Seminars at the Massachusetts Historical Society

As I was trying to sort out the accounts of the New York Tea Party, one of my biggest questions was how the New York Whigs got advance word that James Chambers was bringing in tea. First another merchant captain told the Philadelphia Whigs, who sent word to New York. Then a third captain showed up with nearly the same information, which he had copied from Chambers’s Customs filings.

And literally that tea was nobody’s business but Capt. Chambers’s—he had bought it himself, he was transporting it, and he would presumably pay the duty on it.

Now the American tea boycott made tea everybody’s business for a while. But no one seems to have found it remarkable for information on Capt. Chambers’s cargo to reach New York before he did. Today companies operate on the assumption that most such commercial information is proprietary, not public.

On Friday I attended a seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where research fellow Hannah Tucker helped make sense of that question for me. A graduate student at the University of Virginia, she’s working on the patterns and practices of merchant captains in the eighteenth-century British Empire.

In that period, I grasped from Tucker’s remarks, the uncertainty of Atlantic crossings, the difficulty of communication, and merchants’ and ship owners’ inability to supervise sea captains closely meant that they preferred an open information system to a closed one. It was in nearly everyone’s interest to know about other people’s business. If you tried to keep information within your firm, you could easily find yourself cut off with no information at all.

Thus, sea captains sent their merchant employers signed copies of their bills of lading via two or three other captains—rival mariners working for rival merchants. Captains shared news with others they met at sea. After landing, captains were debriefed for news they had about other ships out of the same port. And apparently it wasn’t that odd for one captain to view the Customs documents of another.

The Massachusetts Historical Society hosts many such insightful seminars on different topics and in different formats, all free and open to the public. (Some require reserving a spot in advance so the society can be sure it has enough seats and sandwiches.)

The session with Hannah Tucker was a “brown-bag seminar,” scheduled at noon (attendees can eat lunch during it); researchers early in their research discuss their current projects and what nearby documents they plan to examine. There are more formal evening series, including the Boston Area Early American History Seminar, when scholars share essays farther along toward publication.

The M.H.S. just announced its schedule of events for the fall and beyond, and here are seminars that caught my eye because of their links to Revolutionary America.

Friday, 7 Sept 2018, 12:00 noon
American Silver, Chinese Silverwares, and the Global Circulation of Value
Susan Eberhard, University of California, Berkeley

Silver coin was the primary commodity shipped to China from the United States in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of which was reworked into silverwares by Chinese craftsmen for British and American buyers. This talk explores the different silver conduits of the American trade relationship with China. Far from a neutral medium, how were understandings of its materiality mobilized in cross-cultural transactions?

Friday, 14 Sept 2018, 12:00 noon
A Possible Connection between a Scandal and Susanna Rowson’s Last Novel
Steven Epley, Samford University

The talk will describe evidence in letters and public records suggesting that best-selling author Susanna Rowson may have based her last novel, Lucy Temple, at least in part on a scandal in which she was innocently but indirectly involved in Medford, Mass., in 1799.

Wednesday, 17 Oct 2018, 12:00 noon
“Watering of the Olive Plant”: Catechisms and Catechizing in Early New England
Roberto Flores de Apodaca, University of South Carolina

Early New Englanders produced and used an unusually large number of catechisms. These catechisms shaped relations of faith for church membership, provided content for missions to the Indians, and empowered lay persons theologically to critique their ministers. This talk explores the content and the function of these unique, question and answer documents.

Monday, 22 Oct 2018, 5:15-7:30 P.M.
Paul Revere’s Ride through Digital History
Joseph M. Adelman, Framingham State University; Liz Covart and Karin Wulf, Omohundro Institute

This seminar examines components of the Omohundro Institute’s multi-platform digital project and podcast series, Doing History: To the Revolution. It explores Episode 130, “Paul Revere’s Ride through History,” and the ways the topic was constructed through narrative and audio effects, as well as the content in the complementary reader app.

