“I saw your Street door vomit forth a Crowd of Senators”

During its 1773–74 session, the Massachusetts General Court spent a lot of time complaining about Chief Justice Peter Oliver accepting a salary from tea tax revenues.

But it wasn’t clear what the legislature could do about that.

Until the lawyer John Adams had a bright idea. Or at least that’s how he described the situation in his post-presidential memoir. And in this case he may well be accurate.

According to the older Adams, he was motivated by fear of popular violence:

I fully expected that if no Expedient could be suggested, that the Judges would be obliged to go where Secretary [Andrew] Oliver had gone to Liberty Tree [in 1765], and compelled to take an Oath to renounce the Royal Salaries. Some of these Judges were men of Resolution and the Chief Justice in particular, piqued himself so much upon it and had so often gloried in it on the Bench, that I shuddered at the expectation that the Mob might put on him a Coat of Tar and Feathers, if not put him to death.

Adams had served one term in the General Court in 1770–71, representing Boston, and then retired to Braintree for a while. In 1773 he was splitting his time between the towns and edging back into politics.

Adams recalled:

I happened to dine with Mr. Samuel Winthrop at New Bost[on], who was then Clerk of the Superiour Court, in company with several Members of the General Court of both Houses and with several other Gentlemen of the Town. Dr. John Winthrop Phylosophical Professor at [Harvard] Colledge and Dr. [Samuel] Cooper of Boston both of them very much my Friends, were of the Company.

The Conversation turned wholly on the Topic of the Day—the Case of the Judges. All agreed that it was a fatal Measure and would be the Ruin of the Liberties of the Country: But what was the Remedy? It seemed to be a measure that would execute itself. There was no imaginable Way of resisting or eluding it. There was lamentation and mourning enough: but no light and no hope. The Storm was terrible and no blue Sky to be discovered.

I had been entirely silent, and in the midst of all this gloom, Dr. Winthrop, addressing himself to me, said Mr. Adams We have not heard your Sentiments on this Subject, how do you consider it? . . . What can be done?

I answered, that I knew not whether any one would approve of my Opinion but I believed there was one constitutional Resource, but I knew not whether it would be possible to persuade the proper Authority to have recourse to it.

Several Voices at once cryed out, a constitutional Resource! what can it be?

I said it was nothing more nor less than an Impeachment of the Judges by the House of Representatives before the Council.

An Impeachment! Why such a thing is without Precedent.

I believed it was, in this Province: but there had been precedents enough, and by much too many in England: It was a dangerous Experiment at all times: but it was essential to the preservation of the Constitution in some Cases, that could be reached by no other Power, but that of Impeachment.

No one mentioned the Massachusetts legislature’s attempt in 1706 to impeach some associates of Gov. Joseph Dudley, squelched by the privy council in London. But of course any good lawyer could argue the differences between the cases meant that precedent didn’t apply.

Adams continued in a common vein for him, saying that even his learned colleagues told him he was wrong, but he showed them he was right:

The next day, I believe, Major [Joseph] Hawley came to my House and told me, he heard I had broached a strange Doctrine. He hardly knew what an Impeachment was, he had never read any one and never had thought on the Subject. I told him he might read as many of them as he pleased. There stood the State Tryals on the Shelf which were full of them, of all sorts good and bad. I shewed him Seldens Works in which is a Treatise on Judicature in Parliament, and gave it him to read. . . . We looked into the Charter together, and after a long conversation and a considerable Research he said he knew not how to get rid of it.

In a Day or two another Lawyer in the House came to me, full of doubts and difficulties, He said he heard I had shown Major Hawley some Books relative to the Subject and desired to see them. I shewed them to him and made nearly the same comment upon them. It soon became the common Topick and research of the Bar. . . .

The Members of the House, becoming soon convinced that there was something for them to do, appointed a Committee to draw up Articles of Impeachment against the Chief Justice Oliver. Major Hawley who was one of this Committee, would do nothing without me, and insisted on bringing them to my house, to examine and discuss the Articles paragraph by Paragraph, which was readily consented to by the Committee. Several Evenings were spent in my Office, upon this Business, till very late at night. One Morning, meeting Ben. Gridley, he said to me Brother Adams you keep late Hours at your House: as I passed it last night long after midnight, I saw your Street door vomit forth a Crowd of Senators.

Benjamin Gridley was a fellow lawyer, but one who leaned toward the Crown and later became a Loyalist.

TOMORROW: Putting the plan into action.

Who wrote, “we can make every Tory tremble”?

Earlier this year, I saw a tweet crediting Samuel Adams with the line: “With ladies on our side, we can make every Tory tremble.”

Adams wasn’t usually that pithy, and the statement doesn’t appear in the four volumes of The Writings of Samuel Adams.

The line first appeared in a letter to Daniel Fowle’s New-Hampshire Gazette published on 22 July 1774. Here’s more context:

The Consumption of TEA I think is in a fair Way of being totally laid aside in this Town, as there are but very few indeed, that will refuse to sign or solemnly ingage not to suffer it used in their Families;

and what adds a great Pleasure to us all, is, that the Fair Sex universally consent to give up, this detested superfluous Article; and under the Auspices of the worthy Doctor Clement Jackson, we hope soon to see a glorious List of Female Worthies, whose Virtue can withstand every daring Insult when put to the Test; and we all desire their Names may be recorded in the Town Books, to perpetuate their Memories:---

Then let us see who will sell that obnoxious Herb, for with the Ladies on our side, we can make every Tory tremble; as it is generally agreed upon, not to frequent those Shops were TEA is sold.

