Young James Lovell Makes His Move

Yesterday, when we left James Lovell, the illegitimate son of the South Latin School usher of the same name, he had stormed out of that school, angry that his grandfather, Master John Lovell, had whipped him so much. Young James said he would attend Master John Proctor’s Writing School instead.

According to the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Homer, James then “met one of Master Proctor’s boys, who asked him whither he was going, and when informed, warned him not to go, for he would fare worse.”

So the younger James Lovell eventually returned to his grandfather’s and father’s school and completed the course there. In the expected fashion, he moved on to Harvard College, where he graduated in 1776.

In 1777, at the age of nineteen, Lovell became an ensign (equivalent of second lieutenant) in Col. Henry Jackson’s regiment of the Continental Army. In 1780 he was with Lt. Col. Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee’s battalion of light dragoons. (The picture above shows Lee, courtesy of Stratford Hall.) Lovell usually served as adjutant, or administrative officer. He spent considerable time in South Carolina.

According to Southern Womanhood and Slavery, by Leigh Fought, Lovell claimed to have been “the favorite secretary of General George Washington” when he wooed and married a wealthy Orangeburg, South Carolina, widow named Ann Reid. (Some people heard even wilder tales about “Major Lovell.”)

Some of Ann Lovell’s relatives remembered that James ran through her fortune quickly, “leaving her poor and with several children.” However, Fought notes that tax records showed that Ann Lovell remained rich, and actually became richer, from 1790 to 1810. Other family traditions confirm that the plantation flourished. The source of marital trouble was not that James got his hands on her property, but that he couldn’t.

By 1806, the couple’s children had all died, and James Lovell lit out for New Orleans, where he remained until 1811. On James’s return, Ann took legal steps to preserve her property outside his control. The couple quarreled over an inheritance in 1826, and James left again. Ann died in 1834 while James lived on, returning to Cambridge for Harvard commencement in 1846. He died in Orangeburg in 1850.

(As far as I’ve seen, sources in Massachusetts have nothing but good things to say about James Lovell while sources from South Carolina have almost nothing good to say.)

Boston's Schools in 1770 by the Numbers

I’ve decided it’s “Back to School Week” at Boston 1775. Every posting (well, ’most every posting) for the next few days will be about schooling in Boston during the Revolutionary era.

In the summer of 1770, the annual committee to inspect Boston’s five public schools counted how many boys were studying at each.

• South Latin School: 119
• North Latin School: 56
• South Writing School: 231
• Queen Street Writing School: 268
• North Writing School: 250

By my estimate, in 1765 a little over half of all white boys of school age in Boston were attending one of the town schools. The rest were presumably working, and perhaps taking private part-time lessons as well.

How many teachers were there? Typically, a school had one master and one “usher,” or assistant teacher. In practice, there were variations on this set-up.

• South Latin School: Master John Lovell and his usher (and son), James Lovell
• North Latin School: Master Samuel Hunt
• South Writing School: Master Samuel Holbrook and his usher, whose name is not recorded
  
• Queen Street Writing School: Master John Proctor and his usher, James Carter
• North Writing School: Master John Tileston and his assistant, sixteen-year-old William Dall

You can do the math on student-teacher ratios. It’s not a pretty picture.

Finally, here’s the total of what the town voted to pay the schoolteachers at the town meeting in March of that year.

• South Latin School: £220 (£120 to Master Lovell and £60 to James Lovell, plus a £40 grant to the younger man “as an encouragement for him to remain and exert himself in the Service of the Town”)
• North Latin School: £100 (Master Hunt had asked for a salary equal to Master Lovell’s, but was denied. Even so, proportional to his student body he was the best paid teacher in town.)
• South Writing School: £150 (£100 to Master Holbrook and £50 to the unnamed usher)
  
• Queen Street Writing School: £175 (£100 to Master Proctor and £50 to Carter, plus a £25 grant)
  
• North Writing School: £134 (£100 to Master Tileston and £34 for young William)
  

The town spent far more on each Latin School student than on each Writing School student.

Nightcaps in the Daytime

Yesterday I linked to some portraits of Boston merchants without their wigs. In those paintings they wore their banyans (dressing-gowns) and night-caps, signaling that they were interested in the life of the mind. Did they dress like that only in private, or did they ever go out in public in their gowns and caps?

According to Dr. Alexander Hamilton (no relation to the U.S. Treasurer), Philadelphia gentlemen did dress that casually in public in 1744. In that year the doctor took a journey for his health from Annapolis to York, Maine, and back, and he wrote a delightful travel narrative (reprinted in this Penguin Classics paperback). In Boston, Hamilton wrote:

I dined with Mr. Fletcher in the company of two Philadelphians, who could not be easy because forsooth they were in their night-caps seeing every body else in full dress with powdered wigs; it not being customary in Boston to go to dine or appear upon Change in caps as they do in other parts of America.