Tuesday, 6 Nov 2018, 5:15-7:30 P.M.
“A Rotten-Hearted Fellow”: The Rise of Alexander McDougall
Christopher Minty, the Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society
Comment: Brendan McConville, Boston University

Historians have often grouped the DeLanceys of New York as self-interested opportunists who were destined to become loyalists. By focusing on the rise of Alexander McDougall, this paper offers a new interpretation, demonstrating how the DeLanceys and McDougall mobilized groups with competing visions of New York’s political economy. These prewar factions stayed in opposition until the Revolutionary War, thus shedding new light on the coming of the American Revolution.

Tuesday, 8 Jan 2019, 5:15-7:30 P.M.
The Consecration of Samuel Seabury and the Crisis of Atlantic Episcopacy, 1782-1807
Brent Sirota, North Carolina State University
Comment: Chris Beneke, Bentley University

Samuel Seabury’s consecration in 1784 signaled a transformation in the organization of American Protestantism. After more than a century of resistance to the office of bishops, American Methodists and Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans all established some form of episcopal superintendency after the Peace of Paris. This paper considers how the making of American episcopacy and the controversies surrounding it betrayed a lack of consensus regarding the relationship between church, state and civil society in the Protestant Atlantic.

Tuesday, 5 Mar 2019, 5:15-7:30 P.M.
Parson Weems: Maker and Remaker
Steven C. Bullock, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Comment: Elizabeth Maddock-Dillon, Northeastern University

This paper argues that Mason Locke Weems’s biography of George Washington built a bridge between Washington and the world of Abraham Lincoln and Ellen Montgomery. Weems’s stories were not just expressing early-19th century cultural commonplaces, but helping to create them. The paper connects these transformations with Weems’s work to recover Weems’s importance within his own time.

Tuesday, 7 May 2019, 5:15-7:30 P.M.
Panel: After the Fighting: The Struggle for Revolutionary Settlement
Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire; Katherine Grandjean, Wellesley College; Stephen Marini, Wellesley College; Brendan McConville, Boston University

In the ten years after the American victory at Yorktown in 1781, the nation faced myriad problems and challenges. This panel examines how the revolutionary generation confronted issues of diplomacy, governance and economic growth, and how the legacies of warfare and political convulsion shaped spiritual and social behaviors in those troubled years.

Check out the M.H.S. Events page for other sessions about other historical periods, subjects, and approaches.

Slicing Open Marion’s Sweet Potatoes

If Jervais Henry Stevens and Samuel Weaver both said they saw Gen. Francis Marion share a meal of roasted sweet potatoes with a British officer, is that enough to validate the legend?

Unfortunately, both Stevens and Weaver were first set down a few years after the Rev. Mason Weems published the story in his biography of Marion. Newspapers and magazines reprinted the tale. Around 1820, apparently, John Blake White painted a picture of it. The sweet-potato dinner became a widely known detail in the story of a regional hero, with a patriotic moral. That meant there was probably value in putting oneself into that story, and little value in casting doubt on it.

I’m impressed, however, that Weaver swore that “He has been told by some, that this [meal] has been recorded in the life of Genrl as a dinner, but this was a breakfast.” Weaver indicated that he had not read the printed accounts, and furthermore that he was willing to contradict them in one detail.

Weaver also said Marion’s guest was “a British Officer as he was told [who] came into camp, but for what he does not know.” The veteran obviously wasn’t trying to present himself as important.

I suspect that Weaver had also not seen White’s painting since that shows a servile black man dishing up the potatoes. Weaver said he served the breakfast himself, and as a white in ante-bellum South Carolina would almost certainly not have enjoyed being represented as a black man.

Therefore, even though Weaver told his story about two decades after the tale first appeared in print, it seems to ring true.

In contrast, we don’t have Stevens’s story. Instead, author Alexander Garden appears to have read the Weems version, asked around, and found some old companions of Marion who said it—or something like it—was true. Even then Garden admitted some doubt by writing “It is said” before his final paragraph.

And that paragraph is, I suspect, all Weemsian mythmaking. The preacher may have come across the sweet-potato story from Weaver, or Stevens, or somebody else, and decided to add it to his Marion biography. Since he was writing a “romance,” Weems felt no compunction about making up dramatic dialogue between the American general and the British officer.

