“It was covertly agreed to use their concealed arms”

As I quoted yesterday, Ann Swift was convinced that her husband, Samuel Swift, was essentially “murdered” by royal authorities when they wouldn’t let him leave besieged Boston in the summer of 1775.

The Swifts’ grandson Joseph Gardner Swift inherited that idea, telling John Adams in 1824 that Samuel Swift “died in 1775 a Prisoner & Martyr under the Tyrrany of [Gen. Thomas] Gage.”

Over the course of the nineteenth century, that family tradition got into print and became more detailed and dramatic.

When Samuel and Ann Swift’s son, Dr. Foster Swift, died in 1835, the Army and Navy Chronicle’s obituary stated that the attorney had been “a distinguished Whig and martyr to the cause of Freedom while a prisoner in Boston, anno 1775.”

In the 1880s Harrison Ellery, who had married into the Swift family, assembled a genealogy that incorporated the family lore.

Ellery loaned his page proofs to local historian Albert Kendall Teele, so the first public version of the full tale of Samuel Swift, zealous Patriot, appeared in Teele’s History of Milton in 1887:

When General Gage offered the freedom of the town to Bostonians who would deposit their arms in the British Arsenal, Mr. Swift opposed the movement. He presided at a meeting where it was covertly agreed to use their concealed arms, also pitchforks and axes, to assail the soldiers on Boston Common.

This scheme was revealed to General Gage, and Mr. Swift was arrested, he was permitted to visit his family, then at Newton, upon his parole to return at a given time. At the appointed time he returned, against the remonstrance of his friends, and so high an opinion of his character was entertained by General Gage that he was permitted to occupy his own house under surveillance.

From disease induced by confinement, he died a prisoner in his own house, a martyr to freedom’s cause, Aug. 31, 1775. He was interred in his tomb, which had formerly belonged to the father of his first wife, Samuel Tyler, Esq.

Oliver Ayer Roberts relied on that account in his collection of biographies of members of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. It contained some clear errors, such as the date of Samuel Swift’s death and the surname of his first wife.

Ellery published his genealogy in 1890 as part of The Memoirs of Gen. Joseph Gardner Swift. In the introduction to that book Ellery wrote of seeing Joseph G. Swift’s “journal,” but the chapters that follow are a retrospective narrative in the general’s voice. I can’t tell if Gen. Swift actually wrote out a memoir and Ellery called it a journal, or if Ellery himself adapted a real journal into narrative form. Either way, that’s the source on Gen. Swift’s one meeting with John Adams that I quoted back here.

The genealogical section of that volume offered Ellery’s rendering of the Samuel Swift legend:

President John Adams told his distinguished grandson, General Swift, while on a visit to his seat in Quincy in 1817 with President [James] Monroe, that Samuel Swift was a good man and a generous lawyer, and was called the widows’ friend; that he was a firm Whig whose memory the State ought to perpetuate. The same sentiments Mr. Adams expressed in a letter to William Wirt, of Virginia.

Mr. Adams also said it was owing to the zeal and resolution of Samuel Swift that caused many Bostonians to secrete their arms when Gov. Gage offered the town freedom if arms were brought in to the arsenal; and that Mr. Swift presided at a freemason’s meeting where it was covertly agreed to use the arms concealed, and, in addition, pitchforks and axes, if need be, to assail the soldiery on the common; which scheme was betrayed to Gage, causing the imprisonment of Swift and others.

This imprisonment brought on disease from which he never recovered, and he died August 30, 1775, aged 60 years, as President Adams said, “a martyr to freedom’s cause.” His remains were interred in the tomb in the stone chapel ground that had belonged to Samuel Tylly, Esq., the father of his first wife.

It’s certainly a dramatic picture, sixty-year-old lawyer Samuel Swift organizing an uprising against the British troops using guns, pitchforks, and axes. And the family’s stated source for that story was none other than President John Adams.

COMING UP: What’s wrong with this picture.

“My opinion of the merits of that Whig”

In 1817, Gen. Joseph G. Swift (1783–1865), the U.S. Army’s chief of engineers, accompanied the new President, James Monroe, on a tour of fortifications and battlefields in the northern states.

