America’s History Conference in Glen Allen, Virginia, 27–29 Mar.

America’s History, L.L.C., will hold its thirteenth Annual Conference of the American Revolution in Glen Allen, Virginia, on 27–29 March.

Here’s the lineup of speakers:

• Richard “Rick” Bell on “The American Revolution and the Fate of the World”
• Todd W. Braisted on “‘You must expect to hear me talked of as a monster of cruelty’: Colonel Francis Lord Rawdon and the Revolutionary War”
• Denver Brunsman on “Prisoners, Press Gangs, and the Battle for Sailors in the Revolutionary War”
• Iris de Rode on “Something New to Think About: The Dutch in the American Revolution”
• William “Larry” Kidder on “Defending Fort Stanwix: New York’s Frontier During the Revolutionary War”
• Stephen L. Kling (the Lorna Hainesworth Sponsored Speaker) on “An Underappreciated Victory: Bernardo de Gálvez’s Mississippi River Campaign Against the British in 1779”
• Mark Edward Lender on “War Without Mercy: Liberty or Death in the American Revolution”
• Charles P. Neimeyer on “Revolutionary Riverine Warfare: The War for Independence on America’s Rivers and Lakes”
• Gordon Blaine Steffey on “‘Trust Not Professions’: Feuding Founders and Diplomatic Disorder in the Arthur Lee–Silas Deane Affair”
• Andrew Waters on “Backcountry War: The Rise of Francis Marion, Banastre Tarleton and Thomas Sumter”

In addition to the conference, attendees can sign up for a bus tour on Friday, 27 March, visiting Ferry Farm, Gunston Hall, and Historic St. John’s Church to learn about “More Virginia Founding Fathers: Essentially Important for Independence” from Edward G. Lengel and site staff.

For more information and registration, visit this page.

“Illuminating” Symposium in Williamsburg, 7 Dec.

On Saturday, 7 December, the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation will present a symposium in Williamsburg, Virginia, on the theme of “Illuminating the Role of Six American Founders.” The day’s presentations will include:

Christian Di Spigna: “Founding Martyr: Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero.” A Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Columbia University, Di Spigna wrote the Warren biography Founding Martyr and is the Executive Director of the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation.

Edward G. Lengel, Ph.D.: “First Among Many Founders: George Washington Guides the Revolution to Victory.” For many years Lengel directed the Washington Papers Project. He has written fourteen books on different periods of American history, including General George Washington: A Military Life and Inventing George Washington.

Elizabeth Mauer: “There Were Founding Mothers Too: Martha Washington Supports the Revolution.” Maurer is the Chief of Programs & Education at the National Museum of the United States Army, having previously held various roles at Colonial Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, the National Women’s History Museum, and the D.E.A. Museum. She’s a former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Museum Education.

Gordon Steffey, Ph.D.: “‘Better known than acknowledged’: Richard Henry Lee and the American Cause.” Steffey is the Director of Research and of the Jessie Ball duPont Memorial Library at Stratford Hall. For nearly twenty years he taught at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, holding an endowed chair in Comparative Philosophy.

Bruce M. Venter, Ed.D.: “Rough-hewn and Enigmatic Founder: Ethan Allen Does Some Crazy Things.” President of America’s History, L.L.C., Venter organizes an annual conference on the American Revolution that’s considered the premier symposium for Revolutionary War enthusiasts, public historians, and scholars. He’s the author of The Battle of Hubbardton: The Rear-Guard Action that Saved America.

Stephen Wilson: “‘Give me liberty or give me death!’: One of America’s Most Important Speeches Celebrates its 250th Anniversary.” As Executive Director at the St. John’s Church Foundation, Wilson highlights the effect of Patrick Henry’s famous speech in that building on 20 Mar 1775.

This Founders Illuminated symposium will take place in the Williamsburg Regional Library Theatre starting at 9:00 A.M. The $95 registration fee includes lunch at the Hound’s Tale and snacks. For more information and to register, follow this link.

Though this event isn’t associated with Colonial Williamsburg, folks attending it will also be able to see that historic museum’s first Grand Illumination, or fireworks show, of the season.

Dr. Benjamin Rush’s “Travels Through Life” Digitized

Here’s another source on the Revolution recently digitized: eight handwritten volumes of Dr. Benjamin Rush’s “Travels Through Life: or Account of Sundry Incidents and Events in the Life of Benjamin Rush…written for the use of his children.”

The American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia owns these volumes and has made them perusable over the web.

There’s a ninth and final volume nearby at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

George W. Corner transcribed and edited Rush’s memoir for publication by the A.P.S. in 1948, which was late for the first-person reminiscences of a noted Founder. The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush is still under copyright, therefore, and I haven’t come across any digitized edition on the web.

