown here), wife of Gen. Friedrich Adolph Riedesel of Brunswick, and their three youngest daughters. In Albany that family stayed with Gen. Philip Schuyler. After traveling to Cambridge, the baroness looked up Angelica Carter, the Schuylers’ eldest daughter.

In her memoir, translated from the German and published in America in the early nineteenth century, the Baroness Riedesel wrote:

None of our gentlemen were allowed to go into Boston. Curiosity and desire urged me to pay a visit to Madame Carter, the daughter of General Schuyler, and I dined at her house several times.

The city, throughout, is pretty, but inhabited by violent patriots, and full of wicked people. The women, especially, were so shameless, that they regarded me with repugnance and even spit at me when I passed by them.

Madame Carter was as gentle and good as her parents, but her husband was wicked and treacherous. She came often to visit us, and also dined at our house with the other generals. We sought to show them by every means our gratitude. They seemed, also, to have much friendship for us; and yet, at the same time, this miserable Carter, when the English General [William] Howe had burned many hamlets and small towns, made the horrible proposition to the Americans to chop off the heads of our generals, salt them down in small barrels, and send over to the English one of these barrels for every hamlet or little town burned down; but this barbarous suggestion fortunately was not adopted.

I haven’t found confirmation that Carter actually said this, but the baroness clearly believed he had. And if he’d said it in her presence, even as a joke, as the wife of a general working for the British king she had every right to be alarmed.

On the 3d of June, 1778, I gave a ball and supper in celebration of the birthday of my husband. I had invited to it all the generals and officers. The Carters, also, were there. General Burgoyne sent an excuse after he had made us wait till eight o’clock in the evening. He invariably excused himself, on various pretenses, from coming to see us, until his departure for England, when he came and made me a great many apologies, but to which I made no other answer than that I should be extremely sorry if he had gone out of his way on our account.

We danced considerably, and our cook prepared us a magnificent supper of more than eighty covers. Moreover, our court-yard and garden were illuminated. As the birthday of the king of England came upon the following day, which was the fourth, it was resolved that we would not separate until his health had been drank; which was done with the most hearty attachment to his person and his interests.

Never, I believe, has ”God save the King” been sung with more enthusiasm or more genuine good will. Even both my oldest little daughters [Gustava and Frederica, ages six and four] were there, having staid up to see the illumination. All eyes were full of tears; and it seemed as if every one present was proud to have the spirit to venture to do this in the midst of our enemies. Even the Carters could not shut their hearts against us.

As soon as the company separated, we perceived that the whole house was surrounded by Americans, who, having seen so many people go into the house, and having noticed, also, the illumination, suspected that we were planning a mutiny, and if the slightest disturbance had arisen, it would have cost us dear.

The house where the Riedesels lived in Cambridge and hosted this occasion still stands on Brattle Street, though it’s been moved and remodeled.

TOMORROW: Back to the Carters’ marriage, and the unveiling of John Barker Church.

“George, be King”

John Nicholls (1744-1832) was a Member of Parliament from 1783 to 1787, and again from 1796 to 1802.

Politically, Nicholls leaned to the left, opposing Edmund Burke and then the younger William Pitt and eventually his early ally Charles James Fox. He saw good in the early French Revolution, opposed British war measures, and championed electoral reforms.

Nicholls’s father had been physician to George II, so he was privy to court gossip from an early age. But of course his political views colored how he interpreted gossip about that monarch and his grandson and successor. In his Recollections and Reflections Personal and Political as Connected with Public Affairs during the Reign of George III, published in 1820, Nicholls profiled the new king this way:

The young King (for he was at that time little more than twenty-two years of age) was of a good person, sober, temperate, of domestic habits, addicted to no vice, swayed by no passion—what had not the nation to expect from such a character? . . .

I recollect the expression used to my father by Mr. [Charles] Pratt, at that time Attorney General, afterwards better known by the name of Lord Camden, within four months after the King’s accession: “I see already, that this will be a weak and an inglorious reign.”

I recollect also the relation which a friend of my father’s gave to him of a conversation which he had had with Charles Townshend: “I said to Charles Townshend, I don’t want to know any state secrets, but do tell me what is the character of this young man?” After a pause, Charles Townshend replied, “He is very obstinate.”

