“Capt. Malcom of this Place, who was taken by a French Privateer”

In the late 1750s, Britain’s cold war with France once again boiled up into a hot war.

That presented dangers for merchant captains like John and Daniel Malcom, as well as opportunities.

In seeking British government assistance years later, John Malcom declared:

I have had thirteen Different Commissions in your Majesty’s Land Service in North America the two last French and Spanish warrs that is Past. I have Serv’d from a Ensign to a Colonel. I have been in all the Battles that was Fought in North America those two warrs that is Past except two and at every Place we Conquerd and Subdued our Enemys to your Majesty.

That’s quite a claim, and he didn’t provide any specifics. Were his “Commissions” in the militia, in a colonial army, as a privateer captain, or even as a contractor?

That vagueness makes it hard to figure out where John Malcom was when his surname appears in Boston newspapers. For example, the 6 Oct 1755 Boston Gazette had a supplement with news of two men missing from “Capt. Malcom’s Company” in Maj. Joseph Frye’s force after the Battle of Petitcodiac in what’s now New Brunswick. What that John Malcom, a relative, or someone with no connection?

The 23 Dec 1756 Boston News-Letter reported that a French schooner had captured a “large Sloop, belonging to Carr and Malcolm,” in Martha Brae Harbour on Jamaica. Was that ship partly owned by John Malcom? Or might that owner have been a merchant from distant Scotland?

Adding to the fog is how John’s younger brother Daniel was also a ship’s captain. The 30 May 1757 Boston Gazette reported this adventure for one of the brothers, but which one?

Thursday last came to Town Capt. Malcom of this Place, who was taken by a French Privateer and carried into Port au Prince, from whence he got to Jamaica, and informs, that just as he came away Advice was receiv’d there, that 18 Sail of French Men of War and Transports, and about 7000 Troops, was arriv’d at Port au Prince, very sickly.

I’m struck by how the Boston press referred to “Capt. Malcom of this Place” as if there were only one. Did that mean that John was serving in an army, so Daniel was the only one commanding a ship? Had one of the brothers moved out of Boston, as John would later do? Or was that just sloppy reporting?

On 4 May 1758 the Boston News-Letter reported:

The ———, Vavason, from New York, and the ———, Malcom, from Boston, for Madeira, are taken and carried into Louisbourg.

Not only was that news item short on details, but it came from London, so it was months old. But it couldn’t have been over a year old and refer to the same capture as the last article.

Fortunately, in the summer of 1758 the British Empire took Louisbourg from the French (again). After that, it’s easier to spot John Malcom.

TOMORROW: Back and forth.

Black Reviews White’s Revolutionary Things

H-Early-America has just shared Jennifer M. Black’s review of Ashli White’s new book, Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

White looks at “the material culture that shaped French, American, and Haitian political contests between 1770 and 1810,” covering “diverse objects such as military clothing, maps, ceramics, wax figures, and politically charged accessories.”

Black writes:

Part 1 examines everyday items that became politically charged due to who procured them, where, how, and why. . . .

Part 2 examines clothing and accessories to show how revolutionary individuals understood, demonstrated, and interpreted their own political alignments and those of others. . . .

Part 3 turns to visual culture, especially maps, prints, and wax figures, to understand how contemporaries shared news about the ongoing revolutions.

The review sums up:

In her focus on the objects’ production, distribution, use, and context, White departs from typical material culture histories of this period, which tend to focus on how certain objects conveyed status or represented cultural and intellectual themes for contemporaries. In this way, White provides a fresh and interesting discussion of these highly politicized objects. But the approach may be somewhat frustrating for material culture scholars accustomed to close readings of particular objects’ attributes and symbolism—there are few of these, and mostly toward the end of the book. . . .

Still, this book makes several important contributions to the extant literature. White’s transnational and comparative focus allows her to isolate racial difference as a factor that shaped individual experience and, for example, affected contemporaries’ reactions to revolutionary violence. . . . Moreover, White’s transnational focus allows her to trace objects that moved across the Atlantic and circulated among varied revolutionaries. Thus, the book is as much a history of material culture in the military as it is about politics and revolutions.

Some of the most knowledgable and diligent researchers into Revolutionary-era material culture I know are reenactors since they literally use the objects of the time or the closest replicas they can make or obtain. It sounds like this book might be useful for exploring the cultural context of those goods and how that changed with events.

The Prize Papers Project’s Peri

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

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

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

The project website explains:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book your trips to London now.

Mr. Shaw and Mr. Dumaresq

While Nathaniel Shaw, Jr., of New London, Connecticut, was speculating on the likelihood of war by buying gunpowder in the Caribbean in early 1775, as discussed here, he was still broadening his commercial network.

In particular, he made a new contact in Boston, a merchant of Huguenot descent named Philip Dumaresq (1737-1801). On 15 Mar 1775, Shaw wrote to Dumaresq:

A few days agoe our Mutual Friend Thomas Mumford shew me a Letter from you recomending to send a Vessell to Cohassett Rather then Salem with West India Goods for the Boston Markett.

