Some Podcast Episodes to Sample

I’m sure everyone reading this has sampled several early American history podcasts. There really is a plethora of them, from both individuals and institutions.

Here are a few recommendations of individual podcast episodes that I recently found interesting. They may have slipped by because they appeared in the series unaccountably not devoted to the history of the early America or Boston.

History Extra’s Matt Elton spoke with Jeremy Black about Sir Robert Walpole, who served as prime minister of Great Britain from 1721 to 1742. Prof. Black presented the case that Walpole, the first man to hold that power (even before the term “prime minister” became codified) is still the greatest. Other historians will speak up for other prime ministers, but since this series is linked to the 300th anniversary of Walpole coming to power, he does seem to have a head start.

On the BBC’s In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg conversed with Kathleen Burk of University College London, Frank Cogliano of the University of Edinburgh, and Michael Rapport at the University of Glasgow about the Franco-American Alliance of 1778, what led up to it and what results it produced for all the parties involved. The end of that treaty of amity in the 1790s raised the question of whether the young republic had made an agreement with the nation of France or simply its monarchy. For pragmatic and perhaps temperamental reasons, Washington chose to interpret the situation in the second way.

On Mainely History, host Ian Saxine and Prof. Andrew Wehrman discussed the controversies of smallpox inoculation, not just in Maine but also not neglecting that district. Wehrman notes that by the late 1700s colonial Americans understood the benefits of inoculation, but they also recognized that it carried risks both to individuals an to surrounding communities, so they were ready to protest inoculation efforts that seems risky or inequitable.

The Library Company of Philadelphia’s Talking in the Library series shared a 2020 talk by Prof. Sally Hadden about two rising young attorneys in federal Boston—Harrison Gray Otis and Christopher Gore. Both represented Loyalists trying to regain the rights to their property, and they used that business to build their own wealth before going into politics.

All of these podcasts are available through multiple platforms and apps, so you should be able to find them by search. But I’ve included direct links in each description for people who prefer that route.

“Pointing to Mr. Jacksons Shop”

On Thursday, 8 Feb 1770, two and half centuries ago today, the Boston Whigs tried a new tactic in their pressure campaign against shopkeepers who were still selling imported goods.

According to the anonymous witness sending reports to Customs Collector Joseph Harrison:

about 10 oClock in the forenoon, a board was stuck up, on the Town pump, with a Hand painted on it, pointing to Mr. [William] Jacksons Shop and below, the word Importer, in Large Letters.—

Jackson’s braziery, or hardware shop, was on Cornhill, one of the main streets forming the crossroads at the center of town. His shop sign, the Brazen Head, had been a town landmark for decades. I can’t help but think that Bostonians also remembered how their town’s last great fire had started at his shop, which he then co-managed with his mother.

Whether it was his shop’s visibility or something he’d done, the Whig activists seem to have singled William Jackson out for hard treatment. He and they were already trading accusations of arson and planting evidence. Some printer produced the handbill shown above, visible at the Massachusetts Historical Society website. It designated Jackson and his shop by name and concluded:

It is desired that the SONS and DAUGHTERS of LIBERTY, would not buy any one thing of him, for in so doing they will bring disgrace upon themselves, and their Posterity, for ever and ever, AMEN.

But that wasn’t the most notable part of this protest, as the informant continued:

this affair drew the attention of the boys, and Country people, who flock’d about it, in great numbers; the Boys insulting Every body who went in, or out of the Shop, by Hissing and pelting them with Dirt.—

Boston’s five public schools let out early on Thursdays, at 10:00 A.M. That schedule was supposed to allow the boys to attend the Thursday Lecture (an extra sermon that Harrison Gray Otis recalled no classmate ever taking the opportunity to hear). Thus, the Whigs had small but enthusiastic adherents available to reinforce their message not to shop at Jackson’s.

Thursday was also Boston’s big market day, when farmers brought their produce in from the countryside. That produced an extra large crowd of people passing up Cornhill to Faneuil Hall.

According to the anonymous report:

Jackson made several attempts to take it [the pointing hand] Down, but was Repulsed by a Number of Idle people, who were standing by, with Clubs and Sticks in their Hands, however about one oClock it was taken away, by those who put it up, and the Crow’d dispersed first taking care to bespatter, all Jacksons windows over, with mudd and dirt—

During this Exhibition a Number of considerable Merchants Stood at a Little distance, and seemed highly pleased with what was going on, and Mr. M——x took Care to distinguish himself in a particular manner—

“Mr. M——x” was of course William Molineux, the Wolverhampton-born merchant who had made himself the leader of the non-importation movement. He was, people assumed, the strategist behind this new form of pressure.

William Eustis Returning to Roxbury

At the start of the Revolutionary War, William Eustis (1753-1825) was a medical student of Dr. Joseph Warren. A son of Dr. Benjamin Eustis, the young man was going into the family business.

Eustis’s training was cut short in 1775 for obvious reasons. He joined the New England army as a surgeon for the artillery regiment, treating the wounded after Bunker Hill and the battles of the New York and New Jersey campaign. In 1777 Eustis shifted to overseeing a military hospital north of New York City.