It was also observed that the Princess Dowager of Wales had kept the young Prince from having any confidential intimacy with any person except herself and the Earl of Bute: the pretence for this was the preservation of his morals. In truth, they had blockaded all approach to him. A notion has prevailed, that the Earl of Bute had suggested political opinions to the Princess Dowager; but this was certainly a mistake. In understanding, the Princess Dowager was far superior to the Earl of Bute; in whatever degree of favour he stood with her, he did not suggest, but he received, her opinions and her directions. The late Marquis of Bute told me, that at the King’s accession, his father, the Earl of Bute, had no connexion beyond the pale of Leicester House [the late Prince of Wales’s residence]. He added, “I never lived with my father, nor did any of his children.” Could such a man be fit to be a minister?

The Princess Dowager of Wales was a woman of a very sound understanding, and was considered as such by all who had occasion to converse with her. But she had been educated in the Court of her father, the Duke of Saxe Gotha. . . . When the Princess of Wales came to the Court of St. James, she found the British Sovereign a very different character from that which she had seen at Saxe Gotha. She found him controlled by his Ministers, indulged in petty gratifications, but compelled to submit to their opinions on all important subjects. We cannot be surprised that she was disgusted at this; and it is well known that she ever impressed upon the King from his early years this lesson, “George, be King.”

In his History of the Life and Reign of George IV (1831), William Wallace cited Nicholls and repeated his analysis, but turned that quotation from the Princess Dowager into “George, be a king.”

George III indeed tried to influence the ministries that governed under him. But he also sincerely believed in the British constitutional notion of Parliament’s sovereignty. After Gen. Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown, he accepted the defeat of Lord North’s ministry—a major step away from monarchical supremacy.

The Issue of Naturalization Laws, and What Really Mattered

Steven Pincus’s new book The Heart of the Declaration raises the question of how British imperial policy on migration into North America after 1763 pushed thirteen of the empire’s colonies toward independence. I hadn’t seen much about that issue, so I did some background reading.

There’s no question that population policy was one of the grievances against the king that the Continental Congress listed in its Declaration of Independence in 1776:

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

The phrase “obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners” refers to an instruction that the London government sent to all the royal governors over King George III’s signature on 29 Nov 1773:

Whereas We have thought fit by our Orders in our Privy Council to disallow certain Laws passed in Some of our Colonies & Plantations in America for conferring the Priviledges of Naturalization on persons being aliens, and for divorcing persons who have been legally joined together in Holy Marriage: And whereas Acts have been passed in other of our said Colonies to enable Persons who are our Liege Subjects by Birth or Naturalization to hold and inherit Lands Tenements and real Estates [which] had been originally granted to or purchased by Aliens antecedent to Naturalization; It is our expressed will and Pleasure that you do not upon any pretence whatsoever give your assent to any Bill or Bills that may have been or shall hereafter be passed by the Council and Assembly of the Province under your Government for the naturalization of Aliens, nor for the divorce of persons joined together in Holy marriage, nor for establishing a Title in any Person to Lands, Tenements & real estates in our said Province originally granted to, or purchased by Aliens antecedent to Naturalization.

G. R.

(This same instruction limited the colonies’ power to pass new divorce laws, as you can see, but that didn’t make it into the Declaration.)

Most people settling in the British colonies came from other parts of the British Empire. Another big chunk came, against their will, from Africa. Europeans affected by naturalization laws were a small portion, but colonies and landowners promoting new settlements wanted to offer them the possibility of full citizenship.

Many of the American colonies passed their own naturalization laws to give non-British settlers rights in their new communities once they were rich enough—rights to own land, vote in local elections, and so on. From the central government’s perspective, those laws were also a back door into having the privileges of a British subject under the empire’s trade laws.

Parliament wanted its Plantation Act of 1740 to be the basis for how people from outside the British Empire became subjects of the king. And by 1773 the ministers in London were wary on principle of any colonial laws that appeared to challenge the authority of Parliament’s sovereignty throughout the Empire.

