The Myth of Frederick II’s Fan Letter to George Washington

On 20 May 1780, the Providence Gazette ran a paragraph headed “Extract of a Letter from an Officer in the American Army, dated May 4, 1780.”

The article read:

On Thursday we were mustered and inspected by the Baron Stuben. We had likewise the Honor of his Excellency’s Presence. The Appearance of the Troops, their Arms, Accoutrements, &c. drew the Applause of that great Man, who does Honor to the Name of Soldier. The Dignity of his Manners, the Elevation of his Sentiments, and the Nobility of his Soul, speak him the first of Characters.

Did I ever mention to you an Anecdote which respects him? For Fear I never did, I’ll relate it:—His Majesty of Prussia wishing to bestow some Mark of his Esteem on so exalted a Character, sent him his Picture; underneath were these Words: “FROM THE OLDEST GENERAL IN EUROPE, TO THE GREATEST GENERAL IN THE WORLD.”

“His Excellency” who was, of course, Gen. George Washington. This laudatory item was reprinted in several other American newspapers that year. Whether or not the letter was genuine, it could be useful propaganda.

While relating the story of King Frederick II sending Gen. Washington a picture, this anonymous officer didn’t claim to have seen the picture itself. He was just retelling “an Anecdote” that was going around.

As I discussed yesterday, scholars studying the papers of Frederick the Great haven’t found any letter mentioning Washington by name, much less sending him a picture and fan letter. No such image or correspondence survives in Washington’s papers, and he was careful about saving such documents. So, of course, was the Prussian court.

In sum, this is just as much of a myth as Frederick the Great’s praise for Washington’s maneuvers around Princeton, yesterday’s example. This story arose during the war, rather than decades later, which makes it seem more reliable, but it lacks the confirmation we should expect.

The officer’s anecdote resurfaced decades later in the Eastern Argus of Portland, Maine, on 20 June 1825, in a review of a French pamphlet about Lafayette (shown above). That item stated that when Lafayette met Frederick II at “Pottsdam” in “the Autumn of 1782,” the Prussian monarch invited the French marquis to his palace and listened to his stories about Washington. In admiration, the king sent Washington an unidentified “token of remembrance” with the “greatest General” inscription. (This item in the Eastern Argus was said to be a letter to the editor of the Albany Argus, but I couldn’t find an issue of the New York newspaper carrying it.)

Lafayette did indeed visit Potsdam, but in 1785, as he reported to Washington in a letter dated 6 Feb 1786. The marquis stated:

I went to Make my Bow to the King, and notwisdanding what I Had Heard of Him, could not Help Being struck By that dress and Appearance of an old, Broken, dirty Corporal, coverd all over with Spanish snuff, with His Head almost leaning on one shoulder, and fingers quite distorted By the Gout. But what surprised me much more is the fire and some times the softeness of the most Beautifull Eyes I ever saw, which give as charming an expression to His phisiognomy as He Can take a Rough and threatening one at the Head of His troops

Obviously, Lafayette hadn’t met Frederick II before this moment. The two men had no long conversation about Washington. And Frederick definitely didn’t send a token to Washington to arrive by May 1780, as the Providence Gazette letter had claimed.

The story bobbed up again in 1839 when newspapers published an article called “The Character of Washington,” the recreation of a speech delivered at a Daniel Webster dinner party in early 1838 by Sen. Asher Robbins (1761-1845) of Rhode Island. Robbins included the anecdote about Frederick II sending a picture “from the oldest General in Europe, to the greatest General in the world.” He might have read that story as a Yale student in 1780 or later. From the newspapers, the speech and thus the story were published the next year in the Rev. Charles W. Upham’s Life of Washington and Ebenezer Smith Thomas’s Reminiscences. Again, there was still no such picture.

TOMORROW: Frederick the Great’s supposed encomium in a new form.

What Frederick the Great Thought of Washington

The Bicentennial dubbed the time between the Continental Army’s expedition against Trenton on 25 Dec 1776 and the Battle of Princeton on 3 Jan 1777 the “ten crucial days” of the New Jersey campaign. More recently, William L. Kidder wrote a book of that name.

One widely repeated statement about that period appeared in a footnote of Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, by His Adopted Son, George Washington Parke Custis in 1859. The “illustrative and explanatory notes” of that volume were written by Benson J. Lossing.

One of those notes concluded:

It is said Frederick the Great of Prussia declared, that the achievements of Washington and his little band of compatriots, between the twenty-fifth of December, 1776, and the fourth of January, 1777, a space of ten days, were the most brilliant of any in the annals of military achievements.

Lossing provided no source for this statement. Indeed, by prefacing it with the phrase “It is said…” he acknowledged that he didn’t have an identifiable source and was relying on hearsay at best. Lossing also didn’t use quotation marks, signaling that he wasn’t claiming to reproduce Frederick’s words, even in translation.

In the following decades Lossing wrote more books about the Revolution, including school textbooks, in which he repeated this statement with no “It is said” beginning. Other authors quoted the phrases about “Washington and his little band of compatriots” and “the most brilliant of any in the annals” from Lossing, using quote marks. That made it appear that those words came from a reliable translation of Frederick’s own words.

Authors continue to repeat that so-called quotation from Frederick in this century. The words appear in Ron Chernow’s biography of Washington and Michael E. Newton’s book on Alexander Hamilton’s rise. My curiosity about the words was piqued by a tweet from Mount Vernon last month. But all the citations lead back to Lossing’s footnote, with its lack of a direct quotation and highly fudged attribution. (I didn’t find any mention of Frederick the Great in Larry Kidder’s book, nor in David H. Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing.)

In 1874, the American historian and diplomat George Bancroft published the tenth volume of his History of the United States, covering some of the war years. In the preface he described studying many archives in Europe, and especially in Berlin, where he was posted. But he wrote: “I sought for some expression, on the part of Frederic, of a personal interest in Washington; but I found none.” Bancroft really wanted to find such evidence, and he came up empty.

In 1904 Paul Leland Haworth published an article in the American Historical Review titled “Frederick the Great and the American Revolution.” By then the Prussian king’s papers had been archived, transcribed, and published. That let Haworth demonstrate how Frederick’s interest in the distant war in North America arose entirely from his pleasure at seeing the British Empire diminished. In his conclusion Haworth echoed Bancroft’s statement: “there is nowhere in Frederick's correspondence any trace of a personal interest in Washington.“

Whatever we might think of the Continental Army’s maneuvers at the end of 1776 and the start of 1777, we can’t ascribe that opinion to Frederick the Great.

TOMORROW: The letter, the portrait, and the sword.

Hagist on Looting by the Hessians

At the first Battle of Trenton in December 1776, Gen. George Washington’s army surprised the king’s troops and took over 900 prisoners, as later detailed on this government document.

The three infantry regiments those men came from were designated by the names of their commanders, not by numbers in the British army. And those names were German, as the prisoners were.

According to Don Hagist’s new book, Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution, those “Hessians” were already gaining a poor reputation for looting, even among their own allies. Don writes:

…by late 1776, the army in America was no longer all British. Needing more professional, campaign-ready troops than could be spared from Britain or raised and trained rapidly, the British government augmented the army with regiments from German states. Collectively called Hessians even though regiments came not only from Hessen-Kassel and Hessen-Hanau but also Braunschweig-Lüneburg, Anspach-Bayreuth, Waldeck, and other states, these troops also had an appetite for plunder—and it was on them that many British officers laid the bulk of the blame.

