The Influenza Epidemic of 1760

Yesterday I quoted Dr. Ernest Caulfield on the dysentery epidemic of late 1775.

Caulfield wrote a few years later on influenza epidemics in colonial New England. Not only did the British subjects of that time not understand the disease, they didn’t even have a name for it:

That name, influenza, coined by the Italians to signify the influence of celestial bodies on man’s affairs, was first used in England during the epidemic of 1743, but was not used in this country, so far as I could determine, until after the Revolution. The colonial epidemics when given definite names at all were usually called “uncommon colds,” “very deep colds,” “pleuritic fever,” or “malignant pleurisy.” . . .

Although influenza attacked all age groups children withstood it much better than adults, for statistics when available usually show that adults comprise about two-thirds of the total deaths. During many colonial epidemics the fact was stressed that this disease was unusually fatal to those in the prime of life, the group that was expected to withstand epidemic diseases best of all. . . .

It is generally accepted among medical historians that severe influenza spread throughout most of the country during the winter and spring of 1760-1761. Early in September, 1760, rumors had reached the country towns that as many as twenty persons were dying in Boston daily, but the News-Letter of September 11, in denying such stories, said that there were not twenty deaths a week, yet acknowledged the prevalence of two diseases, the bloody flux and colds.

Various sources indicate that by late September “Great Colds” were prevalent throughout Massachusetts, and October was “a tedious Time for Colds and Caughs” among the Massachusetts men in the camps around Ticonderoga.

British forces had just taken that fort from the French the previous year.

The New London Summary (February 20, 1761) said that “Great Colds” had prevailed in Connecticut throughout the autumn. The first indication of severe influenza was the outbreak which began in Bethlehem, Connecticut, that November and caused 34 deaths, five of them in the home of Dr. Zephaniah Hull.

“During this epidemic, a flock of quails flew over the chimney of a house, in which were several diseased persons, and five of them [meaning quails, I presume] fell dead on the spot.” [Noah] Webster thought that this was natural in view of the concentration of infected air.

People still had a lot to learn about disease.

Dr. Caulfield published this study in the April 1950 issue of the American Antiquarian Society Proceedings (P.D.F. download).

An Expert in Colonial American Literacy

Last week I was saddened to learn of the death of E. Jennifer Monaghan, author of Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, a necessary source on the experiences of Revolutionary-era children.

Monaghan was eighty-one years old, an emeritus professor at Brooklyn College, and, like many female scholars of her generation, a latecomer to her specialty.

Prof. Monaghan was born in Cambridge, England. She earned a B.A. in classics at Oxford and, with a grant from the English-Speaking Union, an M.A. in Greek at the University of Illinois. Then she met and married Charles Monaghan, an American journalist, and they had three children.

Her obituary explains:

Spurred by her experience as a volunteer reading teacher at a local public school and a fascination with phonics, Jennifer decided to pursue a graduate degree in reading education, receiving an Ed. D. from Yeshiva Graduate School of Education with a dissertation on Noah Webster, which was later published as A Common Heritage: Noah Webster’s Blueback Speller. The book launched her career as a historian of literacy.

Author of dozens of scholarly papers and invited presentations worldwide, she was the founder of the History of Reading Special Interest Group of the International Reading Association and edited the group’s newsletter for 25 years. Their annual best-book award is named after her.

Monaghan’s collection of antique reading textbooks is now at the University of Kansas.

A Peek at Franklin’s Improved Alphabet

Last mont Smithsonian Magazine’s Design Decoded blog highlighted a story on Benjamin Franklin’s phonetic alphabet.

The posting left me confused when it said:

Franklin developed his phonetic alphabet in 1768 but it wasn’t published until 1789, when Noah Webster, intrigued by Franklin’s proposal, included its description in his book Dissertations on the English Language. However, because, Webster lacked the type blocks to illustrate Franklin’s changes, the alphabet wouldn’t be seen until Franklin had new blocks cast to print the alphabet for his 1779 collection of writings, Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces.

No matter how I look at things, 1779 comes before 1789, so Franklin’s alphabet, explanations, and examples appeared in print ten years before Noah Webster reprinted the correspondence—translating it back out of the phonetic spelling into familiar form. I think the passage above must mean that Franklin’s scheme wasn’t published in the U.S. of A. until 1789, and even then the actual lettering couldn’t be reprinted.

But copies of Franklin’s Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces had undoubtedly been shipped into America in the 1780s. Many American authors, including the Rev. Cotton Mather, Prof. John Winthrop, Phillis Wheatley, and the Rev. William Gordon, had their books published in London even as they expected American sales. Webster probably found Franklin’s letters in one such imported copy. Incidentally, the American printer who didn’t have the typeface to replicate the London printing for Webster was Isaiah Thomas.

TOMORROW: What’s really remarkable about Franklin’s 1779 collection.

Predictions for America

In his column in yesterday’s New York Times, David Brooks wrote:

In 1800, Noah Webster projected that the U.S. would someday have 300 million citizens, and that a country that big should have its own dictionary.