How big a deal was the dispute over naturalization laws in New England? Hardly at all. Colonial New Englanders were never exactly welcoming to newcomers who weren’t Congregationalist and English, even those from within the empire. Massachusetts passed its naturalization law in 1731; it accepted all of eleven French and German men in the next year and a half, and then only four more arrivals between 1741 and 1767 under the imperial law. Connecticut’s first naturalization law came in 1773, covering a Spaniard named Don Gabriel Sistera. New Hampshire never passed such a law at all.

So that leaves Rhode Island. That colony, founded to be more open than its neighbors, was more active in naturalizing newcomers for much of its history. In 1762 its high court also ruled that the Plantation Act didn’t apply there, a direct challenge to Parliament’s authority. However, Rhode Island did so in order to exclude a couple of Jewish merchants from full rights. Thus, that colony challenged Britain’s control over naturalization to make immigration less appealing, not more.

Naturalization laws were probably a bigger deal in colonies southwest of New England, which had a more welcoming history. But of course that’s not where the Revolutionary War started. Furthermore, I think we can see the real issue behind this dispute over migration by looking at the other verbiage of the 1773 royal instruction and the Declaration’s complaint about it:

• “Acts have been passed in other of our said Colonies to enable Persons who are our Liege Subjects by Birth or Naturalization to hold and inherit Lands Tenements and real Estates [which] had been originally granted to or purchased by Aliens antecedent to Naturalization”
• “raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands”

The crux of this dispute was lands. The Proclamation of 1763 restricted colonial settlement to the west. The imperial government wanted to reward its Native American allies for their loyalty and to avoid disputes between them and European settlers. But colonists, especially wealthy men who invested in western claims, wanted to maximize settlement there.

As I’ve said before, that restriction wasn’t a big deal in New England since those colonies were already blocked from expanding west. But for a growing colony like Pennsylvania, or an investor with lots of land claims like George Washington, it was a big deal.

I’m interested in seeing how it was that “throughout the 1760s and 1770s the British government tries desperately to stop immigration into North America,” as Pincus says. The Declaration does indeed claim that the royal government “endeavored to prevent the population of these states,” but it looks like a lot of that endeavor was simply not passing laws which certain powerful Americans wanted “to encourage [foreigners’] migration hither.” Not trying to accelerate the movement of people isn’t the same as trying to stop it.

The Issue of Immigration—Running the Numbers

Yesterday I quoted from the Course of Human Events blog’s posting about The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government, a new analysis of the forces behind the Revolution by Yale history professor Steven Pincus.

Specifically, I discussed how Pincus’s book links the imperial debate of the 1760s and 1770s with the issues of economic stimulus and governmental austerity today, wondering how well the analogy works. Given the limitations on what the central British government did and could do in the eighteenth century, what sort of stimulus could Parliament cut back on?

Pincus’s answer relates to an even hotter hot-button issue of our day, immigration. Once again, from the Course of Human Events blog:

The British government had heavily subsidized immigration to North America. The colony of Georgia was even set up specifically so that Parliament could subsidize immigration of tens of thousands of people—including Scottish Highlanders, Italians, Germans, and the poor of England—to come to America. As Pincus explains, “All of that comes to a grinding halt in 1763, and throughout the 1760s and 1770s the British government tries desperately to stop immigration into North America.” The patriots argued that immigrants provided skills and were good consumers, which would drive the economy. Those against immigration argued that these individuals were polluting culture and providing competition that took jobs away from other people. “That strikes me as an interesting parallel to today’s debates”, says Pincus.

Here I have questions about what the American colonists perceived about immigration policy in the pre-Revolutionary period. Because they were actually seeing a growing influx of arrivals from Britain and northern Europe.

In Voyagers to the West (1986), Bernard Bailyn wrote:

…migration figures to mainland British North America before 1760—far greater than those to any other area of European colonization—pale next to the figures for the decade and a half that followed.

