Independence and Enslavement in Middletown

At the end of the Revolutionary War, lots of things changed in Middletown, Connecticut.

In 1784, Hugh White left that town to start surveying an area of upstate New York that would become Whitestown. Relatives and neighbors would follow. The central part of that area would take the name Whitesboro and for a long time have an unfortunate town seal.

Other Middletown residents also moved west to lands made available by the U.S. victory over Britain and its Native allies. Retired general Samuel Holden Parsons became a director of the Ohio Land Company. He traveled to western Pennsylvania in November 1789 and drowned while canoeing.

There were also legal changes at home. The area around the Connecticut River port, where the merchants and ship-builders lived, incorporated itself as a city in 1784. Instead of a town meeting with nearly every farmer eligible to vote, the city of Middletown had a mayor, four aldermen, and ten “common-council-men” chosen from the upper class.

The first set of aldermen included two former generals—Comfort Sage and the ill-fated Parsons—plus Col. Matthew Talcott and, for old times’ sake, former militia captain Philip Mortimer.

Among the first common-council-men was the husband of Mortimer’s favored niece, George Starr, as well as Col. Return Jonathan Meigs.

Also in 1784, the state of Connecticut passed a Gradual Emancipation Act—so gradual that it didn’t actually emancipate anybody for another twenty-five years. Children born into slavery after 1 Mar 1784 would become free on their twenty-fifth birthdays.

The 1790 U.S. Census counted 2,648 people enslaved in Connecticut, alongside 2,771 free blacks. The person who owned the most other people in the state—eleven by official count—was Philip Mortimer.

Back in Boston, as we know from newspaper advertisements, Mortimer employed at least one Irish teenager at ropemaking in 1738, and he imported young indentured servants from Ireland in 1740 and 1741. Maybe he enslaved Africans then, too, but he was doing so in a big way (by New England standards) in 1790.

That number grew to seventeen by July 1792. Mortimer then listed the people working for him for free as:

• Bristol, married to Tamer
• Hagar and her daughter
• Jack, Sophy, and Sophy’s sons Lester, Dick, and John, all under age fourteen
• Amarillas and her children
• Silvy
• Peg, still under the age of twenty-six
• Peter and Prince

That first census also found that Mortimer was the only white person on his estate, the biggest in Middletown. Most of the people he claimed as property must have been his household and farm help. But Peter and Prince worked at his ropewalk as spinners.

TOMORROW: Freedom, but not yet.

John Shy and John Phillip Reid

Two noted historians of the American Revolution died in their nineties within a couple of days in early April.

John Shy was his generation’s preeminent military historian of the American Revolution, having graduated from the U.S. Military Academy and served in the army in the 1950s before going to graduate school.

When Shy retired, the University of Michigan stated:

He has led the way in emancipating military history from its traditionally narrow focus upon strategy and tactics, making it instead an essential component of any full understanding of humanity’s past. Professor Shy’s first work, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the Revolution, published in 1956, was instantly recognized as a seminal contribution, and received the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association. Since that time, he has published extensively. A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence, published in 1976 and in a revised edition in 1990, is widely praised because of its perceptivity and breadth of vision.

Later Shy edited Winding Down: The Revolutionary War Letters of Lieutenant Benjamin Gilbert of Massachusetts, 1780-1783.

I had Toward Lexington in mind as I wrote The Road to Concord. The two books are very different, but they both look not at the war but at how British soldiers and British colonists came to be at war.

John Phillip Reid was a scholar of early American constitutional and legal history who taught at the N.Y.U. Law School. His major work was The Constitutional History of the American Revolution, first a four-volume study and then a one-volume abridgment. Other books focused on the legalities of New Hampshire and the old Northwest.

At Law & Liberty, Aaron N. Coleman wrote of Reid:

His work on the constitutional dimensions of the Revolution challenged both the progressive interpretation, which viewed the conflict through the lens of socio-economic conflict, and the ideological school, which connected the American arguments to the republican intellectual tradition. Both schools, he believed, failed to grasp the essence of the era’s thinking. The American Revolution, he concluded, was concerned predominantly with the nature of the British constitution. . . .