Major Stephen Kemble, an American-born officer serving as deputy adjutant general, confided several complaints to his journal in 1776. “The Ravages committed by the Hessians, and all Ranks of the Army, on the poor Inhabitants of the Country, make their case deplorable; the Hessians destroy all the fruits of the Earth without regard to Loyalists or Rebels, the property of both being equally a prey to them, in which our Troops are too ready to follow their Example, and are but too much Licensed in it,” he wrote on October 3. A month later, he repeated the lament: “The Country all this time unmercifully Pillaged by our Troops, Hessians in particular, no wonder if the Country People refuse to join us.” . . .

The Germans, with no sense of attachment to America as their nation’s colony, behaved as European troops normally did in an enemy country, despite receiving the same orders and admonitions as their British allies.

Don Hagist’s book has a lot more to say about the men who made up the British army, and how they differed both from the Hessians and from common conceptions of them. For a taste, check out his recent online talk for the Old Barracks Museum in Trenton.

Digital Databases to Stay Home For

Here are four digital resources that caught my attention over the past few months.

The British Library has digitized George III’s Topographical Library and put the scans on Flickr, each linked back to its own catalogue for full information. There are 17,908 images in this album, many appearing to come from Germany. As I clicked through, I saw maps, landscape prints, pages from books, gravestone rubbings, printed maps, elevations of fortifications and other buildings, garden plans, bird’s-eye views of towns, architectural drawings, harbor charts, elevation of canals, hand-drawn maps, maps, and maps. Finding specific items may mean starting from the British Library catalogue and then running a search for a title on Flickr.

The American Philosophical Society transcribed three ledgers from Benjamin and Deborah Franklin’s Philadelphia print shop in Philadelphia in the 1730s and ’40s. Alongside images of those financial records, researchers can now find the data in spreadsheets totaling over 15,000 rows, ready to download and study. The transcribers also handled the task of linking people entered into the books with different spellings of their names. These transcriptions expand an earlier project on Franklin’s post office records. Learn more here.

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University and the Center for Digital Editing at the University of Virginia announced the publication of the Jefferson Weather & Climate Records. For nearly fifty years, starting when he was in the exotic city of Philadelphia at the Continental Congress, Jefferson recorded observations about the weather. These included temperature and general conditions, sometimes barometric pressure, moisture, wind direction and force, and precipitation. Occasionally he mentioned the appearance of particular birds or the first harvest of peas. Visitors to the website can view images of Jefferson’s meteorological manuscripts, drawn from the collections of five different repositories, alongside the transcriptions.

Finally, if you’re frustrated that the Leventhal Center’s handsome Atlascope site overlaying maps of Boston goes back only to 1868, check out Bill Warner’s Mapjunction. Its images go back to 1769, plus more recent renderings of the town as far back at 1630. Of course, some of those have to be stretched a bit as cartography has become more exact. Atlascope works like Superman’s X-ray vision while MapJunction has a nifty slider interface.

The Death of Prisoners after the Battle of Bennington

New England troops and Crown forces, including French-speaking Canadians and German-speaking Hessians and Brunswickers, fought the Battle of Bennington on 16 Aug 1777.

The much larger American force won handily, killing more than 200 of the enemy and capturing 700.

On the day after the fighting, the Americans marched many of those prisoners of war across what’s now a state line to the Bennington Meetinghouse and locked them in under guard.

After dark on 17 August, the sentries around the building heard a loud crash inside. It’s not clear what broke—perhaps a bench that prisoners were resting on. Some of the men inside the church appear to have feared that the packed galleries were going to collapse, so they tried to push their way out.

In an article about this event for the Johannes Schwalm Historical Association, Michael P. Gabriel argued that the galleries didn’t collapse because the meetinghouse remained in use for another quarter-century. But perhaps some benches or railings fell onto people.

Outside the church, the guards heard the crash. They saw men pushing out the doors and windows. They feared their prisoners were trying to escape. The language barriers multiplied the confusion.

American soldiers fired their guns into the church. Others used their bayonets to round up the men who had made it outside.

In his article, Gabriel highlighted the experience of Dr. Julius Friedrich Wasmus and Dr. Friedrich Sandhagen, surgeons captured with the Brunswick regiments. They were dining with a local doctor at a militia captain’s house. The crashing, shouting, and shooting caused the hosts to rush out.

After a few minutes alone, the two German doctors decided to return to the Catamount Tavern, where they had been assigned. But on their way they ran into a group of militiamen hurrying toward the disturbance with their weapons. At the head of this group was the Rev. Thomas Allen of Pittsfield, a gung-ho Patriot keyed up by the battle.

Deciding these two German men were trying to escape, Allen started hitting Sandhagen with the flat of his sword. The militiamen cocked their muskets. Wasmus was afraid he would be killed. “I have never seen a man so enraged as this noble pastor,” he wrote.

Suddenly Dr. Wasmus was grabbed from behind. An American major had come across the group and recognized the captives. He pulled them away from the zealous minister, explaining who they were, and shoved them toward the meetinghouse.

At that site, the German surgeons started treating the injured. Wasmus counted two dead and five wounded. Eventually the prisoners were able to explain to their captors why they had tried to leave the meetinghouse. The local doctor sent over the dinner that his guests had missed.

Gabriel reports that American memories of the incident varied. Some veterans described the night in their pension applications, still convinced they had helped spoil an attempted escape. (Indeed, five prisoners seem to have vanished in the night.) Or they blamed the prisoners for the “disturbance.”

At least one man, however, felt he had unjustly participated in killing prisoners of war. When John Collester of Blandford, Massachusetts, applied for a federal pension, he listed many short-term enlistments and didn’t mention the event in Bennington. But in an 1850 speech to the local literary association, William H. Gibbs reported what the veteran had told him:

The prisoners were quartered in a church for the night, and placed under the care of seven sergeants, upon whom Mr. Collester was requested to keep a vigilant eye, About the middle of the night a crash was heard, and the soldiers rushed to the windows, when the guards were commanded to fire upon them. Seven were killed and restored. But morning opened a new revelation. The galleries of the church being weakened by the multitude of their occupants, had fallen, and crushed some and frightened others. Our aged and venerable townsman, on learning this fact, regretted the part he had acted, although in the discharge of his duty.

Many of the wounded prisoners remained in the Massachusetts countryside under guard with Dr. Wasmus kept to care for them. He spent time in Brimfield, Westminster, and Rutland before finally getting exchanged in 1781.

The Life and Death of Christopher Seider

The younger boy hit by “Swan shot” from Ebenezer Richardson’s musket on 22 Feb 1770 was named Christopher Seider (although that last name also showed up as Snider and in other forms).

Christopher’s story starts with an effort to settle Maine. Around 1740, Massachusetts land speculators recruited German-speaking immigrants to live in the area around Broad Bay now called Waldoboro. At first this community was very small, but immigrant-laden ships arrived in Boston harbor beginning in November 1751.