At the end of the war, William Eustis returned to Boston and began a private practice. He entered politics after the Shays Rebellion, serving several years in the Massachusetts House and Governor’s Council. In 1800 he ran for Congress as a Jeffersonian, beating the future mayor Josiah Quincy; in 1804 those two men competed again, and this time Quincy won. Around 1806, William Eustis sat for a portrait by Gilbert Stuart, shown above.

President James Madison appointed Eustis to be his first Secretary of War, hoping to win over New Englanders. With neither the military experience nor the bureaucratic finesse necessary for the job, the doctor lasted right up until there actually was a war in 1812. A couple of years later, Madison made Eustis the U.S. minister to the Netherlands. At least that wasn’t a disaster.

Back in the U.S. of A., Dr. Eustis bought the mansion originally built on a Roxbury hilltop for Gov. William Shirley. He and his wife Caroline, who was also his sister-in-law, lived there for more than forty-five years until her death.

Eustis once again ran for Congress in 1820. Meanwhile, he was also the Jeffersonians’ candidate for Massachusetts governor, losing to a fellow doctor and Revolutionary War veteran, John Brooks. In 1822 Brooks chose not to run again, and the Federalists nominated the archconservative Harrison Gray Otis. That let the Jeffersonians portray Eustis as the moderate, experienced elder statesman. He won the race, and the Federalist Party was wiped out of power in the legislature the following year. Gov. Eustis died in office in 1825.

The Shirley-Eustis House, as the Roxbury mansion is now called, became a pioneering preservation project and museum in the twentieth century. Meanwhile, Stuart’s portrait of Dr. Eustis went into the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—but that institution had so many Stuarts it was hardly ever on display. This year the Met decided to deaccession the painting. Members of the Shirley-Eustis House Association raised the money to bid for it at auction.

Dr. Eustis’s portrait will therefore be welcoming visitors to Dr. Eustis’s house starting in 2020.

“It would mortify Mr. Adams and please Mr. Washington”

The Philadelphia Dancing Assembly planned to honor George Washington’s birthday with a ball on 22 Feb 1798, but then elections were scheduled on that Thursday. So the group postponed their event for a day.

Meanwhile, President John Adams had declined his invitation. On 23 February, the Aurora General Advertiser published that response with some editorial commentary about Adams’s “impolite & arrogant terms.” Its printer, Benjamin Franklin Bache, wrote sarcastically that he did not expect “that the president of the U. States would so far forget the dignity of his station as to mingle with shop keepers.”

Adams had privately written that one problem with such birthday balls was “those Things give offence to the plain People of our Country, upon whose Friendship I have always depended. They are practised by the Elegant and the rich for their own Ends, which are not always the best.” So each side was accusing the other of being elitist.

The dispute also had a personal dimension. Eliza Custis Law, Martha Washington’s eldest granddaughter, was in Philadelphia that month, urging all gentlemen to attend the birthday ball. The Federalists would normally have been happy to do so, but now that seemed disloyal to President Adams. Meanwhile, their Jeffersonian rivals were for once all about having a big party for Washington.

On the evening after the ball, the Swiss-born businessman Albert Gallatin (shown here) wrote to his wife about the situation:

Do you want to know the fashionable news of the day? The President of the United States has written, in answer to the managers of the ball in honor of G. Washington’s birthday, that he took the earliest opportunity of informing them that he declined going.

The court is in a prodigious uproar about that important event. The ministers and their wives do not know how to act upon the occasion; the friends of the old court say it is dreadful, a monstrous insult to the late President; the officers and office-seekers try to apologize for Mr. Adams by insisting that he feels conscientious scruples against going to places of that description, but it is proven against him that he used to go when Vice-President.

How they will finally settle it I do not know; but to come to my own share of the business. A most powerful battery was opened against me to induce me to go to the said ball; it would be remarked; it would look well; it would show that we democrats, and I specially, felt no reluctance in showing my respect to the person of Mr. Washington, but that our objections to levees and to birthday balls applied only to its being a Presidential, anti-republican establishment, and that we were only afraid of its being made a precedent; and then it would mortify Mr. Adams and please Mr. Washington.

All those arguments will appear very weak to you when on paper, but they were urged by a fine lady, by Mrs. Law, and when supported by her handsome black eyes they appeared very formidable. Yet I resisted and came off conqueror, although I was, as a reward, to lead her in the room, to dance with her, &c.; all which, by the by, were additional reasons for my staying at home. Our club have given me great credit for my firmness, and we have agreed that two or three of us who are accustomed to go to these places, [John] Langdon, [Richard] Brent, &c., will go this time to please the Law family.

Gallatin was pleased to have won the respect of his Jeffersonian colleagues, but he seems to have been equally eager to gain credit from his wife for resisting Law’s “handsome black eyes.”

The young, first-term Massachusetts Congressman Harrison Gray Otis explained the Federalist side of the controversy to his wife:

The Birth night ball of last evening was I am told respectably attended, tho by no means equal in splendour & numbers to the last. . . . The President did not attend, & his refusal has given considerable offence, even to some of the federal party.

To be sure his apology was rather formal, but I think he acted rightly upon principle. As President, he ought to know of no distinction among private citizens, whatever may be their merit or virtue; & having never received from the Philadelphians, the slightest mark of attention, he was in my mind quite excusable for declining to be the pageant, to do honor to another.

