A Poetic Postmistress

I heartily recommend reading this webpage from Carpe Librum books, written to sell a rare book of poems printed in London in 1773.

Setting out the sparse known facts about the author Ann Williams, Brad at Carpe Librum succeeded in both assembling an interesting life story and in selling the book.

A taste:

Unlike the majority of women authors before 1800, Williams was not to the manor born. She appears [to] have hailed from the middling classes, and worked for a living as the post mistress of Gravesend, Kent. To the extent that she is remembered today, Williams is known as an experimental biologist, who corresponded with the Society of Arts (after 1908 the Royal Society of Arts, or RSA), which awarded her twenty guineas in 1778 for her observations on the care and feeding of silkworms. She kept her “little family” of “sweet innocent reptiles” in the dead letter pigeon-hole at the post office.

Williams’s poems address astronomy, Gen. James Wolfe, women’s equality, and many other topics, including one “Written when I was extremely sleepy, yet obliged to attend business.”

Unfortunately, Williams died after a laboratory accident in 1779.

From William Fitzmaurice to the Marquess of Lansdowne

William Fitzmaurice was born in Dublin in 1737 and grew up in rural southern Ireland. His parents were from aristocratic families, though neither had titles. William’s father John was a grandson of the Earl of Kerry through a younger son, and his mother Anne was daughter of a knight and brother of the first Earl of Shelburne.

Both those titles—Earl of Kerry and Earl of Shelburne—were in the Irish peerage. The men holding them were entitled to seats in the Irish House of Lords but not the British House of Lords, which covered England, Wales, and Scotland. Even though people in Great Britain addressed Irish peers by their noble titles, they were technically not British lords. I get the sense that British lords could look down on them a bit, but British commoners were supposed to look up.

In 1743, the year William turned six, his father John Fitzmaurice won a seat in the Irish House of Commons, which he held for the next eight years. At that point, in 1751, the status of the family began to change.

First, William’s uncle the Earl of Shelburne died, leaving his extensive property to John Fitzmaurice on the condition that he adopt his wife’s family name, Petty. John Fitzmaurice accepted the name John Petty Fitzmaurice, in later generations hyphenated as Petty-Fitzmaurice to make the alphabetization easier to remember.

Thus, in 1751 William Fitzmaurice, now in his teens, became William Petty Fitzmaurice.

Later in 1751, the Crown granted John Petty Fitzmaurice two noble titles: Viscount Fitzmaurice and Baron Dunkerton. It was very common for a peer to have subsidiary titles under his main one, moving down the ladder of peerages (duke, marquess, earl, viscount, and baron). Those titles for John Petty Fitzmaurice came in the Irish peerage, and the new viscount became a member of the Irish House of Lords.

Furthermore, in the British aristocratic system, the eldest son and heir of a peer is by courtesy addressed by his father’s second-highest noble title. Thus, in late 1751 William Petty Fitzmaurice became Lord Dunkerton.

In 1753 the Crown gave Viscount Fitzmaurice a promotion within the Irish peerage by recreating his late brother-in-law’s title of Earl of Shelburne for him. He was thenceforth addressed as Lord Shelburne.

That meant that in 1753 young Lord Dunkerton gained the courtesy title of Lord Fitzmaurice. That’s how he was addressed when he went off to Oxford University two years later.

As I said before, the Earl of Shelburne wasn’t entitled to a seat in Great Britain’s House of Lords because he was an Irish peer. Likewise, Lord Fitzmaurice, despite being able to use that courtesy title, wasn’t a British peer. As such, they could stand for seats in the British House of Commons. And that’s what Lord Shelburne did in 1754, winning a seat he held until 1760.

In that year, the Crown gave the Earl of Shelburne a title within the British peerage: Baron of (Chipping) Wycombe. That moved him out of the British House of Commons into the British House of Lords. People continued to call him Lord Shelburne because, even though the British peerage was more powerful than the Irish peerage, an earldom was more prestigious than a barony.

As for Lord Fitzmaurice, after his years at college he joined the British army and served under Gen. James Wolfe in the 20th Regiment of Foot. He saw action at Rochefort, Minden, and Kloster-Kampen. Good service and noble background allowed Fitzmaurice to become a military aide-de-camp to King George III in 1760, with the rank of colonel. Within the army he was thus Col. Fitzmaurice. (This rank was controversial since more senior officers were passed over, but it stuck. Furthermore, even though the man stopped being active in the army, he was by protocol promoted to major general in 1765, lieutenant general in 1772, and general in 1783.)