One of Reid’s most persistent criticisms centered on historians’ presumption that law and constitution are the commands of the sovereign. Far too often, historians assume that what Parliament stated was the law, thereby concluding that the only way to understand the negative American response to measures such as the Stamp Act and the Coercive Acts must be to look beyond the law to political ideology. In the eighteenth century, however, “constitutional,” “legal,” and “political” lacked the precision they now carry. In that era, “constitutional” still retained its older definition rooted in custom, “to proceed in conformity to law, in conformity to custom, and in conformity to the current constitutional conventions.” At the same time, “legality” meant acting within the confines of the customary constitution, while the “political” was “a matter of choice rather than precedent” designed for immediacy rather than durability. Hence, the British constitution of the eighteenth century remained one in which custom, traditions, and values restrained power.

Parsing Little Turtle’s Speech

Last month the Aacimotaatiiyankwi blog of the Myaamia (Miami) community shared an interesting conversation about the records from an 1795 treaty conference.

Representatives of the Myaamia (Miami) and other Native nations and of the U.S. government met in Fort Greenville in the part of the Northwest Territory that became Ohio. Gen. Anthony Wayne had won the Battle of Fallen Timbers almost a year before, and the Jay Treaty had deprived the Native alliance of support from Britain.

The Myaamia leader Mihšihkinaahkwa or Little Turtle (c. 1747-1812, shown here) made a speech that survives in four English forms:

• The official report of the U.S. government published in the American State Papers.
• The diary of U.S. military surgeon Dr. John F. Carmichael (1761-1837).
• A brief report from John Askin, Jr., a British and Ottawa trader held prisoner by the Americans.
• A translation of the official English text into Miami, seeking to recreate the original a century later, which was then translated back into English.

The blog also hosted a conversation about those different texts among scholars George Ironstack, Hunter Lockwood, David Costa, Daryl Badwin, and Cameron Shriver. The comparison illuminates some facts about the Myaamia situation in 1795 and about language. For example:

George Ironstrack: Gabriel Godfroy’s [doubly translated] version strikes me as a straight up translation from the English he was provided. We know there is a major language shift between Little Turtle’s time (ca. 1795) and Gabriel Godfroy (ca. 1890). Not that Godfroy wouldn’t have understood Little Turtle’s speech, but I don’t think it tells us a lot about the actual words Mihšihkinaahkwa spoke on that day or the oratorical style he might have used for that circumstance.

For the American State Papers version, we know that William Wells was the interpreter and so I tend to trust the interpretation at a pretty high degree on account of his level of fluency and relationship with Little Turtle, and we also see them working hand in glove politically, which helps me to trust the initial translation, at least. . . .

Cameron Shriver: In the John Carmichael version, I’m struck by how similar it is to the American State Papers version. They almost fully agree, but there are some interesting details in the Carmichael version. “Open your ears and I will tell you where they live,” he says. “The marks of my forefather’s houses are yet plain to be seen. … The Potawatomis live on the St. Joseph and the Wabash, the Ottawas live at ‘blank,’ the Ojibwes live on ‘blank,’ and there are other place names that Carmichael apparently could not write down. Little Turtle is saying explicitly where the Ottawas and Ojibwes and Potawatomis live, and Carmichael just doesn’t know what those words mean or Wells is not translating them from the Miami names. . . .

David Costa: I do wonder whether Godfroy put something into his translation that’s not immediately evident, that might not have been characteristic of his normal speech. You know, there was an oratorical style. There might have been some subtle things about how Godfroy translated this that might have been harking back to “well I kind of remember when I was a kid when people would make speeches.” Maybe he tried to throw in a few old-fashioned turns of phrase into it, like [Thomas Wildcat] Alford did when he translated the Shawnee Bible.