People flooded into North American between 1760 and 1775, first of all from the British Isles. Between the end of warfare and the disruption of the Empire in 1775, over 55,000 Protestant Irish emigrated to America; approximately 40,000 Scots, and over 30,000 Englishmen—a total of at least 125,000 from the British Isles alone. . . . But the British and Irish contributions together constituted only half the whole number of immigrants. In the same years at least 12,000 German-speaking immigrants entered the port of Philadelphia…

Other scholars have reached different conclusions about the numbers of immigrants, but they seem to agree on the upward trend. Carl L. Bankston III has written:

Northern Irish migration peaked between the 1750’s and the early 1770’s, with an estimated 14,200 people from northern Ireland reaching America from 1750 to 1759, 21,200 from 1760 to 1769, and 13,200 in the half-decade leading up to the American Revolution. Most of the Scots migration took place from 1760 to 1775, when about 25,000 new arrivals came to the colonies.

In “Migrations to the Thirteen British North American Colonies, 1700-1775” (Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Spring 1992), Aaron Fogleman estimated the number of Europeans coming into the thirteen North American colonies that broke away as:

• 1740s: 51,500.
• 1750s: 70,900.
• 1760s: 75,500.
• 1770s: 49,700 in the first five years, thus on pace for 99,400 for the whole decade until the war intervened.

Though these scholars’ estimates differ on the number of arrivals from Europe, they all agree that immigration to the North American colonies was up significantly during the 1760s and early 1770s. That’s the same period when Pincus says the imperial government’s support for such movement “comes to a grinding halt.”

So whatever the government in London was doing in those decades to “stop immigration into North America,” it wasn’t working. Maybe it kept the numbers down from where they would have been. But the colonists could see more people arrive from Europe every decade.

TOMORROW: Looking at the naturalization laws.

The Legend of Molly Pitcher—A New Source

Since I was on a Battle of Monmouth kick, I’ll jump to one of the most enduring American legends to come out of that fight: Molly Pitcher.

As Ray Raphael wrote in Founding Myths and this article for the Journal of the American Revolution, there’s solid evidence of a woman helping her husband in the Continental artillery at that battle. In his memoir, first published in 1830, army veteran Joseph Plumb Martin wrote:

A woman whose husband belonged to the artillery and who was then attached to a piece in the engagement, attended with her husband at the piece the whole time. While in the act of reaching a cartridge and having one of her feet as far before the other as she could step, a cannon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing any other damage than carrying away all the lower part of her petticoat. Looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed that it was lucky it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else, and continued her occupation.

There’s also contemporaneous documentation of the state of Pennsylvania awarding a pension to Margaret Corbin, who took her husband’s place at a cannon during the defense of Fort Washington in 1776.

But the specific legendary figure we’ve come to know as Molly Pitcher first showed up in the second volume of Freeman Hunt’s 1830 collection American Anecdotes:

Before the two armies, American and English, had begun the general action of Monmouth, two of the advanced batteries commenced a very severe fire against each other. As the warmth was excessive, the wife of a cannonier constantly ran to bring him water from a neighbouring spring. At the moment when she started from the spring, to pass to the post of her husband, she saw him fall, and hastened to assist him; but he was dead. At the same moment she heard an officer order the cannon to be removed from its place, complaining he could not fill his post by as brave a man as had been killed. ‘No,’ said the intrepid Molly, fixing her eyes upon the officer, ‘the cannon shall not be removed for the want of some one to serve it; since my brave husband is no more, I will use my utmost exertions to avenge his death.’ The activity and courage with which she performed the office of cannonier during the action, attracted the attention of all who witnessed it, finally of Gen. Washington himself, who afterwards gave her the rank of Lieutenant, and granted her half pay during life. She wore an epaulette, and every body called her Captain Molly.

Five years later the story was in print again, in two sources, one of which I don’t think has been discussed before. A Popular Cyclopedia of History, an oft-reprinted reference book compiled by Francis Durivage, stated:

In the beginning of this battle [of Monmouth], one Molly Pitcher was occupied in carrying water from a spring to a battery, where her husband employed in loading and firing a cannon. He was shot dead at last, and she saw him fall. An officer rode up, and ordered off the cannon. “It can be of no use, now,” said he. but Molly stepped up, offered her services, and took her husband’s place, to the astonishment of the army. She fought well, and half pay for life was given her by Congress. She wore an epaulette, and was called Captain Molly, ever after.