On 8 July, Monroe and his company stopped in Quincy to meet former President John Adams (who was also the father of Monroe’s secretary of state).

Gen. Swift wrote in his memoir:

Mr. Adams at first mistook me for the son of his brother lawyer, Samuel Swift, and poured out his commendation, saying: “I have written to Mr. [William] Wirt my opinion of the merits of that Whig, who fell a martyr to the fury of [Thomas] Gage.”

I replied: “It was my grandfather, and you gave me my cadet’s warrant eighteen years ago,” upon which he was pleased to subjoin some civil commendation. The conversation naturally attracted the attention of the whole dinner party; and it was a scene of deep interest to hear the old man scan the days of his life in Congress, when he nominated Washington, etc.

In fact, Thomas Johnson of Maryland was the Continental Congress delegate who had nominated George Washington to be commander-in-chief. Adams told a great story about making that nomination, but the Congress’s records contradict it.

As for the mention of William Wirt, in this period Adams was on a campaign to undercut Wirt’s biography of Patrick Henry, which he felt gave too much credit for the Revolution to that legislator and Virginians as a whole. (Awkwardly enough, Wirt was President Monroe’s attorney general.) The former President was writing long letters to other authors laying out his version of history and encouraging William Tudor, Jr., son of his former law clerk, to write a biography of James Otis, Jr.

Seven years later, having retired from the army to become a civil engineer, Swift wrote back to the former President about his family:

When I had the honour to be at your residence in 1817 (while accompanying President Monroe) I was gratified by some account which you were pleased to give me, of my Grand Father Samuel Swift, formerly a Lawyer of Boston, whom you designated as a friend of yours & as the “Widows friend”—& whose name you had before mentioned, in some Printed Letters, as a distinguished Whig:—It is natural &, with just views, it is commendable in man to reflect with interest upon the conduct & character of his progenitor.—

I have heard that my G. Father was a zealous & a effective Whig—that he died in 1775 a Prisoner & Martyr under the Tyrrany of Gage,—that he was foremost & useful in Public Meetings in urging his fellow Citizens to resist oppression & especially to resist Gages call to the Bostonians to deliver up their Arms:—The premature death of their G Father led to the dilapidation & final loss of his Property while Boston was a Garrison,—This then Young family driven to various parts of this Country & made Poor, were dispersed, & thus we know little of this G. Father except from tradition.—

If you will at a leisure moment cause an amanuensis to note to me any information of the Character & Conduct of Saml. Swift & especially as touching the great struggle for Independence, it will be received as a distinguished favour,—One of my objects in taking this liberty is to be Enabled to tell my Six Sons what share their progenitor may have had in contributing to bring about that War which made a nation Free & Happy!—

If Adams wrote back over the next two years before his death, that letter doesn’t survive. But Swift’s letter certainly lays out the image of his grandfather that he wanted to confirm.

TOMORROW: Swift family sources.

“I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within”

This episode of the Timesuck podcast, this History Daily article, this Cracked article, this 13th Floor article, and this History Extra roundup of Presidential trivia all tell the same story.

That story says President John Quincy Adams was convinced by a man named John Cleves Symmes, Jr., that Earth is hollow, that one can go inside the planet through holes at the poles, and that people are living inside. Allegedly Adams was so taken with this idea that he championed a federal expedition to Antarctica to explore the inner Earth, only to be stymied by losing the election of 1828.

All these web resources also use the term “mole people” for the inhabitants of the hollow Earth, sometimes in quotation marks, even though that phrase isn’t documented before the end of the nineteenth century.

And none points to sources that link President Adams’s statements or actions to Symmes’s vision of a hollow, populated Earth.

You can see where this is going. I’m here to tell you this story is false. Yes, I’m not much fun—but neither, most of the time, was John Quincy Adams.

So far the best online treatment of this story that I’ve found is this Reddit posting by smileyman. So my challenge is to add something interesting to what that says.

First of all, John Cleves Symmes, Jr. (1780-1829, shown above), really did believe in a populated hollow Earth. He was born in New Jersey, named after an uncle who commanded a New Jersey militia regiment in the Revolution and represented the state in the Continental Congress during its low point of the mid-1780s. The elder Symmes was also an early American settler of the Ohio Territory.