The signature, under a Latin quotation, was “AMICUS.”

A few weeks later, on 26 August, the New-Hampshire Gazette published another letter, addressed to the people of New Hampshire and signed “AMICUS PATRIAE.” It urged people in that colony to support Boston, suffering under Parliament’s Coercive Acts, with donations for the poor.

Both letters show a pattern of short italicized phrases and occasional all-capitalized nouns. Both end with Latin quotations. The signatures overlap. I therefore think it’s likely the two letters came from the same pen.

In his History of New-Hampshire (1792), the Rev. Jeremy Belknap printed a letter from New Hampshire governor John Winthrop to the Earl of Dartmouth dated 29 August, which said:

The town-clerk of Boston [William Cooper], who is said to be a zealous leader of the popular opposition, has been in this town about a week; immediately appears a publication in the New-Hampshire Gazette, recommending donations for Boston…

Belknap added a footnote to that sentence:

The publication here referred to was written by a person whom the Governor did not suspect, and the town-clerk knew nothing of it.

But Belknap obviously did know the author. In fact, his granddaughter Jane Belknap Marcou wrote in her 1847 biography that she had found “the imperfect manuscript [i.e., draft] remaining among Mr. Belknap’s papers.” In other words, he’d written it himself.

Back in 1774, Jeremy Belknap was the minister in Dover, New Hampshire. Ministers weren’t supposed to get directly involved in politics, but as “AMICUS PATRIAE” he had things to tell his fellow citizens. And Belknap also appears to have been the most likely author of the line “With ladies on our side, we can make every Tory tremble.” (I wonder if a draft of that essay might be in his papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.)

The line resurfaced in John C. Miller’s Origins of the American Revolution (1943) as an example of American Whig sentiment before the war. Philip Foner picked it up in his History of the Labor Movement in the United States (1947), crediting the sentiment to “Sons of Liberty.” Charles O. F. Thompson included the line in A History of the Declaration of Independence: A Story of the American Patriots who Brought about the Birth of Our Nation (1947), curiously tossing in the word “blessed” ahead of “Tory.” Other books followed.

From there it appears that an author or authors decided that “Sons of Liberty” meant Samuel Adams. In the current century several books and authoritative websites attribute the statement to Adams, usually saying “often quoted” or “reported to have said” as a signal that the writers can’t find the words in those four volumes of Writings. In several places the quotation has also lost the article “the” before “Ladies.”

In conclusion, while it’s definitely possible to quote the line “with the Ladies on our side, we can make every Tory tremble” from the Revolutionary era, it should be tentatively attributed to Jeremy Belknap, not Samuel Adams.

The Resignation of Samuel Locke

On 1 Dec 1773, two and a half centuries ago today, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Locke resigned as president of Harvard College.

I wrote about how the college had come to choose Locke back in 2020, on the sestercentennial of his installment.

Locke had been a star student at the college, where John Adams considered him the second-best classical scholar. He then had a quiet career as a minister in Sherborn, where he married a daughter of his predecessor (whose dowry included some good farmland) and started a family.

Locke wasn’t the Harvard corporation’s first choice to be president in 1770, and he took a long time to accept the job. It looks like the governing board wanted someone clearly different from the Rev. Dr. Edward Holyoke, who had served more than thirty years as president before dying at age seventy-nine. Locke would be the youngest Harvard president ever, and the board hoped he would modernize the teaching and scholarship.

Things appeared to have started off well. In 1772 the college gave Locke an honorary doctorate in sacred theology. The following June, the Rev. Ezra Stiles wrote good things about him, while wishing he would be more supportive of local resistance to the Crown.

And then suddenly Locke was gone. The official college records about his departure come from the minutes of a corporation meeting on 7 December:

Dr. [Nathaniel] Appleton communicated a Letter from President Locke dated Dec. 1st 1773, signifying his resignation of the Office of President of this College. Voted. that the Revd Dr. Appleton, Professor [John] Winthrop and Mr. [Andrew] Eliot be a Committee to receive and take into their Care the Books Papers and other Things in the President’s house, that belong to the College and to receive the Keys as soon as the late President has removed his Family & Effects.

Appleton was the Congregationalist minister in Cambridge, his meetinghouse right next to the college campus. Prof. Winthrop lived nearby. Eliot was a minister in Boston, someone who had turned down the office of president back during the last search. Now they had the task of tidying up after President Locke.

TOMORROW: “The unhappy affair.”

“I should not have chose this town for an Asylum”

On 17 June 1775, as I quoted yesterday, John Adams complained that five friends from Massachusetts hadn’t sent him any letters with news about the province since he’d left for the Second Continental Congress.

I decided to look into what those men did in the previous two months.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper had fled from Boston on 9 April, halfway through Sunday services, wary that Gen. Thomas Gage might order his arrest. He settled in with Samuel P. Savage in Weston. By the end of the month Cooper had his wife, daughter, and clothing with him, but not his library or all his letters.

In early May, Cooper arranged to stand in as the minister in Groton. Or rather, since that town was far away and he liked being near the seat of Patriot power, he made deals with other ministers to go out and preach in Groton while he preached in their churches close by. For a while, at least, he could coast on his celebrity as Boston’s most silver-tongued minister and recycle his old sermons.