Most important, Weems added a moral to the story, which otherwise was just a little episode about American partisans living off the land and a British officer polite enough to share one meal with them. Weems’s version went on to say that Englishman went back to the Crown forces so impressed by Marion’s dedication that he told his commander they had no chance of subduing the Americans. By the time Garden wrote, “It is said,” that officer even resigned his commission.

But how was an American author privy to a private conversation between British officers in British-occupied Georgetown? How could an American author know why a British officer resigned when he clearly doesn’t know that officer’s name or the date of the event? Weems’s ending to the story is a big part of its power, but it’s not nearly as convincing as Samuel Weaver’s simple tale of how he “wiped the ashes off with a dirty handkerchief.”

TOMORROW: Back to the Brockington claim (and away from increasingly strained metaphors about sweet potatoes).

“Most certainly ’tis not MY history, but YOUR romance.”

The first edition of The Life of Gen. Francis Marion appeared at the end of 1809. As I described yesterday, it was brought to press by the Rev. Mason Weems (shown here), but written in the voice of Peter Horry, one of Marion’s officers.

It took until 4 Feb 1811, over a year after publication, before Horry told Weems what he thought of the book, in a fun-to-read letter later printed in William Gilmore Simms’s Views and Reviews in American Literature:

I requested you would, (if necessary,) so far alter the work as to make it read grammatically, and I gave you leave to embellish the work,—but entertained not the least idea of what has happened—though several of my friends were under such apprehensions, which caused my being urgent on you not to alter as above mentioned.

Do you not recollect my sitting on the ground with you near the Georgetown Printing Office, and urging you again on the subject of no alterations to the work—That you replied, (seemingly out of humour,) that, “When the work came out, you engaged I would be satisfied.” I replied, “That is enough;”—and, I recollect nothing farther passed between us afterwards on the subject.

How great was my surprise on reading these words in your letter: “Knowing the passion of the times for novels, I have endeavoured to throw your ideas and facts about General Marion into the garb and dress of a military romance.” A history of realities turned into a romance! The idea alone, militates against the work. The one as a history of real performance, would be always read with pleasure. The other as a fictitious invention of the brain, once read would suffice. Therefore, I think you injured yourself, notwithstanding the quick sales of your book.

Nor have the public received the real history of General Marion. You have carved and mutilated it with so many erroneous statements, your embellishments, observations and remarks, must necessarily be erroneous as proceeding from false grounds. Most certainly ’tis not MY history, but YOUR romance.

You say the book sells better than [Weems’s book on George] Washington! The price of the one is much less than the other—[that] is the reason. Besides, persons unacquainted with the real history, buy and read your book as authentic. When known to be otherwise, [it] will lie mouldering on the shelves, and no more purchasers [will] be obtained. You have my work; compare [it] with yours, and the difference will appear. Yours is greatly abridged, and the letters contained in mine (which I thought much of,) are excluded from yours.

You say, “you are surprised to hear that I am displeased with your book, particularly as it places Marion and myself in so conspicuous and exalted a light.” Can you suppose I can be pleased with reading particulars (though ever so elevated, by you) of Marion and myself, when I know such never existed.

Your book is out. My dissatisfaction of it is no ways material. You say you want to see me to procure some additional anecdotes for your 2d edition—and that, if I can point out any errors or places where improvement may be made, that you will cheerfully attend to any instructions. Could such improvement be really made, I fear for its fate—to be disregarded as my first performances were.

According to a sketch of Horry in the South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, “Horry’s annotated copy is extant and it shows many of Weems’ false statements, but not near all.”

That same article says, “The title page of the first edition credits the alleged biography to Weems, but after Horry’s death [in 1815] new editions falsely assigned it to Weems and Horry, despite Horry’s repeated repudiation of it during his lifetime.”

So it seems far less likely that Horry witnessed the sweet-potato dinner as his narrative voice described. In fact, if my supposition is right, Weems added the episode to the book only after Horry died, when he couldn’t object so vociferously.