And here’s a source I don’t think anyone has spotted before, also from 1835: Allgemeine Beschreibung der Welt [General Description of the World] published in Philadelphia. This book was credited to E. L. Walz with editing by Heinrich Diezel of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. It was printed in old Gothic type, and I’ve never studied German. I’m therefore at the mercy of Google’s O.C.R. transcription and translation services, but this is what I think that book says:

In Monmouth County siel im Revolutionskriege eine Geschichte vor, welche noch immer häufig in N. I. erzählt wird: Die Amerikaner unter Washington, und die Engländer unter Henry Clinton, schlugen sich hier wasser herum. Es war an diesem Tage heiß und schwühl. Mitten in der Schlacht sah man eine Frau, Molly Pitcher, die einigen Artilleristen Wasser zutrug, unter denen auch ihr Mann sich befand. Von einer Kanonenkugel getroffen, stürzte er leblos nieder. Molly that nun, was 1000 andere Weiber nicht gethan haben würden. Statt zu weinen, stellte sie sich an die Stelle des Gefallenen und versah mit wahrem Heldenmuthe seine Dienste. Sie kam glücklich davon. Von dieser Zeit an behielt sie bis zu ihrem Tode den Namen: Major Molly.

[From Monmouth County in the revolutionary war fell a story which is still frequently told in N.J.​​: The Americans with Washington, and the English under Henry Clinton, this also reflected around water. It was hot and schwühl on this day. In the midst of the battle some artillerymen saw one woman, Molly Pitcher, that was happening water in which her ​​husband was. From a cannonball hit, he fell down lifeless. Molly now did what 1000 other women would not have done. Instead of crying, she stood in the place of the dead man and adorned with true heroism his services. She got off lucky. From that time on she kept until her death the name: Major Molly.]

It’s notable that the story penetrated the German-American community so early. That might lend credence to the interpretation that the real Molly Pitcher was Mary (Ludwig) Hays, the daughter of German immigrants to Philadelphia. On the other hand, Mary Hays settled in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, after the war, and lived until 1832, a local character who also received a state pension. So it’s a little surprising that this book’s source for the story seems to come from New Jersey rather than two counties away.

Clearly this anecdote grew in the telling. Mary Hays was supposedly called “Sergeant Molly” after the battle and later in life. In these early sources the corresponding detail became “the rank of Lieutenant” and “Captain Molly,” then “Major Molly.” There’s no documentation to support the claims that this woman received such a rank or a pension from “Gen. Washington himself” or the Congress. But clearly by the 1830s Americans of many sorts were telling the story of Molly Pitcher.

TOMORROW: But there already was a famous Molly Pitcher.

Avant nous le déluge

Last month the Creators Project at Vice featured Viennese photographer Andreas Franke’s Stavronikita Project, part of his series “The Sinking World.”

As I understand Franke’s method, he dives down to shipwrecks and photographs them. Then he creates digital images combining those backgrounds with scenes of people that he stages in his studio. He places large prints of the resulting images back down on the shipwrecks for several months, where people with scuba gear can view them as they take on a patina of sea life. Finally, those prints are brought to the surface for drier displays and sales.

The Stavronikita was a Greek shipping vessel presently about thirty miles off Key West and eighty feet down. For that site Franke created images of what the Creators Project calls “French Revolution-esque bourgeoise,” though to me the people look very much of the Second Estate. The tableau above, for instance, is titled “Picnic for Three.” With the figures seemingly submerged, and coral starting to encrust their frame, it’s quite a metaphor for the French Revolution.

American Revolution Conference in Williamsburg, 18-20 March

On the weekend of 18-20 March, America’s History, LLC, will host its 5th Annual Conference on the American Revolution in Williamsburg, Virginia. There’s a stellar lineup of speakers, plus me.

This conference will take place two months before the one in central New York that I described yesterday. I’m writing about it second only because I understand that it’s already sold out. So this is pretty much for the record.