Prof. John Winthrop of Harvard College lived in Cambridge. As the king’s troops marched through town on 18–19 April, he and his wife Hannah fled for safety, first to the Fresh Pond area, then further the next day, fearing the redcoats would return.

Later Hannah Winthrop wrote to her friend Mercy Warren:

Thus with precipitancy were we driven to the town of Andover, following some of our acquaintance, five of us to be conveyd with one poor tired horse & Chaise. . . .

I should not have chose this town for an Asylum, being but 20 miles from Seaports where men of war & their Pirates are Stationed, but in being fixd here I see it is not in man to direct his steps. As you kindly enquire after our Situation, I must tell you it is Rural & romantically pleasing.

Back in Cambridge, militia companies arrived en masse, taking over the college buildings and larger mansions. Most of the townspeople left.

By mid-June, however, the Winthrops were back home, though only temporarily. The professor helped to pack up the Harvard College library and scientific equipment. College classes resumed in Concord in October, and the Winthrops settled there for the rest of the school year.

Adams’s list started with three lawyers, all from Boston. All also had ties of family or friendship to Loyalists, and that complicated their choices as the war broke out.

Benjamin Kent at some point got a pass out of Boston and, according to his profile in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, stayed with various friends in the countryside through the siege. Though he remained in the U.S. of A. through the war, in the mid-1780s he moved to Canada to spend his last years with his children.

William Tudor was just starting his legal career. He was also courting Delia Jarvis, a young lady from a Loyalist family. According to a family memoir, after the fighting started, Tudor tried to wrangle passes for himself, her, and her family from the Adm. Samuel Graves’s secretary, but that effort was fruitless.

On 12 May, Tudor “broke from Boston by the roundabout way of Point Sherly” in Chelsea (now Winthrop), leaving Delia and her family behind. He sought a position in the Patriot service. With John Adams championing him, Tudor became the Continental Army’s judge advocate general in the summer of 1775.

TOMORROW: The legend of Samuel Swift.

“I have lamented excessively the Want of your Correspondence”

In his letter to Abigail Adams on 17 June 1775, which I started quoting yesterday, John Adams continued:

I have never been able to obtain from our Province, any regular and particular Intelligence since I left it. [Benjamin] Kent, [Samuel] Swift, [William] Tudor, Dr. [Samuel] Cooper, Dr. [John] Winthrop, and others wrote me often, last Fall—not a Line from them this Time.

Adams was referring to his time away at the First Continental Congress in late 1774, when he felt well informed.

Three days later, he wrote directly to Tudor:

I have lamented excessively the Want of your Correspondence ever since I have been here. Not a Line from Dr. Winthrop, Dr. Cooper, Mr. Kent, Swift, Tudor, from some or other of whom I was accustomed the last Fall, to receive Letters every Week. I know not the state, the Number, the Officers of the Army—the Condition of the poor People of Boston or any Thing else.

I decided to look into John Adams’s complaint, using the Adams Papers and Founders Online. He and his heirs were unusually conscientious about saving letters, so we’re at least very close to seeing all the correspondence he received.

To begin with, this chiding wasn’t fair to William Tudor (1750–1819, shown here later in life), who was Adams’s former law clerk. All the other men were senior to Adams, so he couldn’t nag them the same way.

Furthermore, back in the fall of 1774, those older gentlemen had actually sent Adams rather few letters. Tudor had sent more than all the other men combined. He’d also traveled to Philadelphia himself, carrying the only letter that Cooper wrote to Adams in that season.

The first two men Adams named were Benjamin Kent (1708–1788) and Samuel Swift (1715–1775), senior figures in the Boston bar. Indeed, Kent had founded the bar association and liked to preside over its get-togethers. Each man had written Adams one letter in the fall of 1774, and Swift had sent another to the whole Massachusetts delegation. Neither wrote Adams in spring 1775.

As I said above, young Tudor had brought Adams a letter from the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper (1725–1783) in October 1774. That minister didn’t send anything in the spring of 1775.

Finally, no 1774 letters to Adams survive from Prof. John Winthrop (1714–1779) of Harvard College. But four days after Adams’s initial complaint on 17 June 1775, Winthrop did send him one. Tudor wrote a few days later. Both men described what had happened on the same date when Adams complained—namely, the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Because while Adams was aching to know how the war was going, all the men he wanted to hear from were actually living in the war zone. They had other things on their minds besides correspondence.

TOMORROW: Getting out of Boston, and getting news from Boston.

Harvard Digital Collections from the Colonial Period

Last month the Harvard Gazette featured some treasures from the university’s Colonial North America collection, “approximately 650,000 digitized pages of handmade materials from the 17th and 18th centuries.”

Most of that material consists of manuscripts, but highlighted in this article are:

• a Charles Willson Peale miniature portrait of George Washington on ivory, slightly over an inch wide, shown here.
• Prof. John Winthtrop’s almanac for 1772, its frontispiece Paul Revere’s woodcut version of his Boston Massacre copperplate engraving.
• a globe three inches across, made in 1757 and encased in a spherical case covered in shark skin that doubled as a celestial globe.

As I type, the collection’s front page features documents created by Dr. John Jeffries and the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, two men from Revolutionary Massachusetts I don’t fully trust. But I can’t hold that against the university.

This week the university announced the launch of the larger Harvard Digital Collections, which contains the material from Colonial North America. That “provides free, public access to over 6 million objects digitized from our collections—from ancient art to modern manuscripts and audio visual materials.”