TOMORROW: Other eyewitnesses to the sweet potato dinner?

“O that mine enemy would write a book”

For most of the nineteenth century, editions of The Life of Gen. Francis Marion, a Celebrated Partisan Officer in the Revolutionary War, carried this author credit:

By Brig. Gen. P. Horry, of Marion’s Brigade:
and M. L. Weems

The book was written in the voice of Peter Horry (shown here, courtesy of the Horry County Historical Society). For a sample of that voice, the preface began:

“O that mine enemy would write a book.”—This, in former times, passed for as sore an evil as a good man could think of wishing to his worst enemy.—Whether any of my enemies ever wished me so great an evil, I know not. But certain it is, I never dreamed of such a thing as writing a book; and least of all a war book. What, I! a man here under the frozen zone and grand climacteric of my days, with one foot in the grave and the other hard by, to quit my prayer book and crutches, (an old man’s best companion,) and drawing my sword, nourish and fight over again the battles of my youth.

The Lord forbid me such madness! But what can one do when one’s friends are eternally teazing him, as they are me, and calling out at every whipstitch and corner of the streets, “Well, but, sir, where’s Marion? where’s the history of Marion, that we have so long been looking for?”

’Twas in vain that I told them I was no scholar; no historian. “God,” said I, “gentlemen, has made many men of many minds; one for this thing and another for that. But I am morally certain he never made me for a writer. I did indeed once understand something about the use of a broad sword; but as to a pen, gentlemen, that's quite another part of speech. The difference between a broad-sword and a pen, gentlemen, is prodigious; and it is not every officer, let me tell you, gentlemen, who can, like Caesar, fight you a great battle with his sword to-day, and fight it over again with his pen to-morrow.”

Of course, the reason those friends kept asking Horry about his Marion book is that he had collected information for a history of the brigade. But he had trouble getting it published. The Rev. Mason Weems—already a bestselling biographer of George Washington—convinced Horry to send him the manuscript so he could make it saleable.

TOMORROW: Big mistake.

Parson Weems Cooks Up a Dinner for Francis Marion

The Rev. Mason Weems published the first edition of his Life of Gen. Francis Marion in 1809. It followed the hortatory model of the parson’s book on George Washington, issued nine years earlier, but Weems wrote in the voice of Peter Horry, a South Carolina officer who had served under Marion (shown here, courtesy of NNDB.com) and loaned him documents as raw material.

I haven’t found an 1809 edition of Weems’s Marion online, but there are copies of the reprints from 1815-20 and later. That’s also when an incident from the book—the story of Marion and the sweet potatoes—was first reprinted in American periodicals, such as the 1817 volume of the Monthly Magazine, or British Register. That makes me suspect that Weems added the anecdote to his second edition and thus brought it into the public eye.

Weems’s text described Marion dining off sweet potatoes several times, but it highlighted a particular moment when an “Englishman” had brought “a flag from the enemy in George-town, S. C. the object of which was to make some arrangements about the exchange of prisoners.” After that gentleman had concluded that business with Marion:

The officer took up his hat to retire.

“Oh no!” said Marion, “it is now about our time of dining, and I hope, sir, you will give us the pleasure of your company to dinner.”

At the mention of the word dinner, the British officer looked around him, but to his great mortification, could see no sign of a pot, pan, or Dutch-oven, or any other cooking utensil that could raise the spirits of a hungry man.

“Well, Tom,” said the general to one of his men, “come, give us our dinner.”

The dinner to which he alluded was no other than a heap of sweet potatoes, that were very snugly roasting under the embers, and which Tom, with his pine-stick poker, soon liberated from their ashy confinement, pinching them every now and then with his fingers, especially the big ones, to see whether they were well done or not. Then, having cleansed them of the ashes, partly by blowing them with his breath, and partly by brushing them with the sleeve of his old cotton shirt, he piled some of the best on a large piece of bark, and placed them between the British officer and Marion, on the trunk of the fallen pine on which they sat.

“I fear sir,” said the general, “our dinner will not prove so palatable to you as I could wish; but it is the best we have.”