The 25 Sept 1752 Boston Evening-Post reported:

a ship arrived from Holland with about 300 Germans, men, women and children, some of whom are going to settle at Germantown [in Braintree] and the others in the Eastern parts of the Province [i.e., Maine]. . . . a number of very likely Men and Women, Boys and Girls, from Twelve to twenty-five years old, will be disposed of for some Years according to their Ages and the different Sums they owe for their Passage.

In other words, some of the younger immigrants were to be indentured servants.

On that ship, the St. Andrew, came Heinrich Seiter, a farmer from Langensteinbach, and his family. Their home country was ruled by Charles Frederick, Margrave of Baden-Durlach. He was among the more enlightened of Europe’s noble despots, but Seiter was “very poor” and sought better opportunities. In that family, it appears, was a young man named Georg Frederich Seiter, born in 1727.

Around the same time, a woman named Christine Salome Hartwick, born about 1723, arrived with several of her relatives. That family’s name showed up in New England records as Hardwick, Hartig, and other forms.

Heinrich Seiter settled in the Waldoboro area. George Seiter may have lived with him for a while or gone directly to Braintree, where locals were trying to develop a little manufacturing center. Some of the new Germans were said to be glassmakers, and Joseph Palmer and Richard Cranch were building a glass factory.

We know that Georg Frederich Seiter married Christine Salome (soon Sarah) Hartwick on 20 Mar 1753 at Germantown. They had three children in Braintree:

• Christina Elizabeth, born 26 Dec 1754.
• Sophia, born 29 June 1756.
• Christopher, baptized 18 Mar 1759.

By then the family name was written as “Sider.” If Christopher was baptized a week or two after birth, like his sisters, then he was born in early March 1759.

In 1755, the glass factory was struck by lightning and burned. Palmer and Cranch tried to keep the venture going, but in 1760 they gave up and mortgaged the land to Thomas Flucker. Some of the German workers went to Maine, some to a new town soon called Ashburnham—and George and Sarah Seider moved their family to Boston, where their daughter Mary was baptized at King’s Chapel on 10 June 1761.

The Seiders lived in a little house at the bottom of Boston Common on Frog Lane, later gentrified to Boylston Street. On the other side of the street was the giant elm that in 1765 the Sons of Liberty dubbed “Liberty Tree.”

As the 1760s came to a close, Christopher was no longer living with his family, however. He was in the household of the very wealthy widow Grizzell Apthorp, working as a servant. Apthorp was a pillar of the King’s Chapel congregation, which was probably how she came to know the Seiders.

There’s evidence that Christopher also attended a school of some sort. In the 1840s a woman named “Mrs. Preston” told a writer that she had gone to school with him, probably a reading school when they were younger. The Boston News-Letter reported that Christopher “was going from School” on 22 Feb 1770.

It’s quite clear that Christopher Seider was a reader. The Boston Evening-Post reported that he carried “several heroic pieces” or broadsides “in his pocket, particularly Wolfe’s Summit of human glory.” A broadside titled Major-General James Wolfe, who reach’d the summit of human glory, September 13th, 1759 is now on display at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The 17" by 24" sheet describes the taking of Québec in 1759, illustrated with a large colored woodcut of the general.

On the morning of 22 February, Christopher was among the boys outside Ebenezer Richardson’s house. It’s not clear how much he participated in the young mob’s attack on that house. Prosecutor Robert Treat Paine took notes that a witness named Jonathan Kenny said, “Syder threw nothing stood looking,” and “I was by Syder 5. minutes. Saw him throw nothing.” But Charles Atkins testified, “Syder was stooping to take up a Stone as I thought.”

Christopher must have been toward the front of the crowd when Richardson pulled his trigger because his torso was hit by eleven lead pellets. In addition, said the Boston Evening-Post, “The right hand of the boy was cruelly torn, whence it seems to have been across his breast.” Christopher fell and was carried into a nearby house.

The Evening-Post reported, “all the surgeons, within call, were assembled and speedily determined the wounds mortal.” Among the doctors we know examined the boy were the radical Dr. Thomas Young, the apothecary Dr. John Loring, and Dr. Joseph Warren, who afterward conducted an autopsy.

In addition, there were “clergyman who prayed with” Christopher. The newspaper praised “the firmness of mind he showed when he first saw his parents, and while he underwent the great distress of bodily pain, and with which he met the king of terrors.”

Christopher Seider died “about nine o’clock that evening.” Some reckonings say he was the first person killed in the American Revolution. He was probably just a few days short of his eleventh birthday.

TOMORROW: The older boy.

Looking at Submarines in the 1740s

This is a diagram of a submarine. It appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1747, illustrating an article titled “Description of a diving ship, built by order of his most serene highness Charles Landgrave of Hesse Cassel.”

The prince reportedly wanted a replica of “the famous diving ship, constructed by [Cornelis] Drebel” in 1620 and demonstrated in the Thames that decade—or at least a ship that did the same thing.

In the 1747 vessel, a man was supposed to fit into the horizontal cylinder marked E with more men in the larger cylinder working a pump. So this submarine was of considerable size. The article described its purpose as “to destroy the enemy’s ships” rather than, say, salvaging wrecks.

That magazine item concluded with this statement:

As to the difficulty of breathing in such a ship, Drebel mentions that he had provided a certain quintessence of air, one drop of which emitted would render the vitiated air again fit for respiration, but Dr [Denis] Papin imagines this is rather a thing to be wish’d than a reality.

Two years later the Gentleman’s Magazine published another picture of another submarine.

Although the accompanying article signed “T.M.” credited the picture and description to “M. Marriott,” it had actually been designed by Giovanni Alfonso Borelli in 1678. This cutaway view focused on the leather bellows that Borelli imagined being used to take in and expel water for ballast.

The second article prompted letters from Samuel Ley and John Lethbridge discussing submarines they had seen, read about, or developed themselves. There was some squabbling over credit.

Historians of the submarine presume that David Bushnell studied these pictures in the Gentleman’s Magazine as he developed his idea for a submarine as a Yale College student in the early 1770s, though he never mentioned such influence.

The magazine articles show how in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many European scientists were working on diving vessels, and people saw their military potential. At the same time, these diagrams show how inventive Bushnell was. His small Turtle didn’t look like either of these plans. It had some similarities to the one-person diving machine that Lethbridge described making, but even more significant differences. And Bushnell’s submarine actually worked.

A Voice against “the sanguinary vampyres”

As I wrote yesterday, on 1 Apr 1765 the Boston Evening-Post ran a front-page article about vampires cribbed from an account of traveling in Germany published twenty years before. The Fleet brothers could have picked up that item from the Connecticut Courant.

That article prompted a stern response, as long as the original article, in the form of a letter “To the Publishers of the Boston Evening-Post.” So far as I know, this is the only writing about vampires to come out of colonial New England, or all of colonial America.

