Meeting George Washington’s Indispensable Men

Back when I was researching Gen. George Washington’s life and work in Cambridge for the National Park Service, one of the books I drew on heavily was Arthur S. Lefkowitz’s George Washington’s Indispensable Men.

This is a study of the commander’s military secretaries and aides de camp throughout the Revolutionary War. It starts with a useful definition of its subject because descendants and local histories seem to have named almost any officer who was ever in a council with Washington as an aide. Lefkowitz focused on the men whom Washington officially appointed in his daily orders. Then he added Caleb Gibbs of the headquarters guard and Martha Washington, both of whom can be identified as helping with the headquarters paperwork.

And that paperwork is a major theme of the book. Early on Washington learned that he didn’t need young men to dash messages around battlefields.  (See George Baylor.) Instead, he needed penmen to help keep up with a vast correspondence directing an army spread out over thirteen governments. Washington quickly came to prefer professional men: lawyers (e.g., Robert Hanson Harrison), experienced merchants (William Palfrey), and even doctors (James McHenry).

One result of that preference is that it’s a mistake to think of Washington’s most famous aide, Alexander Hamilton, as a typical staff officer. He was younger and less established than most of his colleagues. Each of those men gets a thorough biographical profile in this book as Lefkowitz moves through the war, discussing how the work at headquarters developed in response to changing needs.

And speaking of Hamilton, I got to meet Arthur Lefkowitz last year. I suggested that Hamilton’s new Broadway hotness might help the book. He took that message back to folks at the publisher, Stackpole, and I’m pleased to report that George Washington’s Indispensable Men is now coming out in paperback—with the new subtitle Alexander Hamilton, Tench Tilghman, and the Aides-De-Camp Who Helped Win American Independence. I recommend it for anyone wanting to know about how Gen. Washington learned to manage the war.

Symposium on Washington and Women at Mount Vernon, 2-3 Nov.

Last year I had the honor of speaking at the George Washington Symposium at Mount Vernon, organized by the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington.

This year’s symposium, to take place on 2-3 November, has the theme “‘A Sensible Woman Can Never be Happy with a Fool’: The Women of George Washington’s World.”

The event description:

“When the fire is beginning to kindle, and your heart growing warm, propound these questions to it… Is he a man of good character? A man of sense? for be assured a sensible woman can never be happy with a fool.”

Thus wrote George Washington in a heartfelt 1796 letter to his step-granddaughter Eleanor (Nelly) Parke Custis on the subjects of love and marriage. Although the Father of Our Country was a leader among leaders in a male-dominated world, we know that he enjoyed a number of complex and meaningful relationships with women from all stations of the socially-stratified eighteenth century. Join leading historians and academics for an enlightening look at a wide variety of women from the General’s personal orbit, including his often misunderstood mother, an admiring poet, social confidants, a traitor to the Revolution, and a defiant runaway slave. We will also examine the memory of Washington through the legacies of his adoring step-granddaughters and the Southern Matron who led the charge in the 1850s to rescue his home and final resting place.

The lineup of presentations is:

• “Mary Ball Washington: Tales of Motherhood,” Martha Saxton
• “A Rare Commitment: The Friendship of George Washington and Elizabeth Willing Powel,” George W. Boudreau
• Roundtable on “Women” and “Mothers” across Eighteenth-Century America, moderated by Karin Wulf of the Omohundro Institute 
• “True Republicans: The Relationship between George Washington and Mercy Otis Warren,” Rosemarie Zagarri
• “George Washington and Phillis Wheatley: The Indispensable Man and the Poet Laureate of the Founding Era,” James G. Basker
• “‘The tender Heart of the Chief could not support the Scene’: General Washington, Margaret Arnold, and the Treason at West Point,” Charlene Boyer Lewis
• “‘She should rather suffer death than return to Slavery’: The Escape of Oney Judge,” Mary V. Thompson
• “Daughters of the Pater Patriae: The Custis Step-Granddaughters’ Relationships with George Washington,” Cassandra Good
• “Coming to the Rescue with Ann Pamela Cunningham,” Ann Bay Goddin

These symposiums are designed to bring the latest findings and analyses of historians to the community of Mount Vernon and its supporters. Attendees fill a large auditorium, reflecting the interest in all things Washington.

Interesting Podcasts of Late

I’ve listened to some particularly interesting podcast episodes in the last few days, so I thought I’d share pointers to them.

At the top of the list, Conversations at the Washington Library featured Joe Stoltz speaking with Brenda Parker, a character interpreter at Mount Vernon. As an African-American woman, Parker portrays the roles of several workers enslaved to George and Martha Washington. Those women are documented through their work and families but their own voices were never recorded.

This interview reveals how Parker came to that job and the sensitivities she needs to do it well. Parker explains that, even with her theatrical training and experience, she started work at Mount Vernon as a waitress in the restaurant. She and her husband had kids to feed and send to college, and food service provided a steadier income than character interpretation, at least at the starting level.

It struck me how the life experiences Parker describes bringing to her roles, particularly being a mother, make her a better interpreter than a recent college graduate would have been. (The photo above shows Parker in character, from this profile.)

At New Books Network, Rebekah Buchanan interviewed M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, author of History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s. Their conversation isn’t about Revolutionary history but about how the nation remembered that Revolutionary history in a particular time. I have vivid memories of the Bicentennial, and I’m now involved in Revolution 250’s activities for the Sestercentennial, so I was drawn into the backstage nuances of this topic. Wish there were more about fire hydrants, though.

I haven’t listened to the Age of Jackson podcast before because that’s not Revolutionary America. (I might even argue that’s when the American Founding was decisively over and a new reshaping began.) But my ear was caught by Daniel Gullotta talking to Gregory D. Smithers about his book The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity. The story begins when the the Cherokee were an Iroquoian-speaking people in the midst of suspicious tribes from other cultures, then extends well beyond the “Trail of Tears,” as the Cherokee nations are one of the largest Native American ethnic groupings today. Also interesting is that both Smithers and Gullotta are Australian—they even share an alma mater.

Finally, on Ben Franklin’s World, Liz Covart spoke to Garrett Cloer, Supervisory Park Ranger at the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site. Liz was once an National Park Service ranger while Garrett has been with the agency for nine years, including service at Minute Man and Independence parks before he came to Cambridge. They could thus talk about the place of smaller urban parks in the N.P.S. I knew most of the history here already, but Garrett did a masterful job of summing it up and making the case for a visit this summer.

Representing Washington in Cambridge, 14 July

On Saturday, 14 July, the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge will welcome three guests representing Gen. George Washington in different ways.