The younger Symmes joined the U.S. Army in 1802 and continued to serve through the War of 1812. He then moved to St. Louis as a trader. That business failed in the 1819 Panic, but by then Symmes had a bright new idea to take up his time. In April 1818 he published a circular letter that said:

St. Louis, Missouri Territory, North America,
April 10, A. D. 1818.

To all the World:
I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.

Jno. Cleves Symmes,
Of Ohio, late Captain of Infantry.

N. B. I have ready for the press a treatise on the principles of matter, wherein I show proofs of the above positions, account for various phenomena, and disclose Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin’s “Golden Secret [of wind patterns].” . . .

I ask one hundred, brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia, in the fall season, with reindeer and sleighs, on the ice of the frozen sea; I engage we find a warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men, on reaching one degree northward of latitude 82; we will return in the succeeding spring.

Symmes doesn’t seem to have come to the theory through actual evidence about Earth. He denied having read any previous theories along the same lines. (Edmund Halley had proposed one such theory to the Royal Society, and the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather later mentioned it in passing.) He said instead that he was inspired by seeing the rings of Saturn, though I’m not sure how exactly those were supposed to prove a hollow planet. But Symmes had his idea and insisted it was correct.

Remarkably, the circular letter didn’t attract the hundred companions that Symmes asked for. In 1820 he launched a speaking tour to spread his idea and drum up support. Two years later, Symmes petitioned the U.S. Congress to fund his expedition, but it declined to take up the proposal. The same thing happened the following year. Then the Ohio legislature turned down the opportunity in 1824.

Meanwhile, John Quincy Adams was serving James Monroe as Secretary of State.

TOMORROW: A proposal to the President.

(My thanks to Stephanie McKellop for alerting me to the story of Adams and the “mole people.”)

A Presidential Plodder

Plodding Through the Presidents is Howard Dorre’s ongoing blog about reading Presidential biographies, starting with Flexner’s Washington: The Indispensable Man and getting as far as, well, Andrew Jackson. So the important ones, really.

Dorre has a delightfully irreverent attitude toward this process, as shown in his discussion of Harlow Giles Unger’s treatment of two successive chief executives:

The Monroe Doctrine, in Unger’s words, “declared an end to foreign colonization in the New World and warned the Old World that the United States would no longer tolerate foreign incursions in the Americas.” It basically told Europe to stay out of the western hemisphere, and it still has impacts on our foreign policy today.

It’s widely known that [James] Monroe’s Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, had a major role in authoring the policy as part of Monroe’s annual address to Congress in 1823. But Unger didn’t see it that way. He wrote:

“Contrary to the writings of some historians, Monroe’s proclamation was entirely his own – not Adams’s. The assertion that Adams authored the “Monroe Doctrine” is not only untrue; it borders on the ludicrous by implying that President Monroe was little more than a puppet manipulated by another’s hand. Such assertions show little insight into the presidency itself and the type of man who aspires to and assumes that office; indeed, they denigrate the character, the intellect, the intensity, and the sense of power that drive American presidents.”

Not only does he make a wildly contrarian claim, but he also shits all over most historians in the process. And his main point seems to be that only a president could write the Monroe Doctrine – certainly not John Quincy Adams, even though he became president just a year later.

Three years after publishing his Monroe biography, Unger released John Quincy Adams. His thoughts on the Monroe Doctrine’s authorship seem to have magically evolved, as if he cared more about lionizing whoever his subject was than being consistent.

Unger wrote that JQA “wrote the core provision of the Monroe Doctrine” which the president included “verbatim, in his annual message.” He went on to say that “Monroe embraced John Quincy’s political philosophy and formally closed the Western Hemisphere to further colonization.”

So, according to Unger, it’s ludicrous to think John Quincy Adams “authored” the Monroe Doctrine but he did “write” it. And even though it was based on Adams’s own political philosophy that Monroe embraced, the doctrine was entirely Monroe’s and not Adams’s.

There are also postings drawn from other books, inquiries into Presidential myths and mysteries, and personal history, such as how Dorre’s interest in serial killers spurred him to investigate J. Q. Adams’s childhood reading.