Many families who usually increase the flutter of the beau monde were absent. The Morrisites of course. The Binghams who have lately lost a relation, & the Chews on account of a Mrs. Pemberton who died last Sunday; I am told too that the whole house was very damp and believe I have not lost much.

Abigail Adams declared that by leaking her husband’s note the Jeffersonians had “defeated their own plans. as soon as it was known, it went through the city like an Electrical shock—and the Ball was meager enough, so much so, that tho it was by subscription I have heard but 15 Ladies were present.”

TOMORROW: What Jefferson himself thought of this all.

Making and Wearing Leather Breeches

There appear to be a lot of changes happening at Colonial Williamsburg now. Some pandering (Halloween celebration, skating rink), some ordinary revamping (new restaurant at the Lodge), and some just puzzling.

In the last category is the change of the site’s magazine from the Colonial Williamsburg Journal to Trend and Tradition.

The last, and first, issue of Trend and Tradition includes an article by Ben Swenson on Colonial Williamsburg’s leather breeches initiative. Unfortunately, this is not one of the articles that can be accessed through the history.org website because I think a lot of folks who make reenactment garments would find it interesting.

The major points:

• “Leather breeches were as common in the 18th century as blue jeans are in the 21st.”
• “The modern tools that now exist to re-create 18th-century costumes on a large scale can’t accommodate the properties of leather.”
• “all the breeches produced in the 18th century were made from the hides of deer or other wild game, which were processed differently from shoe or belt leather.”
• “The leather is similar to other fabrics in some ways, but there are just enough differences to throw you off.” —artificer intern Emma Cross
• Good leather breeches are “snug at first, but are pliable enough to stretch, giving everyone’s moving parts a range of motion.”
• “They could resist the punishment of a snag or repeated wear-and-tear that might rip gentler fabric.”

The article notes several type of men who wore leather breeches, and I’ll add a detail from Samuel Eliot Morison’s biography of his ancestor Harrison Gray Otis. Little Harry came from one of the town’s genteel families and he attended the South Latin School in the 1770s. He wore leather breeches, too: “Every year, on Guy Fawkes’ day, a new pair of leather breeches was given him, and reserved for ‘best’ so long as the breeches of the previous vintage held out.”

Here are a couple more articles about leather breeches from Two Nerdy History Girls and Making History, which is also the source of this handsome image.

“Poor Mrs Brown, who was Betsy Otis”

James Otis’s 1783 will didn’t exactly brim with love for his oldest child, Elizabeth, who toward the end of the siege of Boston had married a British army officer, Leonard Brown.

As I quoted yesterday, Otis wrote that he’d heard his daughter’s husband had left her, and that she was suffering from consumption, and then he bequeathed her five shillings. And that was supposed to be in a moment of sanity.

I haven’t found any indication that those rumors were true. Elizabeth Brown lived for decades. And while I can’t confirm the Browns lived together happily, they remained a couple.

In October 1785, after John Adams became the U.S. of A.’s minister to Britain, Elizabeth Brown contacted him, saying, “my Comp[limen]ts: attend Mrs: Adams and inform her I still retain a pleasing remembrance of the agreeable Week I pass’d with her at Plymouth.” She said that she was living “at Leonard Browns Esqr. Sleaford Lincolnshire”—probably her father-in-law’s house.

The biggest problem Elizabeth Brown faced then was not the lack of money from her father but lack of access to bequests from other relatives. Two months later Brown laid out her difficulty for Adams:

my Grandfather at the Decease of my much’d Hond: Father Bequeath’d me one Thousand pound Lawfull Money which his Executors M: J— and Mr: A— Otis were to pay me, and I expected to receive the interest. untill it was convenient to them, to pay the principal

“M: J— and Mr: A— Otis” were Brown’s uncles Joseph Otis and Samuel Allyne Otis. Her uncle by marriage, James Warren, was supposed to be her attorney in Massachusetts, receiving and passing on the money. But the Otises’ business had failed in the tough postwar American economy, so they didn’t have any cash to send. And Warren wasn’t representing Elizabeth Brown’s interests well.

In May 1786, Abigail Adams wrote from London to her sister Mary Cranch about the case:

Poor Mrs Brown, who was Betsy Otis, had all her Grandfather left her, in the Hands of Mr Allen otis and Genll Warren. She has written several Letters to mr Adams upon the subject requesting his advice what to do. Her Father left her nothing. It is very hard she Should lose what her Grandfather left her.

The case hung on. In 1789, Elizabeth’s mother, Ruth Otis, died, leaving her more wealth.

Finally, in February 1790 the Massachusetts legislature passed a law allowing “Leonard Brown and his Wife” to take possession of land belonging to Samuel Allyne Otis as he went through bankruptcy and to sell it to satisfy a debt to them. The attorneys in that settlement were Harrison Gray Otis, Otis’s son, and William Tudor, Adams’s former clerk and father of James Otis’s future biographer.

According to William Tudor, Jr., Elizabeth Brown made “a short visit in 1792” to Massachusetts, perhaps to wrap up those bequests. He also wrote that her husband, “coming into possession of a handsome property, resigned his commission” in the army and retired to a genteel life in the British countryside. That might have been in 1796, when the Monthly Magazine reported the death “At Sleaford, aged 82, Leonard Brown, esq. of Pinchbeck, for many years a magistrate for the district of Kesteven.”