Washington used that Georgian mansion, originally built by friend of government John Vassall, from mid-July 1775 to early April 1776. Martha Washington joined him there in December. In those months the commander-in-chief made plans to reorganize the Continental Army for a wider campaign (including a reversal of his initial decision not to enlist any black soldiers), launched unusual attacks on the Crown at sea and in Canada, and learned crucial lessons about using his staff, working with civil governments, managing intelligence and counterintelligence, and more.

From noon to 4:00 P.M., John Koopman will portray Gen. Washington at the site, and Sandy Spector will join him as Martha. Visitors can converse with the Washingtons and ask questions about their wartime experiences, take and/or pose in photographs, play historic games, and enjoy other activities. Koopman plays the title role in Mount Vernon’s short movie “Washington’s War,” now available through various streaming services. (Alas, this presentation lacks the “snow” that falls in the Mount Vernon theater during winter scenes.)

From 1:00 to 2:00 P.M., Roxane Orgill will read from and speak about her new book Siege: How General Washington Kicked the British Out of Boston and Launched a Revolution. This is a novel in verse about Washington’s time in Cambridge. Though written with young people in mind, it evokes the difficult moments and decisions for all readers. Orgill is the author of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner Jazz Day: The Making of a Famous Photograph, and other books.

At 2:30, a National Park Service ranger will lead a “Road to Revolution” walking tour of nearby sites involved in the “Powder Alarm,” the siege of Boston, the housing of the Convention Army, and other moments in the move toward American independence.

All these events are free and open to the public, as are tours of the mansion. The Longfellow–Washington site is at 105 Brattle Street, only half a mile from Harvard Square. Parking in this part of Cambridge is extremely limited, so plan to walk.

Valentine’s Notes for Martha Washington

In the Washington Papers is a document dated 25 Oct 1759, about a year and a half after George had met Martha and nine and a half months after they married.

It’s headed “An Account of the Sail of the Estate of Colo. Custis Decst in WmsBurg.”

“Colo. Custis” was Daniel Parke Custis, Martha’s first husband, who had died in 1757. With the help of her plantation manager, lawyer, and now her new husband, Martha was settling his estate.

This particular document was written out by manager Joseph Valentine. It lists more than £58 worth of property in eighty-six lots, starting with “Pewter Dishes and 6 Plates” and ending with “210 pounds oald Iron.” Beside each lot Valentine noted who had bought it, either on credit or for cash.

This part of Custis’s estate included 129 “Picturs,” not to mention “A parcel of old Broken picturs.” Unfortunately, Valentine provided no detail about what most of those pictures showed. He simply labeled them small or large or old. The exception was “1 picture of an horse,” purchased by Thomas Craig.

Craig also bought the “Large Looking Glass,” the most expensive item in the sale at £4.10.

John Greenhow bought “15 Picturs & a Bull Dogg,” plus fifteen more pictures, “5 Woodin Immageis,” “1 Tin Basket & other Lumber,” “1 Brass Gun & Close Stool Chear,” “15 Pains Large Glass,” “1 Case & Bottles & mose Trap,” “2 Bell mettle skillets 4 wheat stones 2 sullinges [?],” and “1 Large Press” (probably for clothing) at £2.12.

Valentine himself took “8 Low Leather Chears” and “3 maps.”

Why was Martha Washington having this yard sale? Because she had moved into George’s mansion at Mount Vernon and didn’t need all that stuff from her husband’s house. By liquidating his property, she could divide its value as the law required between herself and her children.

George Washington took over the task of settling John Parke Custis’s estate in 1759 and finally completed the task in 1761. The surviving documents comprise a discrete section of the Washington Papers.

John Valentine (who wrote his own name “Vallentine”) continued to work for the Washingtons until his death in 1771.

Benjamin Franklin’s Birthday (and the Washingtons’ Anniversary)

In a letter to her father, Benjamin Franklin, dated 17 Jan 1779, Sarah Bache (shown here in 1793) wrote from Philadelphia:

I have dined at the Ministers, spent an evening at Mr. Holkers, have lately been several times invited abroad with the General and Mrs Washinton, he allways enquires after you in the most afectionate manner and speaks of you highly we danced at Mr. [Samuel] Powels your Birth day or night I should say in company together and he told me it was the aniversary of his marriage it was just twenty years that night—

Franklin was born on 6 Jan 1705/06 in Boston under the Julian Calendar (17 Jan 1706 under the Gregorian Calendar). The Washingtons married on 6 Jan 1759 under the Gregorian Calendar. Thus, Franklin’s birthday and the Washingtons’ anniversary shared a date, even though fifty-three years plus eleven days passed between them.

I’ve noted before how Americans struggled to figure out when to celebrate Washington’s birthday—the O.S. date or the N.S. equivalent. Eventually we settled on the Gregorian date, as advised by the President’s private secretary, Tobias Lear.

Franklin seems to have been ambivalent about which date served as his birthday. On 6 Jan 1773, he wrote to his wife, Deborah Franklin:

I feel still some Regard for this Sixth of January, as my old nominal Birth-day, tho’ the Change of Stile has carried the real Day forward to the 17th, when I shall be, if I live till then, 67 Years of Age.

As Sarah Bache’s letter shows, she thought of her father’s birthday as 6 January, even though Pennsylvania started using the Gregorian Calendar when she was nine years old.

On 17 Jan 1781, Franklin started to write “My Birth-Day” in his journal but then crossed it off. On 6 Jan 1782 he wrote to Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy about his challenges writing in French without a dictionary:

Il y a soixante Ans que les choses masculins & feminines (hors des Modes & des Temps) m’ont donné beaucoup d’Embarras. J’esperois, autrefois qu’à quatre vingt on peut en etre libre. Me voici à quatre fois dix-neuf, qui est bien prés: & neantmoins ces feminines francoises me tracassent encore.

[For sixty years things masculine and feminine (not to mention the modes and tenses) have given me a lot of trouble. I once hoped that at eighty I would be delivered of them. But here I am four times nineteen, which is very close to that, and nevertheless these French feminines still exasperate me.]

Under the Gregorian Calendar, Franklin was still eleven days away from being 76 years old (or 4 times 19) when he wrote. But I suppose that was close enough.

Dunbar on Ona Judge in Portsmouth, 5 March

On Sunday, 5 March, Erica Armstrong Dunbar will speak in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, about her new book Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.

I wrote about the first President using resources of the federal government to chase Judge (also called Oney Judge) here. There’s much more to her story. Shana L. Haines’s review of this book at the Junto states:

Judge’s story has long been an interesting footnote, paragraph, or article. Unlike many references to Judge, Dunbar’s comprehensive treatment presents Judge as a fully fleshed out human being grappling with the dehumanization of slavery and the complexities of freedom. For both scholars of Early American slavery and the general public, Judge is being reintroduced as an important figure in our understanding of Early American slavery and resistance. Through Dunbar’s empathetic and well-researched biography, the woman whose safety and freedom in eighteenth-century America depended upon remaining hidden, is finally given prominence in her own story rather than as aside to the Washingtons. . . .