In the 1700s people "dined" in early afternoon, not at night, so these Philadelphians (and businessmen in "other parts of America") wore their "night-caps" at the height of day. To "appear upon Change" meant to meet with other businessmen in the town's central trading and deal-making area—the Royal Exchange in London, Exchange Lane in Boston, I-don't-know-where in Philadelphia.

Dr. Hamilton went on:

What strange creatures we are, and what triffles make us uneasy! It is no mean jest that such worthless things as caps and wigs should disturb our tranquility and disorder our thoughts when we imagine they are wore out of season.

I was my self much in the same state of uneasiness with these Philadelphians, for I had got such a hole in the lappet of my coat, to hide which employed so much of my thoughts in company that, for want of attention, I could not give a pertinent answer when I was spoke to.

That last paragraph shows why I love this account: Hamilton is able to spot the same vanity in himself as in the men from Philadelphia.

Perhaps twenty years after Dr. Hamilton's visit Bostonians had come to "walk upon Change" in their night-caps, but I suspect not. I've found only one group of men described as wearing their caps instead of their wigs in public, and that group was schoolmasters. According to the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Homer, "Masters [John] Lovell and [John] Proctor...wore a cap when not in full dress." Lovell, master at Boston's South Latin School, also had Nathaniel Smibert paint his portrait in a nightcap rather than a wig. (Proctor was master at the nearby Writing School on Queen Street.)

But of course teachers:

• were scholars, and thus already interested in the life of the mind; and
  
• dealt mainly with children, not other gentlemen, and therefore didn't have to keep up such appearances.

John Tileston: disabled writing teacher

John Tileston (1735-1826) taught at Boston’s public writing school in the North End for sixty-five years, starting as an “usher” or assistant schoolmaster in 1754 and retiring as an octogenarian in 1819.

Before and during the Revolution, the town’s three writing schools educated more boys than the two more famous and prestigious Latin Schools. For the most part, the writing-school curriculum was, literally, handwriting: learning how to use a quill pen to create dignified-looking documents in two or three genteel styles. This was an important skill in business, but it also shows how limited public schooling then was.

According to his 1887 biographer, D. C. Colesworthy, Tileston (pronounced “TILL-iss-tun”) came to teach writing because a childhood injury limited the jobs he could do:

When John was an infant, he was severely burnt by falling into the fire, and the consequence was so serious an injury to one of his hands that the complete use of his fingers he never recovered. He was thus incapacitated for mechanical or other employments that required the full use of his hands. Notwithstanding this affliction the defective hand became perfectly adapted to the holding of a pen and for writing. After leaving school, at the age of fourteen, young Tileston was placed under the care of...[the master of a writing school] in Boston, where he served faithfully an apprenticeship of six or seven years.

Colesworthy named Tileston’s master as Zachariah Hicks. Education reformer William B. Fowle, who knew Tileston personally, stated that his trainer and model was Master John Proctor of the Queen Street Writing School in central Boston. In 1761, Tileston became a schoolmaster in his own right in the North End.

[ADDENDUM in 2019: John Proctor, Sr., was master of the North Writing School from 1731 to 1743. Hicks was Proctor’s usher starting in 1733 and succeeded him in from 1743 to 1761. John Proctor, Jr., was Hicks’s first usher before becoming master of the Queen Street Writing School. Tileston was Hicks’s second usher, starting in 1754 when he was nineteen. Thus, it’s conceivable that Tileston started writing school under the elder Proctor, but he definitely had most of his schooling under Hicks and the younger Proctor together. According to Colesworthy, he served an adolescent apprenticeship with Hicks. According to Fowle, he modeled his teaching after the younger Proctor.]

Edward Everett, the less-remembered orator at Gettysburg, remembered that Tileston’s hand, though disabled, was strong and hard enough to give scholars blows to the head that “would have done credit to the bill of an albatross.” Corporal punishment was still considered an educational tool in the late 1700s. Everett also recalled how Tileston seized toys he found students playing with:

His long, deep desk was a perfect curiosity shop of confiscated balls, tops, penknives, marbles, and jews-harps, the accumulation of forty years.

Yet Fowle judged that “Master Tileston was not severe in his discipline, as was his great oracle, Master Proctor.” Tileston was also known for wearing a powdered wig and Revolutionary-era clothing long after they had gone out of fashion.

Esther Forbes wrote about Tileston and his burned hand in her Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In (1942). I suspect the schoolmaster was therefore the inspiration for the injury Johnny Tremain suffers in the novel Forbes published the following year. Tileston is also memorialized in the name of a short street in Boston’s North End where his school once stood.