As I wrote yesterday, St. Mary’s church in Pinchbeck contains an inscription about the death of Capt. Brown in 1821. Tudor wrote that Elizabeth Brown was still alive at that time. According to Lincolnshire Pedigrees (which names her father as “Thomas Otis of Boston”), Elizabeth Brown died 18 Apr 1839 at age eighty-two.

That same genealogical book says that Elizabeth and Leonard Brown had a son, also named Leonard, born around 1777. He lived until 1848 and was survived by his widow, Anne. I found gossip about them in Letters of James Savage to His Family, privately printed in 1906. Savage was a genealogist, and in 1842 he went to Britain, determined to track down James Otis’s descendants. Writing from the other Boston, he told his wife what he’d heard about this Leonard Brown: “he was domineered over by his mother, after father’s death, and had only within a short time married his housekeeper or cook, and had no children.” And that was the end of that branch of the Otis family.

“Elizabeth went from hence with the said Leonard Brown”

Elizabeth Otis was born in Boston on 28 Mar 1757, the oldest child of James Otis, Jr., and his wife, the former Ruth Cunningham. Betsy was a small child when her father broke with Massachusetts’s “court party” and the royal patronage system in favor of championing Boston’s Whig merchants through electoral politics. She was twelve years old when her father had his first serious bout of insanity.

As I discussed way back here, Ruth Otis remained politically Loyalist. And as her husband became non compos mentis, she naturally took an even bigger role in raising the children. Ruth and Betsy Otis remained in Boston during the siege while James was outside under doctor’s care.

On 25 Feb 1776, Betsy Otis married Lt. Leonard Brown of the King’s Own (4th) Regiment. According to an inscription in the church in Pinchbeck, Lincolnshire, Brown was born in 1749. He might have been in the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and he was definitely wounded at Bunker Hill.

Boston town records of this marriage identify Brown as a gentleman (“Esq.”), but not an officer. The officiating minister was the Rev. Moses Badger, not one of Boston’s pastors but perhaps acting as a Royal Navy chaplain. Badger was a Harvard graduate from Haverhill who had converted from New England Congregationalism to the Anglican Church years earlier.

According to family traditions, Ruth Otis supported Betsy’s marriage, but James Otis was upset when he learned about it. Within a month, the couple evacuated with the royal army to Halifax. During the war, Brown was promoted to captain and reportedly “placed in command of one of the fortresses on the coast of England.”

In 1782, Betsy’s cousin Harrison Gray Otis later recalled, he brought James Otis down from his asylum in Andover to Boston, “at a period when my father [Samuel Allyne Otis] and his friends thought he was recovered.” During this journey, James Otis shared “delightfully instructive” observations about the law and as an exercise for his nephew started to compose his will.

That will, completed the next year, had little to offer his oldest child:

whereas the said Elizabeth went from hence with the said Leonard Brown at the evacuation of Boston to Halifax & thence for England & with him settled at Steaford [actually Sleaford] in Lincolnshire, and as I hear he has left his wife & joined the British Arm[y] again, and the last I hear is that she was in a consumption I give the said Elizabeth five shillings if alive.

James Otis died later in 1783, leaving the rest of his property to his widow, who had remained in Massachusetts, and his younger daughter, Mary, who married a son of Gen. Benjamin Lincoln. But what about Betsy?

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

Children’s Clothing Talk at Otis House, 13 June

On Thursday, 13 June, Historic New England will host a talk by Associate Curator Laura Johnson on “Skirts, Stays, and Skeleton Suits: Clothing Children in New England.” The lecture description says:

When did children wear corsets? When did boys stop wearing skirts and girls begin wearing pants? Learn about the surprising ways we clothed our children from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries at this illustrated lecture by Associate Curator Laura Johnson, using images of many interesting and rare items from Historic New England’s collection of children’s clothing and portraits.

Registration is required. Admission is $5 for Historic New England members, $10 for others. Johnson will start speaking at 6:00 P.M., and the venue is the society’s Otis House at 141 Cambridge Street in Boston.

And as long as this event is in one of Harrison Gray Otis’s houses, I’ll quote what his descendant Samuel Eliot Morison wrote about the clothing Harry wore as a boy in the 1770s:

Every year, on Guy Fawkes’ day, a new pair of leather breeches was given him, and reserved for “best” so long as the breeches of the previous vintage held out.

That November date seems to have been an Otis family tradition, not a general one. Joshua Green, Harry’s classmate at the South Latin School, recorded receiving a pair of leather breeches on 16 Mar 1773.

The End of the Constitutional Telegraphe

When we left off with John S. Lillie on Tuesday, he was feeling triumphant about the election of Thomas Jefferson as President in 1800. His Constitutional Telegraphe newspaper had strongly supported the Jeffersonian party, though—given how Massachusetts had a favorite son in the race and was already awarding all its Electoral College votes to whoever won the state—that hadn’t actually affected the election.

But Federalists were still in power in New England. And Americans were still working out their understanding of a free press. In February 1801 Chief Justice Francis Dana convinced a jury to indict Lillie for printing an anonymous piece that called him “Lord Chief Justice of the Common Law of England” and cast other aspersions on his integrity. Dana had been trying to apply English libel law in Massachusetts as a way to stamp out “sedition.”

