“The Government of this Colledge is very Strict”

Yesterday I quoted the start of John Adams’s description of his first visit to Princeton in August 1774, when he was on his way to the First Continental Congress.

Adams viewed the college’s Nassau Hall, the mansion of Judge Richard Stockton, the Rittenhouse orrery, and equipment for electrical experiments (which didn’t work in New Jersey’s humid August).

Adams’s account continues:

By this Time the Bell rang for Prayers. We went into the Chappell, the President [John Witherspoon, shown here] soon came in, and we attended. The Schollars sing as badly as the Presbyterians at New York. After Prayers the President attended Us to the Balcony of the Colledge, where We have a Prospect of an Horizon of about 80 Miles Diameter.

We went into the Presidents House, and drank a Glass of Wine. He is as high a Son of Liberty, as any Man in America. He says it is necessary that the Congress should raise Money and employ a Number of Writers in the Newspapers in England, to explain to the Public the American Plea, and remove the Prejudices of Britons. He says also We should recommend it to every Colony to form a Society for the Encouragement of Protestant Emigrants from the 3 Kingdoms [i.e., England, Scotland, and Ireland].

The Dr. waited on us to our Lodgings and took a Dish of Coffee. He is one of the Committee of Correspondence, and was upon the Provincial Congress for appointing Delegates from this Province to the general [i.e., Continental] Congress. Mr. William Livingston and He laboured he says to procure an Instruction that the Tea should not be paid for. Livingston he says is very sincere and very able in the public Cause, but a bad Speaker, tho a good Writer.

Here we saw a Mr. Hood a Lawyer of Brunswick, and a Mr. Jonathan Dickenson Serjeant, a young Lawyer of Prince town, both cordial Friends to American Liberty. In the Evening, young [Samuel] Whitwell, a student at this Colledge, Son of Mr. [Samuel] Whitwell at Boston to whom we brought a Letter, came to see us.

By the Account of Whitwell and [fellow student John] Pidgeon, the Government of this Colledge is very Strict, and the Schollars study very hard. The President says they are all Sons of Liberty.

It’s notable how many of the men Adams met in Princeton eventually became New Jersey delegates to the Continental Congress: college president Witherspoon, professor William Huston, and lawyer Sergeant, not to mention neighbor Stockton.

The Rittenhouse Orreries

On 5 May 1768, the Pennsylvania Gazette ran an article headlined, “A Description of a new ORRERY, planned, and now nearly finished, by Mr. DAVID RITTENHOUSE, of Norriton, in the County of Philadelphia.”

An orrery was a machine that simulated the movements of the solar system through axles and gears. The term had been coined early in the 1700s in honor of the fourth Earl of Orrery. He didn’t invent the device, but he was the patron and funder of the man who did, George Graham. [It was good to be an earl.]

Like Graham, Rittenhouse was a clockmaker. Their orreries were based on the idea that the solar system ran like a clock.

Rittenhouse’s orrery was just one of the machines he invented in Revolutionary Philadelphia. He was also a surveyor and astronomer, and one of the Philadelphia Whigs.

In honor of his orrery, Princeton College gave Rittenhouse an honorary degree. The college president, the Rev. John Witherspoon also raised nearly £300 to buy the machine in April 1770. It was installed in Nassau Hall the following year.

John Adams viewed the Princeton orrery on 27 Aug 1774, on his way to the First Continental Congress, writing:

Here we saw a most beautifull Machine, an Orrery, or Planetarium, constructed by Mr. Writtenhouse of Philadelphia. It exhibits allmost every Motion in the astronomical World. The Motions of the Sun and all the Planetts with all their Satellites. The Eclipses of the Sun and Moon &c.

However, the sale to Princeton had miffed the Rev. William Smith, head of the College of Philadelphia (precursor of the University of Pennsylvania). He thought he’d wooed Rittenhouse into giving his institution first refusal on the device. So Smith convinced the Pennsylvania legislature to “purchase from Mr. Rittenhouse a new Orrery, for the use of the Public, at any sum not exceeding four hundred pounds.”

This new machine, apparently delivered by the end of the year, was bigger and more sophisticated than the first. Rittenhouse followed the same basic design but added some new features. British-Americans viewed the “Rittenhouse orrery” (they seem to have treated the two machines as one) as a convincing argument of their society’s sophistication.

TOMORROW: Orreries at war.

Revisiting Richard Stockton in Princeton

Way back in 2008, I wrote a series of postings about Richard Stockton, who voted for and signed the Declaration of Independence as a Continental Congress delegate from New Jersey. Then, around the end of November 1776, the Crown forces captured him.