Actually, the passage Brooks alluded to came from a preface Webster wrote for a reissue of that dictionary in 1828. Webster flattered his main audience this way:

The United States commenced their existence under circumstances wholly novel and unexampled in the history of nations. They commenced with civilization, with learning, with science, with constitutions of free government, and with that best gift of God to man, the Christian religion. Their population is now equal to that of England; in arts and sciences, our citizens are very little behind the most enlightened people on earth; in some respects, they have no superiors; and our language, within two centuries, will be spoken by more people in this country than any other language on earth, except the Chinese, in Asia, and even that may not be an exception.

It has been my aim in this work, now offered to my fellow citizens, to ascertain the true principles of the language, in its orthography and structure; to purify it from some palpable errors, and reduce the number of its anomalies, thus giving it more regularity and consistency in its forms, both of words and sentences; and in this manner, to furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue, which we shall not be ashamed to bequeath to three hundred millions of people, who are destined to occupy, and I hope, to adorn the vast territory within our jurisdiction.

In an 1824 letter, Webster wrote that he had arrived at that number through “the regular laws of population” applied to “two Centuries.” (That letter also made clear he included Canada in his counting.) I believe Webster was calculating not the population of America at a given time but the number of people who would live in America over those centuries. In other words, he would still have been surprised that there are about 315,000,000 people living in the U.S. of A. right now.

As for Webster’s earlier prediction, experts estimate that there are more native speakers of both Chinese and Spanish than English. In many fields, of course, English has become that oddly named lingua franca.

Brooks also wrote:

In 1775, Sam Adams confidently predicted that the scraggly little colonies would one day be the world’s most powerful nation.

It’s not too hard to figure out what Brooks was alluding to since he quoted a passage from Adams’s writings in his book On Paradise Drive (later collected in The Paradise Suite), also dating it to 1775.

However, that passage comes from Adams’s 4 Apr 1774 letter to Arthur Lee in London:

I wish for a permanent union with the mother country, but only on the principles of liberty and truth. No advantage that can accrue to America from such an union can compensate for the loss of liberty. The time may come sooner than they are aware of it, when the being of the British nation, I mean the being of its importance, however strange it may now appear to some, will depend on her union with America. It requires but a small portion of the gift of discernment for any one to foresee, that providence will erect a mighty empire in America; and our posterity will have it recorded in history, that their fathers migrated from an island in a distant part of the world, the inhabitants of which had long been revered for wisdom and valour. They grew rich and powerful; these emigrants increased in numbers and strength. But they were at last absorbed in luxury and dissipation; and to support themselves in their vanity and extravagance they coveted and seized the honest earnings of those industrious emigrants. This laid a foundation of distrust, animosity and hatred, till the emigrants, feeling their own vigour and independence, dissolved every former band of connexion between them, and the islanders sunk into obscurity and contempt.

Adams wasn’t pleased when the postwar generation opened Boston up to new forms of conspicuous consumption and recreation, including theater. “Luxury and dissipation,” as he called it. There were limits to his predictive powers.

The Words of Noah Webster

In the past month the Eighteenth-Century Reading Room has offered some choice writings from Noah Webster. Well, he thought he was writing all about the right choices. Not everyone agreed.

Webster had conservative New England tastes in many things, as apparent in his thoughts on music, published in Boston in 1787:

The establishment of schools for teaching psalmody in this city is a pleasing institution; but people seem not to understand the design, or rather are not properly conducted and encouraged. Most people consider music merely as a source of pleasure; not attending to its influence on the human mind, and its consequent effects on society. But it should be regarded as an article of education, useful as well as ornamental. . . .

Instrumental music is generally prefered to vocal, and considered as an elegant accomplishment. It is indeed a pleasing accomplishment; but the preference given to it, is a species of the same false taste, which places a son under the tuition of a drunken clown, to make him a gentleman of strict morals. . . . I have often heard the best vocal concerts in America, and the best instrumental concerts; and can declare, that the music of the latter is as inferior to that of the former, as the merit of a band box macaroni is to that of a Cato.

In the same post-Revolutionary period, Samuel Adams, who was a great fan of psalm-singing, also used his influence to discourage other forms of musical entertainment in Boston, most especially theater.

Ironically, at one early point Webster was a radical reformer in the area we associate with him most: standardizing the American language. Here’s part of his introduction to a 1790 collection of essays:

During the course of ten or twelv yeers, I hav been laboring to correct popular errors, and to assist my yung brethren in the road to truth and virtue; my publications for theze purposes hav been mumerous; much time haz been spent, which I do not regret, and much censure incurred, which my hart tells me I do not dezerv. . . .

In the essays ritten within the last yeer, a considerable change of spelling iz introduced by way of experiment. This liberty waz taken by the writers before the age of queen Elizabeth, and to this we are indeted for the preference of modern spelling over that of Gower and Chaucer. The man who admits that the change of housoonde, mynde, ygone, moneth into husband, mind, gone, month, iz an improovment, must acknowlege also the riting of helth, breth, rong, tung, munth, to be an improovment. There iz no alternativ. Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds, still exists in full force; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it wil proove that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ancestors.

Riiiite.