The officer, who was a well-bred man, took up one of the potatoes, and affected to feed as if he had found a great dainty; but it was very plain that he ate more from good manners than good appetite. . . .

The Englishman said, “he did not believe it would be an easy matter to reconcile his feelings to a soldier’s life on general Marion’s terms; all fighting, no pay, and no provisions but potatoes.”

“Why, sir,” answered the general, “the heart is all; and when that is once interested, a man can do any thing. Many a youth would think hard to indent himself a slave for fourteen years. But let him be over head and ears in love, and with such a beauteous sweetheart as Rachel, and he will think no more of fourteen years’ servitude than young Jacob did. Well, now this is exactly my case. I am in love; and my sweetheart is LIBERTY.” . . .

I looked at Marion as he uttered these sentiments, and fancied I felt as when I heard the last words of the brave [Baron Johann] De Kalb. The Englishman hung his honest head, and looked, I thought, as if he had seen the upbraiding ghosts of his illustrious countrymen, [Algernon] Sydney and [John] Hampden.

On his return to George-town he was asked by Colonel [John Watson Tadwell] Watson why he looked so serious? “I have cause, sir,” said he, “to look so serious.”—

“What! has General Marion refused to treat [i.e., negotiate]?”

“No, sir.”—

“Well then, has old Washington defeated Sir Henry Clinton, and broke up our army?”

“No. sir, not that neither; but worse.”—

“Ah! what can be worse?”

“Why, sir, I have seen an American general and his officers, without pay, and almost without clothes, living on roots, and drinking water—and all for LIBERTY! What chance have we against such men!”

Weems always liked to draw a heroic little lesson out of his anecdotes, which helped make them popular with magazine and textbook editors. As I noted above, this story began to be reprinted in the late 1810s (punctuation and other small details differing from one publication to another).

When John Blake White painted Marion inviting a red-coated officer to share a meal of sweet potatoes about 1820, he surely had this episode in mind. It was becoming widely known, and it had a moral and patriotic message for the American public. No wonder a version is now hanging in the U.S. Capitol.

In contrast, no publication before 1999 appears to have reported that Marion also shared sweet potatoes with the Loyalist officer John Brockington as he returned home after the war. In fact, why would a planter like Marion be dining on vegetables in the woods once the war was over? And what message and value would that scene have held to the American public?

Of course, that doesn’t mean the scene Weems described ever happened.

TOMORROW: Hearing from Peter Horry.

A Latter-Day Claim to Gen. Marion’s Sweet Potatoes

Last month at Blog, or Die, Michael Aubrecht wrote about John Blake White’s paintings of Francis Marion inviting a British officer to join him in a dinner of roasted sweet potatoes. Longtime Boston 1775 readers might recall that a ceremony about the version of that painting in the U.S. Capitol prompted some postings on the semi-legendary figure of Marion’s enslaved servant Oscar.

The Senate’s webpage on that painting and Aubrecht’s posting both cite an article about the underlying historic incident in the South Carolina Historical Society’s Carologue magazine for 1999. (Both webpages have typos that date the article to 1989, but the former also has the correct citation.) I haven’t found an online version of that article, Nell Weaver Davies’s “New Facts about an Old Story,” but Aubrecht describes its latter-day interpretation of the painting:

James P. Truluck, a descendant of the alleged British Officer,…[stated that] Captain John Brockington, Jr.—a landowner, slave-owner, and Tory sympathizer, who had fought against the “Swamp Fox”—was the legendary officer depicted in the piece. He added that his ancestor had been among the Tories that were banned to Nova Scotia after Continental forces assumed control of South Carolina.

In an effort to regain his land and reputation, Brockington returned to the colonies to refute his Loyalists ways and repay any claims that were made against him. After receiving a pardon, he and his slaves headed home and traveled through the swamps to avoid confrontation. It was while preparing their own camp meal that Truluck states Marion found them (resulting in the painted scene).

I’m baffled by Trulock’s claim, as best I understand it. It seems clear that White, painting around 1820, illustrated a specific episode described in Mason Weems’s Life of Gen. Francis Marion.