The letter started with the motto “Si populus vult decepi decipiatur” (If people are willing to be deceived, let them be deceived). After discussing the news business and how page-filling “speculation” can produce “useful knowledge” or “benevolent sentiments,” the letter gets to the point in paragraph 4:

…what an injudicious choice of speculation is that publish’d in the Boston Evening-Post of the 1st instant? Can any person capable of exercising his reason, once imagine, that the surprising account of those spectres called Vampyres, has any possible tendency to promote the forementioned very worthy purposes? nay, is it not rather plainly calculated, to frighten old women and children, to amuse the ignorant and superstitious, and the promote deism and infidelity in the world? Most certainly, neither the publishers themselves, nor any sober man and good christian, can believe there is one word of truth, in all that long, surprising, and terrific account exhibited in the aforesaid paper.

Besides, how ridiculous as well as impious must it be, to suppose that the Supreme Being would commit the keys of death to infernal spirits and demons, and suffer them to drag dead bodies of men from their graves, and make them instruments to destroy the living?

For my own part, I can as soon give credence to the most fabulous stories of witches and spectres, of demons and goblins stalking by moon-light; or believe the whole phenomena of the Salem witchcraft; the incubusses, the succubusses, the preternatural teats; with all the trumpery and wonders of the invisible world: Or the scene of witchcraft open’d at Woodstock, a few years ago, when 132 stones of different sizes, were said to be thrown into a room (close shut up) by the agency of infernal spirits;——I say, I can as soon give credit to all this, as to the surprising account of the sanguinary vampyres.

Of course all the Boston newspaper’s readers knew about the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692-93, which had become a notorious embarrassment for the New England Puritan leadership.

The “Woodstock” scene probably meant a legend from Woodstock, England, in 1649. In 1747 the British Magazine published a “Genuine History of the Good Devil of Woodstock,” which purported to debunk the myth. (H. A. Evans revealed that article itself to be a fraud in Notes and Queries in 1903.) Thus, for a well-read Bostonian in 1765, both the Woodstock and Salem stories were delusions and frauds, not real supernatural mysteries.

The letter thus declared the supernatural stories from central Europe about vampires were ridiculous on their face and conflicted with the supernatural system most people in Boston already shared.

But the writer didn’t leave it there. He (or she) dug into the original article’s scriptural references:

The remarks upon these incredible stories, may not be concluded without observing, that they are wickedly and profanely pretended to be supported and confirmed by sundry texts of sacred scripture: which, the the reader will be at pains to examine, he will find no more to the purpose, than the story of the witch of Endor, or that of Balaam’s Ass;—or in the account of the tour which the devil made on the unenlightened part of the globe. . . .

If the first broachers of the story under consideration, instead of prostituting those texts of cannonical scripture, to support their fiction, they refer’d their readers to a story in the apocrypha, it had been nearer the point, and something more to their purpose. The story may be read by the curious, in the 6th 7th and 8th chapters of the book of Tobit.

In those chapters an angel tells Tobias, “Touching the heart and the liver [of a fish], if a devil or an evil spirit trouble any, we must make a smoke thereof before the man or the woman, and the party shall be no more vexed.“ By doing so, Tobias survives a night with a young woman who had been promised to “seven men,” but they “all died in the marriage chamber.” That story wasn’t precisely like the vampire myth but had unmistakable similarities.

So what was the point of that final paragraph? One interpretation might be that vampire stories were as false as scripture that good Protestants had rejected, but the letter writer didn’t drive home that point. Another is that those vampire stories actually had some support in ancient religious literature, but that went against the message of the rest of the essay. I suspect that the letter writer just couldn’t resist showing off his (or her) scholarly knowledge of the Bible.

COMING UP: After the war.

Vampire Reports in Colonial American Newspapers

The March 1732 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine in London carried this news in its Foreign Advices section: “From Medreyga in Hungary, That certain dead Bodies called Vampyres, had kill’d several Persons by sucking out all their Blood.”

The ensuing paragraph described a man named Arnold Paul who had felt himself tormented by vampires, then after his death was deemed to have become a vampire himself.

Having found the man’s body too well preserved in the grave, his neighbors, “according to Custom, drove a Stake thro’ his Heart; at which he gave a horrid Groan. They burnt his Body to Ashes, and threw them into his Grave.” And to be safe, the people “served several other dead Bodies in the same manner.”

That article was widely reprinted and discussed in Europe. I’ve found only two American periodicals that picked it up, however: the Weekly Rehearsal of Boston on 5 June 1732 and the American Weekly Mercury in Philadelphia on 15 June 1732. Both stories ran on page 2, and no follow-up discussions appeared on this side of the Atlantic.

In October 1736 the French magazine Mercure Historique et Politique published a vampire report from Moldavia in eastern Europe. That news was translated into English within months, but it took another year before the New-England Weekly Journal of 14 Mar 1738 reprinted the tale. That two-page periodical promised “the Most Remarkable Occurrences Foreign and Domestick,” and its printers ran this story at the top of page 1.

In this incident, after several deaths a village came to suspect a vampire was lurking nearby. Imperial authorities exhumed several bodies and found one unusually well preserved. They “drove a Stake through his Heart, which done, a great Fire was kindled, and the Carcase reduced to Ashes.” Again, there was no follow-up in the Boston press.

On 21 Jan 1765, the Connecticut Courant of Hartford published a front-page article headed “The surprizing Account of those Spectres called VAMPYRES.” That newspaper stated:

These Vampyres are supposed to be the bodies of deceased persons animated by evil spirits, which come out of their graves in the night-time, suck the blood of many of the living, and thereby destroy them. Such a notion will probably, be look’d upon as fabulous: but it is related and maintained by authors of great authority.

The item then quoted “M. J. Henr Zopfius” as saying that a stake through the heart and a bonfire could solve the problem. The article noted a number of examples from 1693 through 1738 before closing with citations of Biblical verses.

That whole passage came right from The Travels of three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh, being the grand Tour of Germany, in the Year 1734. It was inspired by a conversation those three travelers had in Laubach, Hesse, followed by some library research. This anonymous text was first published in the fourth volume of The Harleian Miscellany, a collection of manuscripts, pamphlets, and tracts from the Earl of Oxford’s library edited by Dr. Samuel Johnson and published in 1745.

In other words, this report wasn’t timely, useful information. Printer Thomas Green used a sensational old story to attract eyeballs. The next item in that issue of the Courant was “A comical MIRACLE” about a dug-up skull that fooled some French Catholics.

I’ve found only one American newspaper picking up the “surprizing Account” from the Connecticut Courant (or a common source). That was the 1 Apr 1765 Boston Evening-Post, and that date might be significant. Again, the Fleet brothers chose to run the as the first item in the issue. But this publication attracted a quick pushback.

TOMORROW: Wonders of the invisible world indeed.

New England Vampires at S.H.E.A.R.

One of last year’s highlights was the annual conference of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, conveniently in Cambridge.

At that meeting the panel I enjoyed the most was one I didn’t highlight back here because its Revolutionary roots weren’t then apparent to me: “Staking Your Life on It: Vampirism, Healing, and Consumption in the Early National Era.”

That session, organized by panelist Mary Fuhrer and moderator Joanne Pope Melish, offered the advantage of looking at a well defined topic from four different angles.

Fuhrer, who studies the dynamics of New England communities, spoke on “Consumption’s Vampire Grasp.” In the early republic tuberculosis caused 20-33% of adult deaths in New England, sweeping through families and frightening towns because of the region’s dense settlements. That made people desperate for a remedy, however far-fetched.