As I discussed at length, a legend grew up in the early 1800s, supplemented with imaginary details in subsequent decades, that the royal authorities mistreated Stockton in jail, ruined his health, and left him in poverty. In fact, eighteenth-century records show that Stockton spent a few weeks in captivity at most, left considerable property for his son, and was said by his son-in-law Dr. Benjamin Rush to have “fully recovered” from his detention before dying of an oral cancer.

In 2009, Todd Braisted shared a document confirming how briefly Stockton was in custody. (Look for Todd’s book about the war around occupied New York, The Grand Forage of 1778: The Revolutionary War’s Forgotten Campaign, coming early next year from Westholme.)

A while back I came across more evidence that Stockton had returned to regular business by mid-1777. College business, at least—he was a neighbor and trustee of Princeton College.

That source is the published edition of A Brief Narrative of the Ravages of the British and Hessians at Princeton in 1776-1777, an anonymous manuscript dated 18 Apr 1777. Toward the end the editor, Varnum Lansing Collins, wrote this footnote:

In his warmth [about British army damage to Princeton College and the Presbyterian Meeting House] the author loses sight of the fact that the first two of these edifices had suffered probably as much damage from the American soldiery as from the British and Hessian. The church had been used by both armies. . . .

The minutes of the Trustees of the College of New Jersey for September, 1776, record the fact that Dr. [John] Witherspoon was to move in Congress “that troops shall not hereafter be quartered in the College.” And three months to a day after our unknown author penned his last paragraph [dated 18 Apr 1777], Dr. Witherspoon, Dr. Elihu Spencer and Richard Stockton, Esq., a committee from the Board of Trustees of the College, presented a petition to Congress praying that no Continental troops be allowed hereafter to enter the College or to use it as a barracks.

The petition recites that every party of provincials marching through Princeton takes possession of the building, and partly through wantonness and partly under pretence of not being supplied with firewood “are daily committing the greatest ravages upon the Building, in breaking up the floors, and burning every piece of wood they can cut out of it.”

Collins reported that the petition was in the manuscripts of the Continental Congress.

Thus, within half a year of his release from supposedly torturous conditions under the British army, Stockton was signing a complaint about damage done by the Continental Army.

“I was neither whig nor tory but a Printer.”

Benjamin Towne of the Pennsylvania Evening Post was one of Philadelphia’s most enthusiastic Whig printers from 1775 to late 1777, when the British army seized the city. He was then one of Philadelphia’s most enthusiastic royalist printers. When the Continental authorities returned in the middle of 1778, Towne didn’t flee like the other printers.

That left him with the only printing press in Philadelphia, so he had a monopoly on government business for a while. In fact, the state government paid Towne to reproduce its long list of people who had treacherously cooperated with the British military, including himself. He also got the job of printing some proclamations of the Continental Congress.

In October 1778 the Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon, a delegate from New Jersey (shown here), found Towne at a bookstore. This is how Isaiah Thomas described their meeting in his History of Printing in America:

After some conversation, Towne requested the doctor to furnish him with intelligence and essays for the Evening Post, as he formerly had done. The doctor refused, and told him that it would be very improper for a member of congress to hold intercourse with a man who was proscribed by law; but he added, “if you make your peace with the country first, I will then assist you.”

“How shall I do it, doctor?”

“Why,” answered the doctor, “write and publish a piece acknowledging your fault, professing repentance, and asking forgiveness.”

“But what shall I say?”

The doctor gave some hints; upon which Towne said, “Doctor, you write cxpeditiously and to the purpose; I will thank you to write something forme, and I will publish it.”

“Will you? then I will do it,” replied the doctor. The doctor applied to [the bookseller] for paper and ink, and immediately wrote, “The humble Confession, Recantation and Apology of Benjamin Towne,” etc. It was an excellent production, and humorously ironical; but Towne refused to comply with his promise to publish, because the doctor would not allow him to omit some sentences in it.

Witherspoon’s essay somehow made it into print nonetheless. Written in Towne’s voice, it started by acknowledging that he had printed under the protection of both the American and British governments, and went on to claim that he had printed lies for the latter.

The facts being thus stated, (I will presume to say altogether fully and fairly) I proceed to observe, that I am not only proscribed by the President and supreme executive Council of Pennsylvania, but that several other Persons are for reprobating my paper, and allege that instead of being suffered to print, I ought to be hanged as a Traitor to my Country. On this account I have thought proper to publish the following humble confession, declaration, recantation, and apology, hoping that it will assuage the wrath of my enemies, and in some degree restore me to the favor and indulgence of the Public. In the first place then, I desire it may be observed, that I never was, nor ever pretended to be a man of character, repute or dignity. . . .

I do hereby declare and confess, that when I printed for Congress, and on the side of Liberty, it was not by any means from principle, or a desire that the cause of Liberty should prevail, but purely and simply from the love of gain. I could have made nothing but tar and feathers by printing against them as things then stood. I make this candid acknowledgment not only as a penitent to obtain pardon, but to show that there was more consistency in my conduct than my enemies are willing to allow. They are pleased to charge me with hypocrisy in pretending to be a Whig when I was none. This charge is false; I was neither whig nor tory but a Printer. 