I have by the bearer James Angell in the Schooner Thames Shipt a Cargo of Brown Sugars Consisting of Sixty seven hogsheads and two teirces, which Sell for my Accot. They Just now came in from Hispaniola, and I believe are of a good quality, we have not made any report at our Custom House and must leave the whole matter relative to the entry with you and paying the Duties, and would have you manage the matter so as to pay as little as possible for on that strong my buissiness with you with turn, and if I find you can do better or as well as any other Port, its very probably I shall send you Severall Cargoes during this Summer. . . .

Mr. Ferrebault who is on board the Schooner as a French Capt. has about one thousand wt. of Coffee which you will be so kind as to assist in Landing &c.

The next day Shaw sent a copy of that letter with another, talking about the possibility of future business. He concluded, “Let me hear from you the return of the post, with the price Current, Politiks &c.”

Capt. Angell returned on 9 April. Dumaresq wrote back that same day, indicating he had been too sick to go out for a while. Shaw replied on the 12th with a nudge to sell the sugar soon. “I shall want to pay about Six hundred pounds L[awful] Money ye. 1st. of next month and hope you’l be in Cash by that Time.”

Then the war broke out. But Shaw continued to manage this deal as if there wasn’t a battle front between him and his partner. On 18 September, Shaw told his contacts in Philadelphia: “I have Two Thousand pounds worth of Sugar their in Boston in Philip Dumaresque hands and I make no Doubt but I shall be able to git the Money Unlless Dumarisq Should prove Dishonest.”

Shaw’s outreach to Dumaresq is striking because Dumaresq was a known Loyalist. In May 1774 he signed the Boston merchants’ addresses to outgoing Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and incoming Gov. Thomas Gage. In June he signed the Loyalists’ protest against the Boston town meeting.

The Whigs responded with a broadside listing all of the “Addressers” and belittling them. That sheet called Dumaresq a “Factor,” or wholesaler, rather than a merchant. More important, the Patriots encouraged people to stop doing business with those men. John W. Tyler’s Smugglers and Patriots quotes Henry Bromfield at the end of October 1774: “The Country Traders carry abot. with them a printed List of the Names of the Addressers to Gov’r Hut’n & dare not buy a single piece of Goods of any of them.”

Nathaniel Shaw was a fervent Patriot. He was especially opposed to the Crown’s customs duties, and back in 1769 he’d even instigated a riot in Newport against the Customs service. From 1776 through the end of the war he would work as the naval agent in New London for both the state of Connecticut and the Continental Congress.

But Shaw evidently didn’t think a little thing like politics should get in the way of asking Philip Dumaresq to land his Haitian sugar at Cohasset and get him the best price for it.

“Agree for the Powder to be brought Down to the Mole”

The start of the Revolutionary War changed New London merchant Nathaniel Shaw, Jr.’s business environment.

For one thing, military supplies were much more valuable. On 25 Apr 1775 Shaw asked his connection in New York for “Five Hundred wt. of Powder, fifteen Hundred Flints and Eighteen Hundred weight of Lead.” But those things were already too scarce on the continent.

According to Robert Owen Decker’s The Whaling City: A History of New London, Shaw also urged the Connecticut government to order 400-500 barrels of gunpowder from him. He strongly supported the Patriot cause, even funding the colony’s delegates to the Continental Congress, but he also had a business to run.

On 11 May the colony treasurer placed its order: only 300 barrels. Shaw replied four days later, “you may Depend on my Supplying you with the Quantity of Powder you Mention.” He already had a captain in the Caribbean, John Mackibbin, with a line of credit and instructions to buy whatever gunpowder he could find.

The new book Two Revolutionary War Privateers, by William and Virginia Packwood, reports that on 29 May Shaw sent another captain, William Packwood, back out to the West Indies on the sloop Macaroni.

Mackibbin returned to Long Island Sound in the sloop Black Joke in July. He brought back “10000 Gallons Melasses, 15 Thousand wt. of Coffee, 26 Thousand of Sugar”—but no mention of gunpowder. Shaw dispatched him to Philadelphia on 12 July with “Orders to take the Sugar and Coffee on Shore without paying the Dutys and if it Can be avoided not to pay any for the Melasses.” Business as usual for Shaw so far.

But there was a new wrinkle. Shaw feared that after 20 July Mackibbin would not be able to “Clear out for N London” and perhaps not for any “Forreign Port.” The royal government was about to clamp down on trade with Connecticut for joining the attack on Boston.

Shaw therefore told his captain that his first course should be to load up with flour and barrel staves and sail for Haiti by 20 July. If Mackibbin couldn’t do that, he should try for some other port in the Caribbean, sell the ship for £300, or come home “in Ballast without Clearing out and Get me Two Thousand feet of Good Long Yellow Pine Plank.”

As for what Capt. Mackibbin should do in Haiti, Shaw wrote: “Purchase Gun Powder & Return as Soon as you Can. If that Article is not to be had Purchase Brown Sugar and Coffee. Dont keep this Letter on Board for Fear of Accidents but burn it.”

Five days later, Shaw sent another letter after Mackibbin:

I am Inform’d that there is a Large Quantity of Powder Arived at the Cape And I would have you in Case you Can Clear go Directly for the Cape and when you Arrive there you may Very Easily know wether you Can have Liberty to Trade there or not And if you Can Purchase Powder to the Amount of your Cargoe, and if you Cannot trade there you Can Agree for the Powder to be brought Down to the Mole

The “Cape” meant Cap-Haïtien and “the Mole” meant Môle-Saint-Nicolas at the end of the same peninsula. In other words, Shaw told Mackibbin that if he couldn’t load gunpowder openly at the main port, he should arrange to pick it up at a more secluded spot.