Also in 1760, Lord Fitzmaurice stood for his father’s seat in the British House of Commons and won. The next year he was elected to the Irish House of Commons representing County Kerry. But before he could take those seats, the situation changed again.

In 1761 the Earl of Shelburne died. Lord Fitzmaurice became the Earl of Shelburne within the Irish peerage and Baron Wycombe within the British peerage. He was no longer eligible to serve in either country’s House of Commons. (His successor in Britain was Col. Isaac Barré, a political protégé and fellow veteran of Gen. Wolfe’s regiment.)

It was as the Earl of Shelburne that the former Lord Fitzmaurice, former Lord Dunkerton, former William Petty Fitzmaurice, born William Fitzmaurice, became a player in British-American politics. Prime Minister George Grenville appointed him First Lord of Trade in 1763, but Shelburne decided to ally with William Pitt and resigned a few months later. When the Marquess of Rockingham and Pitt (now Earl of Chatham) formed a government in 1766, Shelburne became Southern Secretary, but was pushed out after two years.

After 1775, Shelburne sided with Chatham, Rockingham, Barré, and others in opposing Lord North’s war policies. (Lord North was in the House of Commons, not the House of Lords, because his courtesy title came from being son and heir of the Earl of Guilford.) When news of the defeat at Yorktown arrived, Lord North’s ministry fell and was replaced with a government led by the Marquess of Rockingham. Shelburne was named one of two Secretaries of State—the first Home Secretary, in fact.

Then Rockingham died after only a few months, and the Earl of Shelburne became Prime Minister in July 1782. He and his envoys handled most of the negotiations with France, Spain, and the U.S. of A. to create the Treaties of Paris. However, before those documents were signed, Shelburne’s coalition fell because of internal wrangling. Rockingham’s other Secretary of State, Charles James Fox, made an alliance of convenience with Lord North to oust Shelburne in April 1783.

The next year, young William Pitt the Younger took over the Prime Minister’s office. Rather than bring his father’s old ally Shelburne back into government, he arranged for the man to gain a British peerage higher than his Irish one: Marquess of Lansdowne. That was the former William Fitzmaurice’s main title from 1784 until his death in 1805.

The marquess stayed out of politics, but he did do something significant in American culture: he commissioned Gilbert Stuart to create a full-length portrait of George Washington. Stuart delivered that picture in 1796. The artist also produced copies of what became known as the “Lansdowne portrait,” including one hung in the White House since 1800. The marquess’s descendants sold the original to the U.S. National Portrait Gallery in 2001 for $20 million.

The seed for this posting was my realization that mentions of Lord Shelburne and Lord Lansdowne in the late 1700s referred to the same man. I started to wonder whether his name and status had changed at other times in his life. I had no idea how complicated the answer would be.

Thomas Gage Papers to be Digitized

The Clements Library at the University of Michigan just announced that it has received

a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize…over 23,000 items related to Thomas Gage, a famed British commander-in-chief in the early days of the American Revolution who was also the governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay from 1774 to 1775.

This collection was one of the major sources for The Road to Concord and every worthwhile book published in the last century about the start of the Revolutionary War in Massachusetts.

I visited the Clements Library years ago, before pocket digital photography changed the experience of visiting an archive. Back then, we had to type out manuscript transcripts in the reading room. And choose what pages to ask the staff to photograph while staying within our research budgets. And we liked it!

After this three-year project, there will be high-quality photographs of Gage’s correspondence and othe files for researchers to study. To test out the interface, look at how the library already shares the papers of New Hampshire colonel Jonathan Chase.

Not so incidentally, the Clements Library is having an “Adopt a Piece of History” fundraiser, inviting people to give money for particular projects. Articles range from nineteenth-century books to scanners and a 1758 letter from Gen. James Wolfe. Along the way are several volumes of the papers of Gen. Henry Clinton which need to be prepared for another digitization project.

For another look at the resources that archive digitization projects can bring to public view, check out “A Closer Look at Colonial North America Across Harvard Library,” the video recording of an online event in March. Representatives of several Harvard libraries’ staffs share notable colonial-era objects and documents from the university’s vast collection.

The Problem with Ens. Eliphalet Hastings

Yesterday I quoted Capt. Moses Harvey’s newspaper advertisement from November 1775, minutely describing five soldiers who had deserted from his Continental Army company.