Dunbar uses runaway slave notices, Washington’s own diaries and letters, and archival information about slave laws, politics, and abolitionist practices to weave a tense and suspenseful tale of Judge’s game of cat and mouse. Within this fugitive slave narrative is also embedded the emotional toll of separation from family and the physical and economic realities of day-to-day living for black women in the early republic. As America was wrestling with how to implement its Constitutional principles, Judge was forging marriage, motherhood, and community through resilience and courage.

Judge settled in Portsmouth, making her story local as well as national. The Portsmouth Historical Society is hosting Prof. Dunbar’s talk as part of a two-hour program:

• 2:00 P.M.: Gwendolyn Quezaire-Presutti portrays Ona Judge in a living-history performance.
• 2:30: Author presentation.
• 3:15: Q. & A.

This event will take place at the Temple Israel Social Hall at 200 State Street from 2:00 to 4:00 P.M. It is free and open to the public.

Oney Judge and “the President’s Wishes”

As I reported yesterday, George Washington has been our richest President so far. Most of his property consisted of land, both plantations in Virginia and unsettled claims to the west, and slaves. A lot of those slaves had come to his wife Martha or her children, inherited from her first husband’s family, and George felt obliged to preserve that wealth.

When the federal government moved to Pennsylvania in 1791, that state’s law gradually ending slavery posed a problem for the Washingtons. If they brought their household servants to Philadelphia—and how could a rich couple live without their household servants?—then those people were entitled to be free after six months in the state.

On 24 April Washington’s plantation manager, Tobias Lear, wrote to him about what the U.S. Attorney General, Edmund Randolph, had said about that law:

But he observed, that if, before the expiration of six months, they could, upon any pretence whatever, be carried or sent out of the State, but for a single day, a new era would commence on their return, from whence the six months must be dated for it requires an entire six months for them to claim that right.

Lear then discussed the specific situations of several enslaved people, including: “Mrs Washington proposes in a short time to make an excursion as far as Trenton, and of course, she will take with her Oney & Christopher, which will carry them out of the State; so that in this way I think the matter may be managed very well.”

Oney Judge was Martha Washington’s personal maid. She had been born at Mount Vernon around 1774. Judge was part of Martha’s property, and the First Lady planned to bequeath her to a granddaughter. So the Washingtons made sure that she was never in Pennsylvania for six months at a stretch.

Five years after Lear’s letter, on 21 May 1796, Judge slipped away from the Presidential mansion. She later told an interviewer, “I had friends among the colored people of Philadelphia, had my things carried there beforehand, and left Washington’s house while they were eating dinner.” Frederick Kitt, the President’s steward in Philadelphia, placed an advertisement seeking Judge in the 24 May Philadelphia Gazette.

At the end of June, Thomas Lee, Jr., wrote from New York to President Washington in response to, as he wrote, “the desire you expressed that I should make enquiry about your runaway Woman.” Lee reported a cook saying that Judge had gone north to Boston, and he planned to make inquiries there. Washington knew multiple men named Thomas Lee, and I’m not sure which one this was, but he appears to have been pursuing Judge as a private favor.

Later that summer Elizabeth Langdon, daughter of Sen. John Langdon, recognized Oney Judge on the street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Slavery was already unenforceable in that state. According to Washington’s understanding, Langdon “was about to stop and speak to her, but she brushed quickly by, to avoid it.”

The President moved to track Judge down—but instead of continuing his efforts through private channels, he began to use the resources of the federal government. On 1 Sept 1796 he wrote to his Secretary of the Treasury, Oliver Wolcott:

Enclosed is the name, and description of the Girl I mentioned to you last night. She has been the particular attendent on Mrs Washington since she was ten years old; and was handy & useful to her, being perfect a Mistress of her needle. . . .

Whether she is Stationary at Portsmouth, or was there en passant only, is uncertain; but as it is the last we have heard of her, I would thank you for writing to the Collector of that Port, & him for his endeavours to recover, & send her back: What will be the best method to effect it, is difficult for me to say. If enquiries are made openly, her Seducer (for she is simple and inoffensive herself) would take the alarm, & adopt instant measures (if he is not tired of her) to secrete or remove her. To sieze, and put her on board a Vessel bound immediately to this place, or to Alexandria which I should like better, seems at first view to be the safest & least expensive. But if she is discovered, the Collector, I am persuaded, will pursue such measures as to him shall appear best, to effect those ends; and the cost shall be re-embursed & with thanks.

The “Collector” was Joseph Whipple (1738-1816, shown above), the head of the Customs service in Portsmouth and thus a federal employee who answered to Wolcott. He had held the same position for the state of New Hampshire until 1789, and the new President had reappointed him on John Langdon’s recommendation.

Whipple wrote back to the Treasury Secretary on 10 September, “I shall with great pleasure execute the President’s wishes in the matter.” The next month, on 4 October, he wrote again, telling Wolcott that Judge had expressed “a thirst for compleat freedom” as well as “great affection & reverence for her Master & Mistress”; she was (at least initially) willing to return to Mount Vernon if the Washingtons guaranteed her freedom on their deaths.

The President replied directly to Whipple on 28 November, rejecting those terms. He also told the Collector:

…you would oblige me, by pursuing such measures as are proper, to put her on board a Vessel bound either to Alexandria or the Federal City; Directed in either case, to my Manager at Mount Vernon, by the door of which the Vessel must pass; or to the care of Mr Lear at the last mentioned place, if it should not stop before it arrives at that Port.

I do not mean however, by this request, that such violent measures should be used as would excite a mob or riot, which might be the case if she has adherents, or even uneasy sensations in the minds of well disposed Citizens. rather than either of these shd happen, I would forego her services altogether; and the example also, which is of infinite more importance. The less is said before hand, and the more celerity is used in the act of Shipping her, when an opportunity presents, the better chance Mrs Washington (who is desirous of receiving her again) will have to be gratified.

Again, this wasn’t government business. Washington was asking Whipple to do him a big favor, one gentleman for another. But Whipple was a federal government employee, and he owed his position to Washington. Today that would strike us as a clear conflict of interest.

There’s more to Oney Judge’s story, and the Washingtons’ pursuit of her. Today I’m just looking at how having the resources of government presents a great temptation to a President with private interests.

Longmore’s Invention of George Washington

In 1771 George Washington ordered a bookplate incorporating his family coat-of-arms to be engraved and asked for more than 400 printed copies. He didn’t have anywhere near 400 books at the time. But he planned to make himself into a gentleman with a big library.

That fact comes from The Invention of George Washington, by Paul K. Longmore, which became one of my favorite books about Washington when I was working on my study for the National Park Service. That book was published by the University of California Press in 1988 and is now available in paperback from the University of Virginia Press.