Lillie announced in his 18 February paper that he “prefers to remain for a short time incog.” Too short a time, since state authorities brought him to court in August. Lillie produced the handwritten essay he had published about Dana. People recognized the writing of John Vinal—I suspect this was the man born in 1761 who taught in Boston’s Writing Schools and not his namesake father.

Both Lillie and Vinal were tried in the spring of 1802. For his attorney Lillie had George Blake, who had published essays about the case in the Independent Chronicle and had just been appointed U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts. Vinal had Harrison Gray Otis and John Quincy Adams. That team argued that handwriting wasn’t legal evidence—and indeed it wasn’t yet. So Vinal was acquitted for lack of proof.

There was no question, however, that Lillie’s name appeared on the Constitutional Telegraphe’s masthead. And the U.S. hadn’t established our current understanding of protected political speech. So Lillie was convicted of libel and sentenced to three months in jail and a $100 fine. At the end of March 1802, nineteen days into his term, he published an angry account of the proceedings from his cell and announced he was giving up the newspaper.

A printer named John Moseley Dunham took over, soon changing the paper’s title to the Republican Gazetteer. (The fad for Telelgraphe newspapers had passed.) Later it got new owners and became the Democrat. Dunham went into the ink business before moving to Ohio.

On 12 Oct 1803 Lillie wrote to President Jefferson, enclosing a bill for $4.50 for sending him the Constitutional Telegraphe for six months (October 1801 to April 1802). He explained:

When I was Editor of the News Paper called the Constitutional Telegraphe, I sent it on to you, as did Doctr. [Samuel S.] Parker, who was the original Editor of that Paper. I should not at this late period have thought of forwarding my Bill to you, which I have inclosed in this Letter, but for my misfortunes. I have suffered, Sir, very much in consequence of my too ardent zeal in the Republican cause, & am willing, if it should be necessary, still to suffer more, neither the neglect of my Republican friends, nor the contumely or contempt of my federal enemies, will, I trust, ever induce me to alter my political creed. Perhaps my zeal in the Republican cause when I edited the Telegraphe, made me rather imprudent; I certainly meant well, & my concience does not reproach me with an intention, to injure, either directly, or indirectly, the private character of any man. The distress of my family was great during my unfortunate imprisonment for a supposed libel on Judge Dana; at that time, two of my Children lay at the point of Death, particularly, the youngest, who has the honor to bear your name . . .

You no doubt will recollect Sir, that the Constitutl. Telegraphe, was, at one time, the only decided Republican Paper in this State. and if I know my own heart, when I became its Editor, I had no other view, than the good of my native Country, in the promotion of Republicanism in your Election to the Chief magistracy of the nation, and to this single point I exerted with pleasure all the abilities which I possessed, & had the inexpressible satisfaction to find the cause triumphant

Lillie got what look like federal patronage jobs in the U. S. Loan Office and the U.S. Bank. In 1802 he also inherited the “the old Franklin house on Milk Street”—the Benjamin Franklin birthplace—from his uncle. However, he enjoyed that house for only eight years before it burned down. Lillie died at age 76 in 1842.

Which Teacher Said, “War’s Begun”?

Last month Prof. Chris McDonough of the University of the South queried me about how Master John Lovell (shown here) of Boston’s South Latin School announced an end to the school day on 19 Apr 1775. Did he make the announcement in Latin or English or both? I’d noticed a discrepancy, but hadn’t tried to nail it down until then.

Our main (and perhaps only) source for that day in the South Latin School is the recollection that politician Harrison Gray Otis wrote down in 1844, quoted here:

As I entered School I heard the announcement of “deponite libros” and ran home for fear of the regulars.

“Deponite libros [put down your books]” was the traditional way that Latin School masters signaled the end of every school day. It just came early that April morning.

Meanwhile, an alumnus of the Writing School on Queen Street, the newspaper publisher and politician Benjamin Russell, recalled how Master James Carter had closed that school. People recorded Russell’s anecdote in a couple of different ways.

• “Master Carter then said: ‘Boys, war has begun; the school is broken up’,” quoted here.
• “Master Carter said,—‘Boys, the war’s begun, and you may run’,” quoted here.

It makes sense for Carter to give his instructions in English.

In 1880, Henry F. Jenks wrote a history of Boston’s South Latin School that quoted Otis’s letter but added to it the line ”War’s begun and school’s done,” evidently inspired by Russell’s story. I haven’t found those words in any previous publication.

Jenks’s book was prestigious and widespread enough that his formulation went into a lot of reference books and histories over the next few decades. In fact, in 1887 a writer in The Nation responded to a recent article in The Magazine of History with this quibble:

And when Mr. Benjamin tells of “Master Carter,” in Boston, saying to his pupils, “Boys, the war’s begun, and you may run!” is he not thinking of Master John Lovell, of the Public Latin School, whose formula of dismissal was—“War’s begun and school’s done”?

Master Carter had been totally forgotten, and his best line assigned to someone else!

Bathroom Break

As long as I’m writing about schools in Revolutionary Boston, I must address what’s often the most pressing question for children about to enter a new school: Where do I go to the bathroom?

