Stamp Masters in the Deep South

In South Carolina, two men received appointments under the Stamp Act: George Saxby as inspector of the stamps and Caleb Lloyd as distributor.

This appears to have been a way to spread the patronage around. But official news of those appointments didn’t arrive in Charleston until late October 1765, causing some confusion.

On 19 October, Charlestonians—“2000 souls” in all, according to the newspaper—went through the ritual of hanging the stamp master in effigy, even though they weren’t sure who that man was.

Before burning that effigy on the green, the crowd visited a house owned by Saxby and broke some windows. Later the crowd went to Lloyd’s home, demanding to know if he was going to execute the law. The next day, a Sunday, Lloyd posted a notice at St. Michael’s church in the center of town insisting he hadn’t received a commission—which might have been true, but he probably knew one was on its way.

Over the next couple of days, crowds went to other sites, seeking the stamped paper. On the night of 23 October, about seventy men pushed their way into the mansion of Henry Laurens. He hadn’t supported the Stamp Act or sought an appointment under it, but he’d advocated following the law instead of defying it. The crowd demanded the freedom to search Laurens’s house for the stamps. While those men did no more than 15 shillings’ worth of damage, they frightened Laurens’s pregnant wife badly.

The next morning, Lt. Gov. William Bull finally announced that the stamps had arrived back on 20 October and were “lodged in Fort Johnson, till it should be necessary for his Majesty’s service to remove them from thence.” Lloyd was probably in that island fort as well, and Saxby joined him after arriving on another ship from Britain on 26 October.

Two days later Saxby and Lloyd wrote from Fort Johnson with a promise to do nothing to enforce the Stamp Act. That was enough for Charleston’s mercantile and political leaders to promise them safety. The two men came into town, went through the ritual of publicly repeating their promise to the crowd, and were escorted to a tavern with music and flags for “some refreshment.”

A similar situation in North Carolina played out as farce. On 19 and 31 October, Dr. William Houston was hanged in effigy as the colony’s stamp agent in Wilmington, New Bern, and one of the towns that became Fayetteville. Meanwhile, Houston reportedly had no idea he’d been appointed to the job.

Dr. Houston traveled from his plantation to Wilmington to meet with Gov. William Tryon on 16 November, only to be greeted by a crowd of three to four hundred men. They demanded that the physician resign his appointment, which he did, and then repeat that resignation in writing at the courthouse. As for the stamps, they didn’t arrive in the colony until 28 November, nearly a month after the law was supposed to take effect.

Likewise, as of 1 November, the small colony of Georgia had seen no stamped paper, no stamp master, and no anti-Stamp Act demonstrations.

The Declaration of Independence and Big Capital

The folks at Seth Kaller, Inc., and the Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries sent a report on a big sale:

The rare first newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence we auctioned yesterday brought $632,500—a record price for any historic newspaper. . . . The July 6, 1776, edition of the Pennsylvania Evening Post was only the second printing of the Declaration in any form. The copy sold yesterday is one of just four issues of the Post’s Declaration printing that have appeared at auction in the past 50 years.

The purchaser was David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group. Six years ago he bought an antique copy of the Magna Carta, then loaned it to the U.S. National Archives while funding a large display facility for the agency. He’s also made multimillion-dollar gifts to benefit Monticello and the Washington Monument.

In its booklet announcing this sale, with good photographs of the newspaper for sale and other 1776 printings of the Declaration, the firm noted the typographical differences between Benjamin Towne’s Post printing and the earlier official broadside issued for the Continental Congress by Pennsylvania Packet printer John Dunlap (shown above).

Both versions capitalize the beginning of sentences, proper names, and words such as “God,” “King,” “Prince,” etc., but excluding those, Dunlap capitalzes an additional 291 internal words (within sentences). However, Towne capitalizes only two internal words.

This observation led us to compare two June 1776 working drafts of the Declaration, one in Thomas Jefferson’s hand, and one copied from Jefferson’s draft by John Adams. The Adams copy follows the same pattern, with Adams capitalizing many words that Jefferson has in lower case.

The firm suggests that there might have been multiple manuscripts of the Declaration in July 1776, one used by Dunlap and one by Towne—one perhaps from Adams and one from Jefferson.