TOMORROW: Mr. Shaw’s new contact in Boston.

Trading for Gunpowder Just Before the War

Last year I wrote about the New London, Connecticut, merchant Nathaniel Shaw, Jr., and his many ways of evading Customs duties on molasses and other goods.

Shaw’s experience moving molasses from the Caribbean to mainland North America was useful as New England went to war in 1775. The army outside Boston needed gunpowder and weapons, things that were on sale in West Indies as long as Americans had money to pay for them and ships to carry them past Royal Navy patrols.

In fact, Nathaniel Shaw started to trade in military supplies even before the war began. On their website the authors of a new book, Two Revolutionary War Privateers: William and Joseph Packwood of Connecticut, describe the voyage that the older of those two brothers undertook on Shaw’s orders:

Capt. William set sail on 7 Feb 1775 on the Macaroni with orders to obtain as much gunpowder and arms as he could. He visited many Caribbean islands in his search. After a three-week time period, Capt. William was at Anguilla (British) which is 230 miles east of Puerto Rico. . . .

Unable to purchase gunpowder at most places he stopped, Capt. William made his way down the Leeward Islands to St. Eustatius (Dutch) on March 1, Martinique (French) on March 4, and Dominica (French until 1763, then British) on March 6. . . .

Capt. William then went to Guadeloupe (French) on March 7, back to St. Eustatius on March 9, and finally to Haiti (French) on March 15. During the last half of March, he went back and forth between two of the major trading ports in Haiti: Môle Saint-Nicolas on the northwest tip of the island and Cap-Haïtien (called Cap François at the time) on the north coast midway to the Dominican Republic, the Spanish part of the island. He returned to St. Eustatius on April 9 and then went back down to the Môle on April 16.

Back in Connecticut, Shaw was keeping a keen watch on the markets. On 6 April, he wrote to a merchant in Guadeloupe that gin was selling slowly in New York and “Nothing will command cash but Molas. and Powder.” Two days later, after a request that Samuel Holden Parsons passed on for Roger Sherman, Shaw ordered “fifteen Tons of Lead” from his usual trading partners in Philadelphia.

On 25 April, soon after New London received word of the fighting in Massachusetts, Capt. Packwood returned to port. Shaw immediately wrote to Gov. Jonathan Trumbull:

Agreable to your Desire I have Sent up Eighty Three Barrels of Powder to Colo. Jed. Huntington Containg about 108 Each

the Remainder is in this Town I hourly Expect Thirty Two Barrels more that I have Account of the Capt. having it on bord

the Remainder of what Moneys was in My hands Capt William Packwood left with Capt. Jno. Mckibbin who is in One of my Vessels in the West Indies to Lay out in the first Powder that Arives, he says that a large Quantity was Daly Expected

he purchased all that Could be had and thought it best to push home with this Rather than Tarry Longer—this Quantity he Obtain’d through the Influence of the Famous Palunkey (who was An Old Commander of a Private Tear the Warr before Lasts) who Prevailed with the Governour of the Cape to take it out of the Kings Store—

In Short Packwood Says the French Seem to be Disposed in the Islands to Assist in this way as Much as in their power, I Intend he Shall Sail Again for the Cape Next Week and I Don’t Imagine he will be Gone More than Six weeks If you Intend to have any more Money Laid out in that way it will be a good Oppertunity 

The same day, Shaw told his New York connection that Packwood had brought back “fifty One Hogsheads and Eleven Terses of Mollasses and four hogsheads of Cocoa.” That voyage wasn’t just about military supplies. And Shaw hadn’t lost his usual “hope you’l Save the Dutys” by evading the Customs men.

TOMORROW: Placing a bigger order.

The Second Liberty Riot

I’ve been focused on events 250 years ago this week in Boston, but it’s time to look in on other events in New England.

You may recall how in June 1768 the Customs office in Boston confiscated John Hancock’s sloop Liberty on charges of smuggling wine. That produced a riot against Customs officials, which strengthened the royal government’s decision to station troops in Boston. Months later, the government’s Admiralty Court prosecution against Hancock collapsed.

That didn’t mean he got his sloop back, though. Following the law, Customs officials had put the Liberty up for auction. The winning bid came from…the Commissioners of Customs. Soon the sloop was armed and patrolling out of Narragansett Bay to catch smugglers.

On 10 July 1769 the Newport Mercury reported:

We hear the Liberty Sloop, which sail’d a few Days past on a Cruise, has taken a Prize; but of what Nation, or whither bound, we have not learn’d; but imagine her to belong to some of the North-American Colonies, as the whole N–v–l Force of h–s B—t——c M——y seems to be principally aim’d against those Colonies, notwithstanding they are inhabited by the best Subjects that ever serv’d a King; most remarkable for Loyalty and yielding Obedience to every just and constitutional ACT of Parliament.

The captured brig was out of New London, Connecticut, under the command of Joseph Packwood. According to the 24 July Boston Chronicle, it had just come “from Hispaniola with a cargo of molasses and sugar on board.” The 21 July New London Gazette claimed that Packwood was headed for New York and seized in Long Island Sound.