The town schools had sanitary facilities, as shown by this decision by the selectmen on 28 June 1786:

[Selectman] John Andrews appointed to procure flaps for covering the Necessary at Master [James] Carters School, to allay to some measure the disagreable effluvia arising therefrom.

The necessity of going out to the outhouse might have been one reason why in 1789 the town decided that girls shouldn’t go to school in the winter months.

This brings me to a puzzling passage in a reminiscence of the South Latin School just before the war from Harrison Gray Otis:

The boys had a recess of a few minutes to go out in the yard—eight at a time. No leave was asked in words; but there was a short club of a yard in length which was caught up by some boy, round whom those who wished to go out clustered, and were drilled down to eight. The club was then held up near Master’s nose, who nodded assent, when the eight vanished, club in hand. Upon their return there was a rush to seize the club which was placed by the door, and a new conscription of eight formed, and so toties quoties [as often as].

Nothing I’ve read about Boston’s colonial schoolteachers leads me to think they’d tolerate a “recess” in the way we use the term—which in this case would mean eight boys tearing around after each other in the schoolyard, right under the windows where the two teachers were trying to keep more than one or two hundred other boys focused on their lessons.

The “few minutes,” the strict limit of eight, the “rush to seize the club” when the first group was done—all those details seem to fit if Otis was really talking about boys lining up to go to an eight-holer in the yard. Alas, no one wrote down a lot of details about this aspect of life.

(The photo above, titled “North Bloomfield School outhouse,” comes from seancoon via PhotoBucket.)

The South Latin School Closes for War

Yesterday I quoted Harrison Gray Otis on his first day at the South Latin School in Boston. Today I quote his memory of his last day under Master John Lovell, which was the memorable morning of 19 Apr 1775.

In the morning about seven, Percy’s brigade [i.e., the British reinforcement column] was drawn up extending from Scollay’s building [underneath the J.F.K. Federal Building] thro’ Tremont Street nearly to the bottom of the Mall [on the Common], preparing to take up their march for Lexington.

A corporal came up to me as I was going to school, and turned me off to pass down Court St. which I did, and came up School St. to the School-house. It may well be imagined that great agitation prevailed, the British line being drawn up only a few yards from the School-house door.

As I entered School I heard the announcement of “deponite libros” and ran home for fear of the regulars.

Here ended my connection with Mr. Lovell’s administration of the School. Soon afterwards I left town and did not return until after the evacuation by the British in March, 1776.

“Deponite libros”—“Put down the books”—was the way the Latin School masters traditionally ended the school day.

By that evening, Boston was under siege by the provincial militia. On 24 April, Harry Otis’s classmate Joshua Green, Jr., wrote in his diary: “Bro’t my books home from Latin School”—by then it was clear that school would be closed for a while. (Joshua’s diary was published by a descendant in Facts Relating to the History of Groton, Massachusetts, volume 2, of all places.)

Two weeks later, the Greens left Boston to stay with relatives in Westfield. At the same time, the Otis family went to Barnstable, where Harry’s grandfather had a large estate. Most other wealthy families who adhered to the Patriot cause also departed, leaving the Loyalists.

Among those Loyalists were Master Lovell and most of his relations. But his son and assistant, James, was a Patriot. With his wife pregnant and himself suffering from diarrhea, he felt he couldn’t leave. Instead, he arranged for some of their older children to go out, and tried to make himself useful to the provincials. In August, Nathaniel Appleton quoted James Lovell as saying that a return to teaching would be “spending his time idlely schooling the children of a pack of Villains.”

But by that point James Lovell no longer had much choice about where he would spend his time. In late June, after the Battle of Bunker Hill, the military authorities had put him in jail on suspicion of spying for the rebels. Chroniclers say that in March 1776 the Lovell family sailed from Boston to Halifax on one ship, Master John as a passenger and James as a prisoner. The Latin School on School Street reopened later that year without them.

Latin School Entrance Exam

Master John Lovell (shown here, in an image from the 1886 Catalogue of the Boston Public Latin School) didn’t let just any child into Boston’s South Latin School in the decades before the Revolutionary War. No, a child had to be male and white. He had to be old enough—usually seven years old. He had to read English already. And it helped to be prompt.

Harrison Gray Otis (1765-1848) recalled the admission process in a letter he wrote to a Boston newspaper in 1844, which was quoted in the Catalogue:

I perfectly remember the day I entered the School, July, 1773, being then seven years and nine months old.

Immediately after the end of [Harvard] Commencement week, I repaired, according to the rule prescribed for candidates for admission to the lowest form [i.e., the youngest class], to old Master Lovell’s house, situate in School Street, nearly opposite the site of the old School House. I was early on the ground, anticipated only by Mr. John Hubbard, who lived near—it being understood that the boys were to take their places on the form in the same routine that they had presented themselves at the house.

The probationary exercise was reading a few verses of the Bible. Having passed muster in this, I was admitted as second boy in the lowest form.

Throughout their scholastic career, the boys were seated according to their class rank. That made it clear to them and everyone else how well they were performing. Thus, ambitious young Harry Otis kept careful track of his ranking, and might have resented John Hubbard for living close enough to Master Lovell’s house to get an early lead.