TOMORROW: Parson Weems and General Marion.

Building and Rebuilding Washington

Edward G. Lengel’s Inventing George Washington is a quick, readable study of how Americans have remembered the “Father of Our Country” over the decades. Many legends arose despite the lack of documents, or even despite the existence of contradictory documents, reflecting the interests of different periods and people.

In some cases, such as the cherry tree and phrase “Washington slept here,” the fact that those legends are legends is also part of our culture. Other legends, such as the general praying in the snow at Valley Forge, serve as articles of faith for some Americans.

Because there are so many Washington myths, and debunking takes far more space than retelling, this book could have filled a thousand pages. So Lengel’s first step was to narrow down the field to those stories that have had the most readers and the widest influence. This book doesn’t quibble over every little doorstep where Washington may have walked.

Lengel’s second step was to organize his material along two tracks. One is chronological. The first two chapters discuss some stories about Washington in his lifetime and for the fifty years thereafter, when authors like Mason Weems and George Lippard (who never claimed to write nonfiction) confirmed that the first President’s name could sell books.

The second track is thematic. In the late nineteenth century a combination of nostalgia, nationalism, and post-Romantic interest in “the real man” produced a flowering of Washington myths. Lengel offers separate chapters on “Washington’s Loves”; “Washington’s Visions,” or religious experiences; and “Washington Slept Here,” on the growth of historical tourism. Along the way come the claims from the families of Lydia Darragh, Betsy Ross, and John Honeyman. Most of these stories have few sources, but folks who wanted Washington to be a certain sort of person filled in the holes.

Not every story turned out to be a myth, though. The “Sally Fairfax letter” which published in the late 1800s showed young Washington as a flirt—a flirt with another man’s wife when he was about to marry Martha. That fit into the period’s notions of Washington as a romantic hero, though it also ran up against proper Victorian mores. The letter vanished into an individual’s collection, leading many people to denounce it as a forgery or myth. But then it resurfaced in 1958, looking quite convincing.

Inventing George Washington isn’t just about debunking myths. It’s also about the way Americans have preserved the President’s memory, including preserving Mount Vernon, publishing his papers, and erecting monuments that look nothing like him.

Chapters 6 and 7 discuss the historiography of the 20th century, including the “debunking” of the 1920s writers William E. Woodward and Rupert Hughes; the government’s Depression-era project to publish all the general’s writing (as opposed to the current project, publishing letters he both sent and received); and the post-WW2 biographies from Douglas Southall Freeman (exhaustive, dry) and James Thomas Flexner (lively and, well, imaginative about what people were thinking and feeling).

The final chapter is a bit of a gumbo, with ghost stories, television movies, and the latest favorites about Washington—politicians’ misquotes, the hemp lobby’s claims. But Lengel pulls it together with his personal experience of acting as historical advisor on a movie about Washington for Mount Vernon. He says the reenactors involved called the result “FUBAR,” which it might have been, but I bet they also said it was “farby.”

In all, Inventing George Washington is a brief, thought-provoking read. It’s a reminder that debunking and revamping historical stories has been a constant phenomenon, not something that began in our lifetimes. It shows how each period has, consciously or unconsciously, created a George Washington that serves its cultural needs and reflects its contemporary concerns.

The book is enough to make one wonder what our time is unconsciously doing to the man and his memory.

The Literature of Oscar Marion

The incident in the life of Gen. Francis Marion (shown here, courtesy of NNDB.com) that John Blake White depicted in his “General [Francis] Marion Inviting a British Officer to Share His Meal” was first reported in Mason Weems’s Life of General Francis Marion, published in 1805. Weems is best known for his biography of Gen. George Washington, which included such enduring but completely unconfirmable legends as Washington chopping at a cherry tree and praying in the snow at Valley Forge.

In the eighteenth chapter of his Marion biography, Weems included a long anecdote about a young British officer visiting Marion in his camp for a conference. The American general invites the officer to share his dinner, which turns out to be roasted sweet potatoes on platters of tree bark. Impressed by the partisans’ dedication to the cause of independence, the officer returns to his commander, Col. Watson; praises the enemy; and eventually resigns from the army. You can read the text in an 1852 edition through Google Books.