Towne toughed it out in Philadelphia for the rest of the war, but he had trouble finding subscribers for his Evening Post and printed sporadically. In 1783 he tried something novel: printing a new issue of the paper every day. The result was America’s first daily newspaper, but Towne couldn’t keep up the pace past 26 Oct 1784. He went back to job printing and died nine years later, still in Philadelphia.

Primary Sources on Richard Stockton

So what do documents from 1776 and 1777 tell us about Richard Stockton, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and what he experienced as a British captive? How might those primary sources help to explain the discrepancies between what his family and friends said about him when he died in 1781 and the family tradition that was published in the 1820s?

In mid-1776, official records say, Richard Stockton was elected a delegate to the Continental Congress from the state of New Jersey. He arrived in Philadelphia in time to take part in the vote on independence, then was part of a committee to inspect Fort Ticonderoga. When he returned to New Jersey, the British army under Gen. William Howe was pushing down through that state toward Philadelphia.

According to Stockton’s entry in the Biography of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, a squad of Loyalists captured him on 30 Nov 1776. The 8 July 1778 New Jersey Gazette reported that a jury had convicted Cyrenus Van Mater of “giving information to the enemy, and thereby being the cause of their taking the Hon. Richard Stockton, Esq. and John Covenhoven, Esq. in the month of December, 1776.” (By the time that article was printed, though, the British army had raided Monmouth County and rescued Van Mater from jail.) So let’s guess that Stockton was grabbed on the night of 30 Nov–1 Dec 1776, or thereabouts.

All the following quotations come from Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789, part of the Library of Congress’s American Memory website. I haven’t figured out how to link directly to particular documents in that collection, however, so I’m relying on other links when I can find them.

Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia (shown above), who had married Stockton’s daughter, wrote to Richard Henry Lee, a fellow Congress delegate, on 30 December:

I have heard from good Authority that my much hon[ore]d father in law who is now a prisoner with Gen Howe suffers many indignities & hardships from the enemy from which not only his rank, but his being a man ought to exempt him. I wish you would propose to Congress to pass a resolution in his favor

However, members in Congress were worrying over another rumor about Stockton. Word had reached Philadelphia that he had sworn off the American cause under the terms of a general amnesty offered by Gen. Howe and Adm. Richard Howe. On 26 Dec 1776, Elbridge Gerry wrote home to Massachusetts, possibly to James Warren, saying:

Judge Stockton of the Jersies who was also a Member of Congress has sued for pardon. I wish every timid Whig or pretended Whig in America would pursue the same plan, as their weak & ineffectual system of politics has been the Cause of every Misfortune that we have suffered.

The Congress wasn’t officially ready to accept that rumor as truth. On 3 Jan 1777, it made a formal complaint about how Stockton had “been ignominiously thrown into a common goal [jail].” Three days later John Hancock as chairman wrote to Gen. George Washington that while negotiating with the British over military prisoners he should “make Enquiry whether the Report which Congress have heard of Mr. Stockton’s being confined in a Common Jail by the Enemy, has any Truth in it, or not.” Congress’s Executive Committee told Washington on 9 Jan 1777: “We suppose the Report about Mr Stockton to be totally false but your Excellency will no doubt know that matter perfectly.” I’m not sure which “report” worried them more—Stockton being in a common jail or him asking the British commanders for a pardon.

Some latter-day sources say Stockton was released in a prisoner exchange, but those usually leave a paper trail and there isn’t any evidence of one in his case. Rather, it appears that the British authorities simply set the judge free. That was part of the Howe brothers’ amnesty policy. If gentlemen gave their word they wouldn’t take up arms against the British Empire again, they were free to go on “parole.” (If they did rejoin the Continental army and got recaptured, then they were liable to be hanged.)

By early February—or after less than three months in captivity—Stockton was back home in Princeton. On the 8th a fellow delegate, Abraham Clark, was seeking a replacement for him in Congress because “Mr. Stockton by his late proceedure cannot Act.” The next day, Hancock told Robert Treat Paine, “Stockton it is said, & truly, has Rec’d General How’s protection.” On 15 February, the New Jersey legislature received the judge’s formal resignation as delegate to the Continental Congress.

On 17 March, another New Jersey delegate, John Witherspoon, wrote to his son:

Judge Stockton is not very well in health & much spoken against for his Conduct. He Signed Howes declaration & also gave his Word of honour that he would not meddle in the least in American affairs during the War.