In fact, lists kept by Master Lovell and his son and by classmate Joshua Green, Jr., show that Harry was initially ranked third or fourth, behind an unidentified Lovell, Hubbard, and Samuel Taylor. But by the end of 1773 “H. G. Otis” was at the head of his form, and probably stayed there until the Revolution began.

Jonathan Homer (1759-1843) had a different reason to feel miffed about this admission process because the Lovells turned him away, probably for being too young:

At the age of six and a half years, I was sent to master John Lovell’s Latin School. The only requirement was reading well; but, though fully qualified, I was sent away to Master [John] Griffith, a private teacher, to learn to read, write and spell.

Homer returned to the South Latin School the next year, went on to Harvard, and became a minister in Newton, where Homer Street starts (or ends) at the site of his church.

How Pope Night Died and Was Reborn

Pope Night was a—perhaps the—major holiday in colonial Boston, especially for working-class teenaged boys. After 1765 it became an occasion to protest Crown officials, thus squarely within the Revolutionary movement. But by the end of the 1770s it was gone. What happened to this elaborate celebration?

After all, New England anti-Catholicism deeply entrenched, especially after decades of fighting the French. Paranoid Whigs suggested that the French king was behind the whole political conflict (as did paranoid Loyalists). Colonial governments used the threat of a French attack to justify building up their militias. Whigs shared rumors that London was recruiting francophone soldiers in Canada to sweep down on New England. In the Suffolk County Resolves of September 1774, one grievance was how the Quebec Act guaranteed French Catholics the freedom of worship.

But that same year, with Boston's port shut and folks expecting war between the troops and the populace, town fathers leaned on the young men to forgo Pope Night. The times were too serious for such revelry. And then public attitudes and values started to change.

In November 1775, a New England army was preparing to invade Canada, expecting the francophone population would help them drive out the British authorities. Gen. George Washington issued these general orders:

As the Commander in Chief has been apprized of a design form'd for the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the pope—He cannot help expressing his surprise that there should be Officers and Soldiers in this army so void of common sense, as not to see the impropriety of such a step at this Juncture; at a Time when we are solliciting, and have really obtain'd, the friendship and alliance of the people of Canada, whom we ought to consider as Brethren embarked in the same Cause. The defence of the general Liberty of America: At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused; indeed instead of offering the most remote insult, it is our duty to address public thanks to these our Brethren, as to them we are so much indebted for every late happy Success over the common Enemy in Canada.

The holiday enjoyed a last gasp in 1776 and 1777, after the British military had sailed away. It might have been politically awkward to commemorate a British king's deliverance at the same time the town was reviling a British king and celebrating a republic. But in Boston the ideological fuel for Pope Night was anti-Catholicism anyway, and locals could still get into that.

Until the French fleet arrived. In 1778 Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane negotiated an alliance in Paris. Eventually the French king's money, weapons, fleet, and soldiers decided the war. (There were more French soldiers at Yorktown than American.) The ports of Portsmouth, Boston, and Newport were the main conduits for that aid.

With a little trepidation at first, New Englanders welcomed the same Frenchmen they had feared a few years earlier. Rich householders in Boston and Cambridge fêted French officers. In 1783, a priest established Boston's first Catholic parish in what had been the Huguenots' church at the corner of School Street and Cornhill (now Washington Street, where the godawful Irish Famine Memorial now stands). In that atmosphere, it became politically incorrect to revile the Catholic Church—at least as publicly and crudely as the Pope Night gangs had done.

But Pope Night wasn't entirely dead. One element of the celebration survived, and continues in altered form today. That element appears in many reminiscences of the holiday, but overshadowed by the giant effigies and rolling wagons and (in Boston) brawling gangs. A writer in the 9 Nov 1821 Boston Daily Advertiser recalled:

boys in petticoats...swarmed in the streets and ran from house to house with little Popes in their hands, on pieces of board and shingle, the heads of which were carved out of small potatoes.

Harrison Gray Otis told his granddaughter that "A few days before the anniversary [of 5 November], boys ran around to every front door in town ringing handbells and singing:

‘Don’t you hear my little bell
Go chink, chink, chink?
Please to give me a little money
To buy my Pope some drink.’”

This was the local equivalent of English children's "Penny for the guy?"

That part of Pope Night kept going: young boys dressing up and going door to door, asking for coins. So did bonfires; teens didn't need a papal effigy to have fun burning things. In the late 1800s, folklorists spotted children in old New Hampshire towns following these rituals on what they called "Pork Night," with no knowledge of the holiday's older name and roots. These traditions also shifted a few days on the American calendar—from the fifth of November to the last of October.

Corporal Punishment in Colonial Schools

With corporal punishment in schools on the front page of today's New York Times, it seems timely to share more of Harrison Gray Otis's memories of going to the South Latin School on School Street just before and during the Revolution.

The practice of beating children in American schools goes back a long time, and has even been viewed as humorous, as in this Norman Rockwell illustration for Tom Sawyer. But today adults aren't allowed to beat unrelated children in schools in most of the U.S. of A., just as they aren't allowed to beat those children on the streets, in cinemas, or other places where they might be sorely tempted to.

Among the states that allow corporal punishment in schools, the Times reports, it's most common in Mississippi (over 9% of all students struck at some point in 2002), Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Louisiana (fewer than one in forty students). Those six states also rank at #40 or below among American states on national test scores in elementary public education.

