Learning about the “Oxford Army”

Here’s one more detail about the Locke family, whose retreat to Sherborn in December 1773 I’ve been discussing.

The youngest child was John Locke, born in 1765. He had a peripatetic life after the Revolution, not marrying and moving north to Maine and west to Northampton before his death at age thirty-four.

The family history, Book of the Lockes, also stated he “was a soldier in the Oxford army.”

What the heck was that? I wondered. Most of the references to the phrase that I found went back to the English Civil War, when the college city of Oxford was the military stronghold of the Royalists. But it turns out that Massachusetts hosted its own “Oxford army.”

In the late 1790s the U.S. of A. went through some friction with France, then governed by the Directory. Eventually this low-level conflict was called the “quasi-war.” At the time, however, some people wanted to get ready for real military action.

One product of this period was the U.S. Navy, recommissioned after the Confederation Congress had done away with this form of national military to save costs. The U.S.S. Constitution was one of the frigates launched in that push, and it’s still with us, along with the larger navy.

In May and July 1798 Congress authorized President John Adams to beef up the army as well. One measure increased the still-authorized U.S. Army by over 10,000 men, these new soldiers for a while called the Additional Army. But enough citizens were worried about the army becoming too large that the government needed to assure them with a different approach.

Thus, Congress founded a parallel force of 10,000 men, the Provisional Army of the United States. Later this was superseded by the Eventual Army of the United States, which could be as large as 30,000. This force was authorized to last only as long as the crisis with France—that was the provision or event that defined it.

As further reassurance to the populace, George Washington was brought out of retirement to be the nominal commander of all the U.S. armies. The regular army already had its command structure. But for the new Provisional Army, operational command fell to inspector general Alexander Hamilton. He brought in William North as his adjutant general.

It took a while for the Provisional/Eventual Army to commission officers, so those officers didn’t start recruiting men until May 1799. In the next several months, before Congress decided that peace with France was at hand, that force grew to a little more than 4,000 soldiers. That army had three sites for training: Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in the south and Plainfield, New Jersey, for the middle states.

And the third Provisional Army campsite, for troops hailing for the New England states, was in the Massachusetts town of Oxford.

“Extremely messy as documents”

In 1726, Mary Toft claimed to have given birth to rabbits.

This generated a lot of news coverage and debate in Britain. The episode continues to interest social historians.

Earlier this month Karen Harvey, author of The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England, wrote about her work on documents that seemed at once absolutely central to the event and very difficult to work with:

Mary Toft’s three ‘confessions’ were new to me. These were taken down by James Douglas, a doctor present on these three occasions that Toft was questioned by a Justice of the Peace. . . .

Reading these thirty-six pages was an absolute revelation. The writing jumped off the screen. In their form and their content, they were urgent, vivid and disturbing. They recorded Toft’s version of events in what appeared to be as close to a transcription as Douglas could possibly muster. They were also far richer than I had imagined from the fairly cursory discussions in existing scholarship.

But it also became immediately apparent why historians had not undertaken a thoroughgoing analysis of the confessions and placed this centre-stage in their accounts of the case. Not only were these extremely messy as documents – full of errors and deletions – but the narratives they offered were inconsistent and contradictory.

Before her book, Harvey wrote about the Toft confessions in this article for History Workshop Journal.

Her essay is part of a series from the University of Birmingham’s Eighteenth Century Centre on sources that historians have found powerful, including:

• Naomi Pullen on a letter from John Locke to Quaker preacher Rebecca Collier deemed fake for mistaken reasons—but is it genuine?
• Charles Walton on Thomas Paine’s letter to Georges Danton urging the French Revolutionary government to crack down on “calumniators.”

“This prophetic answer of the Doctor”

Yesterday I quoted a short anecdote from Dr. James McHenry’s diary of the Constitutional Convention. That diary was first published in 1906, becoming part of the twentieth century’s understanding of the Constitution. But it doesn’t appear in any books before then.

I recently found, however, that the story also appeared in significantly different form in the short-lived Baltimore newspaper called The Republic; or Anti-Democrat.

In June 1803 George L. Gray became that newspaper’s owner and publisher. From the begining this paper opposed President Thomas Jefferson’s administration and politics—a little confusing since Jefferson’s party was also claiming the mantle of “republican.”

Gray’s 15 July issue included a long essay headlined “Thoughts on the essential qualities of a Democracy recommended to the serious consideration of the sober and thinking part of the community.” A subhead said “For the Republican, or Anti-Democrat,” showing that this was the first publication of that essay. That in turns suggests the writer probably came from Maryland.