One phrase that appears in both of the detailed contemporaneous sources is “any white man who wore a hat.” This might be a bit redundant because the scholars agree that an early term for white people in Miami and other languages of the area was “people who wear hats.” Notably, the back-translation of the late 1800s doesn’t use that language, suggesting the description no longer held power.

TOMORROW: Defining territory.

“I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within”

This episode of the Timesuck podcast, this History Daily article, this Cracked article, this 13th Floor article, and this History Extra roundup of Presidential trivia all tell the same story.

That story says President John Quincy Adams was convinced by a man named John Cleves Symmes, Jr., that Earth is hollow, that one can go inside the planet through holes at the poles, and that people are living inside. Allegedly Adams was so taken with this idea that he championed a federal expedition to Antarctica to explore the inner Earth, only to be stymied by losing the election of 1828.

All these web resources also use the term “mole people” for the inhabitants of the hollow Earth, sometimes in quotation marks, even though that phrase isn’t documented before the end of the nineteenth century.

And none points to sources that link President Adams’s statements or actions to Symmes’s vision of a hollow, populated Earth.

You can see where this is going. I’m here to tell you this story is false. Yes, I’m not much fun—but neither, most of the time, was John Quincy Adams.

So far the best online treatment of this story that I’ve found is this Reddit posting by smileyman. So my challenge is to add something interesting to what that says.

First of all, John Cleves Symmes, Jr. (1780-1829, shown above), really did believe in a populated hollow Earth. He was born in New Jersey, named after an uncle who commanded a New Jersey militia regiment in the Revolution and represented the state in the Continental Congress during its low point of the mid-1780s. The elder Symmes was also an early American settler of the Ohio Territory.

The younger Symmes joined the U.S. Army in 1802 and continued to serve through the War of 1812. He then moved to St. Louis as a trader. That business failed in the 1819 Panic, but by then Symmes had a bright new idea to take up his time. In April 1818 he published a circular letter that said:

St. Louis, Missouri Territory, North America,
April 10, A. D. 1818.

To all the World:
I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.

Jno. Cleves Symmes,
Of Ohio, late Captain of Infantry.

N. B. I have ready for the press a treatise on the principles of matter, wherein I show proofs of the above positions, account for various phenomena, and disclose Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin’s “Golden Secret [of wind patterns].” . . .

I ask one hundred, brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia, in the fall season, with reindeer and sleighs, on the ice of the frozen sea; I engage we find a warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men, on reaching one degree northward of latitude 82; we will return in the succeeding spring.

Symmes doesn’t seem to have come to the theory through actual evidence about Earth. He denied having read any previous theories along the same lines. (Edmund Halley had proposed one such theory to the Royal Society, and the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather later mentioned it in passing.) He said instead that he was inspired by seeing the rings of Saturn, though I’m not sure how exactly those were supposed to prove a hollow planet. But Symmes had his idea and insisted it was correct.

Remarkably, the circular letter didn’t attract the hundred companions that Symmes asked for. In 1820 he launched a speaking tour to spread his idea and drum up support. Two years later, Symmes petitioned the U.S. Congress to fund his expedition, but it declined to take up the proposal. The same thing happened the following year. Then the Ohio legislature turned down the opportunity in 1824.

Meanwhile, John Quincy Adams was serving James Monroe as Secretary of State.

TOMORROW: A proposal to the President.

(My thanks to Stephanie McKellop for alerting me to the story of Adams and the “mole people.”)

Slavery in Early Illinois

Yesterday I mentioned how John Beaird, the instigator of war with the Cherokee in the Southwest Territory in 1793, eventually moved to Illinois with his family and slaves.

But Illinois was part of the old Northwest Territory. In 1787 the confederation Congress’s Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery there. So how did Beaird’s move work out?