Longmore painted “a portrait of Washington as a self-fashioning representative of his turbulent time,” as the book cover states. As a younger son from the lower colonial gentry, he shaped himself to succeed within his society. The aloof, always correct image that’s come down to us, Longmore argued, isn’t just a creation of Washington’s family or admiring historians. It was how Washington ultimately invented himself.

The first stage in that process was as an hard-working and frankly pushy young officer from Virginia. Basically every complaint that Washington as general had about uncooperative officers in the Revolutionary War could also be applied to Washington as colonel in the French and Indian War. It’s remarkable how marriage to Martha Custis calmed down that ambitious young man.

In Chapter 14, Longmore reexamined the Continental Congress’s choice of Washington as commander-in-chief of its army. Many historians have taken John Adams’s memoirs and later letters as their main source for that moment, retelling how Adams, as he suggested Washington to be commander-in-chief, saw the big Virginian slip out the door while John Hancock grew angry at being passed over.

There are problems reconciling that anecdote with the contemporaneous record and other delegates’ recollections, Longmore pointed out. For example, Adams described a lot of opposition to Washington, naming such delegates as Edmund Pendleton as arguing against the choice. But many of those men actually favored Washington, and he treated them as supporters: that month the new generalissimo asked Pendleton to write both his will and his acceptance speech. The whole story falls too easily into Adams’s pattern of recalling more opposition to himself than we can see through other sources.

Longmore hypothesized instead that Adams mixed up his memories of arguing for Washington as commander-in-chief (which probably produced little opposition) with arguing for Charles Lee to be another high-ranking general (which contemporaneous sources, including Adams’s letters, show was controversial). A big reason I admire Longmore’s book is his willingness to go against received wisdom like the Adams story.

I didn’t realize until this year how much effort Longmore had to put into the book, however. Longmore contracted polio when he was seven years old and lost the use of both hands. He needed a ventilator to breathe for much of the day. When he wrote, he held a pen in his mouth and punched a keyboard with it. The Invention of George Washington took ten years to finish.

After that biography was published, Longmore burned a copy in front of the Federal Building in Los Angeles to protest how royalties from it would reduce his Social Security disability payments, thus discouraging him or other disabled people from doing creative work. (Those rules were later changed.)

Longmore became a professor at San Francisco State University. He specialized in the study of disability in American history, helping to establish that historical field. He coedited the anthology The New Disability History: American Perspectives and published the collection Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability.

Longmore died in 2010 at age sixty-four. The Institute on Disability he co-founded at San Francisco State is now named after him. Earlier this year, Longmore’s colleagues completed the publication of his last history book, Telethons.

“The birthday of our beloved President John Adams”

After the controversy over celebrating George Washington’s birthday in February 1798, President John Adams reconciled himself to such ceremonies. Indeed, we’re still celebrating the first President’s birthday today, in a way.

But Adams’s Federalist supporters also appear to have stepped up their efforts to celebrate his own birthday, so long as he was in office. (This whole series of postings started with me wondering whether the U.S. of A. celebrated President Adams’s birthday the way it celebrated President Washington’s, and before him King George’s. And the answer is yes, in a way.)

Balls and banquets weren’t to Adams’s taste, of course. The preferred method of honoring him, particularly during the Quasi-War of the late 1790s, became a militia parade. The Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette reported on a ceremony in Alexandria, Virginia, on 30 Oct 1798:

Tuesday last, being the anniversary of the birthday of our beloved President John Adams, was observed in this town with military honors. The uniform companies of Militia, and the company of Silver Grays, went through a variety of maneuvers and evolutions, under the command of George Deneale. After firing several rounds in evidence of their attachment to this good man, as well as to shew that they approbated his conduct towards the insidious French Directory, they retired in the evening with the utmost decorum and harmony.

Even then, however, Adams’s predecessor hovered over the ceremony. Martha Washington presented a banner (regrettably incomplete) to the company. On it, “The Golden Eagle of America has a portrait of General Washington suspended from its beak.”

And of course Washington’s birthday balls continued. On 20 February 1799, Abigail Adams wrote from Quincy:

I have received an invitation to the Ball in honour of Gen’ll. Washington but my health is so precarious, and sufferd such a Shock last Summer, that I am obliged to be very circumspect and cautious in all my movements. Thomas will go, and that will be sufficient.

Thomas was the couple’s son Thomas Boylston Adams. He liked balls. In fact, one day after he had arrived in Philadelphia following years in Europe, the President reported to his wife, “This Evening he goes with me to the Ball. I had rather spend it with him at home.”

But now President Adams knew what he had to do to maintain party unity. On 22 Feb 1799, Washington’s birthday, he wrote home to Abigail:

To night I must go to the Ball: where I Suppose I shall get a cold, and have to eat Gruel for Breakfast for a Week afterwards. This will be no Punishment.

Adams enjoyed gruel more than balls, it seems.

The picture above shows Boston’s celebration of the President’s birthday in October 1799: “The Boston troops, as reviewed on President Adams’s birth day on the Common by his Honr. Lieut. Governor [Moses] Gill & Major Genl. [Simon] Elliot, under the command of Brigadier Genl. [John] Winslow. Also a view of the new State House.” In fact, this is said to be the earliest printed picture of the new Massachusetts State House designed by Charles Bulfinch.

TOMORROW: Mrs. Rowson’s reprise.

“William Costin’s reputed father was white”

As I wrote yesterday, Martha Washington’s son John Parke Custis is believed to have had a child by an enslaved woman named Ann Dandridge around 1780 as well as children with his wife, Eleanor.

Jack Custis died in 1781 of a disease he contracted during the siege of Yorktown. His wife remarried. She continued raising their two eldest children while the two younger grew up at Mount Vernon with their grandmother Martha and her second husband, George.

Ann Dandridge was herself the daughter of an enslaved woman and John Dandridge, Martha’s father—which means she was also an aunt of Jack Custis. In An Imperfect God, Henry Wiencek reported that Ann Dandridge eventually married a man named Holmes, and the husband of Jack Custis’s oldest daughter, Eliza Custis Law, freed her in 1802.

What happened to the child of Jack Custis and Ann Dandridge? The answer became public in, of all places, The Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Condition and Improvement of Public Schools in the District of Columbia: Submitted to the Senate June, 1868, and to the House, with Additions, June 13, 1870. The federal government published that lengthy report in 1871. It contained a thorough discussion of schools in the District, including some for African-Americans started by a family named Costin.