At the end of the essay was the label “The Mirror,” which looks like a signature. However, later essays from the same author were headed “The Mirror,” so that was probably meant to be the name of the whole series.

At the end came twenty-five endnotes—a rare sight in newspapers then or now. Most of those notes cited classical sources: Aristotle, Xenophon, Demosthenes, and so on. One pointed to the target of the essay: the Jeffersonian newspaper in Philadelphia called the Aurora. Another cited the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. So the pseudonymous author was educated and wanted readers to know it.

The essay began:

The deepest thinker of all antiquity, after examining and comparing the theory and practice of upwards of two hundred commonwealths, the justly celebrated Aristotle, whom the great [John] Locke acknowledged “a master in politics,” speaking of the different kinds of government, observes, of the republic, that it is “prone to degenerate into democracy.”

Doctor [Benjamin] Franklin, our countryman, who was certainly well read in human nature, held on this point the same opinion as the Stagirite [i.e., Aristotle]. Being asked by a lady of Philadelphia remarkable for wit and good sense, on the dissolution of the convention which frames the constitution—“well Doctor what have we got?”

“A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”

“And why not keep it?“ rejoined the Lady.

“Because,” replied the Doctor, “the people on tasting the dish, are always disposed to eat more of it than does them good.”

Sixteen years have not elapsed since this prophetic answer of the Doctor, and what do we behold! Men openly and voluntarily affirming the name of Democrat, and loudly proclaiming “the constitution of the United States is a Democracy, the American governments are in every respect completely and perfectly Democracies,” and those who will not so consider them, “fools, despicable knaves, or imposters.”

Such is the dogma and language of the Aurora.

The author of this essay was almost certainly James McHenry. In 1803 he was living in Baltimore, retired from active politics after a contentious stint as John Adams’s Federalist Secretary of War. He is the only person we can be sure already knew the anecdote about Franklin. And his papers at the Library of Congress include a file labeled as “Drafts of articles for The Mirror, undated.”

TOMORROW: How the anecdote had changed.

Bullock on Polite Politics in Boston, 29 Mar.

On Wednesday, 29 March, Steven C. Bullock will speak at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston on “Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America.” This presentation is based on his new book of the same name.

Even as eighteenth-century thinkers from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson struggled to find effective means to restrain power, contemporary discussions of society gave increasing attention to ideals of refinement, moderation, and polished self-presentation.

These two sets of ideas have long seemed separate, one dignified as political theory, the other primarily concerned with manners and material culture. Tea Sets and Tyranny challenges that division. In its original context, Steven C. Bullock suggests, politeness also raised important issues of power, leadership, and human relationships. This politics of politeness helped make opposition to overbearing power central to early American thought and practice.

Tea Sets and Tyranny follows the experiences of six extraordinary individuals, each seeking to establish public authority and personal standing: a cast of characters that includes a Virginia governor consumed by fits of towering rage; a Carolina woman who befriended a British princess; and a former Harvard student who became America’s first confidence man.

Steven Bullock is a professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic University. His previous work includes Revolutionary Brotherhood, a study of Freemasonry in the Revolution and early republic.

This event will take place from 6:00 to 7:00 P.M., with a reception beforehand starting at 5:30 P.M. There is $10 registration fee per person, with no charge for M.H.S. Members or Fellows. But of course all are expected to be on their best behavior.

Coopting the Pine Tree Flag

Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish highlighted the meaning of the “Appeal to Heaven” motto in the photo above from this weekend’s “Million Vet March” demonstration by, oh, hundreds of people in Washington, D.C.

As I quoted back here (and here), that banner is based on descriptions of a flag that Connecticut troops raised outside Boston in July 1775. It was flown by the Continental Army’s ill-fated floating batteries and then by the armed schooners Gen. George Washington sent to sea in the fall. The motto “Appeal to Heaven” (in some sources “An Appeal to Heaven”) was John Locke’s euphemism for armed revolution.

The same demonstration involved waving a Confederate flag outside the White House, haranguing the White House security staff, and a speaker demanding that our twice-elected President “put the Quran down” and resign.

Shameful displays like that are sullying the Revolutionary-era flags people bring to those rallies. As one of Sullivan’s readers wrote in identifying the banner above:

Alas, just like the Gadsden flag and it’s famous “Don’t Tread on Me” snake, it has now been appropriated by the Tea Party movement. I am a liberal Democrat who used to regularly fly those historic flags outside my home on the Fourth of July to commemorate the American Revolution – when there was a real, not imagined and hysterical, reason for revolt – but now I’m afraid I have to confine them to the closet. The idea that my neighbors might affiliate me with these crazies is too much to bear.