In practice, the government dragged its feet about ending slavery. Some French settlers already in that territory owned slaves, and the first U.S. governor, Revolutionary War general Arthur St. Clair, took no action against the practice. When Americans from slave states first moved into the western Northwest Territory, they were also generally allowed to keep their human property. That appears to be what John Beaird did in 1801.

Here’s what the Combined History of Randolph, Monroe and Perry Counties, Illinois (1883) says about John Beaird:

Then comes an inventory of the estate of John Beaird, dated March 13th, 1809. Beaird must have been farming extensively; the inventory mentions seventeen horses, worth from $45 to $100 each, two yoke of oxen, wagons, plows, six sets of harness, etc., a “mulatto negro” worth $350, and a black boy worth $250.

At the subsequent estate sale, “The negro boy ‘Berry’ was sold to John Beaird, Jr., for $450, the other brought only $225.”

The legal situation shifted a little in 1803 when Ohio became a free state. In September 1807 the Indiana Territory (including Illinois) passed a law forbidding slave owners from bringing in human property. But that didn’t mean immediate emancipation because:

• Within thirty days of entering, owners could go to the county clerk and make out an agreement for their slaves to continue working as indentured servants. If slaves refused the deal offered, owners had another sixty days to send them back into slave territory.
• Slaves under the age of fifteen could be indentured only until men turned 35 and women turned 32.
• Children born to indentured people would be indentured themselves until age 30 for men and 28 for women.

In 1814, the year after Indiana became a free state, the Beaird family must have felt some pressure to put their ownership of people on a more secure legal footing. On 17 October, Joseph Beaird had two workers—James, aged about 18, and Charles, 27—sign indentures agreeing to work for him for the next 65 years. Beaird promised each man $50 at the end of that term. Of course, by then they would most likely all be dead.

On the same day, John Beaird, Jr., made out similar indentures for three boys and one girl:

• Harry, aged about 16, for 80 years.
• Annaky, about 16, for 80 years.
• Welden, about 16, for 80 years.
• Peter, about 21, for 75 years.

The indenture for Harry read:

St. Clair county, Illinois territory. ss. Be it remembered that on the 17th day of October of the year 1814, personally came before me the subscriber, clerk of the court of common pleas of the said county, John Beaird of said county, and Harry, a negro boy, aged near upon sixteen, and who of his own free will and accord, did in my presence, agree, determine, and promise, to serve the said John Beaird, for the full space of time, and term of eighty years from this date. And the said John Beaird, in consideration thereof, promises to pay him, said Harry, the sum of fifty dollars, at the expiration of his said service. In testimony whereof, they have hereunto set their hands and seals the day and year first herein above written. Interlineation made before signing.

Mark of X Harry. [seal.]
John Beaird. [seal.]
Signed and sealed in presence of John Hay, C. C. C. P.

Was Harry the same as the “negro boy ‘Berry’” that John Beaird, Jr., had bought from his father’s estate six years before? It’s possible. In a later court case Beaird’s heirs claimed that he had brought Harry in from Tennessee just one week before signing those indentures, making the arrangement fit within the 1807 law. But that could have been a lie for legal reasons. Likewise, were all three of those sixteen-year-olds really just a little too old for the shorter indenture period?

The future of slavery in Illinois was foggy in those years. Periodically politicians floated proposals to formally allow slavery or to completely end it sometime in the future, but they never found a compromise everyone would accept. The first state constitution of 1818 avoided the subject. An attempt five years later to make slavery explicitly legal failed.

By turning their slaves into indentured servants—indentured for what would be their expected lifetimes—the Beairds sidestepped that debate. But the legalities didn’t really fool anyone. In the 1820 census, Joseph A. Beaird was listed as owning eight slaves.

TOMORROW: What happened to Harry?

New Henry Burbeck Collection at the Clements Library

Earlier this year, the Clements Library at the University of Michigan acquired more than 1,600 documents in the Papers of Henry Burbeck (1754-1848), a general in the early U.S. Army.