Harvey surmised that those men had left for these feeble reasons:

They have been apt to make excuses for their running away, and intimate they took a dislike to one Eliphalet Hastings, who was put in Ensign over them, and found much fault with the continental allowance.

Of course, it’s a soldier’s prerogative to grumble about food and pay. But what was the problem with the new ensign?

Eliphalet Hastings (1734-1824) was a veteran soldier. He had enlisted early in the French and Indian War, a decision that didn’t turn out well. In January 1760 the Massachusetts legislature voted to pay him £8 because

in the Year 1757 being a Soldier in the pay of this Province, he was taken Prisoner by the Indians near Fort William Henry by whom he was sold to the French and carried to Quebeck from whence he was sent to France where he remained till October 1758 when he was sent to England; and did not return home till May 1759

Hastings’s descendants understood that he had also participated Gen. James Wolfe’s Québec campaign and even “assisted in carrying General Wolfe to the rear, when mortally wounded.” But the timing for that would be awfully tight.

In April 1775, Hastings had marched as a minuteman, then rose to sergeant as Massachusetts formed its army. According to his pension application, he

was in the battle of Bunkers hill, commanded a company in Col Jonathan Brewers Regt in the Massachusetts line, had twenty-nine killed and eleven wounded besides myself out of seventy nine in that action, had my right arms and collar bone shot to pieces

Col. Brewer’s regiment was stationed mostly between the provincial breastwork and the rail fence. It got pretty shot up, with Brewer (d. 1784) and Lt. Col. William Buckminster (1736-1786) both wounded. But a Massachusetts report in 1775 said that in all the regiment suffered twelve dead and twenty-two wounded, far less than the figures Hastings recalled for one company decades later.

Col. Brewer had already gotten into hot water for aggressive recruiting tactics in Middlesex and Worcester Counties. He in turn complained about other colonels, on 4 July petitioning the Massachusetts legislature about how

a number of men that enlisted in different Companies in my Regiment have, through the low artifice and cunning of several recruiting officers of different Regiments, re-enlisted into other Companies, being over-persuaded by such arguments as, that Colonel Brewer would not be commissioned, and that if they did not immediately join some other Regiment, they would be turned out of the service; others were tempted with a promise to have a dollar each to drink the recruiting officer’s health; others by intoxication of strong liquor; by which means a considerable number have deserted my Regiment, as will be made to appear by the returns therefrom, as also the different Companies and Regiments they are re-enlisted into.

Around the same date, on 1 July, Eliphalet Hastings was appointed an ensign in the company of Capt. Moses Harvey. I can’t tell which company Hastings had been a sergeant in—perhaps Capt. Edward Blake’s—but it wasn’t Harvey’s.

Capt. Harvey was a late addition to Brewer’s regiment, not listed among his officers in early June. He had also come late to the Battle of Bunker Hill. A soldier from that company named Moses Clark recalled, “I was on the march towards Bunkers Hill on the day that battle was fought we arrived there just after the battle ended, while our men were carrying away the wounded.”

Col. Brewer appears to have assigned Ens. Hastings to Capt. Harvey’s company, rewarding a wounded veteran and filling out that company’s ranks so he could have more soldiers under him. But that created a problem.

Moses Harvey had been born in Sunderland, in the part of town that became Montague in 1754, and he had recruited men from that area. Of the five soldiers in his deserter ad, three had enlisted in Sunderland: John Daby; Gideon Graves, born in that town in 1753; and John Guilson, born in Groton in 1750 and married to Graves’s sister in 1769. Simeon Smith came from Greenfield and Matthias Smith from Springfield, other towns in the Connecticut River Valley. Capt. Harvey knew them so well he could describe them in acute detail.

In contrast, Eliphalet Hastings lived in Waltham, on the eastern side of Middlesex County. Harvey’s men didn’t know him. By tradition, New England soldiers enlisted under neighbors they knew and trusted. They expected to elect their own officers instead of having someone assigned over them. So over the summer of 1775 those five men decided to head back home to western Massachusetts.

Capt. Harvey was lenient enough not to advertise for their return right away; he didn’t even report them as deserted until 27 September. But as November came around, there was new pressure from Gen. George Washington to recruit soldiers for the coming year. Harvey might have thought his own hopes to remain in the army depended on showing that he could maintain discipline in his company. So on 8 November he finally put his neighbors’ names and descriptions into the newspaper. Did he really expect them to return, or did he just want to make their lives in and around Sunderland a little less comfortable?