It should be easy to have a political demonstration without also demonstrating bigotry, and without threatening to overthrow the republic that the Revolution established.

Learning about John Adams and Abraham Whipple

On Thursday I attended a seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society discussing a chapter from Richard Ryerson’s intellectual biography of John Adams. A former editor of the Adams Papers, Dick is writing this book for Johns Hopkins University Press. He described how he started out focusing on Adams’s formal essays, tracing how the lawyer developed his notions of republicanism. Gradually he’s adding thoughts on how Adams’s life might have affected his political philosophy—which of course makes for much bigger chapters.

Among the topics we attendees discussed was how to handle Adams's vice presidency and presidency. He wrote no major political essays between 1791 and 1801, but he actually got/had to act on his ideas and ideals. I sensed the book getting longer still.

I still feel dubious about any of John Adams’s pronouncements that he was the only man on one side of a particular issue, and/or was brave to hold that position. Specifically, we discussed this remark in his Thoughts on Government from 1776:

A man must be indifferent to the sneers of modern English men, to mention in their company the names of Sidney, Harrington, Locke, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, and Hoadly. No small fortitude is necessary to confess that one has read them.

Many of these political writers came from the period of the British Commonwealth, or were invoked to defend that supposedly non-monarchical government. Cromwell’s rule was seen as a mistake in Britain, and no longer openly celebrated even in New England. But to say one needed “No small fortitude” to admit to reading John Locke? Come on, John.

Curiously, on 27 March of that year Adams wrote to William Hooper: “In my early Youth, the Works of Sidney, Harrington, Lock, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, Hoadley, were put into my Hands…” So supposedly those same sneered-at authors—in the same order—were suitable reading for a man in “early Youth.”

The next day I sat in on a talk by Prof. Sheldon S. Cohen on his new biography of Commodore Abraham Whipple of Rhode Island. Like most of the top American naval officers of the Revolutionary War, Whipple had a stormy career. It’s actually pretty remarkable that we remember any naval commanders at all, they went up and down so fast. (It’s even more remarkable that the one we do remember is the tempestuous and unpopular John Paul Jones.)

After the war Whipple tried to retire to a plantation in Rhode Island, but suffered in the 1780s economy. He and his family moved to the new territory of Ohio and helped to settle the city of Marietta. How did a seaman adjust to life in a landlocked state? Cohen explained how Whipple and his fellow settlers built a shipyard on the Ohio River and started to transport goods downstream to New Orleans.

History Now Now Covering Revolution

The latest issue of the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s online magazine History Now is all about studying and teaching the American Revolution. Its historical articles are:

• Lockean Liberalism and the American Revolution, by Isaac Kramnick
• Unruly Americans in the Revolution, by Woody Holton
• The Righteous Revolution of Mercy Otis Warren, by Ray Raphael
• The Indians’ War of Independence, by Colin G. Calloway
• Women and Wagoners: Camp Followers in the American War for Independence, by Holly A. Mayer
• Teaching the Revolution, by Carol Berkin
• Inventing American Diplomacy, by R.B. Bernstein

Another part of the magazine offers lesson plans for various levels of students on women’s lives, propaganda, the Revolution as a civil war, and the Boston Massacre.

Revolutionary parenting advice: cold baths & bare feet

Josiah Quincy, future mayor of Boston and president of Harvard College, was born in Boston in 1772. After his father, the fiery cross-eyed lawyer of the same name, left town on a last-ditch political mission to Britain in late 1774, Josiah's mother took him to his grandparents' home in Braintree. There she set up what seems like an odd ritual:

Mrs. Quincy caused her son, when not more than three years old, to be taken from his warm bed, in winter as well as summer, and carried down to a cellar-kitchen, and there dipped three times in a tub of water cold from the pump. She also brought him up in utter indifference to wet feet,—usually the terror of anxious mammas,—in which he used to say that he sat more than half the time during his boyhood, and without suffering any ill consequences.

One child who didn't share Quincy's equanimity about cold feet was Mary Palmer, born in 1775. During the war her family also moved to Braintree, closer to her grandparents, and she remembered similar experiences: “My parents, especially my mother,...began that winter by letting us all run out upon the first snow and ice without shoes or stockings, intending to make us hardy and proof against the cold.” The Palmers weren't kids playing barefoot on a warm or even a cool day, like the young reenactor pictured above, at Hartwell Tavern in Minute Man National Historical Park.

