“He was Billy, and the old servant of General Washington”?

In 1777 a London printer issued a pamphlet titled Letters from General Washington, to Several of His Friends in the Year 1776.

James Rivington, New York’s leading Loyalist printer (shown here, courtesy of the New-York Historical Society), soon reprinted those letters in his Royal Gazette newspaper. He issued a pamphlet of his own, adding a couple of genuine American letters to fill out the pages. Other Loyalist printers issued a particularly embarrassing private letter on handbills.

The preface to the pamphlet offered this explanation of how the person publishing the documents had come by them:

Among the prisoners at Fort-Lee, I espied a mulatto fellow, whom I thought I recollected, and who confirmed my conjectures by gazing very earnestly at me. I asked him, if he knew me. At first, he was unwilling to own it; but when he was about to be carried off, thinking, I suppose, that I might perhaps be of some service to him, he came and told me, that he was Billy, and the old servant of General Washington. He had been left there on account of an indisposition which prevented his attending his master.

I asked him a great many questions, as you may suppose; but found very little satisfaction in his answers. At last, however, he told me that he had a small portmanteau of his master’s of which, when he found that he must be put into confinement, he entreated my care. It contained only a few stockings and shirts; and I could see nothing worth my care, except an almanack, in which he had kept a sort of a journal, or diary of his proceedings since his first coming to New-York:

there were also two letters from his lady, one from Mr. Custis, and some pretty long ones from a Mr. Lund Washington. And in the same bundle with them. the first draughts, or foul copies, of answers to them. I read these with avidity; and being highly entertained with them, have shown them to several of my friends, who all agree with me, that he is a very different character from what they had supposed him.

The letters were addressed to Martha Washington, her son Jack Custis, and Lund Washington, the cousin managing Mount Vernon at the time. They portrayed Washington as disillusioned with the Continental Congress and hoping for a negotiated peace. They were entirely fake.

Whoever wrote those letters was familiar enough with life at Mount Vernon to have been in the Washingtons’ circle in Virginia. The general suspected John Randolph, the Loyalist father of his former and future aide, Edmund Randolph. Scholars have theorized that the Rev. John Vardill guided this and other propaganda efforts.

Describing the letters as having been captured with an enslaved servant also reminded readers that Washington and many of his biggest American supporters were slaveholders. That was a big talking-point in British political writing at the time, not out of any abolitionist sentiment but to undercut the Continental claim to be fighting for “liberty.”

In 1795, as domestic political disputes heated up, American printers opposed to President Washington’s policies pulled out this pamphlet and reprinted its contents, not necessarily claiming the letters were authentic but just stirring the pot.

Eventually Washington wrote to several of his associates in the war reminding them that these “spurious letters, [were] known at the time of their first publication…to be forgeries,” as he told Benjamin Walker. He asked them to remind other people, too.

The President added:

But of all the mistakes which have been committed in this business, none is more palpable, or susceptible of detection than the manner in which it is said they were obtained, by the capture of my Mulatto Billy, with a Portmanteau. All the Army, under my immediate command, could contradict this; and I believe most of them know, that no Attendant of mine, or a particle of my baggage ever fell into the hands of the enemy during the whole course of the War.

To that we can add that in 1776 William Lee was not an “old servant” of the general but only in his early twenties.

Those letters from the 1790s are the only time that Washington referred to his former body servant William Lee as “Billy” after 1771. And he wasn’t really referring to Will—he was referring to the fictional version of his servant described by a British propagandist using that name.

Washington hoped that Rivington, who appears to have become an American intelligence source by the end of the war, would be able to reveal the author of the letters. That didn’t happen. Rivington probably knew as little about their origin as anyone else in America.

“All the strength and beauty of the antithesis”

Yesterday I quoted “Bradshaw’s Epitaph” as first printed in December 1775. No American politician liked its final line—“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God”—more than Thomas Jefferson.

In late 1776, that statement was one of two possible mottoes that Jefferson proposed for the independent state of Virginia. As governor of Virginia in 1780, he had it engraved on a medal to be shared with Native American allies.

(The other possible motto was “Rex est qui regem non habet,” words from a Latin satire by the Dutch scholar and statesman Janus Dousa. I think for Jefferson that translated into “Whoever doesn’t have a king over him is a king.”)

Jefferson also had the “Rebellion to tyrants” line engraved on one of his personal seals, shown here, courtesy of Monticello. He was using this seal on his letters by 1790.

In an 1823 letter discussing the value of bending grammatical rules for the sake of style, Jefferson wrote:

to explain my meaning by an English example, I will quote the motto of one, I believe, of the regicides of Charles I. ‘Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.’ correct it’s syntax ‘Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God,’ it has lost all the strength and beauty of the antithesis.