What’s more, this is the policy on copyright governing this material:

In order to foster creative reuse of digitized content, Harvard Library allows free use of openly available digital reproductions of items from its collections that are not under copyright, except where other rights or restrictions apply.

Harvard Library asserts no copyright over digital reproductions of works in its collections which are in the public domain, where those digital reproductions are made openly available on Harvard Library websites.

So if a person wanted an image of a certificate of initiation into the African Lodge of Freemasons, signed by Prince Hall, George Middleton, and other officers, one has merely to click.

“I have engag’d that it shall not be printed”

In the spring of 1773, the Boston Whigs had an incendiary document that they wanted to share with the public. But the person who supplied that document had asked them not to make copies or circulate it widely.

The document was a collection of letters from Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver, and other friends of the royal government to the British official Thomas Whately in the late 1760s. The person who had supplied that collection was Benjamin Franklin, the London lobbyist for the Massachusetts house.

On 2 Dec 1772 Franklin had sent the letters to Thomas Cushing, speaker of the house, saying:

On this Occasion I think it fit to acquaint you that there has lately fallen into my Hands Part of a Correspondence, that I have reason to believe laid the Foundation of most if not all our present Grievances. I am not at liberty to tell thro’ what Channel I receiv’d it; and I have engag’d that it shall not be printed, nor any Copies taken of the whole or any part of it; but I am allow’d and desired to let it be seen by some Men of Worth in the Province for their Satisfaction only.

In confidence of your preserving inviolably my Engagement, I send you enclos’d the original Letters, to obviate every Pretence of Unfairness in Copying, Interpolation or Omission. The Hands of the Gentlemen will be well known. . . .

I therefore wish I was at Liberty to make the Letters publick; but as I am not, I can only allow them to be seen by yourself, by the other Gentlemen of the Committee of Correspondence, by Messrs. [James] Bowdoin, and [James] Pitts, of the Council, and Drs. [Charles] Chauncey, [Samuel] Cooper and [John] Winthrop, with a few such other Gentlemen as you may think it fit to show them to. After being some Months in your Possession, you are requested to return them to me.

Chauncy and Cooper were Boston’s most respected Whig ministers. Winthrop was a Harvard professor.

On 24 March, Cushing wrote back:

I have communicated them to some of the Gentlemen you mentioned. They are of opinion, that though it might be inconvenient to publish them, yet it might be expedient to have Copys taken and left on this side the water as there may be a necessity to make some use of them hereafter, however I read to them what you had wrote me upon the occasion, and told them I could by no means Consent Copys of them or any part of them should be taken without your express Leave, that I would write you upon the subject and should strictly Conform to your directions.

Despite Cushing’s assurances, other men besides the six Franklin had specified had already seen the copies of the letters.

TOMORROW: Information wants to be free.

Mapping As a City on a Hill

In his essay or sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” Gov. John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony used the metaphor of a “citty upon a hill.” We currently treat that concept as one of the founding ideas of America. Yet Winthrop’s text was unknown in the eighteenth century.

As Edward O’Reilly describes in this blog post, a Winthrop descendant gave the manuscript to the New-York Historical Society in 1809. The Massachusetts Historical Society published the first transcript in 1838. That essay was reprinted in the American Quarterly Register two years later, but it wasn’t widely promulgated.

In 1867 another Winthrop descendant published Life and Letters of John Winthrop, which modernized the spelling of the phrase as “city on a hill.” After that, the essay started showing up in collections of American literature, on its way to becoming famous.

In the new book As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon, Daniel T. Rodgers keeps tracing the phrase over the last century, showing how it became more resonant and its implications changed. Prof. Rodgers is also my Uncle Dan, so I’ve been waiting to see this book.

In Commonwealth Magazine, Carter Wilkie writes of As a City on a Hill:

In the best argued brief of speechwriting forensics yet published, Rodgers reveals how the resuscitation and redefinition of Winthrop’s words was performed before Reagan and JFK, by Perry Miller, the Harvard historian who fathered the field of Puritan studies after watching Boston’s tricentennial celebration in 1930 as a graduate student, and by Daniel Boorstin, the American historian who attended Harvard in the 1930s, when Miller was there.

According to Rodgers, it was Miller who “put the ‘city upon a hill’ phrase at the core of historians’ understanding of Puritanism and put Puritanism, for the first time, at the core of the American story itself.” But it was Boorstin who popularized the myth as a foundational idea in the American mind.

In his 1958 book, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, Boorstin began with, “A City Upon a Hill: The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay.” There, Boorstin proclaimed: “John Winthrop, while preaching to his fellow-passengers, struck the keynote of American history… No one writing after the fact, three hundred years later, could better have expressed the American sense of destiny. In describing the Puritan experience we will see how this sense of destiny came into being.”

Again, that “keynote of American history” was completely unknown during the actual founding of the U.S. of A. And the original text didn’t include the word “upon.”

Here’s another review of As a City on a Hill from the Chicago Tribune. And here are podcast discussions with Dan Rodgers at John Fea’s Way of Improvement Leads Home, Princeton’s Politics and Polls, and John J. Miller’s Bookmonger.

While studying the original Winthrop manuscript, Rodgers noticed that the phrase “New England” was in a different, thicker handwriting than the rest. Edward O’Reilly of the New-York Historical Society was determined to figure out the text underneath, and that blog posting I mentioned above shared the result.

Hunter on Dighton Rock in Middleboro, 19 May

On Saturday, 19 May, the Massachusetts Archaeological Society will host a special lecture by Douglas Hunter on “The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past.”