The next panelist was Brian D. Carroll, who emphasizes the transnational approach to history. His thesis, which I highlighted in 2015 tracks a belief in the “chewing dead”—corpses that chewed their burial shrouds and might also sap life from living relatives—from folk belief to Enlightenment medical writing, then from Hessian military physicians to prisoner-of-war settlements in Connecticut.

Nick Bellantoni, Connecticut state archeologist emeritus, then described the first archeological evidence for the New England practice, as opposed to the scores of documentary descriptions (usually critical). His study of a skeleton exhumed and rearranged a few years after death in Griswold, Connecticut, made the news shortly after the conference when D.N.A. evidence confirmed a guess about the man’s identity.

Finally, folklore scholar Michael Bell commented on the three papers. In Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires, Bell was the first to pull together the evidence of the exhumation practice in New England. By now he’s counted 72 documented exhumations, 53 of which involve burning the corpse and 19 eating or breathing some remnant of it.

One major theme of the discussion is that looking back on the cultural phenomenon through the lens of “vampires” and the twentieth-century understanding of that myth might distort what we’re seeing. Although that term was known in America before the Revolution, people didn’t apply it to this worry about consumptive corpses until after the practice of emergency exhumation was nearly over.

A point of discussion and, it appeared, disagreement was how much of the exhumation practice in New England derived from Enlightenment medicine (top down) and how much from folklore (bottom up). I’ll share evidence from both sides this weekend.

TOMORROW: Sources from the 1700s.

Farinelli on “The Palatine Wreck,” 3 May

On Friday, 3 May, the New England Historic and Genealogical Society will host a noontime lecture by Jill Farinelli on the topic “The Palatine Wreck: The Legend of the New England Ghost Ship.”

The event description says:

Two days after Christmas in 1738, a British merchant ship traveling from the Netherlands to Pennsylvania grounded in a blizzard on the northern tip of Block Island, 12 miles off the Rhode Island coast.

The ship carried emigrants from the Palatinate and neighboring territories in what is now southwest Germany. The 105 passengers on board—sick, frozen, and starving—were all that remained of 340 men, women, and children, who left their homeland the previous spring to move to America. They now found themselves castaways, on the verge of death, and at the mercy of a community of strangers whose language they did not speak.

From this incident sprang one of New England’s most chilling maritime mysteries. Shortly after the wreck, stories began circulating that the passengers had been mistreated by the ship’s crew and by some of the islanders. The stories persisted, transforming over time as stories do, and in less than a hundred years, two terrifying versions of the event were in circulation.

Farinelli is a local writer and editor. The Palatine Wreck, published by the University Press of New England, was her first work of historical nonfiction.

This talk will begin at noon on Friday at 99-101 Newbury Street in Boston. It is free and open to the public.

Richard Fry’s Greatest Scheme

Before going on with The Saga of the Brazen Head, I’ll zip through what happened with Richard Fry.

Under his contract for the paper mill with Samuel Waldo and Thomas Westbrook, Fry had to pay £64 a year. But making paper on the Maine frontier didn’t bring in huge profits, and the whole province was in a cash crunch. Fry managed to send his landlords fifty reams of paper in place of specie, but that wasn’t £64 in cash, was it?

Waldo and Westbrook sued Fry and won a judgment of £70. They had the sheriffs in Maine seize the paper-making equipment. And they had Fry clapped into the Boston jail as a debtor around the start of 1737. In response, Fry claimed that Waldo and Westbrook had taken that action only after they had tried to buy him out and he refused.

Waldo recruited another man to continue the paper manufactory as an employee. Then he turned on Westbrook, forcing him out of the partnership. Calling himself “hereditary lord of Broad Bay,” Waldo recruited more settlers in Europe.

Among the people who came to America at Waldo’s invitation were the German ancestors of Christopher Seider. However, whenever Britain went to war with France, which happened in 1744 and again in 1757, the Maine frontier became a risky place to live and the settlements emptied out. Waldo died in 1759. Some of his holdings descended to his daughter Hannah and then to her daughter Lucy, wife of Henry Knox.

Meanwhile, back in the Boston jail, Richard Fry produced a steady stream of petitions complaining about his Maine landlords, the sheriff and undersheriff who’d taken his stuff, and the jailer who’d locked him up.

On 22 May 1739 Fry placed yet another advertisement in the New-England Weekly Journal:

This is to inform the Publick, that there is now in the Press, and will be laid before the Great and General Court, a Paper Scheme, drawn for the Good and Benefit of every individual Member of the whole Province; and what will much please his Royal Majesty; for the Glory of our King is in the Happiness of his Subjects: And every Merchant in Great Britain that trades to New-England, will find their Account by it; and there is no Man that has the least Shadow or Foundation of Common Reason, but must allow the said Scheme to be reasonable and just:

I have laid all my Schemes to be proved by the Mathematicks, and all Mankind well knows, Figures will not lye; and notwithstanding the dismal Idea of the Year Forty One, I don’t doubt the least seeing of it a Year of Jubile, and in a few Years to have the Ballance of Trade in Favor of this Province from all Parts of the Trading World; for it’s plain to a Demonstration, by the just Schemes of Peter the Great, the late Czar of Muscovy, in the Run of a few Years, arrived to such a vast Pitch of Glory, whose Empire now makes as grand an Appearance as any Empire on the Earth, which Empire for Improvement, is no ways to be compared with this Royal Majesty’s Dominions in America.

I humbly beg Leave to subscribe myself,
A true and hearty Lover of New-England,
Richard Fry.

Boston Goal, May 1739.

What was he on about now? Fry was issuing A Scheme for a Paper Currency to solve the specie crisis and promote the local economy. Backing up the new printed money, he wrote, would be the output of “Twenty Mills” built around Boston harbor. When Fry had first announced his scheme the previous August, even calling a meeting of investors at the Green Dragon Tavern, he had only seventeen mills in mind.

One might question the value of economic advice from a man who had gone bankrupt in England and was in jail for debt. But those circumstances didn’t daunt Fry. We can read his proposal, plus a couple of the petitions he wrote in the same years, in this book. Other documents from him are in the Clements Library.

Fry’s scheme wasn’t the only attempt to address the province’s specie shortage. In 1740, Boston businessmen set up the Massachusetts Land Bank, which issued private paper currency based on land holdings. The royal government and its supporters, led by Thomas Hutchinson, worked to stifle that enterprise, and in 1741 Parliament outlawed it. Some historians have traced the enmity between Hutchinson and Samuel Adams, whose father was a Land Bank investor, to that controversy.

Fry of course saw nothing wrong with paper currency (and one suspects he hoped to win the contract to supply the paper). But he no doubt preferred his own approach to issuing it. And as long as the provincial authorities opposed the Land Bank, he was ready to take advantage of that. In December 1740 Fry pointed out to Gov. Jonathan Belcher and his Council that his jailer was dealing in Land Bank currency. (A sample shown above.)

Richard Fry died in 1745, his finances still a mess. He left a wife and at least one child.

An International Mystery at the Fraunces Tavern Museum

A recent email newsletter from the Fraunces Tavern Museum raised interesting questions about one of its prize artifacts, the painting shown here.