That anecdote did not name the British officer or explain how the author came by his information. Weems did not mention an enslaved man named Oscar accompanying Marion. Instead, as he described the scene, a soldier named Tom was roasting the potatoes.

The figure of Oscar Marion entered the literary record in A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion, published in 1821 by William Dobein James (1764-1830). This book described a different dinner in Marion’s camp, not with a British officer but with the author himself:

At this place, the author had, (in the absence of his father,) the honour to be invited to dine with the general. The dinner was set before the company by the General’s servant, Oscar, partly on a pine log and partly on the ground; it was lean beef, without salt, and sweet potatoes. The author had left a small pot of boiled homminy in his camp, and requested leave of his host to send for it; and the proposal was gladly acquiesced in, gladly. The hominy had salt in it, and proved, although eaten out of the pot, a most acceptable repast. The general said but little, and that was chiefly what a son would be most likely to be gratified by, in the praise of his father. They had nothing to drink but bad water; and all the company appeared to be rather grave.

White produced his painting of Marion’s camp about the same time that James wrote his book. The artist may have combined the two published descriptions of Marion’s camp dinners to show Oscar making sweet potatoes for the British officer. He may have relied on his own unknown sources of information about Oscar. Or he may never have read about or met Oscar, and simply depicted a generic black servant for the general.

James mentioned Oscar one other time in his book, while describing Marion’s retirement to his slave-labor plantation at the end of the war: “His faithful servant Oscar, who had accompanied him through all his difficulties, always received high marks of his favour.” What marks those are James didn’t say. Unlike Washington’s bodyservant, William Lee, Oscar was never formally freed. By applying the term “faithful” to Oscar in one of two mentions, James’s book scores what I’ll call a “faithful quotient” (F.Q.) of 50%.

William Gilmore Simms’s The Life of Francis Marion (1844) also mentions Oscar twice. The first is an imperfect but basically accurate quotation of James’s anecdote. The second passage describes how Marion dealt with the property he had used during the war:

He had preserved carefully, as memorials of an eventful history, his marquee, camp bed, and cooking utensils, just as he had done while in the Brigade, during the last twelve months of his military life. These were carefully taken with him; and, with his faithful servant Oscar, and his two sumpter mules, were still the companions of his wanderings.

Like James, Simms had an F.Q. of 50%.

Subsequent biographies of Francis Marion drew heavily on those first three. In 1959, for example, Prof. Robert Duncan Bass published Swamp Fox: The Life and Campaigns of General Francis Marion. Bass was a literary scholar, not a historian, and his book had no footnotes. Reviewing a newer biography of Marion in The History Teacher in 1975, historian George Athan Billias criticized Bass and his predecessors for having “relied on dubious secondary sources, legends, and traditions.”

Nevertheless, Bass’s book found a large audience and became the principal source of Walt Disney’s Swamp Fox adventures, televised from 1959 to 1961. (I’ll discuss that adaptation tomorrow.) In the midst of America’s civil-rights movement, Bass mentioned Marion’s servant Oscar on five pages. Three describe the man as “faithful,” for an F.Q. of 60%.

Washington and the Cherry Tree

Every American “knows” the story of young George Washington and the cherry tree, and knows that it has no basis in fact. But how many of us have had a chance to read the original version of that story?

Here’s Mason Weems’s fable as it was published in 1809, transcribed by the George Washington Papers at the University of Virginia.

The crucial point:

The next morning the old gentleman finding out what had befallen his tree, which, by the by, was a great favourite, came into the house, and with much warmth asked for the mischievous author, declaring at the same time, that he would not have taken five guineas for his tree. Nobody could tell him any thing about it.

Presently George and his hatchet made their appearance.

George, said his father, do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry-tree yonder in the garden?

This was a tough question; and George staggered under it for a moment...

What will our young hero say?

(Today’s picture, also courtesy of the Washington Papers at Virginia, shows Grant Wood’s painting Parson Weems’ Fable.)