Drawing on his book of the same name, Dr. Hunter will discuss the legacy and mythology behind a petroglyph-covered boulder found in the area that became Berkley:

First noticed by colonists in 1680, Dighton Rock in Massachusetts by the nineteenth century was one of the most famous and contested artifacts of American antiquity. This forty-ton boulder covered in petroglyphs has been the subject of endless speculation that defies its Native American origins. Hunter dissects almost four centuries of Dighton Rock’s misinterpretation, to reveal its larger role in colonization and the conceptualization of Indigenous peoples.

Among the many New England scholars who studied the rock was the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles. In 1766, while living in Newport, Rhode Island, he saw a copy of a broadside about the boulder written by the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather. (Other men who had written about the rock included Prof. John Winthrop of Harvard and Dr. William Douglass, best known for opposing smallpox inoculation and Mather’s other ideas.)

In June 1767 Stiles went to visit a man who lived half a mile from the rock. He used chalk to make the markings more distinct and then drew them in his journal, stating on 6 June: “Spent the forenoon in Decyphering about Two Thirds the Inscription, which I take to be in phoenician Letters & 3000 years old.”

Stiles returned in July for more investigation. He “washed & skrubbed the Rock with a Broom,” fighting the water level, before drawing more surfaces. The next month, two local men did the minister the favor of going out and collecting more drawings, measurements, and even what seems to be a casting of the scrapes in “the Phœnitian rock.”

Here’s one of Stiles’s drawings, courtesy of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

In 1768 the Swiss artist Pierre Eugène du Simitière visited Stiles on his way to settle in Philadelphia. He studied the material that the minister had collected. He looked at the characters on Mather’s broadside and and observed, “They are also totally different from the copy taken by Dr. Stiles.” Indeed, most or all of those researchers were seeing what they wanted to see.

Hunter’s talk about this history and what it shows about colonial New Englanders’ attitude toward the Natives around them will take place at the Robbins Museum of Archaeology, 17 Jackson Street in Middleboro, starting at 1:00 P.M. The program is free, but the society suggests a donation of $5 per person.

Digging through Harvard’s Digital Papers

I rather like my segue yesterday from the Stamp Act confrontation unfolding 250 years ago to Harvard’s new Colonial North American Project.

As the university announced, its archivists are digitizing all the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents in several different collections. With 2,400 objects documents available for viewing, the project is still in an early stage.

For example, here’s a notebook of Prof. John Winthrop’s meteorological observations for the mid-1740s. The professor kept those up to his death in 1779, meaning we have detailed weather records from just outside Boston for all the important days of the pre-Revolutionary turmoil and the siege of Boston. But the later notebooks don’t appear to be digitized yet.

Winthrop’s astronomical studies probably explain why the papers of him and his wife Hannah, who were firm establishment Whigs, include almanacs from the Loyalist printers John Mein and John Fleeming. But maybe they were just intrigued by the scientific reports on the covers of those publications, about giants in South America and a furious wild beast in France.

There’s a lot of other visual material in the online collection, more easily reproduced that way than in print. Harvard students learned how to take surveys and sketch buildings as part of their mathematics courses, so more than one left a plan of Cambridge common,

William Tudor, Jr.’s mathematics notebook shows him using “Genl. Warren’s monument on Bunker Hill” to calculate heights in 1795, illustrated above. A couple of decades later, Tudor helped to organize the initial drive to create today’s Bunker Hill Monument on the same hilltop.

“Make Application before the said first Day of November”

Here’s a glimpse of Ames’s Almanack for 1766. Usually almanacs were published at the end of the preceding year, sometimes reprinted in the first couple of weeks of the year they covered.

The 1766 almanacs, however, would then fall under the provisions of the Stamp Act, taking effect on 1 Nov 1765. Some printers therefore moved up their publishing schedules so they could sell copies without needing stamped paper.

Richard and Samuel Draper advertised this almanac in early September issues of their Boston News-Letter. Its second page summarized the part of the Stamp Act that applied to almanacs and then warned:

Those Persons who are desirous of being furnished with this Almanack, are requested to make Application before the said first Day of November, as the Price after that Time will be more than double what it is now.

(Incidentally, the author of this almanac wasn’t Dr. Nathaniel Ames of Dedham, despite its title. Instead, it was probably Joseph Willard [1738-1804] credited as “a late Student of Harvard-College.” Ames had published with the Draper family in the past, but this year he either didn’t like being rushed or chose to go with other printers, so the Drapers just pirated his name. But hey—they were taking a moral stand against the Stamp Act!)

Harvard professor John Winthrop (or his wife Hannah, but I think it was John) bought a copy of this almanac, presumably before November. It became part of the couple’s papers in the collections of Harvard University.

And now that university is digitizing this almanac and all its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents to create the Colonial North American Project at Harvard University, as reported here. The Winthrops’ artifacts are also part of a new exhibit at the Pusey Library called “Opening New Worlds.” And both the online resource and the exhibit are free to all.

What Kind of Man Was James Winthrop?

James Winthrop (shown here) was a son of Prof. John Winthrop of Harvard College, one of the most respected New England men of his generation. James benefited from that connection with some appointments, first at Harvard and later within the Massachusetts government. But he doesn’t appear to have ever been content.