Although this information wasn’t connected to the condition of the schools, the report stated:

This Costin family came from Mount Vernon immediately after the death of Martha Washington, in 1802. The father, William Costin, who died suddenly in his bed, May 31, 1842, was twenty-four years messenger for the Bank of Washington, in this city. His death was noticed at length in the columns of the National Intelligencer in more than one communication at the time. The obituary notice, written under the suggestions of the bank officers, who had previously passed a resolution expressing their respect for his memory, and appropriating fifty dollars towards the funeral expenses, says: “It is due to the deceased to say that his colored skin covered a benevolent heart,” . . .

John Quincy Adams also, a few days afterwards, in a discussion on the wrongs of slavery, alluded to the deceased in these words: “The late William Costin, though he was not white, was as much respected as any man in the District, and the large concourse of citizens that attended his remains to the grave, as well white as black, was an evidence of tho manner in which he was estimated by the citizens of Washington.” His portrait, taken by the direction of the bank authorities, still hangs in the directors’ room, and it may also be seen in the houses of more than one of the old and prominent residents of the city.

William Costin’s mother, Ann Dandridge, was the daughter of a half-breed, (Indian and and colored,) her grandfather being a Cherokee chief, and her reputed father was the father of Martha Dandridge, afterwards Mrs. Custis, who, in 1759, was married to General Washington. These daughters, Ann and Martha, grew up together, on the ancestral plantations. William Costin’s reputed father was white, and belonged to a prominent family in Virginia, but the mother, after his birth, married one of the Mount Vernon slaves by the name of Costin, and the son took the name of William Costin. His mother being of Indian descent, made him, under the laws of Virginia, a free born man. In 1800 he married Philadelphia Judge, (his cousin,) one of Martha Washington’s slaves, at Mount Vernon, where both were born in 1780. The wife was given by Martha Washington at her decease to her granddaughter, Eliza Parke Custis, who was the wife of Thomas Law, of Washington. Soon after William Costin and his wife came to this city the wife’s freedom was secured on kind and easy terms, and the children were all born free. This is the account which William Costin and his wife and his mother, Ann Dandridge, always gave of their ancestry, and they were persons of great precision in all matters of family history, as well as of the most marked scrupulousness in their statements.

That report didn’t come out and name William Costin’s father, but it linked him and his mother and his wife to Mount Vernon. That left no doubt about which “prominent family in Virginia” his father hailed from. Anyone who knew the Washington-Custis family tree could figure out the rest. Elizabeth Van Lew of Richmond certainly put the pieces together in her private papers, Wiencek found.

Though this account says Costin’s surname came from his mother marrying “one of the Mount Vernon slaves,” I can’t help but wonder if Costin was simply a safe variation on Custis. I can’t find any other mention of an enslaved man named Costin at Mount Vernon.

William Costin’s wife, Philadelphia or Delphy Judge, was a sister of Oney Judge, who escaped to New Hampshire in 1796. If Delphy Judge and William Costin were indeed first cousins, as this profile suggests, the Judge sisters’ mother, “Mulatto Betty,” must have been a sister or half-sister of Ann Dandridge.

The 1871 profile said that for William Costin “being of Indian descent, made him, under the laws of Virginia, a free born man.” In fact, the laws of Virginia assigned him the same status as his mother, who was enslaved. Wiencek suggests that the Custis-Washington family treated William as free simply because they preferred it that way. He and his family remained at Mount Vernon until Martha’s death, then went to the capital, the women and children becoming formally free in the next few years.

It’s notable that this federal government report discussing gentlemen in Martha Washington’s family having children with enslaved women appeared at almost the same time that a U.S. Census taker noted Madison Hemings’s statement about being a son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. That was between the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction in 1877. In that narrow window, it appears, some black Americans felt more free to talk about their white ancestors and some white Americans openly acknowledged the realities of intertwined families.

Expanding the Extended Washington Family

Last month the Boston Globe ran an Associated Press dispatch about how two historic sites, Arlington House and Mount Vernon, were presenting the evidence that the Washington family—which is to say, Martha Washington’s descendants—included people of African ancestry.

This article focused on George Washington Parke (“Wash”) Custis, youngest son of John Parke (“Jack”) Custis, whom George and Martha Washington took in and raised from the early 1780s. (Wash Custis, shown here, is sometimes referred to as the first President’s adopted son, but I don’t think there was a formal adoption.)

The dispatch says:

[In 1797] George Washington Parke Custis was 16 and attending Princeton, one of several schools he bounced in and out of. Before long, he was back home at Mount Vernon, where he would be accused of fathering children with slaves.

Two centuries later, the National Park Service and the nonprofit that runs Washington’s Mount Vernon estate are concluding that the rumors were true: In separate exhibits, they show that the first family’s family tree has been biracial from its earliest branches. . . .

Outside the marriage, Parke Custis likely fathered children with two of his stepfather’s slaves: Arianna Carter and Caroline Branham, according to the exhibits at Arlington House and Mount Vernon. . . .

He said no new, definitive evidence has surfaced to prove Parke Custis fathered girls with slaves; rather, the recognition reflects a growing sense that African-American history cannot be disregarded and that Arlington House represents more than Lee’s legacy, he said.

In other words, we don’t need new evidence. We just need to take a clear-eyed look at the evidence we already have, recognizing that Wash Custis and his white relatives were very unlikely to make a formal admission of paternity. In 1826 Custis freed Arianna Carter’s daughter, Maria Syphax, with her children, and granted her seventeen acres of his land. That was about as much as we can expect from a prominent Virginia planter.

There’s also strong evidence of men in preceding generations of Martha Washington’s family having children with enslaved women as well. As Henry Wiencek detailed in An Imperfect God:

• John Custis (1678-1749) and his slave Alice had a son named Jack around 1739. Five years later he set “my dear black boy Jack” free through an action of the Virginia Council, which he sat on. There’s even a tradition that he toyed with rewriting his will to make Jack his heir instead of his legitimate son Daniel, who eventually became Martha’s first husband.
• Martha’s own father, John Dandridge (1700-1756), had a daughter by “a woman whose name is not known, of mixed white, Native American, and African blood.” That daughter, Ann, wasn’t manumitted until 1802.
• Martha’s son John Parke Custis (1754-1781) had a son by Ann Dandridge, his enslaved half-aunt, around 1780.

Thus, in having sex with women his family owned, Wash Custis was following the model of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

TOMORROW: John Parke Custis’s secret son.

Winner and Finalists of the 2016 Washington Book Prize

Last week Mount Vernon, Washington College, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History announced the winner of the 2016 George Washington Book Prize, created to honor “the best new works on the nation’s founding era, especially those that engage a broad public audience.”