The same day, the Liberty also seized a sloop, “where belonging and from whence, unknown, having on board brandy, wine, &c.” The New London Gazette said the Customs men left “most of the crew adrift in a leaky old canoe” and sailed away with that sloop.

Two weeks later, the Newport Mercury had more to say:

LAST Monday Morning the 17th Instant [i.e., of this month], the armed Sloop Liberty, commanded by Capt. William Reid, arrived here and bro’t in a Brig and a Sloop belonging to Connecticut, taken in the Sound, without this Colony, on Suspicion of the Brig’s having done some illicit Act, & that the Sloop had contraband Goods on Board; but as no Proof appeared against the Brig, she reported her Cargo at the Custom House here;—

and on Wednesday, no Prosecution having been enter’d against either of them, Capt. Packwood went on Board his Brig in Order to get his Sword and some necessary Apparel, which the Commanding Officer on Board, (one of the Liberty’s Men) refused to let him bring away, and tis said, offer’d him Violence; which reduced Capt. Packwood to the necessity of drawing his Sword, to force his Way into his Boat, whereupon the Officer call’d to the Liberty’s People to fire on Capt. Packwood as he was going ashore, which they did, and a Brace of Balls, tis suppos’d, went very near but did not hurt him; they then attempted to fire several more Guns upon him, which happily all snapped or flashed and cou’d not be discharged.

This Attempt at Violence by the Liberty’s People, whose Commander had never condescended to exhibit his Commission to the Governor of this Colony, so enraged a Number of Persons, that, the ensuing Evening, having met Capt. Reid on the Long-Wharf, they obliged him to send for his Men on Shore, in Order to discover the Man who first fired at Capt. Packwood; upon which Capt. Reid sent for all his Hands except his Mate, afterwards a Number of Persons, unknown, went on Board the Liberty, sent the Mate away, cut her Cables and let her drive ashore at the Point, where they cut away her Mast, scuttled her, and carried both her Boats to the upper Part of this Town and burnt them.—

While this Affair was transacting, the Sloop suspected of having contraband Goods on Board made her Escape; and the Brig has since received her Papers and sail’d last Friday.

Arthur A. Ross’s A Discourse, Embracing the Civil and Religious History of Rhode-Island (1838) said that the crowd which took the Liberty’s boats dragged them

up the Long-wharf, thence up the Parade, through Broadstreet, at the head of which, on the Common, they were burned.— Tradition says, that, owing to the keel of the boats being shod with iron, such was the velocity of their locomotion, as they passed up the Parade, that a stream of fire was left in the rear, of several feet in length.

Meanwhile, the Liberty itself was sitting grounded out on a point in the harbor. 

COMING UP: Lightning strikes?

Recreating the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Data

Scholars and technicians at Lancaster University in Britain and Emory University In Atlanta have collaborated to create a 3D model of an eighteenth-century slave ship.

The model is based on the plans for the Aurore, launched from La Rochelle in August 1784. Those are the only plans for a slaving ship known. The Aurore sailed for Africa and then carried people in captivity to Saint-Domingue, now Haiti.

That trip is item number 32359 in the online reference Voyages, a database of 36,000 slave voyages used in classrooms and museums. The video of the 3D model is now part of that website.

News coverage of this software creation describes “the cramped, dirty and stifling conditions experienced by enslaved Africans.” But the online video is almost antiseptically smooth and unpopulated. It takes us from surviving period images to the topmost of the digital ship and then down into its hold—still empty. The actual conditions are still up to our sympathetic imaginations.

The Voyages website has recently been redesigned and augmented with data on the intra-American slave trade, opening up new areas for research. The next planned expansion is a database called “People of the Atlantic Slave Trade,“ recording information about the individuals known to have been involved in the transatlantic trade, both enslaver and enslaved.

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.

Slavery Databases Open to Researchers

The Runaway Slaves in Britain database just became available for online researchers. It offers:

a searchable database of well over eight hundred newspaper advertisements placed by masters and owners seeking the capture and return of enslaved and bound people who had escaped. Many were of African descent, though a small number were from the Indian sub-continent and a few were Indigenous Americans.

Interest is so high that the host servers are having trouble keeping up.

This is just one of several online databases about enslaved people that researchers can now use. There’s the venerable Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which has numbers (not names) of every known slaving voyage from Africa to the New World. This project has recently received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to expand with information about shipments from one American port to another.

The New York Slavery Records Index has collected records that “identify individual enslaved persons and their owners, beginning as early as 1525 and ending during the Civil War.”

Runaway Connecticut is based on a selection of the runaway notices that appeared in the Connecticut Courant between 1765 and 1820. Those advertisements involve different sorts of people—escaping slaves, runaway apprentices, deserting soldiers, escaped prisoners, and dissatisfied husbands and wives.

The Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy site is based on databases created by Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and published on CD-ROM by the Louisiana State University Press in 2000.

The Virginia Historical Society’s Unknown No Longer website collects “the names of all the enslaved Virginians that appear in our unpublished documents.” That means it’s not as comprehensive as other compilations, but the society felt it was better to share what they had which would otherwise remain hidden than to wait for more.

There are a couple of databases for North Carolina, drawing on different pools of data: N.C. Runaway Slave Advertisements and People Not Property – Slave Deeds of North Carolina.