Reading about Rick Beyer’s Rivals unto Death

Rivals Unto Death: Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr is a retelling of the political rivalry that led to the most famous fatal duel in U.S. history. It comes from Rick Beyer, an author and filmmaker from Lexington.

Rick’s behind the “First Shot” film, the “In Their Own Words” pageant, the annual Lexington tea burning, and more to come. I invited him to answer a few questions about his new book.

What was the genesis of Rivals Unto Death? How did you come to write it?

I have Lin Manuel Miranda to thank for that! With the musical Hamilton getting hotter and hotter, the editor who shepherded my first book into print invited me to write about the rivalry. The idea was to squeeze the whole story into a compact and accessible volume. I’ve long been fascinated by this tale, and I jumped at the chance. The publisher had a hurry-up deadline, but I had an ace up my sleeve. A dozen years ago I researched the duel for a History Channel documentary I was supposed to produce. At the last minute Richard Dreyfuss decided he wanted to produce that show, and for some strange reason they went with him instead of me! That research stood me in good stead for this project.

What were the biggest surprises for you as you researched and wrote the book?

To start with, Burr saved Hamilton from capture during the Revolution, and may well have saved his life later on when he extricated Hamilton from what was shaping up as a duel with future President James Monroe. You won’t find that in most history books—or the musical! And there are many more fascinating and little known connections. The two men switched back and forth from allies to adversaries multiple times…so tracing their relationship makes for a fascinating journey.

I was also surprised by the degree to which I revised my opinion of Aaron Burr. He’s not quite the cardboard cutout villain history has portrayed. He was a war hero, a feminist, an abolitionist, a supporter of immigrant rights (far more so than immigrant Alexander Hamilton), a patron of the arts, a loving husband and father, and a brilliant innovator in political campaigning. All and all a fascinating character.

The bulk of Rivals Unto Death is about the tangled legal, commercial, and political world of New York in the early republic. How did you get a handle on that topic?

Important as it was, NYC was tiny by modern standards. When Burr and Hamilton started practicing law there in 1783, there only about two dozen lawyers in the entire city. Today you can find that many in a Wall Street Starbucks! A great source on the crowded cockpit that was early 19th-century New York is the Pulitzer Prize-winning history Gotham by ‎Mike Wallace‎ and Edwin G. Burrows.

One of the things that history tends to paper over is the passion and partisanship of the time. The founders weren’t marble statues; they were flesh and blood men who were often at each other’s throats. So many events and controversies of the late 18th and early 19th centuries seem remarkably familiar today. Street protests ending in violence, hysterical predictions about presidential candidates, accusations of vote fraud, anger over immigration and deficits—it was all there in the time of Hamilton and Burr, and it forms the context for their rivalry. A great source of insights on that score is the website founders.archives.gov, a searchable archive with more than 175,000 pieces of correspondence and other writings from the first five presidents and Alexander Hamilton. Thank you, National Archives!

How did you structure your narrative for readers?

This is a murder mystery in which there is no doubt about who pulled the trigger, but the why is endlessly fascinating. The book opens one week before the duel, at New York’s Fraunces Tavern, where Hamilton and Burr sat side by side at a convivial July 4th dinner. No one else there knew that they already set in motion their duel, and they gave no hint of it that night. How could they share an enjoyable evening when they were dead set on shooting it out? What in the world was going on? That’s what I wanted to explore, and the book goes back to the time of the revolution in a search for clues.

I structured the book as a countdown to the duel. The chapters literally count down from ten to one, and at the beginning of each chapter I note how much time is left until the duel. Burr and Hamilton are on a slow-motion collision course, and as the years tick down, the causes of their ultimate confrontation become clear.

You write that the roots of the rivalry between Hamilton and Burr lay in the two men’s relationships to George Washington. Tell us more about those relationships and how they steered the men.

Hamilton and Burr were each offered a chance to serve on Washington’s staff during the Revolution, Burr when he was twenty, Hamilton when he was twenty-two. Burr lasted ten days and left with a bitter taste in his mouth, harboring a lifelong enmity toward Washington. Hamilton stayed four years, becoming Washington’s most important aide and his lifelong protégé. Over the years, this fundamental divide over Washington shaped their politics and soured their relationship.