Burbeck was born in Boston, son of William Burbeck, who became storekeeper at Castle William as well as the town’s fireworks expert. Henry did his militia service in Boston’s artillery company; I’ve used letters he dictated late in life that are now at the Massachusetts Historical Society to trace the last days of that unit in September 1774.

When the war began, Henry and his brothers joined the provincial artillery regiment under Col. Richard Gridley; their father was the unit’s nominal second-in-command, but Gridley preferred to administer through his son Scarborough.

In late 1775, Gen. George Washington and the Continental Congress replaced Gridley with Henry Knox, bypassing Lt. Col. Burbeck. At the end of the siege of Boston, the lieutenant colonel refused to march to New York and thus left the Continental Army.

But Henry, then a lieutenant, remained in the army. In fact, he stuck out the whole war and then rejoined in 1786. He commanded at West Point and Springfield, served in the Northwest Indian War, and established a number of forts on the western frontier. In 1808 he presided over the court-martial of Gen. James Wilkinson, and finally he commanded troops through the War of 1812. Most of the new Clements collection appears to come from that long army career.

The longest report I’ve found about the acquisition is from the Mackinac Island News, focusing on documents of local importance:

In 1796 he peacefully received Fort Mackinac from its British garrison and then commanded the post until 1799. He was a steady officer and strict disciplinarian. A young British lieutenant who visited Mackinac in 1799 described Burbeck as “a little man, as stiff as his boots, awkwardly consequential and [who] passed for a martinet.” Perhaps Major Burbeck still harbored some animosity toward his old foes and greeted his British visitor with reserve.

The collection includes two previously unknown plans of the fort, one by Burbeck and Winthrop Sargent and one by Wilkinson, showing how it developed in those years.

That article also says the Clements’s new collection “represents only about 60% of Henry Burbeck’s entire archive. The remainder is divided among three institutions in the Northeast.” One of those is the New London County Historical Society, but I don’t know the others. A large lot of Burbeck’s papers was sold in 2011.

“A constitution to be offered to the people”

Here’s an unusual discussion of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 between two New Yorkers, published in (of all places) The Cincinnati Miscellany in 1846.

That Ohio periodical stated, “The following letter, published now for the first time, was written by Gen. [Alexander] M’Dougal [shown here] to Judge [William] Goforth of New York, afterwards one of the first settlers of Columbia” in the Northwest Territory:

Fish Kill, February 7th, 1780.

My Dear Sir:—

This will inform you that I have been at quarters here, since the 6th of December last, in order to get rid of an old complaint of the stone. The symptoms have so far yielded to medicine, as to render them more tolerable than they were.

I have seen the report of the committee of the convention of Massachusetts Bay of a constitution to be offered the people for their approbation. From some sentences in it, I think they have not wholly lost sight of an establishment [i.e., state support for one favored religion]. I am inclined to believe this was occasioned by their dread of the clergy; for if the convention declared against such a measure, they would exert themselves to get a negative put on it when it should be proposed to the people. But independent of this subject, I think the people will not approve of it, or any other form, which gives energy to the government or social security to the people. To give security to a people in the frame of a government, they must resign a portion of their natural liberty for the security of the rest. There is a large county in that state that will not suffer a court of justice to sit to do any business. These very people have become so licentious that they have taken flour by force of arms from a magistrate in this state, who was retaining it here according to law to supply the army, which has been frequently distressed for the want of that article. From this specimen you may form a judgment what kind of constitution will suit that people. There is a great deal of good sense among them; but I have my doubts of its having effect in the frame of govemment.

I want some small articles from your town. I shall be much obliged to you to inform me how much higher dry goods are than they were before the war for hard money? What can the best leather breeches be bought for in like specie? Your old subaltern is well.

I wish to hear from you by post on the subject of my request as soon as possible.

I am, dear sir, your humble ser’t,
ALEX. M’DOUGAL.

Judge W. Goforth, New York.

Massachusetts towns did end up approving that constitution of 1780, which is still the basis of the state government today. However, I believe the approval came only after the legislature defined the rules in a fashion that Samuel Eliot Morrison later called “political jugglery.”