The article said:

Since November 17, 1913 the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York have been proud to refer to the man in the portrait…as Samuel Fraunces, a New York City tavern keeper, an entrepreneur, an American Revolution spy, and a professional relation of George Washington. But this article is not about the man but the continued research being conducted on the painting and its sitter.

This 18th century Museum object was purchased by the Society for thirty-five dollars at auction from Merwin Sales Company in 1913. The auction catalogue lists this painting along with other items for sale, “Artist Unknown / Colonial Period / Portrait of Samuel Fraunces. / Canvas. Height 29in.: width, 23in.” Since 1913 the portrait has hung proudly in the Museum’s galleries and always interpreted as the image of Samuel Fraunces.

This portrait comes up in discussions of Fraunces’s nickname, “Black Sam.” In the early and mid-twentieth century, many African-Americans interpreted that name to mean the tavern keeper was of African descent. That would have been remarkable, given Fraunces’s social standing in slaveholding New York, but none of his contemporaries wrote anything else to support the idea. And of course the portrait shows a pale man.

But now there’s reason to question whether that portrait shows Fraunces at all. As the museum explains in this article, in December 2017 a German historian named Arthur Kuhle contacted the museum about a painting of an unknown nobleman at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden. That man’s face and wig look very much like the picture of Samuel Fraunces, and the clothing is similar.

Kuhle hypothesizes that the Dresden portrait came from the court of Frederick the Great and shows one of that king’s six most intimate friends in the 1740s. Evidently Frederick had portraits of all six of those men painted, and only four survive. Judging by other images of the two missing men, I think the most likely candidate from that group is Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf (1708-1758). He was allegedly a royal lover who rose from a soldier guarding the prince to a powerful court administrator before he married a woman, fell from favor, and died.

But of course the Dresden portrait may show someone entirely different, not even from Prussia. And the Fraunces Tavern portrait likewise. Even the resemblance could be a coincidence or the sign of an artist with a limited range. There’s much more research to do.

The idea that Samuel Fraunces was African-American is still unlikely. His nickname might have reflected his Caribbean background in some way, or perhaps his coloring was just darker than the man in this painting—whoever he was.

The Last Years of Baron de Steuben

When we left the retired general Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, usually then known as Baron de Steuben, his first postwar housemates had left him as well.

Those were three of his former military aides: Benjamin Walker, James Fairlie, and William North. In the mid-1780s they all got married and set up their own households. That left the baron at loose ends in New York, living beyond his means.

Steuben enjoyed the company of young men—but not all young men. Sometime during the 1780s two nephews visited Steuben from Prussia. The baron quickly came to dislike them, especially because they expected him to provide their fare and living expenses (after all, he had written letters boasting of his success in America). They went home.

In the late 1780s the baron showered gifts on his butler, who North thought was a “worthless rascal” being dressed up as a “beau.” For a while in 1791 Steuben lived at Walker’s house.

In the spring of 1792, however, the baron set up a household at 32 Broadway and collected a new pair of companions. The first was John W. Mulligan (1774-1862), son of New York tailor and wartime spy Hercules Mulligan. A recent Columbia graduate, Mulligan started to study the law in the office of Alexander Hamilton but then took the job of Baron de Steuben’s secretary.

The next arrival was Charles Adams (1770-1800), son of John and Abigail Adams, another aspiring attorney. In April 1792, Adams told his mother about Steuben: “He is the best man in the world I sincerely beleive.” In a letter dated 8 Oct 1792, Charles Adams described how the baron had invited him to move in:

The Baron returned from Steuben [his town in upstate New York] last week and I had intended to procure lodgings at some private boarding house, but when I mentioned to him my intention, he took me kindly by the hand “My dear Adams said he When your sister went from New York I invited you to come to my house, at least till you could find more convenient and pleasant Lodgings; I then had not the pleasure of a long acquaintance with you, but I was pleased that in our little society we could be of mutual advantage to each other, and that our improvements in the French language and in other branches of literature would render my table the seat of improvement and pleasure.

[“]I have since you have been here formed a very great and sincere friendship for you. You must now allow me the right of friendship; Indeed you must not leave me. What is it? Is there any thing you do not like? Is any thing inconvenient? I wish I could give you a better apartment, but the house will not aford it.[”]

I told him there was not a desire I could form but what was accomplished in his house; but that I did not think it proper that I should any longer take advantage of a kindness I had not a right to expect.

[“]And will you not then allow me to be any longer your friend and patron? You must not make such objections. It is not from any favor I can ever expect from your father. I am not rich, nor am I poor: and thank God I have enough to live well and comfortably upon; your being here does not make any difference in my expences. I love you, and will never consent that our little society should be broken, untill you give me more sufficient reasons for it.[”]

To this affectionate and fatherly address, I could only reply that I would do any thing he wished and would not leave him if he was opposed to my doing so. My dear Mamma there is something in this man that is more than mortal.

On 31 Jan 1793 Adams wrote to his father:

The Baron returned [from Philadelphia] on teusday his visit has been of service to him He said to me upon sitting down to supper that evening “I thank God my dear Charles that I am not a Great man and that I am once more permitted to set down at my little round table with Mulligan and yourself enjoy more real satisfaction than the pomp of this world can afford.” 

However, that situation was financially unsustainable. Steuben decided to move to his country estate, where life was cheaper. He headed out there in May 1793 and again in the spring of 1794. Vice President Adams understood the baron intended “there to reside for the Remainder of his Days.” Mulligan moved with him, still in the role of secretary.

On 12 Feb 1794, before leaving the city, Baron de Steuben made his third and final will (P.D.F. download). He had decided to “exclude my relations in Europe”—those nephews. Instead, he would “adopt my Friends and former Aid Des Camps Benjamin Walker and William North as my Children and make them sole devisees of all my Estates therein.” So they shared a financial inheritance which they probably would have had to sort out anyway.

Steuben left swords and other specific bequests to North and Walker. He left Mulligan “the whole of my library Maps and Charts and the sum of Two Thousand five hundred Dollars to complete it.” He assigned a year’s wages and clothes to his servants. Charles Adams, who was staying in the city to study for the bar, was a witness to the will. Another was Charles Williamson (1758-1808), a former British army officer who emigrated to America to promote land investments and the interests of the British Empire.

On 22 September, Charles Adams wrote to his mother:

On the fourteenth of October I shall set out for Albany The earnest solicitations of the Baron have drawn a promise from me to spend a few days with him at his solitude after I have passed my Counsellors examination. I have always lamented that you have so little acquaintance with this excellent man I never have know a more noble character and his affection for me calls forth every sentiment of gratitude which can exist in my breast.

In November Adams’s father happily reported that Charles was “at Steuben after an Examination at Albany and an honourable Admission to the Rank of Counciller at Law.” But out on the baron’s estate, things were going poorly.

Early in the morning of 26 November, the general suffered a stroke. A biographer who relied on Mulligan’s memories wrote that a servant came to fetch him from another building:

Mulligan at once ran through the snow to his room, and found him in agony. Steuben appeared to have suffered much, and could only articulate a few words, “Do n’t be alarmed, my son,” which were his last.