TOMORROW: What became of those deserters?

Julian Peters’s Battle of Québec

Julian Peters is a comics creator from Montréal, Canada. Among his current projects is a graphic novel about the 1759 siege of Québec, in which Gen. James Wolfe took the city from Gen. Louis-Joseph de Montcalm.

On this webpage, Peters shares eight pages of his work and explains:

I am currently at work on “Each in His Narrow Cell,” a graphic novel recounting the siege of Quebec and the Battle of The Plains of Abraham in 1759. In revisiting this pivotal moment in Canadian history, my intention is not simply to present a didactic history lesson in visual form, but rather to create an emotionally engaging, character-driven narrative centered on the personal motivations and inner conflicts of the French, English and Indigenous participants. . . .

One of the parameters I set for myself with the colouring was that all the characters from a particular nation would be depicted in a combination of a neutral grey tone and one characteristic colour—blue for the French, red for the English, purple for the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and so on. Similarly, the colour of the lettering in the speech bubbles indicates what language is being spoken. Chief Nissowaquet of the Odawa of l’Arbre Croche appears in yellow, a decision based on the background colour of the present-day flag of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa, within whose reservation boundaries the village of l’Arbre Croche was situated.

In the sample section, Gen. Montcalm arrives home in Languedoc, having learned that one of his four daughters has died—but not knowing which family member is lost. He discovers more pressing concerns.

To balance that, here’s a bit of Wolfe.

Peters’s previous historical work included a previous depiction of the 1759 Battle of Québec, this time as a national food fight, and a 1709 chanson.

Seeing “Whites of Their Eyes” Everywhere and Nowhere

After Liz Covart tweeted about my post tracing a variation of “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes” to Israel Putnam, I had an interesting chat about the quotation on Twitter with Alexander Rose, author of Washington’s Spies.

We agree that it’s unlikely Putnam coined the phrase in 1775, that probably many officers in the British Empire had said such words to many infantrymen and sailors. That seems even more likely given yesterday’s quotation credited to Adm. Richard Howe in 1794, which hints that the phrase had already become linked (at least in Englishmen’s minds) to “the Old English way of fighting.”

But if the quote was really so common, I wonder, why doesn’t it appear in several British or American sources before 1794? I’ve searched in all the databases I have access to, including Google Books, books on Archive.org, Readex’s Archive of Americana, Founders Online, and British History Online. Using those resources let me push back the publication date as far as I have. I’ve found the phrase “whites of their eyes” in other eighteenth-century contexts—medical, veterinary, even religious—but not military.

Many modern books and articles credit particular British military officers with saying some variation on “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes” at specific battles in the mid-1700s. But those statements don’t appear in print until the mid-1800s, after the phrase had already become famous in American history.

For example, Gen. Sir Andrew Agnew is said to have told his troops at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743 not to fire “till they saw the white of their een.” But I can’t find a written report of Agnew saying those words before Thomas Maccrie published The Memoirs of Sir Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw about a descendant in 1850. (That quotation evolved into “Dinna fire till ye see the whites o’ their e’en!” by the time of The Agnews of Lochnaw in 1864. Curiously, in the April 1841 United Service Magazine a veteran officer put the words “Dinna fire, men, till ye see the wheights of their eyes” into the mouth of Lt.-Col. William Gordon of the 50th Regiment during the Peninsula War against Napoleon.)

In January 1806 The Gentleman’s Magazine published a letter from “W.P.” crediting Capt. Robert Faulknor of the Royal Navy with saying, “My boys, hold hard, I’ll tell you when to fire; let us see the whites of their eyes first.” That was supposedly in 1761 during a fight between the Bellona and the French Courageux. Of course, forty-five years elapsed between the battle and the letter, which offered no other information to back up its statement. Did anyone record Faulknor’s words at the time? Were they the inspiration for Adm. Howe?

Wikipedia says Gen. James Wolfe (shown above) gave an order about “whites of their eyes” during the attack on Quebec of 1759. But its citation for that order is a book from 1960. Wolfe got a huge amount of press in colonial America after that battle. His orders and subordinates’ battle reports were widely reprinted. So why can’t we find an eighteenth-century source for such an order?

Of course, as more printed materials, especially British periodicals, are digitized, the key words could pop up in a mid-1700s publication. They could even be visible now, but hidden by imperfect scanning and transcription, variations in wording, or dialect like the Scottish variations above. But so far they’ve eluded me.