I think this analysis is missing an important factor. Almost all the words capitalized in Dunlap’s broadside but not in Towne’s newspaper are nouns. The rest are adjectives preceding important nouns. In eighteenth-century English it was still common, though old-fashioned, to capitalize all nouns and noun phrases (while capitalizing and italicizing proper nouns). Dunlap followed that rule of style for his Declaration broadside; Towne chose the more modern style for his newspaper reprint. The differences between the two printings could thus arise from each printer applying a systematic rule to the same text.

Was Dunlap guided by John Adams’s style? I doubt that since Dunlap also published Adams’s Thoughts on Government in 1776, and that pamphlet didn’t capitalize most nouns, as this careful transcript shows. (I also checked images of the pamphlet, but I can’t link to them.) Adams did capitalize many nouns, though irregularly, in the letters leading up to that pamphlet. Thus, I conclude:

• Dunlap didn’t conform to Adams’s capitalization when setting his manuscripts.
• Dunlap didn’t always capitalize all nouns, even in serious publications like Adams’s pamphlet.

Dunlap also didn’t capitalize most nouns in his newspaper, and neither did Towne.

On the other hand, when the Congress issued a broadside on 10 Dec 1776 (about “the Army that now threatens to take Poessession of this City”), Dunlap reached into the capital case again. So it appears that someone important at the Congress in 1776 liked Big Letters for its major announcements.

I haven’t done a systematic survey, but I did see that when the Congress issued its “Address to the Inhabitants of the United States” in May 1778, with Henry Laurens as presiding officer, Dunlap did not use the extra capitals. And John Hancock had gone home.

Seven Founders

Last week guest blogger Ray Raphael laid out a challenge: Choose seven people to follow through the entire American Revolution whose stories, when combined, would tell the whole of that political, military, and social change.

I shared my thoughts, and Boston 1775 readers rose to the challenge with many more suggestions. I also promised to reveal the folks whom Ray chose to follow in Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation, and here they are:

• George Washington. Virginia planter. Delegate to the House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress. Generalissimo. Chairman of the Constitutional Convention. President. You’ve heard of him, right?
• Joseph Plumb Martin. Native of Massachusetts raised in Connecticut. Private soldier from 1775 to 1783, reaching rank of sergeant. Settled in Maine. Published a lively account of his military career, most likely edited from his contemporaneous journals because of all the detail, in 1830.
  
• Mercy Otis Warren. Political writer. Sister of James Otis, Jr., wife of James Warren, friend of John and Abigail Adams. Active Whig, Anti-federalist, and Jeffersonian. The Woman Who Did Everything More Beautifully Than You.
  
• Robert Morris. British-born Pennsylvania merchant. Delegate to the Congress. Financier and financial manager of the U.S. of A., founder of the Bank of North America, lender of large sums to the new republic. Delegate to the Constitutional Convention and Senator. Land speculator and debtor.
  
• Timothy Bigelow. Blacksmith from Worcester. Local political organizer. Colonel of a Massachusetts regiment in the Continental Army. Developer of Montpelier, Vermont. Debtor.
  
• Henry Laurens. South Carolina planter. President of the Continental Congress after John Hancock. Diplomat and eventually one negotiator of the Treaty of Paris. Father of John Laurens. Highest-ranking U.S. government official ever captured by the enemy.
  
• Dr. Thomas Young. A New York country doctor, deist, and poet. Helped found the Albany Sons of Liberty before moving to Boston. Soon one of the town’s top Whig organizers. Fleeing the troops in Boston in September 1774, he joined the Patriots in Rhode Island. Then he moved on to Philadelphia, becoming a leader of the state’s radical party and an army surgeon. Coined the name “Vermont.”

Choosing these particular people allowed Ray to play them off each other. For example, Dr. Young was one of the most radical and democratic politicians of the period while Laurens was fundamentally conservative. Warren strenuously opposed Morris, who in turn distrusted Young.

Washington, Martin, and Bigelow were all in the army at Valley Forge and Yorktown, but, holding different ranks, experienced the war in different ways. Morris and Laurens were very important figures in the civil government while Warren and Young wrote political essays and exercised behind-the-scenes influence. Washington, Morris, and Bigelow all invested in land development after the war; Martin was one of the small farmers who settled on such newly developed land. Only one of these people didn’t live to see Britain acknowledge American independence.