This account didn’t mention Charles Adams, but he must have been in the area because he wrote to his father (in a letter that no longer exists) that Steuben had suffered a “Palsy.” William North hurried over from his home in Duanesburg, and a doctor arrived.

But Steuben never regained consciousness. He died on 28 Nov 1794. Mulligan and North picked out his burial place “an eighth of a mile north of the house, on a hill in the midst of a wood.” Ten years later the baron’s remains were moved to the present gravesite.

Charles Adams married in 1795 but died only five years later, having drunk himself to death. John W. Mulligan around the same time wed a woman from Kentucky; they had nine children. He lived until 1862, thus witnessing the end of the Revolutionary War and the start of the Civil War.

[The statuary shown above, labeled “Military Instruction,” consists of an ancient warrior displaying a sword perilously close to a nearly naked young man. It’s part of the monument to Steuben in Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C. The baron would have loved it.]

Steuben, Walker, and North (and Fairlie)

For the last few days I’ve been discussing statements about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s sexuality made in this comic published by The Nib. I think there’s good evidence for Steuben being gay, but there are also a lot of errors floating around. To whit:

“President George Washington rewarded his prize general with an estate in Valley Forge, the site of perhaps his greatest military victory.”

The source for that misstatement is probably this article by Mark Segal, or one of many like it making a similar error. That article shares a timeline of the baron’s war activity and then says, “Washington rewarded von Steuben with a house at Valley Forge…” That can easily be interpreted as a grant after the war by the first President. But there was no such gift.

Gen. Washington assigned the baron a house within the Valley Forge encampment in 1777-78. That wasn’t a lifelong grant of real estate. It wasn’t a reward for service since, after all, Steuben had just arrived. That house was just where the new general and his staff could live so snow wouldn’t fall on their heads.

Baron de Steuben did receive some grants of real estate after the war in recognition of his service to the new republic. The Continental Congress offered western lands to any officer meeting certain terms, but the baron also got special gifts. His holdings are a bit hard to suss out, not least because he overstated them in his wills. But it looks like his major properties were:

• rented houses in New York City where he lived in the 1780s.
• an estate that New Jersey confiscated from a Loyalist family and granted the baron in 1783 on the condition that he live there, not rent it out. He spent considerable time and money fixing it up, receiving full title in 1788—and a month later he sold it to pay off debts.
• a large amount of land granted by New York in Oneida County. In 1792 that area was even named the town of Steuben.

None of the general’s real estate was in Valley Forge.

Lastly, Valley Forge was the site of an army camp, not a battle and thus not a “military victory.”

“Steuben spent his finals [sic] years with two younger men he had served with in the war: Captain Benjamin Walker and Brigadier General William North. Who later became a US Senator.

“He adopted both as his ‘sons’, but speculation about their relationship remains.”

While this statement acknowledges ambiguity in the historical evidence, it simplifies and skews the facts of Baron de Steuben’s life and of the lives of Walker and North. Steuben did live with those men for a while after the war. He did write in his final will that he wished to “adopt [them] as my Children.” However, those two former aides left the baron’s household to get married in the 1780s, so he didn’t spend his “final years” with them. Here’s the more complex story.

At Valley Forge, Steuben picked up three aides de camp: Benjamin Walker (1753-1818), William North (1755-1836), and James Fairlie (c. 1757-1830). He became very close to them all. In the first will the baron wrote after coming to America, dated 28 May 1781 (P.D.F. download), he bequeathed £1,050 to each of those three men. (He also left half that sum to two Frenchmen who had accompanied him to America, Peter Stephen Duponceau and Capt. Louis de Pontière, and to Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the diplomatic fixer and playwright who helped him connect with American envoys in Paris.) But Steuben’s main heir was a nephew back in Germany, whom he wanted to renounce his baronial title, emigrate to America, and become a republican.

In Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships, William E. Benemann describes a web of shifting relationships among Gen. de Steuben and his military aides: North and Fairlie as a couple before North realizes he likes Walker more and they become intimate, and then Steuben becomes infatuated with both North and Walker, but Walker strings the general along for favors while North is truly affectionate, though more like a son to a father… All this in only two years of those men being in the same military family. And with, frankly, very little textual support for such a level of detail.

But the evidence is clear that Steuben, North, Walker, and Fairlie became very close. Though assignments took them in different directions in the last years of the war, afterward they reunited and lived in the baron’s house on the outskirts of New York City.

That last decade of Steuben’s life is particularly significant to the question of his sexuality because it’s the only period when he wasn’t serving in an army or in a court and thus could live as he chose—or as close to that as circumstances allowed. And what Gen. Steuben wanted to do was spend his time in the company of young men. He used his martial celebrity to sponsor militia units and military academies. For money, he borrowed a lot and sought rewards for his wartime service.

Steuben, then in his fifties, was happy in his bachelor lifestyle. His young friends, however, took more traditional paths in their society. First Walker married a Quaker girl named Molly and set up his own household. Around 1786 Steuben, North, and Fairlie all had their portraits painted by Ralph Earl while he was locked up in debtors’ prison, but later that year Fairlie married and moved to Albany. The next year, with the baron’s help, North married Mary Duane, daughter of the city mayor; they eventually had six children.

Walker, North, and Fairlie all lived for many decades as prominent members of New York’s political class—not leading politicians but lawyers, civil servants, and occasional officeholders. North would be elected to the New York legislature and appointed for a few months to the U.S. Senate. In the early 1800s Walker would serve one term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Walker and North remained close to Baron de Steuben once they married, but more like grown sons looking after a failing father—failing in the financial sense. They tried to cajole the baron into not spending so much and to cajole Congress or state governments into granting him more support. The letters that have been preserved don’t say much about physical intimacy, but there’s clearly fondness on all sides.

Meanwhile, Baron de Steuben found some new young friends.

TOMORROW: The baron’s last years.

[The photo above shows relief portraits of Walker and North on the monument to Steuben in Washington, D.C.]

“The abominable rumor which accused Steuben”

Here’s the continuing discussion about what we know and don’t know about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s sexuality, keyed to statements in a recent comic at The Nib.

“Rumors about Steuben’s ‘tastes’ were common knowledge, and reported in the American press.”

It would be good to see examples of such American newspaper reports. To my knowledge no one has found any. And that’s significant to how “openly” Baron de Steuben lived as a gay man and how much his American neighbors accepted him.

Now it’s conceivable that such articles are lurking in the big newspaper databases with asterisks and allusions making them hard to spot. But no one researching Steuben has cited such a report, and I’ve kept my eyes open for such a finding.

The most open discussion of Steuben’s sexuality in print in the eighteenth century was an article published in Germany in 1796, two years after the baron’s death. Christoph Daniel Ebeling (1741-1817) was a professor in Hamburg and a fan of the American republic. In his Amerikanisches Magazin he wrote an article (“Nachrichten von den Lebensumständen des Baron von Steuben”) which John Macauley Palmer translated as saying:

Just who it was who spread abroad the abominable rumor which accused Steuben of a crime the suspicion of which, at another more exalted court [i.e., Frederick the Great’s] at that time (as formerly among the Greeks), would hardly have aroused such attention, has not become publicly known.

I couldn’t find any American newspaper or magazine mentioning Ebeling’s article in the decades after it was published.