The winner was Flora Fraser for The Washingtons: George and Martha, “Join’d by Friendship, Crown’d by Love.” The award announcement says:

While many books have chronicled George Washington’s life and public service, no other has so thoroughly examined the marriage bonds between him and his wife. Few primary sources exist on the life of Martha Washington, who destroyed all but one of the couple’s personal letters. But Fraser’s diligent research has resulted in a more comprehensive understanding of the nation’s first First Lady—and through her important story, a fuller sense of the nation’s first President. Fraser portrays a couple devoted to each other and steadfast in their loyalty: from their short courtship, through raising a family at Mount Vernon, to the long years of the Revolutionary War, to the first U.S. Presidency, and to retirement at their beloved Virginia plantation.

Living in London, Fraser’s previous books have been about European women. She’s a third-generation biographer, a granddaughter of Elizabeth Longford and a daughter of Lady Antonia Fraser.

In addition to The Washingtons, the finalists for this year’s book prize were:

• Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention
• Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution
• Robert Middlekauff, Washington’s Revolution: The Making of America’s First Leader
• Janet Polasky, Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World
• David Preston, Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution
• John Sedgwick, War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel That Stunned the Nation

Plenty of good reading there.

“Such a charge made upon such authority is monstrous”

Yesterday I quoted a passage from Frank Moore’s 1859-1860 compendium The Diary of the American Revolution which stated, among many other things, that Martha Washington had “a mottled tom-cat (which she calls in a complimentary way ‘Hamilton’).”

In 1879, George Shea published The Life and Epoch of Alexander Hamilton: A Historical Study. He cited that page from Moore when he wrote:

Hamilton’s name is not free from reproach for libidinousness. It appears to have been observed afterwards by Mrs. Washington when he was at Morristown.

However, Shea didn’t quote the passage in question.

That left open the door for a person using the name “Columbia” to complain in the Magazine of History the next year:

Judge Shea, in his Life and Epoch of Hamilton, makes an assertion, all the more extraordinary as coming from one whose profession is supposed to train to careful statement and a proper weighing of evidence.

In Moore’s Diary of the Revolution, Vol. II., 250, is published one of the numerous Tory squibs recorded in the manuscript diary of Captain Smyth of the Royal Army. The point is that the number thirteen was peculiar to the rebels. After charging that the army rations were thirteen dried clams per day, that Lord Stirling took thirteen glasses of grog every morning, and in consequence had thirteen rum bunches on his nose, that General Washington had thirteen toes on his feet, and thirteen teeth in each jaw, and other similar absurdities about Putnam, Schuyler and Wayne, he concludes by saying, that “Mrs. Washington has a mottled tom-cat (which she calls in a complimentary way ‘Hamilton’) with thirteen yellow rings around his tail, and that his flaunting it suggested to the Congress the adoption of the same number of stripes for the rebel flag.”

As to Hamilton’s libidinousness, “Columbia” concluded, “Such a charge made upon such authority is monstrous.”

And of course it would be. In fact, given the satirical purpose of the passage and how it was written by a British officer, not confirmed by anyone in the American army camp, to state on that authority that Martha Washington even had a cat is a stretch. Much less to state confidently that she named it after her husband’s lustful aide.

On the other hand, in discussing Hamilton’s “libidinousness” Shea also cited Hamilton’s own confession to his extended extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds. Personally, I find it hard to believe, as some Hamilton fans seem to, that the one time the man had a sexual affair he was caught and forced to confess publicly.

In 1777, Hamilton told Catherine Livingston, “you know, I am renowned for gallantry.” He joked with other officers on Washington’s staff about pursuing women, sometimes in romantic terms (“I have no invincible antipathy to the maidenly beauties & that I am willing to take the trouble of them upon myself”) and sometimes in anatomical terms (“mind you do justice to the length of my nose and don’t forget, that I [cut out by a descendant]”). Some modern biographers even suggest Hamilton had an affair with his sister-in-law, Angelica Church.

So although the passage Moore quoted is weak evidence for the tomcat, and weak evidence that Martha Washington thought Hamilton was anything like a tomcat, there’s other evidence about Hamilton’s libido for historians to consider.

TOMORROW: Who was Moore’s source?

A Tomcat Named Hamilton?

Given certain events in New York, particularly along its main thoroughfare, this factoid has been getting a lot of use:
Martha Washington named a tomcat after Alexander Hamilton.

Back in 2008, this Hamilton fan complained that the story came from a passage in George Henry Preble’s 1882 History of the Flag of the United States of America, quoting a New York newspaper.

When I saw that, I got suspicious. Preble could be a terrible transcriber. In that same book he came up with the phrase “Grand Union Flag” by messing up the words “Great Union Flag” in a letter from Gen. George Washington. So I decided to dig into this story as far as I could go.

As it turned out, that blog post didn’t quote Preble correctly. To his credit, Preble quoted his source correctly. But his source, which was Lippincott’s Magazine in July 1876, misstated the source it was quoting. And neither Preble nor the magazine was the genesis of that factoid. So let’s start at the beginning, or as close as I can get.

In 1860, Frank Moore published a two-volume compendium of material from the Revolutionary War, arranged chronologically, titled Diary of the American Revolution. On page 250 of volume 2, Moore quoted one source from 1780 this way:

Thirteen is a number peculiarly belonging to the rebels. A party of naval prisoners lately returned from Jersey, say, that the rations among the rebels are thirteen dried clams per day; that the titular Lord Stirling takes thirteen glasses of grog every morning, has thirteen enormous rum-bunches on his nose, and that (when duly impregnated) he always makes thirteen attempts before he can walk; that Mr. Washington has thirteen toes on his feet, (the extra ones having grown since the Declaration of Independence,) and the same number of teeth in each jaw; that the Sachem Schuyler has a topknot of thirteen stiff hairs, which erect themselves on the crown of his head when he grows mad; that Old Putnam had thirteen pounds of his posterior bit off in an encounter with a Connecticut bear, (’twas then he lost the balance of his mind;) that it takes thirteen Congress paper dollars to equal one penny sterling; that Polly Wayne was just thirteen hours in subduing Stony Point, and as many seconds in leaving it; that a well-organized rebel household has thirteen children, all of whom expect to be generals and members of the High and Mighty Congress of the “thirteen United States” when they attain thirteen years; that Mrs. Washington has a mottled tom-cat, (which she calls, in a complimentary way, ‘Hamilton,’) with thirteen yellow rings around his tail, and that his flaunting it suggested to the Congress the adoption of the same number of stripes for the rebel flag.

Moore’s volumes were reprinted a number of times over the following decades, sometimes with different pagination but always including this quote. It looks like the Lippincott’s Magazine passage was pulled from the centennial edition.

Now what does that passage really tell us about Alexander Hamilton?

TOMORROW: A century of debate.

No Birthday Cake for George Washington

This month Scholastic published a book about Hercules, the Washingtons’ cook at Mount Vernon and Philadelphia in the 1790s.