Jefferson famously died on 4 July 1826. Two years later, Nicholas Philip Trist, a grandson-in-law, went through his papers at Monticello researching a legal question. Trist later wrote a memo about what he had found, quoted by Henry S. Randall in his 1858 Life of Thomas Jefferson. Here’s the relevant bit:

It occurred to me to ascertain what might be the contents of a little trunk, evidently very old, which, on visiting a closet over the alcove containing his bed, I had noticed among the many old things collected there. Ascending once more the steep step-ladder which led to this omnium gatherum, I raised the lid of that little trunk, upon which lay a thickness of dust, indicating that it had not turned upon its hinges for a long period. It was filled with papers—law papers almost exclusively. . . .

The bundles were, of course, all examined by me—the tape around them giving way in the act of untying it. In one I found the epitaph of John Bradshaw; and, in its company, copies of several letters bearing date years before the earliest of those contained among his papers as arranged by himself, which, to the best of my recollection, began in 1779. Among them was one to his old preceptor Dr. [William] Small, two to John Randolph, and one to Dr. Franklin; the three former written in 1775, the last in 1777. . . . These MSS. were in Mr. Jefferson's hand-writing of that period; the most beautiful, to my taste, I have ever seen.

The page also included a note at the bottom, “evidently a remark by Mr. J. himself,” Trist wrote:

From many circumstances, there is reason to believe there does not exist any such inscription as the above, and that it was written by Dr. Franklin, in whose hands it was first seen.

Wait. So the whole epitaph was a hoax by Benjamin Franklin?

TOMORROW: What did Jefferson really think of “Bradshaw’s Epitaph”?

John Adams Views Trumbull’s Painting of the Congress

In 1818 the Revolutionary War veteran and painter John Trumbull came to Boston to exhibit his depiction of the Continental Congress considering the Declaration of Independence.

Josiah Quincy, son of the Patriot lawyer of the same name, was then between his terms in the U.S. House and his terms as the mayor of Boston. That gave him time on 4 December to accompany Trumbull out to Quincy to dine with John Adams, the figure at the center of that painting.

Quincy’s diary entries, published in his son Edmund’s The Life of Josiah Quincy, described some conversation on that trip:

Trumbull, a gentleman of the old school, greatly delighted at the patronage given by the national Legislature to the series of his paintings commemorating four great national events.

The conversation turned on the character of Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin. Adams said, that the suggestion made against Dr. Franklin, as not being hearty in his support of the Declaration of Independence, was a calumny. To his knowledge, he supported that measure at its earliest period, with energy and perfect devotion.

Adams said, that he was present at the sittings of the Royal Academy of France, when Voltaire and Franklin both attended. As each appeared, the hall rang with acclamations. They approached each other. The cry was, “Let them embrace, let them embrace!” They accordingly began to hug and kiss. The room rang with, “Behold, Sophocles and Solon are embracing each other!”

That meeting occurred on 29 Apr 1778, as recorded in Adams’s diary. Voltaire died one month later.

The next day, Adams made the reverse trip to Boston. Quincy wrote:

President Adams came to town to view the “Declaration of Independence,” by Colonel Trumbull, now exhibiting at Faneuil Hall. President Adams, Trumbull, Prof. Farrar, Wm. S. Shaw, dined with me. Colonel Trumbull said, that every portrait in his picture was taken from a real sitting of the individual, or from some existing picture of him, except that of Benjamin Harrison, which was only from general description, received from his son, the recently distinguished General [William Henry] Harrison.

Adams said, that the portrait bore a general resemblance, but was not sufficiently corpulent. He well remembered, that, when engaged in signing the Declaration of Independence, a side conversation took place between Harrison, who was remarkably corpulent, and Elbridge Gerry, who was remarkably the reverse. “Ah, Gerry,” said Harrison, “I shall have an advantage over you in this act.” “How so?” said Gerry. “Why,” replied Harrison, “when we come to be hung for this treason, I am so heavy, I shall plump down upon the rope and be dead in an instant; but you are so light, that you will be dangling and kicking about for an hour in the air.”

Dr. Benjamin Rush had put this story into a letter to Adams in 1811, as quoted here.