Speakers and presentations include:

• Edward G. Lengel, “‘The Action was Warm in Every Quarter’: The Battle of Germantown”
• Nathaniel Philbrick, “‘Stand Secure Amidst a Falling World’: The Battle of Bunker Hill”
• Daniel Krebs, “The King’s German Auxiliaries during the American War of Independence”
• Kathleen Duval, “Spain’s Unsung Hero: Bernado Galvez and the Capture of Pensacola 1781”
• Peter Henriques, “America’s Atlas: The Leadership of George Washington”
• James Kirby Martin, “Through a Howling Wilderness: Benedict Arnold’s March to Quebec”
• Todd Braisted, “The Grand Forage of 1778: The Revolutionary War’s Forgotten Campaign”
• J. L. Bell, “The Road to Concord: How Four Small Cannons Set Off the American Revolution”
• Molly Fitzgerald Perry, “‘The Lowest of the Mob’: Exploring the Actions of Sailors and Slaves during the Stamp Act Crisis”

There will also be panel discussions with all the speakers and an update on Campaign 1776 from the Civil War Trust.

The entire conference will take place at the Colonial Williamsburg Woodlands Hotel. For comparison, the package, including lunches and refreshment breaks, costs $225. Featured sponsors are Westholme Publishing, Tim Sampson’s Battlemaps.us, and White Historic Art.

Aside from some speakers, I doubt there will be many people at this conference as well as the Fort Plain Museum’s. But I’ll have different presentations for each.

Jerusalem on Display in Germantown

In 1888 the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography published some extracts from the diary of Hannah Callender (1737-1801), a Quaker woman who evidently grew up in a comfortable mercantile family.

Here’s part of Callender’s entry for 2 June 1762:

1762, 6th mo., 2d day.— . . . In afternoon [with several others] set out for Germantown by the falls. Some mirth on the road by female fears. Passed Pemberton’s place and the new college. Arrived safe at Maconet’s. From thence to a neighboring house to see some models in architecture done by an illiterate shoemaker, intended when put together as a representation of Jerusalem. . . .

I shall mention the houses of most note. The Temple of Solomon about one yard high, three quarters long and half a yard deep. Noble entrances on both fronts and sides, all different orders with their proper embellishments. In the balcony of the first battlement are four Priests blowing trumpets. It has a fine steeple and is enclosed by three courts, having twelve gates adorned with cherubim and angels. twelve magnificent towers at the corners of the courts, the whole a yard and a half square.

Solomon’s house in the forest, built on a high green hill ascended by one hundred steps, is a noble looking pleasure house. It joins the first battlement of the temple by a balcony supported by large columns. King David’s Palace with its towers.

The magazine editors then inserted the note “Then follows brief mention of models of thirteen other buildings in Jerusalem.” Which isn’t helpful if you’re intrigued by how an illiterate shoemaker imagined ancient Jerusalem.

(A footnote in Stephanie Grauman Wolf’s Urban Village, a 1976 study of Germantown, suggests that there may be a link between this model and the probate inventory of Anthony Sultser or Sulzer, who died in that town in 1761. Anyone want to follow that lead?)

The 22 Mar 1764 Pennsylvania Gazette offered another description of this creation in an advertisement:

JERUSALEM,

A View of that famous City, after the Work of seven Years, which is newly repaired, in a better Manner than it has been before,
IS yet to be seen at Mr. Andrew Angel’s, at the late House of Mr. Butler, deceased, between Second and Third-street, next Door to the Green Tree Tavern, in Race-street, Philadelphia, from Six o’Clock in the Morning till Six in the Afternoon, and from Seven till Ten at Night, at Ninepence each Person coming by Day, and One Shilling at Night, and for others and Children accordingly.———

It represents Jerusalem, the Temple of Solomon, his Royal Throne, the noted Houses, Towers and Hills; likewise the Sufferings of our SAVIOUR from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Cross, on the Hill of Golgotha, an artful Piece of Statuary, in which every Thing is exhibited in the most natural Manner. It will be shewn no longer than the 16th Day of April, or a few Days after, according as Shipping suits to New-York.

I’m struck by the different prices for viewing the model in daylight and at night. Was the latter more valuable because it was more convenient for people or because the model was more impressive by firelight?

The last line reveals that the model was about to go on tour.

TOMORROW: Jerusalem on the road.

[The illustration above is a map of Jerusalem published in London in 1752 and featured in this online exhibit from the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine.)