In 1786 John Quincy Adams wrote to his mother about Winthrop:

…the librarian, Mr. W.…is a man of genius and learning, but without one particle of softness, or of anything that can make a man amiable, in him. He is, I am told, severe in his remarks upon the ladies; and they are not commonly disposed to be more favorable with respect to him. It is observed that men are always apt to despise, what they are wholly ignorant of. And this is the reason, I take it, why so many men of genius and learning, that have lived retired and recluse lives, have been partial against the ladies. They have opportunity to observe only their follies and foibles, and therefore conclude that they have no virtues. Old bachelors too are very apt to talk of sour grapes; but if Mr. W. ever gets married, he will be more charitable towards the ladies, and I have no doubt but he will be more esteemed and beloved than he is now, he cannot be less.

Winthrop never married.

A Harvard library finding aid for a small set of James Winthrop papers states:

When his father died in 1779, James hoped to succeed him as Harvard’s Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. Samuel Williams was chosen instead, though, and it has been speculated that Winthrop’s intemperance and eccentric personality were the primary reasons he was overlooked. Although he participated in a scientific expedition with Williams and Stephen Sewall in October of 1780, he also attempted to damage Williams’ reputation as a scholar on several occasions.

Winthrop was widely known for making malicious comments about others, and as a result he appears to have been unpopular among his colleagues at Harvard. In 1787 he was removed from the librarianship as the result of a newly instituted rule preventing faculty members from holding civil or judicial office. This rule is believed to have been instituted for the sole purpose of removing Winthrop [a register of probate] from the staff.

The position of Hollis Professor became vacant shortly thereafter, but Winthrop was unwelcome. He eventually bequeathed his father’s impressive collection of books to tiny new Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.

After leaving Harvard, Winthrop wrote some prominent essays against ratifying the new Constitution and some analyses of the Book of Revelations. He served many years as a low-level judge. In James Bowdoin and the Patriot Philosophers, Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel wrote: “Regarded as an intriguer, drunkard, and cynic, he was the misfit son of a gifted father, and tolerated out of respect for his ancestors.” But I suspect that the root of Winthrop’s problem wasn’t drinking or intriguing but just not being able to get along easily with people.

For that reason, I’m inclined to think that Winthrop’s writings about the Battle of Bunker Hill are reliable so far as they go, and frustrating because he didn’t grasp what people would be most interested in hearing.

More about Bunker Hill from James Winthrop

In 1818, the same year he responded to a map of Bunker Hill published in the Analectic Magazine as quoted yesterday, James Winthrop wrote another letter about the battle published in the North American Review. That second letter was dated 18 June—i.e., right after the battle’s anniversary.

Winthrop was also responding to a statement in Henry Dearborn’s recently published account of the battle, which said that American soldiers had prepared the rail fence “by the direction of the ‘committee of safety,’ of which James Winthrop, Esq. who then, and now lives in Cambridge, was one, as he has within a few years informed me. Mr. Winthrop himself acted as a volunteer on that day, and was wounded in the battle.”

Winthrop insisted that wasn’t right:

I lived in Cambridge all the summer of 1775, and among others was present at the battle of Bunker Hill, on the 17th of June, in that summer. The army was then upon the state establishment [i.e., the Massachusetts army was not yet part of the Continental Army]. About one o’clock, or a little after it, an alarm was given in this vicinity. James Swan, Esq. was then resident here. We two armed ourselves and went down together to Charlestown. A little beyond the College, General Joseph Warren overtook us. We were both known to him and exchanged the passing compliment. But as he was on horseback we did not join company.

When we passed over Bunker Hill, we went immediately to that part of the lines, where the rail-fence stood. There were two fieldpieces there, but no artillery-men with them. Generals [Israel] Putnam and Warren were in conversation by one of them. We spoke with them, and then passed on toward the redoubt. The two generals were standing, and General Putnam had hold of the briddle of his horse; there were then very few, if any men at the fence. When we got to the redoubt, we did not enter, but spent a little time in viewing the situation of the ground and of the enemy. We supposed, from the position of the British troops, that their intention was to advance between our intrenchment and the Mystic river, and that it would become necessary to have that part of our line well guarded. We expressed our opinion, and some of the people about us desired us to go and see if any sufficient force was there. We two accordingly went over to the rail-fence, and being arrived near the place where we had seen the two generals, and where the fieldpieces were still standing, the firing commenced. I did not see either General Putnam or General Warren afterwards on that day.

I have not now the command of dates, but think it was only a few days after this, when the army was taken into continental pay, and General [George] Washington took the command. [Artemas] Ward, Putnam and [William] Heath were general officers, and continued to be generally respected. I never heard any blame cast on General Putnam, and it was about fifteen years after this that he died in peace.

It is altogether a mistake, that either I, or my brother [John Winthrop], was ever on the Committee of Safety. About a month after the battle, if I rightly recollect, the government [i.e., the official Massachusetts General Court] was organized according to the charter, and the Committee of course ceased.

Winthrop’s second letter was thus in basic agreement with his first, which isn’t surprising since he wrote them around the same time. Once again he didn’t provide a complete account of the battle as he’d seen it. He didn’t describe the actual fighting. He didn’t describe the retreat off the peninsula. Dearborn wrote that Winthrop was wounded at the battle, but Winthrop’s own letter says nothing about that.

The North American Review letter was mostly about who was in command of the American forces and what Israel Putnam did. Those were hotly debated questions in the early 1800s, with Putnam’s descendants being particularly keen to make their views known.