African Runaway Slaves in the Anglo-American Atlantic World is a compilation of runaway advertisement by Douglas B. Chambers. There are separate sections for the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina Low Country regions.

The Black Loyalist site starts with the “Book of Negroes,” people who evacuated New York with the British military in 1783, adding other sources about their lives in Canada and elsewhere in the British Empire. It comes from the University of Sydney and grew from Cassandra Pybus’s research for Epic Journeys of Freedom.

[ADDENDUM: Marronnage in Saint-Domingue is a bilingual website from Canada offering a database on Haiti. It compiles advertisements about enslaved or formerly enslaved people that appeared in the Affiches américaines between 1766 and 1790.]

[ADDENDUM: Ancestry.com makes available the Slave Registers of Former British Colonial Dependencies, 1813-1834. Between outlawing the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 and outlawing slavery in 1834, the British Empire collected registers of “lawfully enslaved” people in many of its Caribbean colonies.]

What data of this sort is available for Massachusetts? I know of three sites that offer raw numbers, not names. Unfortunately, even those numbers are incomplete and not comparable from one database to the next, but they can provide a start.

Primary Research has shared the 1754 Slave Census of Massachusetts, which counted the number of enslaved people over age sixteen in 119 towns in Massachusetts and Maine. Thus, for example, in 1754 two men and two women over age sixteen were held in bondage in Waltham.

The province’s 1765 census was reproduced in Josiah H. Benton’s Early Census Making in Massachusetts, available on archive.org. So far as I know, these figures haven’t been transcribed into a searchable or formulatable data, so one has to consult this just like a printed book. Also, these numbers make no distinction between enslaved and free people. In 1765, Waltham was home to eight male Negroes and five female.

Finally, the 1771 Massachusetts Tax Inventory compiled the property of individuals in many towns (though not all towns’ records survive). One type of taxed property was “Servants for Life,” or slaves. Drilling down patiently from county to town data reveals that in 1771 four Waltham residents were taxed for each owning one enslaved person: the widow Anna Ball, Samuel Gale, Thomas Wellington, and Bezaleel Flagg. Unfortunately, we still don’t know the names of the enslaved people, but it’s possible that further research on the owners would yield more details.

Philadelphia Programs in October

A couple of intriguing academic conferences are happening in Philadelphia this month. I’m sharing links to the programs for people who are in the area and those interested in current scholarship.

The McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania is hosting a graduate student conference titled “Lenses and Contacts: Framing Early America” on 5-7 October.

In recent years, scholars have questioned traditional boundaries and envisioning new frontiers. The advent (and departure?) of the Atlantic World has sparked new ways of framing the field and mapping the space of early America. Scholars have polished off traditional lenses of analysis such as politics, economics, and intellectual history.

Our panelists challenge accepted perspectives by offering their own insights into topics such as: spatial lenses, including Atlantic, continental, global, and local; people, places, and ideas on the margins; histories from above and below; perspectives on race, class, gender, and sexuality in early America; ways of knowing, including religion, environmental, scientific, and medical histories; and networks and crossings, disciplinary and otherwise.

The American Philosophical Society has posted the program for its “The Art of Revolutions” conference on 26-28 October:

The tumult and transformations resulting from the Age of Revolutions (1770s-1840s) created a trans-Atlantic body of art and material culture that reflected and inspired new ideas and actions. “The Art of Revolutions”, co-sponsored by the American Philosophical Society, Museum of the American Revolution, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, explores the role of imagery in influencing and giving meaning to the political revolutions that defined the late-18th and early-19th centuries.

The symposium covers the American Revolution, French Revolution, Circum-Caribbean Revolutions, and the Revolutions of 1848. We hope the chronological scope and transatlantic breadth of the conference will stimulate an interdisciplinary dialogue that crosses traditional geographic barriers and transcends the limitations of strict periodization.

Both conferences are free of charge.

Fall Events at the American Antiquarian Society

The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester has a full schedule of events coming up. Here are those touching on the eighteenth century.

Tuesday, 26 September, 7:00 P.M.
Politeness and Public Life in Early America—and Today
Steven C. Bullock

Long before current fears about incivility in public life—before anxieties about Twitter-shaming and cable-news name-calling—politeness was very much on the minds of American leaders. Eighteenth-century leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin considered politeness an essential part of a free society, a part of the larger project of challenging authoritarian rule. Drawing upon his new book Tea Sets and Tyranny, this lecture examines why civility seemed so important in early America—and why it seems so problematic today.

Tuesday, 3 October, 7:00 P.M.
A Revolution of Her Own!
Judith Kalaora

In 1782, Deborah Sampson bound her chest, tied back her hair, and enlisted in the Continental Army. This one-person play, written and performed by Judith Kalaora, recreates Sampson’s arduous upbringing, active combat, and success as the first female professional soldier. Judith Kalaora is an actress, educator, and historical interpreter. She has worked on stages from London to Montreal and across the United States.

Thursday, 12 October, 7:00 P.M.
Thundersticks
David J. Silverman

The adoption of firearms by American Indians between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries marked a turning point in the history of North America's indigenous peoples—a cultural earthquake so profound that its impact has yet to be adequately measured. This lecture, based upon the book Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America, explores how the embracing of firearms by Native Americans transformed their cultures and empowered them to pursue their interests and defend their political and economic autonomy for over two centuries.