As a result, some of Rush’s anecdotes aren’t as well known and retold as one might expect. Here from near the start of handwritten volume 6, for example, is the doctor’s recollection of interactions with George Washington on 18 June 1775, right after he agreed to be the Continental Congress’s top general:

A few days after the appointment of General Washington to be commander in chief of the American Armies, I was invited by a party of Delegates and several citizens of Philada. to a dinner which was given to him at a tavern on the Banks of the Skuilkill below the city.

Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, Mr. [Thomas] Jefferson, James Wilson, Jno. Langdon of New Hampshire and about a dozen more, constituted the whole company. The first toast that was given after dinner was “The Commander in chief of the American Armies.” General Washington rose from his seat, and with some confusion thanked the company for the honor they did him. The whole company instantly rose, and drank the toast standing.

This scene so unexpected, was a Solemn one. A silence followed it, as if every heart was penetrated with the awful, but great events which were to follow the Use of the Sword of liberty which had just been put into general Washington’s hands by the unanimous voice of his country.

About this time, I saw Patrick Henry at his lodgings, who told me that general Washington had been with him, and informed him, that he was unequal to the station in which his country had placed him, and then added with tears in his eyes “Remember Mr. Henry what I now tell you,- From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, & the ruin of my reputation.”

My transcription differs from Corner’s in tiny details of punctuation and capitalization. But only by looking at the manuscript can we see, for example, that Rush:

• added the words “New Hampshire” because, I presume, he didn’t think his readers would remember who John Langdon was.
• started to write that Washington thanked his companions with “great confusion” before easing that down to “some confusion.”
• first quoted Henry as saying Washington spoke of “what I this day tell you” and changed that to “what I now tell you,” probably because the phrase “the day” appeared in the next clause.

Rush biographer Stephen Fried, whose tweet alerted me to this digital offering, noted that the digitization of Rush’s memoirs “even shows the parts his kids tried to cut out,” and that “his infamous riffs on his fellow signers is in Vol 7.” Have fun.

The Lord of the Manor Americanized

The new issue of Colonial Williamsburg’s Trend & Traditon magazine offers an interesting article by Jon Kukla about a 1781 copy of the play The Lord of the Manor.

That copy is also featured in this online exhibit from Stanford University, the current owner.

The Lord of the Manor was a loose adaptation of the French comic opera Sylvain. It opened at “the Theatre Royal Drury-Lane” in 1780 and was a hit.

William Jackson of Exeter Cathedral had composed the new score, and once the play was a success the author of the libretto came forward: John Burgoyne, home from his flop in America.

Burgoyne arranged for his script to be published with a preface. A copy of that publication crossed the Atlantic to the household of Patrick Henry, who wrote his name on the title page.

But that wasn’t all. Kukla guesses that some of the many Henry children put on their own production of The Lord of the Manor and that, before they did so, their father edited the text for them.

Henry “deleted three passages with dialogue referring to prostitution or adultery—as well as the sleazy remarks of an upper-class character lusting after a servant girl.” (Not that Virginia aristocrats didn’t lust after their servants—they just didn’t remark about it in front of the children.)

Also edited out were two scenes satirizing British customs that didn’t pertain to America. One went on about hunting laws, and the other portrayed an army recruiting officer. The latter, Kukla says, was already “extraneous” to the plot, created by Burgoyne for some laughs.

Most interesting, Henry made changes to Americanize a few lines, though the play still seems to be set in Britain. He replaced “old Britons” with “our Fathers,” removed the words “king and” from the phrase “enemies of my king and country,” and added a speech about one’s “birth-right as a free man.”

Henry also took out Burgoyne’s criticism of the French—a long-standing national habit made especially acute in wartime. The line “though I hate the French in my heart, as a true Englishwoman, I’ll be friends with their sunshine…” became “though I never was in France, yet I’ll be friends with their sunshine…” After all, in the 1780s France was America’s far-off friend.

Governance at James Madison’s Montpelier

James Madison’s estate Montpelier was a slave-labor plantation. 

In fact, Madison appears to have been comfortable with that. He didn’t wrestle with the morality of slaveholding like his friend Thomas Jefferson. He didn’t even acknowledge the contradictions as frankly as Patrick Henry (“I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them. I will not—I cannot justify it, however culpable my conduct.”).

The historic site of James Madison’s Montpelier had been owned since 1983 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In 1998 the Montpelier Foundation was formed “with the goal of transforming James Madison's historic estate into a dynamic cultural institution.” Which of course means raising money.

More recently the Montpelier Descendants Committee formed as a “nonprofit organization devoted to restoring the narratives of enslaved Americans at plantation sites in Central Virginia, including but not limited to James Madison’s Montpelier.”

This month the Montpelier site announced a significant step in its governance, making the Descendants Committee and the Foundation co-equals in governing the historic site.

This is the latest step in a long process that included a National Summit on Teaching Slavery convened at Montpelier in 2018. One product of that gathering was the report “Engaging Descendant Communities in the Interpretation of Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites” (P.D.F. download).

Every historic site is in a different situation, but it will be interesting to see how other sites associated with slave-owning Founders approach the questions Montpelier has been talking through.