And this week Scholastic decided to pull that book from circulation. As The Guardian reported:

A Birthday Cake for George Washington was released on 5 January and had been strongly criticized for its upbeat images and story of Washington’s cook, the slave Hercules, and his daughter, Delia.

“While we have great respect for the integrity and scholarship of the author, illustrator and editor, we believe that, without more historical background on the evils of slavery than this book for younger children can provide, the book may give a false impression of the reality of the lives of slaves and therefore should be withdrawn,” the publisher said in a statement. . . .

While notes in A Birthday Cake for George Washington from author Ramin Ganeshram and illustrator Vanessa Brantley-Newton pointed out the historical context of the 18th-century story and that Hercules eventually escaped, some critics faulted Ganeshram and Brantley-Newton for leaving out those details from the main narrative. . . .

The trade publication School Library Journal called the book “highly problematic” and recommended against its purchase. Another trade journal, Kirkus Reviews, labeled the book “an incomplete, even dishonest treatment of slavery”.

One notable detail about this publication is that the book’s editor, Andrea Davis Pinkney, is one of the industry’s most respected and active African-American editors and champions of black authors and artists. She has published many books about African-American history, including slavery. Both the author and the illustrator of the book are women of color.

Last year there was a big controversy in the children’s book world about how another picture book, A Fine Dessert, depicted a moment in the lives of a mother and child enslaved in ante-bellum South Carolina. (I wrote about an early presage of that controversy but didn’t anticipate what developed.) By that time, A Birthday Cake for George Washington was probably too far along in production to be changed in major ways.

Pinkney and her colleagues clearly anticipated some complaints about how the new book portrayed slavery and prepared online essays explaining their choices. That makes Scholastic’s decision to reverse course and pull the book—on a weekend, yet—even more striking.

“Pewter Dish (?) with Handle”

Smithsonian Magazine’s website featured this object back in August, saying:

An 18th-century bedpan isn’t all that different from one today. Then, it was round and made of pewter with a handle. In an era before plumbing and bathrooms, the bedpan could be gently heated and slipped under the covers of a sickbed.

The elderly, ill, and women recovering from childbirth could use the bedpan without having to risk further injury by leaving their bed. While healthy adults could use a chamberpot, which might be kept in a cabinet or attached beneath a hole in a chair seat, the bedpan was designed for the immobile.

This particular bedpan was made by a New York pewterer named Frederick Bassett in the late 18th century.

Why did it merit that attention? Because this particular bedpan can be traced to George and Martha Washington.

Or at least to the descendants of Martha’s granddaughter Britannia Wellington Peter Kennon. Around 1900 they inventoried and numbered all the household items that family lore said had come from Mount Vernon after Martha Washington’s death in 1802. This was identified as a “pewter dish (?) with handle.” In the 1930s one heir sold it to the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association as a “plate warmer.”

Apparently, however, no one used this container in any commemorative banquets before a material-history expert recognized it as a bedpan. And that’s how it’s been catalogued and occasionally displayed at Mount Vernon ever since.

Hogeland on Hamilton on the Ten-Dollar Note

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew recently announced a plan to add a notable American woman to the next redesign of the ten-dollar bill. It’s been more than a century since Martha Washington appeared on a U.S. silver certificate.

The Los Angeles Times reported:

Alexander Hamilton will still appear on the note even after the yet-to-be-selected woman makes her debut. The Treasury either will design two bills or Hamilton and the woman will share the same bill.

Somehow I think Hamilton would like the space-sharing solution. (Ladies…) Nonetheless, Lew’s plan has been decried as “replacing” Hamilton.

This announcement followed a campaign to put an American woman on the twenty-dollar bill in place of Andrew Jackson, a very important President with repressive policies and an antipathy to a national bank. But the ten-dollar bill happens to be the next up for redesign.

Fans of Hamilton (now appearing on Broadway) came to his defense, making the obvious argument that the Treasury Department owes loyalty to its founder. Some, such as Steven Rattner in the New York Times, added that Hamilton’s political views are better in tune with today’s values than Jackson (who hasn’t been the lead character in a Broadway musical in, what, two years).

William Hogeland, author of The Whiskey Rebellion, agrees on the irony of reducing Hamilton’s place on Treasury notes, but he thinks that Rattner’s comparisons are fallacious. The whole essay is a delight, but here are a couple of choice bits:

Jackson was a slaveowner, and he defended the institution. While there is ample evidence to suggest that Hamilton at times owned slaves, Hamilton opposed the institution, so Rattner repeats a familiar fallacy: “Hamilton was an abolitionist.” Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow says that about Hamilton too; most of the biographers do, and why not? it’s a lovely thought. But it’s not true.

Readers interested in that subject will want to start with this balanced, scrupulous paper by the historian Michelle DuRross. Hamilton the “staunch abolitionist” (Chernow) is such a longstanding biographical fantasy, with such a tangled history, that a certain kind of graduate student would have a ball unraveling it. Readers may be forgiven for believing that young Hamilton had the horrors of the slave markets of the Caribbean so painfully seared on his brain that in adulthood he was inspired to oppose slavery: most of the major and not-so-major Hamilton biographies — Lodge’s, Miller’s, Mitchell’s, Randall’s, McDonald’s, Brookhiser’s and Chernow’s — tell that story. Literally none can cite a primary source. Some cite one another: Randall cites Mitchell, Miller cites Lodge, e.g. The story is such common knowledge that I don’t think Chernow even gives it a citation. Its origin is unclear. But it’s made up.

DuRoss reminds us of the difference between promoting manumission (encouraging slave owners to free their human property) and campaigning for abolition (using the law to end slavery).

And as for Hamilton being more appropriate for a printed bill:

Hamilton’s entire career, before and after becoming Secretary, was based on demolishing paper finance, the depreciating populist currencies of his day that built debt relief into money. With the entire lending-and-investing class that he represented and promoted, Hamilton liked specie, metal. Big notes like those written on the Bank of the United States were not, to Hamilton, a “national currency,” as Rattner tortures history to assert. The federal government did not print paper currencies as long as (and well after) Hamilton had anything to say about it.

Eighteenth-Century Developments in the Media

The past week has brought a little flurry of news stories related to eighteenth-century America.

National Public Radio interviewed Ed Lengel, chief editor of the big Washington Papers Project at the University of Virginia, about the recent decision to give the same scholarly treatment to Martha Washington’s surviving letters.

Among the rarest are letters between George and Martha—she burned most of those after his death. Two survived in the back of a desk Martha gave to a relative; George had written those in the summer of 1775, explaining how he’d accepted the post of commander-in-chief and wouldn’t be back home before late fall at the earliest. Martha probably set those letters aside as special, though it’s not clear whether she meant to preserve them from the fire or just forgot about them.