TOMORROW: What exactly did that mean?

Word Problems

The University of Pennsylvania library holds a notebook created in Southampton County, Virginia, between 1786 and 1791, according to the notations inside. It shows someone learning practical arithmetic through word problems like these:

An Overseer and 28 Negroes made 37660 lb. Tobacco, I Demand the Overseers Part, who was to have 1 1/2 Shares?

An Overseer and 50 Negroes made 1575 Barrels of Corn — 42000 Pounds of Tobacco — 3150 Bushels of Peas. I demand the Overseers Part, and what was left for the Employer, allowing the Overseer 2 1/2 Shares?

A little thought reveals that the “Negroes” are irrelevant to the calculations. Which was the real problem, wasn’t it?

A page in the back of the book has “Southampton County” written on it several times. It also has the words “Hamilton County, Northwestern Territory” and, at top, possibly the name “Bennet.” James Bennett was one of the first members of the “Legislative Council” elected in the Northwest Territory in 1799. Had he come from Southampton County, Virginia? Was the student who used this notebook a member of his family? If so, by moving into the Northwest Territory the family gave up direct participation in America’s slavery system. But as the arithmetic problems show, that system pervaded nearly all parts of life.

Poking Through Google’s Old Newspapers

It all started with a tweet from a friendly genealogist containing a link to this page from Google, listing all its digital newspaper archives. I searched on that page for the character string “, 17” to find series that begin in the 1700s.

That produced a couple of false hits—newspapers that reprinted much older papers during the Bicentennial. Later I spotted the image above, preserving the hand of whoever was scanning that volume for Google. With that evidence I suspect that Google has digitized volumes of historic newspapers as part of its run through university libraries, and is now using its optical-character-reading software to organize those images. This service went online in March, and has probably been growing since.

As with Google Books, the result is sprawling, frustratingly incomplete, not always accurate in its metadata—and magnificently, munificently free to all. It doesn’t approach Readex’s Early American Newspapers archive in quantity, but that requires a subscription and a sign-in. Furthermore, the Google archive offers some newspapers from outside of the U.S. of A.

The software has missed some points when one issue ends and another begins, so the grids we see can understate the number of issues available. For example, here’s the Virginia Gazette and Norfolk Intelligencer for 4 May 1775. The bottom of page 3 brings word of the British army’s march through Lexington, Massachusetts—the dispatch sent by Joseph Palmer and initially carried by Isaac Bissell, here rendered as “Trail Bissell.”

Flip ahead to “page 6,” and you’ll find the same newspaper for 25 May, which includes Gen. Thomas Gage’s version of the Concord march.

The next page reports on an Edenton, North Carolina, celebration of “king Taminy the tutelar Saint of America,” on 1 May, at which “all the American gentlemen were habited in the garb of the Indian king.” Google Books, Google Scholar, and just plain Google don’t unearth one quotation of that article. Seize on it, cultural historians!

Then comes Gen. John Burgoyne’s speech in Parliament on being ordered to North America, followed by the 15 June issue with a speech against the American war by William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham.

Here’s the list of intriguing newspaper archives from the Revolutionary era that I found last weekend:

• Halifax Gazette, intermittent issues from the 1750s through the 1780s.
• Edinburgh Advertiser in 1772, 1775, 1779-80, and onward.
• Virginia Gazette and Norfolk Intelligencer starting in 1775.
• the bilingual Quebec Gazette starting in 1775 (some 1776 issues are hidden in the last 1775 entry); alas, the newspaper ceases publication as the American army approaches.
• Providence Gazette starting in 1778.
• Providence’s American Journal in 1779-1780.
• Cincinnati’s Centinel of the North-Western Territory starting in 1793. (There are others launched in the 1790s, but I threw this one in since it’s on the frontier.)

The archive suggests that searchable transcriptions are coming, but they don’t seem to be available for most of these very old newspapers (yet).