Thursday, 26 October, 7:00 P.M.
Minutemen Revisited—the thirteenth annual Robert C. Baron Lecture
Robert A. Gross

In this lecture, A.A.S. member Robert Gross will discuss his 1976 Bancroft Prize-winning book, The Minutemen and Their World. Providing a provocative and compelling look at the everyday lives of New England farmers and their community as they rebelled against Great Britain, The Minutemen and Their World was reissued in a 25th-anniversary edition in 2001. Gross will reflect on the conception of this ground-breaking work and its ongoing impact on scholarship and society.

Tuesday, 7 November, 7:00 P.M.
Second Revolutions: Thomas Jefferson and Haiti
James Alexander Dun

Jefferson’s defeat of John Adams in the election of 1800 represented a peaceful transfer of power and signaled the onset of a more unified polity. This lecture, base upon the book Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America, examines how the Jeffersonian victory took place on more than one front. Other more radical agendas for change were quashed as well at that moment, including that of Toussaint Louverture, leader of the nearly-independent French colony of Saint Dominque.

All these events are free. Parking is on the nearby streets. Seating is first-come, first-served.

The Celebrated Saint-Georges

A concert in Seattle got me intrigued about the life of Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

He was born on Guadeloupe in 1745, son of a wealthy planter and his black slave. At around age seven, he traveled to France to go to school. His parents joined him in Paris a couple of years later, his father receiving a noble title.

At age thirteen, Joseph went to a school of military arts. By his late teens, he was known as one of the finest swordsmen in France. The king granted him the title of chevalier.

That would be impressive enough, but in his twenties Joseph Bologne de Saint-Georges became one of Paris’s most celebrated musicians, concertmaster of the Concert des Amateurs. He wrote an opera with Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, later author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He also crossed paths with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, though no music seems to have come of that.

Then the American War started to affect Saint-Georges’s life. Because his orchestra’s patrons had put all their money into supplying the French army in America, the Concert des Amateurs had to shut down in 1781. He bounced back with a new patron in Philippe D’Orléans, duc de Chartres, and his lodge of Freemasons. With their support, Saint-Georges commissioned the Paris symphonies from Joseph Haydn.

In 1785, Philippe succeeded to his father’s title as duc d’Orléans. A cousin of King Louis XVI, the duke favored a constitutional monarchy along British lines, particularly if he could be in charge as regent. He sent Saint-Georges to London to strengthen contacts with the Prince of Wales, early anti-slavery activists, and other potential allies.

The portrait above comes from Saint-Georges’s time in London. It was painted by Boston-born Loyalist Mather Brown at the request of the Prince of Wales.

Saint-Georges was in the audience at the opening of the Estates General of France in 1789. That limited attempt at political change soon brought on the larger French Revolution. At first Saint-Georges continued work as a musician and courtier, but in 1792 he accepted a commission as colonel of a cavalry legion of free men of color from Haiti.

For the next several years, Saint-Georges was part of the army of Revolutionary France, caught up in its politics. That meant he spent some of his time at the front, some in Paris, some in jail. There’s evidence he went to Haiti in 1796 as part of the central government’s unsuccessful campaign to suppress Toussaint Louverture. Finally he returned to music, frustrated by government service and suffering from illness. Saint-Georges died in Paris in 1799.

TOMORROW: Another picture of Saint-Georges.

Political Science in Fever-Stricken Philadelphia

H-Net just ran Jan Golinski’s review of Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic by Thomas A. Apel.

As Golinski explains, no one in 1790s Philadelphia understood the cause of the epidemic that emptied the new national capital, but that didn’t stop two schools of thought from forming:

Broadly speaking, the “localist” side of the dispute traced the disease’s origins to bad air in the affected area, due to the presence of corrupt or putrefying matter or to a change in what they called the “atmospheric constitution.” Against them were ranged the “contagionists,” who believed the disease had originated elsewhere, brought by migrants—such as the refugees who fled to Philadelphia from the revolution in Haiti—and subsequently communicated from one individual to another.

From a modern perspective, one might be inclined to dismiss the whole debate as founded on ignorance and mistaken assumptions. Nobody at the time had any knowledge of the virus that causes yellow fever, and nor did anyone recognize the role of the female Aedes aegypti mosquito in transmitting it from person to person. We now know that the disease is not directly infectious, though it is so through the medium of the insect vector; it is not caused by putrefying organic matter, but stagnant water does provide an environment in which the mosquito can easily breed. Both localists and contagionists could therefore muster facts to support their case, but neither side could decisively disprove the other’s claims.

Like many medical controversies in the eighteenth century, therefore, we don’t really want to take either side. It would be so much easier if any of the debating doctors of the period just washed his hands.

In his final chapter, Apel examines the political dimension of the controversy. He rightly declines to map the two sides directly onto the political divisions of the time. On the other hand, he suggests that the fierceness of the dispute did reflect the political factionalism of the 1790s. This was the era when the Enlightenment public sphere fissured into contending groups, and when conspiracy theories abounded on both sides of the Atlantic. Participants in the yellow fever debates frequently alleged their opponents were lying or conspiring against the public interest.