Burr challenged Hamilton to their duel after reading a reference to “a still more despicable opinion which General Hamilton had expressed.” Do you have any suspicions about what that opinion was?

Gore Vidal posited that Hamilton accused Burr of having an incestuous relationship with his daughter, but I think that is just a novelist’s invention. Hamilton had written privately to people about his fear that Burr might be secretly scheming to create a new country out of New England and New York, largely for the sake of his own personal aggrandizement. I suspect his “more despicable opinion” involved some variation on that theme. As an immigrant who had adopted America as his own nation, Hamilton was unalterably opposed to breaking apart the nation he had worked so hard to create. “I view the suggestion of such a project with horror,” he once wrote. It seems like just the kind of thing he would expound on at a political dinner not knowing it would eventually bring about about his own demise.

Thanks, Rick! If you have your own questions about Hamilton and Burr, you can ask Rick at these upcoming appearances:

• Thursday, 23 February, 7:00 P.M. at Brookline Booksmith
• Sunday, 26 February, 2:00 P.M., at Lexington Depot for the Lexington Historical Society
• Wednesday, 15 March, 7:00 P.M., at Beverly Historical Society
• Thursday, 6 April, 7:00 P.M. at Porter Square Books

Paine, Prisons, and Poetry

Yesterday’s posting left Thomas Paine and Robert Smyth, former baronet, in Revolutionary Paris at the end of 1792. Both Englishmen by birth, they were enthusiastic supporters of the French Revolution.

Unfortunately for them, in February 1793 the French government declared war on Britain, as well as the Dutch Republic. It was already at war with Austria, Prussia, Brunswick, Sardinia, Spain, and Portugal, and perhaps some smaller Germany and Italian states I haven’t tracked. So there were rather few foreigners in France who didn’t fall under suspicion.

The Jacobin faction took power in June 1793 and began to arrest lots of people. Sometime in the fall of 1793, Smyth was confined at the College des Écossais or “Scots College,” shown above. While there he became friends with a couple of British teenagers: James Millingen (1774-1845), then working for a bank and later a respected archeologist, and Charles Este (1775-1841), son of a prominent London clergyman and theater critic who had come to France in 1789 to study medicine.

In December the Jacobin government stripped Paine of his seat in the National Convention because he was a foreigner. He was soon in prison as well, and came close to being executed. The American minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, didn’t intervene for him as a citizen of the U.S. of A., and Paine later blamed President George Washington for that neglect.

While in jail, Paine received some encouraging letters in English from a woman who signed her notes “From a Little Corner in the World.” Paine replied as “the Castle in the Air.” He may have fallen in love with his correspondent. At the very least he sent back poetry that that included verses like these:

I gazed and I envied with painful goodwill,
And grew tired of my seat in the air;
When all of a sudden my Castle stood still,
As if some attraction was there.

Like a lark from the sky it came fluttering down,
And placed me exactly in view,
When whom should I meet in this charming retreat,
This corner of calmness, but You.

Also, this poetic argument for why he didn’t believe in the Old Testament God:

Their country often he laid waste,
Their little ones he slew;
But I have shown a better taste
In choosing Y, O, U.

That latter verse was published in Jack Fruchtman, Jr.’s Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom.

After Maximilian de Robespierre and the radical Jacobins were deposed in July 1794, the French government started to treat foreigners more gently. Smyth petitioned the government for release in September. A new American diplomat, James Monroe, got Paine out of jail in November.

Only then, according to the standard biographies, did Paine discover that the lady writing to him was Smyth’s wife Charlotte. Most authors don’t believe that she and Paine had a sexual affair, even if she was calling herself a “Little Corner” while he was a “Castle,” and even if he wrote to her more passionately than to practically anyone else.

Paine remained on excellent terms with Robert Smyth. In one of his published essays he referred to the man as “a very intimate friend of mine.” He lived with the Smyths in 1796 while recuperating from his months in prison. As France’s war with Britain raged on, Paine wrote letters that allowed Robert Smyth to return home before he was arrested again. He recommended Smyth to American businessmen. Paine even sent Smyth another poem about love:

’T is that delightsome transport we can feel
Which painters cannot paint, nor words reveal.
Nor any art we know of can conceal.

And so on.