And of course Ebeling did his best to imply the “abominable rumor” was untrue, spread by Steuben’s clerical enemies and eventually rejected by right-thinking people. Which is not exactly the same thing as stating flatly that it was untrue.

“One story claimed that Von Steuben loved to host cocktail nights for his favorite cadets. No clothing allowed.”

The ultimate source for this statement is the memoir of Peter Stephen Duponceau, a young Frenchman who accompanied Baron de Steuben to America in 1777 (and actually paid for their passage). Duponceau served unsuccessfully as a staff officer during the war and more happily as a linguist in Pennsylvania after it. Late in life he wrote about Valley Forge:

Once, with the Baron’s permission, his aids invited a number of young officers to dine at our quarters, on condition that none should be admitted that had on a whole pair of breeches. This was of course understood as pars pro toto [the part for the whole]; but torn clothes were an indispensable requisite for admission, and in this the guests were very rare not to fail. The dinner took place; the guests clubbed their rations; and we feasted sumptuously on tough beef steaks and potatoes, with hickory nuts for our dessert. In lieu of wine, we had some kind of spirits, with which we made salamanders; that is to say, after filling our glasses,, we set the liquor on fire, and drank it up, flame and all. Such a set of ragged, and, at the same time, merry fellows, were never before brought together. The Baron loved to speak of that dinner, and of his sans-culottes, as he called us.

The point of this gathering was that those young Continental Army officers were wearing torn uniforms and eating “tough beef steaks” because their pay and supplies were so meager. It was a bonding experience. Notably, Duponceau recalled the idea coming from Steuben’s aides, not the general himself.

Now that gathering might have been titillating for some; certainly we’d interpret an anecdote about young women having to wear torn clothing to a party through the lens of sexuality. But as to the accuracy of the statement from the comic above, if people have to wear torn clothing to a party, then that party is not “No clothing allowed.” And since this happened “once,” it’s not evidence Steuben made a habit of hosting such events—however fondly he remembered that one occasion.

Also, an eighteenth-century midday dinner does not constitute “cocktail nights.”

TOMORROW: The baron in retirement.

A Letter of Recommendation for the Baron de Steuben

Yesterday I started to analyze evidence about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s sexuality. In sum, I think that evidence strongly suggests he was gay, but it’s not nearly as definite as popular articles have recently claimed.

I’m drawing from the draft of an essay I started years ago, somewhat abashed that I’m pulling it off my hard drive in response to a cartoon. Nevertheless, here’s the second installment of replies to claims in that cartoon.

“Franklin knew about Von Steuben’s past, but still decided to write a letter of recommendation to George Washington.”

There’s no evidence Benjamin Franklin knew about the allegations of child-molesting or homosexuality against Steuben in the principality of Hohenzollern-Hechingen. That statement rests on the assumptions that (a) that gossip reached Paris by September 1777, and (b) Franklin heard it. But actual evidence would be some document showing that Franklin knew more facts than he let on.

In fact, the evidence we have suggests Franklin knew less. Here’s the letter that he and his fellow envoy  Silas Deane sent to Gen. George Washington on 4 Sept 1777, recommending Steuben for a role in the Continental Army. The diplomats wrote:

The Gentleman who will have the Honour of waiting upon you with this Letter is the Baron de Steuben, lately a Lieutenant General in the King of Prussia’s Service, whom he attended in all his Campaigns, being his Aide Camp, Quartermaster General, &c. He goes to America with a true Zeal for our Cause, and a View of engaging in it and rendring it all the Service in his Power.

Steuben had never been “a Lieutenant General in the King of Prussia’s Service” or a “Quartermaster General.” He had indeed been an aide de camp to Frederick the Great for a while, but his highest Prussian army rank was captain. He’d been working in the civil government of a small German state since 1764.

I have to add that there’s nothing in Steuben’s European career to suggest he had “a true Zeal” for America or republican government, unlike some other Old World officers offering their services. He had personal reasons, both legal and financial, for sailing thousands of miles from home.

Where did Franklin and Deane get their information about Steuben? They dropped the names of two French high officials: “Mr Le Comte de Vergennes,” the foreign minister and spymaster, and “Mr Le Comte de St Germain,” the minister of war. St. Germain especially admired the Prussian military, and his attempts to reform the French army along those lines ran into such opposition that he resigned later that September.

But most of the American diplomats’ information probably came from Steuben himself. And he was a habitual liar. In John Macauley Palmer’s 1937 biography there’s an index entry for “Steuben…, his fictitous autobiography, 2-5, 53, 85-6, 103-108, 305, 407.” And those pages don’t even include all of his false claims to have become become a lieutenant general in Europe (e.g., 97, 138).

Palmer viewed Steuben as indispensable to American independence, and he didn’t want to believe that his hero lied as he offered his services to the young nation. In fact, when Palmer considered that possibility early in his research, he was ready to set aside the project. He wrote:

My first reaction upon discovering that my hero was a systematic, circumstantial and deliberate liar, was one both of disgust and disappointment. I was disposed to proceed no further with my book. Here was, indeed, a golden opportunity for a debunker or a muckraker, but that sensational role made no appeal to me. 

But eventually Palmer came up with a way to explain the discrepancy between the baron’s actual résumé and what Franklin and Deane wrote about him: Franklin came up with the lie. 

This approach depended on Franklin’s status in American culture and memory. We accept him as a trickster. From his teen-aged essays as “Silence Dogood” to his false supplement for a Boston newspaper printed at Passy and how we remember the oil in his cane, we enjoy stories of Franklin fooling people. We don’t tell such stories about Washington, Adams, or Hamilton, and Jefferson’s duplicity still gets people angry.

In the case of Steuben, Palmer decided that the baron didn’t make any false claims about his career to Franklin (who was supposedly too smart to fall for such lies, anyhow). Instead, Franklin was so smart that he made up those falsehoods himself. He recognized how useful Baron de Steuben would be near the top of the Continental Army. Therefore, he ensured that Gen. Washington and the Continental Congress would treat this newcomer as a man of invaluable experience who deserved top rank by harmlessly—even helpfully—inflating his Prussian credentials.

As for the hapless Silas Deane, Palmer blamed him for falsely claiming to have seen documents to confirm the baron’s credentials—a deception that, unlike Franklin’s, he couldn’t forgive. Palmer didn’t present the simpler possibility that Steuben had fooled Deane. The baron appears to have flashed papers and described their contents at his first meeting with the American envoys, but never handed them over; at the second meeting he said that, alas, he had left those documents behind.

Thus, Palmer rejected the evidence that Baron de Steuben was gay and argued that he was—if only at this crucial moment—honest about his past. Many later authors who accept that Steuben was gay have adopted Palmer’s conclusion that he was also honest. But if there’s one thing we can say for sure about the baron, it’s that he told a lot of lies about himself.

The simplest explanation for the glowing recommendation that Franklin and Deane sent to Gen. Washington is that they actually believed what Steuben had told them about his brilliant career. And the simplest explanation for why Franklin didn’t write anything about the baron being gay is not that he covered up that fact but that the baron didn’t tell him.

TOMORROW: Gen. Steuben in the Continental Army.