The other correspondence between Martha and George Washington consists, as far as I recall, of notes she wrote on the back of other people’s letters, as Lengel describes:

One of the most interesting discoveries that I made when we were starting to assemble these papers was a letter from her son, John Parke Custis, to George Washington on September 11, 1777, the day of the Battle of Brandywine. And I was looking over the letter, and on the back was a note that nobody had paid any attention to. And it was a note, it turned out, from Martha to George that had been missed. It was a very brief note, but she begins it, my love, I wrote to you by the last post about a silver cup that I bought, and it weighed 113 ounces, something to that effect. And to me, it's fascinating that here they are in their mid-40s, after they’ve been married almost 20 years. And, in a casual note, she calls him, my love.

Back in 1994, Joseph E. Fields compiled “Worthy Partner”: The Papers of Martha Washington, published by Greenwood Press. Fields worked on his own; he was a document collector and independent researcher, without the institutional resources or assumed authority of a university or institution. The Washington Papers edition will follow the same process and standards as its series about George’s correspondence.

N.P.R. also explored the construction and voyage of the Hermione, a replica of the ship that brought Lafayette back to America in 1780. The ship was reportedly constructed with eighteenth-century techniques, though it also includes twenty-first century plumbing. The Hermione will visit several ports along North America’s east coast this summer, from Yorktown to Halifax; scheduled stops in New England are Newport, Boston, and Castine.

I’m not sure why this project recreated the Hermione, which brought Lafayette from Rochefort to Boston in 1780, rather than the Victoire, which first brought him to America (landing near Georgetown, South Carolina) three years earlier. The Hermione was an official French naval vessel while the Victoire was a merchant ship the marquis bought to get out of France against familial and royal wishes. Maybe the plans for the Hermione are the only ones that survive. Maybe its role in the Yorktown campaign was also crucial to the choice. Anyway, it’s on its way.

The Charlottesville Daily Progress reported that Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate, has opened two log cabins and nine restored rooms in the upper stories of the main mansion for the upcoming season. The cabins are part of a new effort to show the life of people enslaved on that plantation. One is furnished to represent the home of part of the Hemings family, and the other is a workshop. Their structure was informed by archeological work on the sites of the original cabins, plus the large amount of recent documentary research on the lives of Monticello workers.

Those additions to Monticello’s public areas are part of a long-term project to restore the estate more to its appearance in Jefferson’s time. The Guardian says upcoming plans include restoring “a weavers’ cottage once used by enslaved women and Jefferson’s stable where slaves cared for his horses.” A similar project is underway at Montpelier, James Madison’s plantation, also largely underwritten by David M. Rubenstein.

This being the twenty-first century, Monticello also unveiled a smartphone app called “Slavery at Monticello: Life and Work on Mulberry Row.” It “takes users touring the south end of Monticello through the new cabins and offers virtual representations of other workshops, storehouses and dwellings that have been removed from the property in its nearly 250 years of existence.”

“An object of nearly universal detestation”

After the royal authorities published the private letters they had captured on Benjamin Hichborn in August 1775, what was the fallout for the men who had written those letters?

Unfortunately for unabashed gossips, there aren’t a lot of good sources on Benjamin Harrison’s reaction. We can imagine that he quickly wrote another letter to Gen. George Washington promising that his earlier one had never really hinted that they might both enjoy a pretty washerwoman’s daughter. (If so, that follow-up letter doesn’t survive.)

It’s conceivable that Harrison volunteered to be part of the Continental Congress committee that met with Washington in Cambridge in October in order to confirm their personal relationship.

In November, Harrison was very insistent on having a ball in Philadelphia to honor Martha Washington, passing through the city on her way north. Was he so passionate because he wanted to make up for embarrassing her? That’s possible, but it’s also possible that Harrison had laughed off the publication of the falsified letter and just liked parties.

As for John Adams, the letters published over his initials had managed to denigrate most of the Congress in general, John Dickinson (shown above) in particular, and Gen. Charles Lee in passing. Printers in Philadelphia chose not to reprint the letters from the Boston News-Letter, but things were still pretty bad for a while. On 16 September Adams wrote in his diary:

Walking to the Statehouse this Morning, I met Mr. Dickinson, on Foot in Chesnut Street. We met, and passed near enough to touch Elbows. He passed without moving his Hat, or Head or Hand. I bowed and pulled off my Hat. He passed hautily by. The Cause of his Offence, is the Letter no doubt which Gage has printed in Drapers Paper.

And Dickinson wasn’t the only one snubbing Adams, according to the memoir of his friend Dr. Benjamin Rush:

It exposed him to the execrations of all the prudent and moderate people in America, insomuch that he was treated with neglect by many of his old friends. I saw this profound and enlightened patriot…walk our streets alone after the publication of his intercepted letter in our newspapers in 1775 an object of nearly universal detestation.

A British spy in Philadelphia named Gilbert Barkly reported that local Quakers had decided that Adams was dangerous to America; he also planned to push that sentiment along by circulating his own copies of the letters.

Adams might have told people he hadn’t written exactly what was published. In his autobiography decades later he said: “Irritated with the Unpoliteness of Mr. Dickinson and more mortified with his Success in Congress, I wrote something like what has been published. But not exactly. The British Printers made it worse, than it was in the Original.” And the originals are gone, so there’s no proof one way or the other.

But historians generally think that the Boston News-Letter quoted Adams accurately. Unlike the Harrison letter, there are no copies without the embarrassing lines. Adams never identified what bits he hadn’t written, but instead tried to justify one of the more controversial parts (as I quoted yesterday). Most tellingly, Adams had written quite similar things in previous letters, including two he’d sent the previous day.

Looking back, Adams claimed that the publication of his letters had actually benefited him, and he may have been right. For one thing, he liked to think of himself as unpopular because of his principled stands. At times he exaggerated the criticism and downplayed the support he received to justify that feeling. But in the summer of 1775, he could feel that way naturally.

Furthermore, the publication of the letters opened a public discussion on the possibility of independence, and raised his profile as an advocate for it. In his autobiography Adams even wrote that Joseph Reed had told him, “Providence seemed to have thrown these Letters before the Public for our good.”

Meanwhile, events were bending Adams’s way. Before copies of his letters arrived in London, the royal government had already declared all the colonies at the Congress to be in rebellion and rejected the Olive Branch petition. Thus, by the end of the year Dickinson’s moderate position had lost some credit and Adams’s advocacy of independent governments seemed smart.

In fact, on 1 Jan 1776, while Adams was back home in Massachusetts, the Boston Gazette reprinted the letters. Obviously, printer Benjamin Edes, working out of his temporary quarters in Watertown, didn’t view those documents as too awkward or scandalous to share with the world.

But there was still that comment about the “Oddity” of Gen. Lee.

TOMORROW: Abigail Adams extends the hand of friendship.