After Britain and France signed the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, Robert Smyth returned to Paris to restart his business. But he died in April of that year, “of a sudden attack of gout” according to the British historian John Goldworth Alger. Despite his father’s 1792 renunciation of all hereditary titles, eighteen-year-old George-Henry Smyth took up the family baronetcy.

TOMORROW: The Smyths and the Estes.

The 2013 Wall Calendar Contest

I find myself with an extra Colonial Williamsburg wall calendar for 2013. It’s about 8 inches by 11, with a color photograph for each month and notations of major holidays and events at the museum. (Colonial Williamsburg sells a larger wall calendar; I think this one is printed as a promotion.)

Back in 2010, I ran a contest to give away an extra copy of a book, so I decided to do the same with this wall calendar.

Since we’re finishing an election year, here are five questions about early American politics.

1) What office(s) in the government of the United States of America did John Hancock hold and when?

2) Gouverneur Morris was never a governor, alas, but he was a member of the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the U.S. Senate. From where?

3) In 1789 Alexander Hamilton took office as the first Secretary of the Treasury, but he was ineligible to be President. Why?

4) What Pennsylvanian did George Washington appoint as Postmaster General?

5) Of the first seven Presidents of the United States, which men had publicly acknowledged biological sons as heirs when they were in office?

If you want to play along, put your best answers in a comment on this posting by Friday, 7 December, at 8:00 P.M., Boston time. I’ll screen all those Blogspot/Blogger comments so they’ll remain hidden until. Include a name or unique pseudonym with your answers. (If you comment on Facebook, your answers will be visible to some people—but I still don’t understand how to make Facebook work.)

Since we’re in the age of Wikipedia and Google, I won’t be surprised to see more than one Boston 1775 reader respond with a complete set of correct answers. In that case, I’ll number all the comments that contain the correct answers and pick one winner randomly. After posting the answers here on Saturday, I’ll contact that winner by email to get a surface-mail address for the calendar. Hey, it worked once before!

“And extraordinary indeed it was!”

The Houghton Library at Harvard has devoted a blog posting to a notable item among its rare books: George Washington’s copy of A View of the Conduct of the Executive in the Foreign Affairs of the United States, published by James Monroe in 1797.

Monroe had been the U.S. of A.’s minister in Paris in the mid-1790s. Meanwhile, John Jay was in London negotiating a treaty that moved the country closer to Great Britain. Monroe disliked that policy, resigned, and wrote this book criticizing not only the treaty but “the Executive” who had brought it about—who was, of course, President Washington.

What’s most remarkable about this copy of the book is that Washington wrote notes in his copy criticizing the young diplomat back. As the library describes:

The tone of Washington’s response is obvious from Monroe’s very first sentence. Monroe writes “In the month of May, 1794, I was invited by the President of the United States, through the Secretary of State [Edmund Randolph], to accept the office of minister plenipotentiary to the French Republic.” Washington ripostes “After several attempts had failed to obtain a more eligible character.” . . .

Due to the fragility of the paper and the corrosive ink Washington used to write his notes, this volume is restricted from use. Fortunately, Washington’s notes were transcribed, in a late 19th century edition of his works that is freely accessible online.

Many of Washington’s comments take the form of questions, a polite way of disagreeing. Every so often he cites letters of particular dates. But sometimes he responds directly. “Such was my conduct upon the above occasion, and such the motives of it,” Monroe writes, and his old boss adds, “And extraordinary indeed it was!”

TOMORROW: More news of Washington’s books.

Townsend-Warner History Prize—Play Along at Home!

The St. Paul’s Preparatory School (Colet Court) in London won this year’s Townsend-Warner competition for historical knowledge. As this webpage explains, this test has been an unofficial part of upper-class English private education since the late 1800s.