The Shifting Gulf Stream

American ships’ captains in the Atlantic appear to have caught on early to the steady northeast current along North America’s eastern coast and across to northern Europe. However, no one apparently mapped that whole current until the late 1760s, when Benjamin Franklin and his cousin, Nantucket captain Timothy Folger (shown here, courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association), created and privately published the first chart of the Gulf Stream.

That map can be explored at the Library of Congress website. Franklin wanted to speed up mail delivery across the Atlantic by showing British captains how to avoid the current when sailing west. Apparently most captains ignored him.

Coming home to America in 1775 in bureaucratic disgrace after leaking Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s letters, Franklin apparently took his supply of printed maps with him; none survived in Britain. For two centuries that printing was thought to be entirely lost, but then a couple of examples turned up in French archives. Either French captains saw more potential in them, or Franklin brought a few copies when he arrived in France as an American diplomat.

While in Paris, Franklin allowed another map to be engraved. Yesterday I described how the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library discovered Franklin’s own copy in its collection. That map’s labels are in French, and they suggest the Gulf Stream points to France, not Britain—emphasizing natural ties between the new allies?

On returning to the U.S. of A., Franklin commissioned yet another engraving of the Gulf Stream chart, this time published in Philadelphia by his American Philosophical Society in 1786. Here’s the Library of Congress’s image. This map’s inset shows all of western Europe equally, but this time the main map offers a lot more detail about the enticing Northwest Territory.

Thus, though the Gulf Stream doesn’t change much from one of Franklin’s maps to another, the lands shown around it change significantly.

Learning about John Adams and Abraham Whipple

On Thursday I attended a seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society discussing a chapter from Richard Ryerson’s intellectual biography of John Adams. A former editor of the Adams Papers, Dick is writing this book for Johns Hopkins University Press. He described how he started out focusing on Adams’s formal essays, tracing how the lawyer developed his notions of republicanism. Gradually he’s adding thoughts on how Adams’s life might have affected his political philosophy—which of course makes for much bigger chapters.

Among the topics we attendees discussed was how to handle Adams's vice presidency and presidency. He wrote no major political essays between 1791 and 1801, but he actually got/had to act on his ideas and ideals. I sensed the book getting longer still.

I still feel dubious about any of John Adams’s pronouncements that he was the only man on one side of a particular issue, and/or was brave to hold that position. Specifically, we discussed this remark in his Thoughts on Government from 1776:

A man must be indifferent to the sneers of modern English men, to mention in their company the names of Sidney, Harrington, Locke, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, and Hoadly. No small fortitude is necessary to confess that one has read them.

Many of these political writers came from the period of the British Commonwealth, or were invoked to defend that supposedly non-monarchical government. Cromwell’s rule was seen as a mistake in Britain, and no longer openly celebrated even in New England. But to say one needed “No small fortitude” to admit to reading John Locke? Come on, John.

Curiously, on 27 March of that year Adams wrote to William Hooper: “In my early Youth, the Works of Sidney, Harrington, Lock, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, Hoadley, were put into my Hands…” So supposedly those same sneered-at authors—in the same order—were suitable reading for a man in “early Youth.”

The next day I sat in on a talk by Prof. Sheldon S. Cohen on his new biography of Commodore Abraham Whipple of Rhode Island. Like most of the top American naval officers of the Revolutionary War, Whipple had a stormy career. It’s actually pretty remarkable that we remember any naval commanders at all, they went up and down so fast. (It’s even more remarkable that the one we do remember is the tempestuous and unpopular John Paul Jones.)

After the war Whipple tried to retire to a plantation in Rhode Island, but suffered in the 1780s economy. He and his family moved to the new territory of Ohio and helped to settle the city of Marietta. How did a seaman adjust to life in a landlocked state? Cohen explained how Whipple and his fellow settlers built a shipyard on the Ohio River and started to transport goods downstream to New Orleans.