The fact that Winthrop was disclaiming the distinction of being on the Committee of Safety and not talking about his wound suggests he might have provided a broad and honest perspective of the battle, rather than puffing himself up. Then again, Winthrop may have bragged to Dearborn and felt pressure to openly disclaim those lies once they became public. Winthrop’s reputation wasn’t the highest—but was his problem being deceitful or too honest?

TOMORROW: Assessing James Winthrop.

Observing Instruments at Harvard

After I wrote about 1760s astronomy earlier this week, I heard from Sara Schechner, the David P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University.

She alerted me that that collection is available for online viewing through the Waywiser webpage. It includes many instruments that Profs. John Winthrop and Samuel Williams used to observe the transits of Venus in the 1760s and (in Williams’s case) the eclipse of the Sun in 1780. Folks can also visit the “Time, Life, & Matter: Science in Cambridge” exhibit in person in the Putnam Gallery, Science Center 136, One Oxford Street in Cambridge.

When John Singleton Copley painted Winthrop in 1773, he included a telescope made by James Short of London in the background. That same instrument is on display at that gallery now. (I wonder if people could pose for pictures in front of it in the same way.) In all, the Harvard collection contains ten items made by Short: five reflecting telescopes, one optical telescope, and four spare parts.

The instrument above is an “astronomical quadrant with achromatic sights” made by Jeremiah Sisson of London in 1765 and used by both Winthrop and Williams in the following decades.

On Saturday, 21 July, Dr. Schechner will speak about “Politics and the Dimensions of the Solar System: Colonial American Observations of the Transits of Venus” at the Astronomer's Conjunction in Northfield, Massachusetts. That talk will focus on Winthrop and the affairs of Boston.

Samuel Williams: minister, astronomer, fugitive,…

Along with future physician Isaac Rand (profiled yesterday), Prof. John Winthrop took a young man named Samuel Williams (1743-1817) up to Newfoundland in 1761 to help observe the transit of Venus.

After that experience Williams, son of a Waltham minister (and former young captive from the Deerfield raid of 1704), set out on a rather conventional career path. He became minister at Bradford, Massachusetts. But he also kept up his scientific interests. In 1769 Williams observed the decade’s second transit of Venus from Newbury, publishing his observations through the American Philosophical Society seventeen years later.

In 1780 Williams succeeded Winthrop as Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard. That year he wrote about New England’s famous “Dark Day” and led a small college expedition to Maine to watch the Moon eclipse the Sun.

That trip was hampered by the fact that Williams decided that the best place to make his observations was an island in Penobscot Bay which the British military had just defended from a large Massachusetts attack. As with the 1761 transit of Venus, however, warring governments were willing to let gentlemen make observations for the sake of science.

Later in the 1780s, Harvard student John Quincy Adams wrote: “Mr. Williams is more generally esteemed by the students, than any other member of this government [i.e., college faculty]. He is more affable and familiar with the students, and does not affect that ridiculous pomp which is so generally prevalent here.”

But in 1788 Prof. Williams suddenly had to depart Harvard—and the U.S. of A. He was charged with forgery for falsifying a receipt from a trust he administered. Williams rode north, leaving his family in Cambridge to await word of where to find him.

Williams settled in Rutland, Vermont, and found work as a legal copyist and minister, first fill-in and then full-time. He brought his family north and rebuilt a respectable life. Williams launched the Rutland Herald newspaper and edited it for three years. He published a history of the state and a short history of the Revolution for use in schools. Williams helped found the University of Vermont and in 1806 used his astronomical knowledge to settle the state’s northern boundary with Canada.

One of the telescopes Williams reportedly used is shown above courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. The museum’s webpage says Williams used this one to observe the 1769 transit of Venus, but also implies he was a Harvard professor at the time. Soon I’ll share links to more of Williams’s equipment.

In 2009 Robert Friend Rothschild published Two Brides for Apollo, a sympathetic biography of Williams. I believe the title refers to the two types of astronomical events Williams studied: the transit of Venus and the solar eclipse.

Dr. Isaac Rand and the “Important Branch of Obstetrics”

After reading that Prof. John Winthrop took two recent Harvard graduates with him to Newfoundland in 1761 to observe the transit of Venus, as described yesterday, I wondered what had become of those young men. What do you do with your life after having seen “the Savage coast of Labrador”?

Isaac Rand (1743-1822) went into medicine. He trained with Dr. James Lloyd, and like his mentor he sided with the Crown when war broke out and stayed in Boston through the siege. However, both men opted not to leave with the British military.

Within a few months of the evacuation, Rand was managing a smallpox hospital for the local authorities. He overcame suspicions about his political leanings by staying out of the fight and working hard for his patients.

After the war, Rand became a founding member of the Humane Society of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the Massachusetts Bible Society.

Dr. James Thacher wrote of Rand:

Previous to this period strong efforts had been made by the physicians of Boston, and more particularly by the late Dr. James Lloyd, to rescue from the hands of unqualified females, the important branch of obstetrics, and to raise it to an honorable rank in the profession. So great was considered the necessity of changing the practice in this respect, that Dr. L., even while engaged in the most extensive and lucrative business in the town, made a visit to Europe partly for the purpose of qualifying himself for the exigences which the practice of this highly responsible and important branch of obstetrics continually furnishes. His efforts succeeded; that business gradually fell into the hands of the physicians, and Dr. Rand and his contemporaries completed what had been begun by Dr. Lloyd. In this branch Dr. R. acquired a high and deserved reputation.