Mrs. Cochran was sent to the Enemies Lines by a flag of Truce and when Mr. Cochran came out to meet his wife he said to the Officers that went with the flag that Judge Stockton had brought Evidence to General Howe to prove that he was on his Way to seek a protection when he was taken. This he denies to be true yet many credit it but Mr. Cochrans known quarrel with him makes it very doubtful to candid Persons.

“Mr. Cochran” appears to be Richard Cochran, a Scotsman who settled in New Jersey in 1764 and was an early Loyalist. Even setting aside his story, which Witherspoon clearly wanted to do, the Gerry letter above shows that Stockton had been in Crown custody for less than a month before people in Philadelphia heard that he had forsworn the independence movement. How long Stockton was in a jail cell is unclear, but he was definitely back home in less than three months. By 29 April Stockton was apparently shopping for furniture.

At the end of 1777, the New Jersey government summoned Stockton to take another oath of allegiance, this time to the independent state. Finding the record of this oath in the late 1800s forced historians to notice the reports of Stockton’s promise to Howe in early 1777. In the end, however, most authors simply incorporated those events into the established story of Stockton’s terrible suffering: now they wrote that the British had treated him so badly that just to survive he’d had to swear allegiance to the Crown, so badly that he had to leave the independence fight because of poor health.

Not every author has accepted the usual story of Richard Stockton’s martyrdom. Leonard Lundin wrote of the judge’s “temporary apostasy” in Cockpit of the Revolution in 1940, while still accepting that his imprisonment led to his death. Frederick Bernays Wiener wrote a balanced, less than idolatrous article about Stockton in American Heritage in 1975. In Washington’s Crossing David Hackett Fischer may even be a little too critical, citing Stockton only as an American who “turned his coat” when the British army looked like it was winning. I think the situation is in some ways more complex, and in some ways simpler.

TOMORROW: How badly did the British authorities treat Richard Stockton?

Fact-Checking the Huckabee Campaign

A week ago I wrote about Mitt Romney’s attempt to invoke the First Continental Congress in his speech on religion in politics. Now it’s Mike Huckabee’s turn—which makes sense, since Huckabee’s growing poll numbers prompted Romney to speak on a topic he’d tried to avoid.

At a Republican presidential debate in October, Huckabee said:

When our founding fathers put their signatures on the Declaration of Independence, those 56 brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen, they said that we have certain inalienable rights given to us by our creator, and among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, life being one of them.

On C.N.N. yesterday, Huckabee’s campaign manager Ed Rollins answered a question about the propriety of religion in politics by starting out:

You go back to the signing of the constitution I think 26 of the people that signed it were ministers.

Huckabee and Rollins appear to have been pulling their numbers and facts out of the air. (Thanks to Talking Points Memo for the tip.)

There were indeed fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, but only one, John Witherspoon of New Jersey (pictured above, courtesy of Adherents.com), was a minister. He was the president of Princeton College at a time when all college presidents were ministers.

Two or three other Congress delegates had once preached, according to different sources. It was common for a young man with a college degree and no clear career plan to try either teaching or preaching to see how he enjoyed that work. Often the experience was enough to galvanize him into putting all his energy into law or medicine or business. In any event, three or four men out of fifty-six is far less than “most.”

As for the U.S. Constitution, thirty-six men signed that document out of fifty-five who attended the Constitutional Convention. Only two ever had professional affiliations with a church:

• Abraham Baldwin of Georgia was a Continental Army chaplain. After the war, he declined the position of Professor of Divinity at Yale and instead went into the law. He was “a fervent missionary of public education,” according to a U.S. Army website. Curiously, it’s unclear to Adherents.com what Baldwin’s religious affiliation was; different sources say different things.
  
• Hugh Williamson of North Carolina taught college Latin for three years, studied theology for two and “was licensed to preach the Gospel” by the Presbyterian church in Philadelphia. Instead, he became a mathematics professor for two years, then studied medicine for eight years and also went into the mercantile business.
  

Rollins’s own understanding of the place of religion in politics might have been revealed after the New Jersey governor’s race in 1993 when he boasted, “We went into black churches and we basically said to ministers who had endorsed [his candidate’s opponent] Florio, ‘Do you have a special project?’ And they said, ‘We’ve already endorsed Florio.’ And we said, ‘That’s fine, don’t get up on the Sunday pulpit and preach. . . . Don’t get up there and say it’s your moral obligation that you go out on Tuesday and vote for Jim Florio.’” Rollins said his campaign contributed to cooperating ministers’ “favorite charities.”

After this became a scandal, he denied that he had actually done anything of the sort, saying that he’d told a false story to unnerve an opposing consultant. The same attitude toward honesty seems to be at play in Rollins’s remark about twenty-six signers of the Constitution being ministers.

To my knowledge, no U.S. President was ever a religious minister. Either Huckabee, ordained in the Southern Baptist church, or Romney, who has served as bishop and stake president in the Latter-Day Saints church, would therefore be the first.