Matthias Buchinger’s Micrography at the Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is featuring a small exhibit about a small eighteenth-century celebrity, Matthias Buchinger (1674-1739).

Buchinger was from the German margraviate of Brandenburg-Ansbach. He was only twenty-nine inches tall. He was born without hands or feet.

Despite those physical limitations, Buchinger became a skilled sleight-of-hand artist, musician, and visual artist. He traveled northern Europe displaying his talents, eventually settling in Ireland with his fourth wife.

The Met’s exhibit highlights one facet of Buchinger’s art: micrography, or writing very, very small. In 1764 Horace Walpole recalled that Buchinger “used to write the Lord’s Prayer in the compass of a silver penny.” Later, after he became afflicted with gout, Walpole would compare himself to Buchinger “writing with his stump!”

Shown here is a print of one of Buchinger’s self-portraits. If one looks very, very closely in the engraving at the pattern that defines his wig, one can see that it consists of the words of seven Biblical psalms and the Lord’s Prayer. (Don’t strain yourself here; the resolution isn’t good enough.)

The exhibit contains over a dozen Buchinger drawings from the collection of modern conjurer Ricky Jay, who has also written the new book Matthias Buchinger: “The Greatest German Living”. It will be on display until 11 April.

Here are articles about Buchinger and his micrography, with more illustrations, from The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times.

Peter Hasenclever and His Ironworks

Yesterday’s posting introduced Peter Hasenclever, manager of a big ironworks in New Jersey from 1764 to 1769. This extensive article at Immigrant Entrepreneurship tells a lot more about him.

Hasenclever was born in the German city of Remscheid in 1716 and as a young businessman worked in many parts of Europe. In 1763 he moved to London and began to promote a scheme to mine and refine iron in New Jersey. A year later he was in America to set up the manufactory.

A relative recruited miners and other specialized workers in Germany to come to America, their passages paid in exchange for years of work. In the 16 June 1766 New-York Mercury Hasenclever advertised for nine workers who had run away from his employment, asking for them to be “secur’d in any of his Majesty’s Goals.”

In his History of Printing in America, Isaiah Thomas wrote that newspaper hawker Lawrence Sweeny told New York officials that the anti-Stamp Act Constitutional Courant was printed “At Peter Hassenclever’s iron-works, please your honor.”

Hasenclever’s letters show he was opposed to the Stamp Act. Whether he had anything to do with that fake newspaper is uncertain. He might have provided printers James Parker and William Goddard with workspace, he might have provided financial support, or he might have been a convenient red herring.

Thomas also wrote:

Peter Hassenclever was a wealthy German, well known as the owner of extensive iron works in Newjersey. Afterward, other publications of a like kind frequently appeared with an imprint—“Printed at Peter Hassenclever’s iron-works.”

“Frequently” is an overstatement at best. Not one publication with that line has been identified.

The ironworks did not succeed as the investors hoped, and Hasenclever fell out with his partners in 1769. He slipped away to Charleston, then sailed back to Europe. Lawsuits over the American enterprise dragged on in British courts. In 1773, after publishing a pamphlet to promote his side of the story, Hasenclever moved to Silesia in Prussia.

Hasenclever promoted connections to America both before and after the War for Independence, but King Frederick II was uninterested. The businessman died in 1793. Six months later, the Chancery Court in London issued a final ruling for his side in the dispute over the ironworks.

“The dead siphoning life from their relatives”

On Thursday, 3 December, Clark University in Worcester will host a seminar with Brian Carroll on “The Introduction of Vampire Belief to New England.”

I’ve got your attention now, don’t I? Here’s the event description:

Between 1782 and 1820, New Englanders suspected severe outbreaks of tuberculosis were caused by the spirits of the dead siphoning life from their relatives. In order to stop the spread of the disease, they exhumed the corpses they thought responsible, burned their hearts, and made a medicine from the ashes.

Originally a European belief, the practice was brought to the region during the American Revolution by German military physicians serving in Hessian regiments. Many became itinerant doctors in the aftermath of the war and taught Americans to believe in the undead. But vampire belief in America was medicalized—turned from a folk belief into a cutting-edge medical procedure. The exhumations were conducted like autopsies and doctors used “science” to identify and destroy supposed vampires. American doctors quickly caught on and began using it as a cure for the deadly wasting disease.