That of course reflects a physician’s professional bias about who’s best at birthing babies.

The engraving of obstetrical forceps above originally appeared in André Levret’s Observations sur les causes et les accidens de plusieurs accouchemens laborieux, published in 1750. The image comes from this National Institutes of Health history of cesarean sections.

Prof. Winthrop Gets a Good Look at Venus

Prof. John Winthrop of Harvard College (portrayed here by John Singleton Copley, in an image that comes courtesy of the university’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments) was among the many scientists who scrambled to observe the transit of Venus in 1761.

His report on the event to the worldwide scientific community included praise for “His Excellency FRANCIS BERNARD, Esq. Governor of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, inspired with a just zeal for the advancement of Literature, which he demonstrates on every opportunity.”

In 1761 Bernard was newly arrived in Massachusetts, and that April he helped secure government support for Winthrop’s research. In just a few years the governor would become very unpopular, with Winthrop quietly supporting that Whig opposition.

As the professor knew from Edmund Halley’s calculation years before, “Newfoundland was the only British Plantation in which one [observation] could be made, and indeed the most western part of the Earth where the end of the Transit could be observ’d.” Therefore, he set out for “the Savage coast of Labrador” with two recent Harvard graduates, Samuel Williams and Isaac Rand, both eighteen years old. They took along most of the college’s astronomical equipment, viz.:

an excellent Pendulum clock, one of Hadley’s Octants with Nonius divisions and fitted in a new manner to observe on shore as well as sea, a refracting telescope with cross wires at half right angles for taking differences of Right Ascension and Declination, and a curious reflecting telescope, adjusted with spirit-levels at right angles to each other and having horizontal and vertical wires for taking correpondent altitudes, or differences of altitudes and azimuths.

Winthrop and his assistants arrived in Newfoundland on Massachusetts’s provincial ship in late May 1761. They set up their equipment and checked and rechecked it, Winthrop wrote, “with an assiduity which the infinite swarms of insects, that were in possession of the hill, were not able to abate, tho’ they persecuted us severely and without intermission, both by day and by night, with their venomous stings.”

The morning of 6 June was “serene and calm.” Prof. Winthrop wrote:

at 4h 18m we had the high satisfaction of seeing that most agreeable Sight, VENUS ON THE SUN, and of showing it in our telescopes to the Gentlemen of the place who had assembled very early on the hill to behold so curious a spectacle. The Planet at first appear’d dim thro’ the cloud, but in a short time became more distinct and better defined.

Winthrop recorded the time of transit and sketched what he saw, telling his readers:

The above observations gave me so many differences between the Sun’s and Venus’s altitudes and azimuths, from whence by spherical trigonometry I deduc’d the Planet’s right Ascensions and Declinations and, from them, in the last place, her Longitudes and Latitudes. It would be neither of entertainment nor use to the Reader to insert the particulars of such tedious calculations. . . .

The comparison of the observations made in the N.W. parts of the world with those in the S.E., when all of them come to be laid together, will give the true path of Venus, abstracted from parallax, by which means the quantity of the parallax will at length be discovered. The right determination of which point will render this year 1761 an ever-memorable era in the annals of astronomy.

Those quotations comes from this edited version [P.D.F. download] of Winthrop’s report.

Winthrop planned to view the 1769 transit from Newfoundland as well, but a fire at Harvard destroyed the astronomical instruments. He asked Benjamin Franklin to send a new set from London, as this Dutch Transit of Venus website describes.

Unfortunately, there was a heavy demand for astronomical devices all over Europe as the second transit approached. Then telescope-maker James Short died before delivering Winthrop’s order. On 11 March 1769, Franklin wrote to Winthrop that he’d managed to get that brass reflecting telescope from Short’s estate, but he was still waiting for the other tools from another craftsman. During the 1769 transit, Winthrop was stuck in Cambridge.

(Thanks to Boston 1775 reader Robert C. Mitchell for some of the links used in this posting.)

Did Anyone Feel That? Like a Rumbling? Anyone?

Most of the articles under the pins of the Bostonian Society’s “Mapping Revolutionary Boston” website/app were drafted by students at Wellesley, Suffolk, and Harvard. There were layers of vetting and editing, but those students deserve their credit for starting the process.

One of those pins touches on the Earthquake of 1755. The original article focused on Prof. John Winthrop of Harvard, and his suggestion that the tremor was the product of underground gases and not, as some of his prominent forebears would have said, the anger of God.

The subject doesn’t link to Boston’s political Revolution—the quake came ten years before the Stamp Act, twenty years before the war. But it ties into the Enlightenment’s scientific revolution, the ongoing shift away from theocracy in New England, and daily life in colonial Boston.

Unfortunately, with that focus the article didn’t provide a place to put the pin. Prof. Winthrop lived and worked in Cambridge (I like to think of his house as under the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream in the Garage). The map under “Mapping Revolutionary Boston” shows only the Boston peninsula in 1769.

So one of my tasks was to find a way to connect that article to a place in Boston. Surely someone in town mentioned the earthquake. After all, it was…an earthquake! Unfortunately, there’s much less published about 1755 than about 1765 or 1775. Eventually I remembered that John Tudor kept a diary for many years before the war, and his descendants published it in 1896.

Sure enough, Deacon Tudor wrote a few lines about the earthquake. He even pinpointed where in Boston the worst damage occurred! So that’s why the article starts with him, and then zips across the Charles River to discuss Winthrop’s commentary.