Quincy’s son and biographer Edmund, ten years old in 1818, added:

I well remember being one of the party which accompanied Mr. Adams to see Trumbull’s picture. Faneuil Hall was full of spectators when we arrived, and what impressed the scene upon my boyish memory was the respectful manner in which all the men took off their hats when Mr. Adams entered leaning on my mother’s arm, and remained uncovered while he stayed. Room was made for him by common consent, so that he could see the picture to the best advantage. He seemed carried back to his prime of manhood, and to the most famous scene of his life, and he gave his warm approval to the picture as a correct representation of the Convention. “There is the door,” said he, “through which Washington escaped when I nominated him as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army!”

(I think there’s reason to doubt Adams’s memory on that point, which I’ll write about some day.)

This picture must be always interesting as an authentic collection of portraits, and an accurate representation of the Hall of Independence; and it pretends to be nothing more. At one time a shade of ridicule attached to this painting, because of John Randolph’s splenetic description of it as “a great shin-piece!”—a most groundless sarcasm, as any one may see who will be at the trouble of counting first the heads and then the shins it portrays. That part of the subject is certainly as well managed as possible, if the venerable signers are to be allowed any legs at all.

“More Moving Parts to This Machine”

The public discussion of Thomas Jefferson and slavery continued this month as The Atlantic Monthly’s Ta-Nehisi Coates posted an essay about a comment that the third President was caught in an “economic system of which no alternative was readily available.” That appears to be a quotation from a commenter, but Coates didn’t single out the author. It has been, as he wrote, a rather common claim.

Coates noted how Jefferson had counterexamples within his own circle, genteel planters who freed their slaves in different ways: President George Washington, his own cousin John Randolph, young correspondent Edward Coles, and the religiously-minded Robert Carter III. As I’ve written someplace before, the idea of emancipation was definitely in the marketplace of ideas during Jefferson’s career. He chose not to buy into that idea because ultimately he found the price too high.

Jefferson made his choice despite what Coates called his extraordinarily eloquent condemnation of slavery. In past decades authors glossed over the mismatch between the third President’s rhetoric and behavior, but that topic appears at the heart of many recent books. However, earlier portrayals of Jefferson as a champion of liberty for all still influence popular conceptions. That means complaining against the received image of Jefferson depends on what one has actually read.

In his next posting, Coates addressed the controversy over Thaddeus Kosciuszko’s will. He also wrote:

There's a temptation here to rage against a man who preached the evils of slavery in public, actually tried to talk others into continuing to hold slaves in private, and then refused to act on his own words, even when it would have cost him nothing. I think this instinct only works if you understand slavery strictly as an economic system. But as we've discussed before, slavery was the foundation of antebellum society. . . .

It seems clear to me that one can salute the ideas of a founding father, and at the same time condemn his cowardice when it came to putting them in practice. In other words, Jefferson can be both the intellectual father of this country and a notorious violator of the very ideas he put forth.

This fall the Kosciuszko will has been one item of dispute between Henry Wiencek, author of Master of the Mountain, and Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello. A commenter said Coates’s summary of the issue was too simple, and he agreed.

But then Coates went on to quote Gordon-Reed’s critique of Wiencek as a “defense of Jefferson” that “implicitly assumes that Jefferson bears no moral culpability, that Kosciuzko is ultimately (and seemingly totally) at fault.” I think that was also simplistic, seeing a “defense” in a reminder that the situation was more complicated than described in the book she was reviewing.

Gordon-Reed sent a reply, which Coates featured in yet another post. It noted racist statements even from emancipator Edward Coles and concluded:

Many today do not want to face the fact that white supremacy was as much a part of the founding ideology as republicanism. Beating up on TJ, as if he were some singular case, is part of the denial

That prompted more discussion, which Gordon-Reed, Coates, and Wiencek all joined. This might have been the most interesting discourse of the series.

Coates and some of his commenters argue that it’s valid to criticize Jefferson more harshly than other slaveholders of his time because he wrote so well about the harms of slaveholding. As commenter “abk1985” wrote to Gordon-Reed:

The difference here on this blog from what you do is that we are much more likely to make moral evaluations rather than simply attempt to understand historical personages. So there's a kind of built in conflict here.

Gordon-Reed’s reply:

Writing history is for me a moral enterprise, but there are different ways to show that. I don't think anyone who has read my books and articles about TJ would think I have not been critical of him when appropriate, witheringly critical at times. My point in writing this post was to make it clear that there were more moving parts to this machine than have been described. As I said in another post, I've existed in this strange position where some people are absolutely convinced that all I want to do is destroy Jefferson and others are absolutely convinced that all I want to do is to protect him. I don't approach TJ, or the founders, with any notion that my goal is to hold them to a standard. I don't "expect more". I don't expect anything beyond what my knowledge about them, gleaned from my study of them, suggests they are capable of doing at any given point of their lives, and what their society would have allowed them to do.