This is separate from, though perhaps related to, the vampire fear in Jewett City, Connecticut, in 1854.

Carroll is Assistant Professor of History and American Indian Studies at Central Washington University. He flew to New England to be an American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, which co-sponsors this seminar series along with the history departments at Clark, Brown, and the University of Connecticut.

This seminar will start at 4:00 P.M. in the Rare Book Room of Goddard Library on the Clark campus. There will be refreshments provided before the paper. If you plan to attend, please email Paul Erickson by the end of the workday today so he’ll know what to expect.

Reviews of Revolutions without Borders

Earlier this month H-Net published Bryan Rindfleisch’s review of Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World by Janet L. Polasky, which looks at the multiple revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1700s.

Polasky’s scope includes not just the now-well-studied American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, but “the Genevan Revolution of 1782, the Dutch Patriot movement in 1787, the Belgian Revolution of 1787-89, the Wolfe Tone rebellion in Ireland (1798), and the Freetown Revolution of 1800.”

Rindfleisch says, “Polasky provides a grand synthesis of the many and disparate struggles and revolts against monarchical authority and aristocratic privilege that erupted during the late eighteenth century, all of which were interconnected and related to one another.” In this telling those connections are both literary and individual:

Out of this wave of revolutions emerged what Polasky calls “itinerant revolutionaries”—a large group of individuals, both men and women—who moved about on the Atlantic stage and gravitated toward the various upheavals of the late eighteenth century, thereby linking those revolutionary struggles together.

Take for example the case of Gerrit Paape, an earthenware painter of humble origins in Amsterdam, who—infected with the republican ideals of the American Revolution—reinvented himself as a poet, novelist, and revolutionary in the Dutch provinces in 1787. Although Prussian forces ultimately crushed this Dutch Patriot movement, Paape fled to the nearby Belgian provinces where he joined a second revolutionary movement that sought to undermine Austrian control of Belgian territories and peoples. And for a brief time in 1789, Paape and his fellow revolutionaries succeeded in emulating their American counterparts, creating the “United States of Belgium” and successfully repelling Austrian invasions.

But in 1790, the Belgian provinces were ultimately overrun by European empires and monarchies that desperately sought to stem the revolutionary tide. Yet again, Paape fled to another revolutionary scene, this time in France, where he fell in with like-minded radicals who created a French republic. Subsequently, in 1795, Paape returned home to the Dutch provinces, bringing up the rear of the French armies that liberated those territories from monarchical control, where Paape joined the “Batavian Revolution” that established a Dutch republic.

Telling such stories means likewise jumping among nations, languages, and archives. Polasky organized the first part of her book not chronologically but according to different forms of discourse, which have also become different historical sources: political pamphlets, revolutionaries’ narratives and memoirs, newspapers and the rumors they spread along with hard news, novels presenting modern ideas, and family correspondence.

Polasky even writes, “This book could be read as an extended essay on sources,” but Tom Cutterham said at the Junto blog:

Polasky’s book is delightfully unencumbered by visible theoretical apparatus or historiographical call-backs. Most of the time, it’s a series of linked stories that pull us, in vaguely chronological order, back and forth across the Atlantic and the Alps, with excursions south to Sierra Leone and east to Warsaw.

Rindfleisch notes that Polasky’s narrative doesn’t extend to Latin America in the early 1800s, as many studies of the “Atlantic Revolutions” do. But with transnational figures like Bolivar active there, it looks like someone could pick up the threads and go there.

In the end, Cutterham sees many stories of failure, as the most dedicated internationalists saw their romantic ideals overpowered by larger nation-states:

Ironically, the cause of most of these failures was their clash with successful revolutionary states, namely France. As much as American and French revolutionaries inspired imitators, they also soon came to fear them and attempt to control them—as Polasky points out, it was governments in these new states that brought the age of revolution to an end.

The ideals of worldwide republicanism fell before a new focus on nationalism—which brings us back to why so many scholars have studied these upheavals separately.