The questions now take this form:

13. Explain the link between each of the following:
a) Conwy, Beaumaris, Caernarfon
b) John Balliol, John Comyn, Robert Bruce
c) Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt
d) Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck, Edmund de la Pole
e) Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan
f) Jane Seymour, Catherine Howard, Katherine Parr
g) John Adams, James Madison, James Monroe
h) Osborne House, Sandringham, Balmoral
i) Winston Churchill, Dardanelles, Suvla Bay

And this:

1. Write fully on TWO of the following: . . .
The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763)
Canals in the 18th Century in England
The Agricultural Revolution in the 18th Century
The Boston Tea Party (1773)
The Settlement of Australia (1788 on)
The achievements of Horatio Nelson (1758-1805)

I’ve chosen examples that touch a little on eighteenth-century American history, but those are naturally just a small part of the test. Britain has so much more history than the U.S. of A. Of course, that national outlook can hinder as well as help: one of the most common mistakes in the quoted quizzes was to credit Lincoln’s “house divided” speech to the English abolitionist William Wilberforce.

Why do I mention all this? Because Godson’s Brother placed 47th out of 700 scholars who took the test this academic year and thus helped St. Paul’s Prep School to its win. While he wasn’t quite in the Top 30 individual performances, most of the students who took the test were ages 12 or 13 and he was only 10. He had another birthday last month, and is raring for another go next year. Everyone is, of course, very proud of him and his teammates.

(Pictured above: One of the individuals mentioned in this posting. Click on the image to see who.)

Three Early American Studies

Three items in the latest issue of Early American Studies caught my eye last month because of their Revolutionary-era content:

The Wheatleyan Moment
David Waldstreicher
Despite the recent profusion of interest in Phillis Wheatley by literary scholars, who increasingly recognize her artfulness and her challenge to slavery, she has not been seen as a political actor in real time. This essay argues for her canny timing and careful interventions in the politics of slavery from 1772 to 1784. The “Mansfieldian Moment” in the politics of slavery can also be called a Wheatleyan Moment, when leading whites were forced to respond to the art and politics of slaves and their allies. Wheatley garnered specific and consequential responses from Lord Dartmouth, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. A more interactive approach to the politics of slavery explains much about Wheatley strategies as well as the range of specific responses to antislavery among participants in the American Revolution—responses which cannot be ascribed merely to racism or the lack thereof.

Rattlesnakes in the Garden: The Fascinating Serpents of the Early, Edenic Republic
Zachary McLeod Hutchins
This essay considers the various ways in which writers and visual artists deployed the rattlesnake in order to advance and, later, destabilize nationalist agendas between the French and Indian War and the Civil War. During the intervening century the rattlesnake, with its powers of fascination, evolved into a multifaceted symbol used to represent a wide range of ideas: British colonial unity; American national identity; (white) fears of interracial conflict and miscegenation; and the lingering belief that original sin represented a serious threat to a secular republic whose well-being could only be insured by the virtuous behavior of its citizens. Between 1751 and 1861 visual artists like Benjamin Franklin and Charles Gadsden, together with writers such as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur and Oliver Wendell Holmes, made the rattlesnake a symbol of the national transition from imported art to endogenous culture, from indigenous inhabitants to European emigrants, from innocence to experience.

(Some Boston 1775 discussion of the rattlesnake starts here.)

The First Gerrymander? Patrick Henry, James Madison, James Monroe, and Virginia’s 1788 Congressional Districting
Thomas Rogers Hunter
While the term gerrymander was coined following Massachusetts’ state Senate districting in 1812, many scholars have posited that it was actually Patrick Henry who first practiced this art, by designing an unnatural district that would ensure rival James Madison’s defeat in Virginia’s first Congressional elections in early 1789. Historians have ample evidence to buttress such claims, for numerous Founding Fathers bitterly complained that Henry was going out of his way to design a district for Madison’s defeat. Through hard and smart campaigning, however, Madison managed to defeat his opponent James Monroe — thus marking the only Congressional election in American history pitting two future Presidents. This article closely examines Virginia’s 1788 Congressional districting, and finds that contrary to the accepted wisdom, “ingenious and artificial combinations” were not used to design Madison’s district, for it was composed of a compact group of whole counties entirely within the Piedmont region, and bounded on all sides by natural geographic features; Madison’s true problem was not the district’s formulation, but that he lived in an area that was predominantly Anti-Federalist. In fact, Virginia’s entire 1788 districting scheme shows no marks of partisan purpose, for it was both fair politically, and one of the most geographically logical plans in all of American history.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll share some thoughts on Phillis Wheatley and her reception in pre-Revolutionary Boston.