Nor was the Palmer family poor at that time. Like young Josiah, Mary and her siblings were raised in the upper crust of Braintree society. Abigail Quincy and Elizabeth and John Palmer were all loving parents, trying to give their offspring the best possible upbringing. And who offered the finest advice of the day? Both Josiah and Mary reported that their mothers were following John Locke (1632-1704).

We think of Locke as a political philosopher whose ideas of natural rights and men coming together to form governments inspired the Declaration of Independence. But in pre-Revolutionary Boston he was apparently just as respected for his advice on raising and educating children in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692). Locke's stature as a parenting expert was not hurt by the fact that he was a lifelong bachelor who never had children of his own. He came by his opinions through tutoring other people's sons and through reading.

In particular, Locke was impressed by what classical historians wrote about the Scythians:

The first thing to be taken care of, is, that children be not too warmly clad or cover'd, winter or summer. The face when we are born, is no less tender than any other part of the body. 'Tis use alone hardens it, and makes it more able to endure the cold. And therefore the Scythian philosopher gave a very significant answer to the Athenian, who wonder'd how he could go naked in frost and snow. How, said the Scythian, can you endure your face expos'd to the sharp winter air? My face is us'd to it, said the Athenian. Think me all face, reply'd the Scythian. Our bodies will endure any thing, that from the beginning they are accustom'd to.

Those lightly-clad Scythians lived around the Black Sea. Climatic and topographical differences didn't deter Locke from cajoling parents:

Give me leave therefore to advise you not to fence too carefully against the cold of this our climate. There are those in England, who wear the same clothes winter and summer, and that without any inconvenience, or more sense of cold than others find. But if the mother will needs have an allowance for frost and snow, for fear of harm, and the father, for fear of censure, be sure let not his winter clothing be too warm: And amongst other things, remember, that when nature has so well covered his head with hair, and strengthen'd it with a year or two's age, that he can run about by day without a cap, it is best that by night a child should also lie without one; there being nothing that more exposes to headaches, colds, catarrhs, coughs, and several other diseases, than keeping the head warm.

Locke went on at greatest length about the value of cold, wet feet:

I will also advise his feet to be wash'd every day in cold water, and to have his shoes so thin, that they might leak and let in water, whenever he comes near it. Here, I fear I shall have the mistress and maids too against me. One will think it too filthy, and the other perhaps too much pains, to make clean his stockings. But yet truth will have it, that his health is much more worth than all such considerations, and ten times as much more. And he that considers how mischievous and mortal a thing taking wet in the feet is, to those who have been bred nicely, will wish he had, with the poor people's children, gone bare-foot, who, by that means, come to be so reconcil'd by custom to wet in their feet, that they take no more cold or harm by it, than if they were wet in their hands. And what is it, I pray, that makes this great difference between the hands and the feet in others, but only custom? I doubt not, but if a man from his cradle had been always us'd to go bare-foot, whilst his hands were constantly wrapt up in warm mittins, and cover'd with hand-shoes, as the Dutch call gloves; I doubt not, I say, but such a custom would make taking wet in his hands as dangerous to him, as now taking wet in their feet is to great many others. The way to prevent this, is, to have his shoes made so as to leak water, and his feet wash'd constantly every day in cold water. It is recommendable for its cleanliness; but that which I aim at in it, is health; and therefore I limit it not precisely to any time of the day. I have known it us'd every night with very good success, and that all the winter, without the omitting it so much as one night in extreme cold weather; when thick ice cover'd the water, the child bathed his legs and feet in it, though he was of an age not big enough to rub and wipe them himself, and when he began this custom was puling and very tender. But the great end being to harden those parts by a frequent and familiar use of cold water, and thereby to prevent the mischiefs that usually attend accidental taking wet in the feet in those who are bred otherwise, I think it may be left to the prudence and convenience of the parents, to chuse either night or morning. The time I deem indifferent, so the thing be effectually done.

How common was it for Lockean parents to subject their children to cold baths and wet shoes? As I wrote above, the Quincy and Palmer families both lived in Braintree, and raised their children about the same time. Abigail and John Adams were part of the same set, related by marriage and friendship to both Quincys and Palmers. But I haven't found John Quincy Adams writing about childhood wet feet and cold baths the same way. Perhaps he escaped this treatment by being raised a few years earlier. Perhaps Abigail and John were less anxious than their neighbors about following the latest parenting trends.