[Dr. Benjamin] Rush, in particular, exhibited a high degree of paranoia, likening himself to the early Christian martyrs persecuted under the Roman Empire. Simultaneously, he insisted that his opinions were the undeniable outcome of reason and truth. Apel reminds his readers that twentieth-century critics of the Enlightenment identified this combination of paranoia, conspiracy theories, and dogmatic insistence on one’s own rationality as symptomatic of the last phase of the movement.

The epidemic occurred at the same time as the French Revolution, after all, and the harsh British reaction to its radicalness.

Book Prizes from the A.H.A.

At their meeting earlier this month, the members of the American Historical Association announced the winners of their awards for books, other media, and teaching.

The Littleton-Griswold Prize for book on “the history of U.S. law and society (broadly defined)” went to a book about pre-Revolutionary Boston: Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston, by Cornelia H. Dayton of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and Sharon V. Salinger of the University of California, Irvine.

I’ve mentioned this book before, but here’s the publisher’s description:

In colonial America, the system of “warning out” was distinctive to New England, a way for a community to regulate those to whom it would extend welfare. Robert Love’s Warnings animates this nearly forgotten aspect of colonial life, richly detailing the moral and legal basis of the practice and the religious and humanistic vision of those who enforced it.

Historians Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger follow one otherwise obscure town clerk, Robert Love, as he walked through Boston’s streets to tell sojourners, “in His Majesty’s Name,” that they were warned to depart the town in fourteen days. This declaration meant not that newcomers literally had to leave, but that they could not claim legal settlement or rely on town poor relief. Warned youths and adults could reside, work, marry, or buy a house in the city. If they became needy, their relief was paid for by the province treasurer. Warning thus functioned as a registration system, encouraging the flow of labor and protecting town coffers.

Between 1765 and 1774, Robert Love warned four thousand itinerants, including youthful migrant workers, demobilized British soldiers, recently exiled Acadians, and women following the redcoats who occupied Boston in 1768. Appointed warner at age sixty-eight owing to his unusual capacity for remembering faces, Love kept meticulous records of the sojourners he spoke to, including where they lodged and whether they were lame, ragged, drunk, impudent, homeless, or begging. Through these documents, Dayton and Salinger reconstruct the biographies of travelers, exploring why so many people were on the move throughout the British Atlantic and why they came to Boston. With a fresh interpretation of the role that warning played in Boston’s civic structure and street life, Robert Love’s Warnings reveals the complex legal, social, and political landscape of New England in the decade before the Revolution.

In addition, here are some other prize-winners covering eighteenth-century America.

Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, by Ada Ferrer of New York University, won the Friedrich Katz Prize in Latin American and Caribbean history and the Wesley-Logan Prize in African diaspora history, and shared the James A. Rawley Prize for the integration of Atlantic worlds before the twentieth century.

Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807, by Gregory E. O’Malley of the University of California at Santa Cruz, shared the Rawley Prize and won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize in the field of British, British Imperial, or British Commonwealth history since 1485.

The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, by Greg Grandin of New York University, shared the Albert J. Beveridge Award on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada, from 1492 to the present.

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.

“Fear in the Revolutionary Americas” at Tufts, 31 Oct.

On Friday, 31 October, the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University will host a one-day conference on the topic “Fear in the Revolutionary Americas, 1776-1865.” [A conference about fear on Halloween? Well played, Tufts University—well played.]

This conference reflects the current academic interest in examining the entire “Age of Revolutions” that started with American independence and ran through the upheavals in France, Haiti, Mexico, and South America, rather than stop at national boundaries. Co-sponsors include the university’s Departments of History, Latin American Studies, and Romance Languages, and the Center for the Study of Race & Democracy.

Presentations that will definitely touch on developments in North America include:

• Edward Rugemer, Yale University, “Fear of Slave Violence in Jamaica and South Carolina during the American Revolution”
• Nicole Eustace, New York University, “Republics of Saints?: Fear and Virtue in the Age of Revolutions”
• Alan Taylor, University of Virginia, “Fear and Loathing in the American Revolution”
• David Nichols, Indiana State University, “Capitalizing on Fear: Violence, Insecurity, and Negotiation in Native North America, 1750-1830”
• Roundtable Discussion: Chris Schmidt-Nowara, Tufts University and Ben Carp, Brooklyn College

Download the full program and speaker biographies here.

The sessions will take place in the Coolidge Room of Ballou Hall. Here are directions. To reserve a slot, contact Ms. Khalilah Tyre, administrator of Tufts’ Humanities center.

Van Ruymbeke on French Migrations to America, 1 May

On 1 May, the French Cultural Center in Boston will host a talk by Dr. Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Professor of American History at the Université de Paris, on “French Migrations to America Before 1800.”

The description of this lecture says:

French and Francophone migrations to America before 1800 were very diverse. First the Huguenots arrived in the 1680s. They were Calvinist refugees. They settled mostly in New England, New York, Virginia, and South Carolina. Arriving in the colonies in a very auspicious time they quickly and thoroughly integrated.

Seventy years later, in the mid-1750s, the Acadians were deported from Nova Scotia to all the British seaboard colonies. Poor and Catholic, these refugees were unwelcomed and went through a very difficult time before either returning to Nova Scotia or going to Louisiana after the Seven Years War in 1763.