I’m not saying that lack of evidence means no eighteenth-century British military officer told his men, “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes!” or the like. In fact, there’s a strong argument that because the phrase pops up in different military sources around 1800 it had probably spread orally before then. But if we credit those words to a particular man at a particular time, we should have solid evidence for that attribution, not just a claim made decades later.

Brumwell on Washington in Cambridge, 18 Oct.

At 6:00 P.M. on Friday, 18 October, Stephen Brumwell, author of George Washington: Gentleman Warrior, may speak at the Cambridge estate that was Gen. Washington’s headquarters from July 1775 to April 1776.

Brumwell is a British military historian who lives in the Netherlands. His earlier books include Redcoats, on British soldiers in the French and Indian War; White Devil, about Robert Rogers; and Paths of Glory, about Gen. James Wolfe.

Brumwell’s study of Washington focuses on his military career in the 1750s and how he returned to that work in his forties as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. It emphasizes how Washington looked to British models of both genteel behavior and military organization. Earlier this year Brumwell won the Washington Book Prize from Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and Mount Vernon.

I wrote that Brumwell may speak on Friday because that venue, Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, is part of the National Park Service. If the House Republican caucus can agree to fund our federal government again, then Brumwell’s talk and book-signing will go ahead as planned. If not, then the site will remain closed and its staff furloughed. Call 617-876-4491 to confirm that the event will take place as scheduled and to reserve a seat.

Brumwell is also scheduled to speak at Old South Meeting House on the preceding night starting at 6:30. That building is a local non-profit, not affected directly by the national gridlock, so it remains open. Both talks are free.

“Heroic pieces found in his pocket”

One of my doorways into eighteenth-century history was Christopher Seider, the young boy fatally shot in a riot in Boston on 22 Feb 1770.

After Christopher’s death, the Boston Evening-Post reported the event in unusual detail and concluded:

…all the friends of Liberty may have an opportunity of paying their last respects to the remains of this little hero and first martyr to the noble cause, whose manly spirit (after the accident happened) appeared in his discreet answers to his Doctor, his thanks to the clergyman who prayed with him, and the firmness of mind he showed when he first saw his parents, and while he underwent the great distress of bodily pain, and with which he met the king of terrors. These things, together with several heroic pieces found in his pocket, particularly Wolfe’s Summit of human glory, give reason to think he had a martial genius and would have made a clever man.

For years I hunted for “Wolfe’s Summit of human glory.” Given the context, it was almost certainly a publication about Gen. James Wolfe (shown above), killed during the British conquest of Québec City in 1759. But none of the many poems and articles written about the man included the phrase “summit of human glory.”

I checked Readex’s Archive of Americana database in many ways; it’s based on microtext collections of what was supposed to be basically every newspaper published in colonial America, and every “imprint”—i.e., book, broadside, pamphlet, handbill, lottery ticket, &c. The latter part is often called the “digital Evans” after the American Bibliography catalogue of all that material by Charles Evans and his successors. But even within that vase amount of scanned stuff, there was no “summit of human glory.”

Evans and his team didn’t find every broadside, however. Some entered archives, or came to light, after the last volume of that series in 1959. But many items printed in colonial America simply didn’t survive.

This fall I tried my keyphrase on a catalogue I know well—that of the Massachusetts Historical Society. And up popped a broadside with this title:

Major-General James Wolfe, who reach’d the summit of human glory, September 13th, 1759: with a particular account of that gloriously dangerous work, the taking the city of Quebec, the capital of the French settlements in North-America.

So of course I asked to look at that.

This broadside is a 17" by 24" sheet with four columns of tiny type around a 9" x 12" engraving of Wolfe surrounded by clouds, a booming cannon, and a frame decorated with leaves, swords, and banners. There’s no indication of who published it or for how much, but a broadside of this size was expensive. The copy at the M.H.S. is stamped and perhaps painted in blue and red—an embellishment that cost extra.

The text is a detailed, sometimes technical, description of the taking of Quebec, written by Vice Admiral Charles Saunders and Gen. George Townshend, who took over after Wolfe’s death. Not the sort of thing one would expect a ten-year-old to be carrying around, even with the big colored picture.

But that’s what was reportedly in Christopher Seider’s pocket on the day he died, along with other “heroic pieces.” That’s one of my favorite discoveries of the past year.