Corporal punishment was probably more common in colonial Boston's schools, based on memories of former scholars like Otis. For one thing, beating children was more common across society. Furthermore, with teacher-student ratios of up to 100:1 and lessons quite boring, physical punishment was probably the only way that teachers could keep the boys in order.

Harry Otis and his classmates started at the South Latin School under Master John Lovell (1710-1778) and his "usher," or assistant teacher, who was also his son: James Lovell (1737-1789). The boys called their teacher "Old Gaffer" (behind his back), and looked out for his "ferule"—a wooden stick like a thick ruler without any of those distracting measurements etched on it. Otis wrote:

Gaffer’s ferule was a short, stubbed, greasy-looking article, which, when not in use, served him as a stick of sugar candy. The lightest punishment was one clap, the severest four—the most usual, two, one on each hand. The inflictions of the old gentleman were not much dreaded; his ferule seemed to be a mere continuation of his arm, of which the centre of motion was the shoulder. It descended altogether with a whack, and there was the end of it, after blowing the fingers.

But Master James’s fashion of wielding his weapon was another affair. He had a gymnastic style of flourishing, altogether unique—a mode of administering out experimentum ferules that was absolutely terrific. He never punished in Gaffer’s presence, but whenever the old gentleman withdrew, all began to contemplate the "day’s disaster," and to tremble, not when he "frown’d," for he did not frown, nor was he an ill-tempered person, but rather smiled sardonically, as if preparing for a pugilistic effort, and the execution as nearly resembled the motion of a flail in the hands of an expert thrasher as could be acquired by long practice.

Otis also told his granddaughter about an "old Latin School ditty" that linked the punishments to the grammar lessons:

Hic haec hoc, strap him to the block;
Noun and pronoun, pull his breeches down,
Verb and participle, the rod begins to whistle.

Another Latin School alumnus recalled how another boy "pronounced the P in P-tolemy, and the younger Lovell rapped him over the head with a heavy ferule.” But the boys also told each other that the town's Writing School masters beat their pupils just as much.

TOMORROW: How effective was this pedagogical method?

Schoolyard Insults from Revolutionary Boston

The recent kerfuffle over a book distributed to every kindergartner in Maine, discussed on Oz and Ends, reminded me of the deep roots of the American tradition of insulting schoolyard rhymes.

In an 1844 letter, Harrison Gray Otis (1765-1848), the Federalist politician who kept building mansions so Historic New England would have something to catalogue, recalled one such rhyme from his time at the South Latin School, ancestor of today's Boston Latin School.

The nearest School to the Latin School was on the east end of Scollay’s building, forming a part thereof, and since cut off to open the communication from Tremont St. to Cornhill. It was a public Town School, called Proctor’s School though in my time kept by Master Carter. The boys of the two Schools often met in Tremont St. and dealt out their gibes in passing each other—for example:—

Carter’s boys shut up in a pen
They can’t get out but now and then;
And when they get out they dance about
For fear of Latin School gentlemen.

Here are some annotations for full appreciation of this fine verse.

Scollay's building later gave its name to Scollay Square. It touched what before the Revolution was Queen Street, so the school in the end of that building was also called the Queen Street Writing School. Newly republican Bostonians changed the name of that road to Court Street.

Cornhill was part of the main north-south street through Boston, renamed Washington Street in the early republic.

Town School: Boston's public-education system is the oldest in the U.S. of A., the basis of universal schooling in this country. I estimate that only about half of all eligible boys in Boston actually attended town schools in the pre-Revolutionary period, however.

Carter was James Carter, successor to John Proctor as master of the Queen Street Writing School. He served from 1773 to 1790. The town's three Writing Schools prepared boys for careers in business; the two smaller but better funded Latin Schools sent a few boys each year to college.

boys: Until 1789, only boys were eligible for public education in Boston. The South Latin School poet distinguishes between the "boys" of the Writing School and the "gentlemen" of his own institution, thus cleverly implying that the writing scholars were both less mature and less genteel.

pen: The main lessons at the town's three Writing Schools were in calligraphy, and the quill pen was the emblem of a writing scholar. When George Washington visited Boston in 1789, the Writing School boys turned out to greet him, holding their feathered pens proudly. The punning poet turns the word "pen" from an object of pride into a form of confinement, referring not only to the scholars' long hours but perhaps also to their more limited economic prospects.

fear: One of the oddest elements of this schoolboy taunt is that Boston's Latin School boys were greatly outnumbered by Writing School boys, especially as they grew bigger. More than half of each Latin School class dropped out before the end of their studies, many transferring to Writing Schools. So a young South Latin boy chanting this rhyme:

• had a good chance of becoming one of "Carter's boys" himself.
• had a good chance of getting beaten up.

Perhaps class deference, school solidarity, and good nutrition gave the Latin School boys enough advantages that they could hold their own. Perhaps they were at the mercy of the Writing School boys. (Henry Adams certainly described such a situation in a snowball fight between the Latin scholars and all comers on the ante-bellum Common in chapter 3 of his Education.) Whatever the case, through Harry Otis the South Latin School boys got one of their taunts into print while the writing scholars' replies, if any, are lost to us.