In the 1790s three types of French migrants arrived in the United States: the refugees from Saint-Domingue; the émigrés, often part of the nobility, from Revolutionary France; and a handful of Catholic priests also from France. Settling in American port cities (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston), these Catholic émigrés and refugees for the most part did not remain in the United States.

Prof. Van Ruymbeke’s books include From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina and L’Amérique avant les États-Unis: Une histoire de l’Amérique anglaise, 1497-1776, which won the Prix France-Amériques in 2013.

The French Cultural Center is at 53 Marlborough Street in Boston. This event is scheduled to run from 6:30 to 8:30 P.M., including a question period and reception afterward. It is free to members of the center and $5 for others. Register for the event here.

[The picture above shows Father Francis Matignon (1753-1818), who arrived in Boston in 1792 and stayed for the rest of his life.]

Many Revolutions at Brandeis This Year

To gain perspective on the American Revolution, it helps to consider it in context. And over the past generation historians have been broadening the contexts of their studies in all directions.

We thus have “the long 18th century,” which lets specialists in 18th-century history or literature claim some interesting bits of the late 1600s and early 1800s as well. We have “the Atlantic world,” which looks at all the empires and trading that straddled the Atlantic Ocean, not confined to one nation-state.

Put those together, and we get “the Age of Revolution(s),” usually said to start with the American Revolution and to include other revolutions partly inspired by it: French, Haitian, and South American. Brandeis University has recently launched a year-long seminar called “Rethinking the Age of Revolution” which expands the timeframe even further, back to Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 and up through France’s 1830 Revolution (better known as “the exciting bits of Les Miz”).

This “Comparative Study of Culture” includes a blog in which various participants carry on the discussions from the seminar sessions. Among the postings, John Hannigan discusses how the South Carolina lawyer William Henry Drayton shifted his thinking about the nature of the American colonies’ resistance to the Crown over the course of the year 1776.

And in the process Drayton may have been the person who labeled what was going on “the American Revolution.” In a widely-reprinted charge to a grand jury on 15 Oct 1776, Drayton said, “Carolinians! heretofore you were bound. By the American Revolution you are now free.” (Of course, almost half the population of South Carolina was still bound, but Drayton was speaking to the white men of property who could serve on a jury.)

The next event in Brandeis’s yearlong seminar will take place on Thursday, 14 November. There will be a panel discussion on the topic of “People in Revolution” with presentations by:

• Kathleen DuVal, University of North Carolina: “Middle (Wo)man History: Biographies of Slightly Important People in the Revolutionary Era”
• Amy Freund, Texas Christian University: “Aux Armes, Citoyens! Portraiture and Political Agency during the French Revolution”
• Emma Rothschild, Harvard University/University of Cambridge: “Family Life in Revolution: Angoulême in the 1790s”

That’s scheduled from 4:00 to 5:30 P.M. in the Mandel Humanities Center, room 303.

(The image above shows William Henry Drayton’s family seat, Drayton Hall in Charleston, South Carolina.)

The American Revolution as a Flop and a Model

Last week the Washington Post ran a provocative essay by the Ontario writer and retailer Paul Pirie arguing that the American Revolution was “a flop,” not achieving what the Declaration of Independence set out as its goals—or at least not achieving those goals as well as some other democratic nations today (not least of which is Canada).

Pirie noted that the U.S. of A., despite being founded with the ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” today:

• ranks 51st in the world in life expectancy at birth.
• has far more of its population in prison than any other large democracy.
• guarantees fewer benefits and protections for workers, and has a life-satisfaction measure behind Australia and, yes, Canada.

Pirie also points to the gridlock in Washington, a product of the U.S. Constitution’s design for the federal government. (Though I don’t think his example of an “austerity budget” right after a recession is the best example of how government should work, given classical economics. But some rational budget process would be nice.) And he doesn’t even mention the Electoral College.

I agree with Pirie that Americans have a tendency to overlook how many other nations have produced peaceful, prosperous democracies with rights for their citizens and good services for their children even though they aren’t American. Some have even done so while keeping vestiges of monarchy, which the American Revolution threw off. Some have chosen democracy under much harsher economic and geographic circumstances than the U.S.

Over the past century few of of those nations have followed our Constitution’s model. In particular, most have chosen parliamentary systems over our form of separated, overlapping, and often conflicting powers.

But in other important respects those nations have been inspired by the U.S. We Americans may be too wedded to provisions in a Constitution written over two hundred years ago by men who didn’t agree on its meaning then and couldn’t conceive of how we live today, but most nations since 1789 have seen the value of having a written national constitution. Finite terms for elected officeholders, judges empowered to overturn unconstitutional laws, and stated individual rights are other ideas the American republic worked out for the world.

Indeed, the very idea of a large republic of diverse interests was revolutionary. As scholars at the “American Revolution Reborn” conference discussed at length this spring, the American Revolution inspired many others in the following decades, including the French and Haitian revolutions of the late 1700s and the South American revolutions of the early 1800s. The example of the American republic spurred reformers in Britain, and even Canada.

Would, for example, Denmark or South Korea or Costa Rica or even Canada be as democratic as they are today if the U.S. of A. hadn’t been founded as it was in the late eighteenth century? It’s impossible to say one way or the other. History doesn’t allow for controlled experiments of that sort. But if the American Revolution had indeed “flopped,” as Pirie suggested, the world—and even Canada—might look very different today.