Patrick Henry’s Gerrymandering

Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker essay “Drawing the Line,” a review of David Daley’s new book on modern computer-aided gerrymandering, starts out with this snatch of early Virginia politics:

Sometime around October 20, 1788, Patrick Henry rode from his seventeen-hundred-acre farm in Prince Edward [County], Virginia, to a session of the General Assembly in Richmond. Henry is now famous for having declared, on the eve of the Revolution, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”—a phrase it’s doubtful that he ever uttered—but in the late seventeen-eighties he was best known as a leader of the Anti-Federalists. He and his faction had tried to sink the Constitution, only to be outmaneuvered by the likes of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. When Henry arrived in the state capital, his adversaries assumed he would seek revenge. They just weren’t sure how.

“He appears to be involved in gloomy mystery,” one of them reported.

The Constitution had left it to state lawmakers to determine how elections should be held, and in Virginia the Anti-Federalists controlled the legislature. Knowing that his enemy Madison was planning a run for the House of Representatives, Henry set to work. First, he and his confederates resolved that Virginia’s congressmen would be elected from districts. (Several other states had chosen to elect their representatives on a statewide basis, a practice that persisted until Congress intervened, in 1842.) Next, they stipulated that each representative from Virginia would have to run from the district where he resided. Finally, they stuck in the shiv. They drew the Fifth District, around Madison’s home in the town of Orange, to include as many Anti-Federalists as possible.

An ally of Madison’s who attended the session in Richmond wrote to him that while it was unusual for the legislature to “bend its utmost efforts” against a single individual, this was, indeed, what had happened: “The object of the majority of today has been to prevent yr. Election in the house of Representatives.” Another friend reported, “The Counties annexed to yours are arranged so, as to render your Election, I fear, extremely doubtful.” George Washington, too, was pessimistic; Madison’s defeat seemed to him “not at all improbable.”

This was of course decades before the term “gerrymandering” was devised, immortalizing another opponent of the U.S. Constitution. And back then the voter data wasn’t as detailed and reliable as it is now. As we know, James Madison did make it to the first federal Congress.

Virginia Resolutions “of an extraordinary Nature” in Newport

Two hundred fifty years ago today, on 24 June 1765, the Newport Mercury carried an item about the Stamp Act. That wasn’t unusual—American newspapers were starting to fill with essays warning about Parliament’s new law. The Mercury story was unusual for two reasons:

• It printed resolutions that the Virginia House of Burgesses had debated, adopted, and in one case retracted at the end of May. Under pressure from Gov. Francis Fauquier, the Virginia newspapers hadn’t reported any of that story. So the Rhode Island paper had a scoop.
• The Rhode Island paper got the story wrong. 

The article began:

Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman in Philadelphia, to his Friend in this Town, dated last Tuesday.

“I have inclosed the Resolves of the Virginia Assembly, on debating the Stamp Act. The Governor, as soon as he heard what they were about, sent for them, and without Preamble, told them, he would dissolve them; and that Minute they were dissolved. As they are of an extraordinary Nature, thought they might not be disagreeable. They are as follows.”

Then came the six resolves.

Six? The Burgesses had approved five resolves, then pulled one back. So how did the Mercury report six? To start with, the newspaper omitted the third of the passed resolutions (“That the Taxation of the People…”). It did print the fifth, which the Burgesses passed on 30 May and then repealed on 31 May.

But the letter from Philadelphia also included two resolutions that the Virginia legislature had never passed, and apparently never officially considered. They read:

Resolved, That his Majesty’s liege People, the Inhabitants of this Colony, are not bound to yield Obedience to any Law or Ordinance whatever, designed to impose any Taxation whatsoever upon them, other than the Laws and Ordinances of the General Assembly aforesaid.

Resolved, That any Person, who shall, by speaking or writing, assert or maintain that any Person or Persons, other than the General Assembly of this Colony, have any Right or Power to impose or lay any Taxation on the People here, shall be deemed an Enemy to this his Majesty’s Colony.

Those resolutions were even more confrontational toward Parliament and its appointees and supporters than the one that got repealed.

What happened? Recall that Gov. Fauquier reported to London:

I am informed the gentlemen had two more resolutions in their pocket, but finding the difficulty they had in carrying the 5th which was by a single voice, and knowing them to be more virulent and inflammatory; they did not produce them.

But those gentlemen might have been unable to resist sending the drafts to friends in Philadelphia, who in turn passed them on to other friends in other colonies. Patrick Henry didn’t record those last two resolutions in his personal papers, as he did the previous five, so it’s unclear whether he wrote them or someone else did.

In any event, the gentleman who wrote to Newport from Philadelphia, and the people who read the Newport Mercury, apparently believed that the Virginia Burgesses had approved all six of the resolutions that appeared in the newspaper. So did the readers of the 1 July Boston Post-Boy, which reprinted the item from Newport.

And gradually the story spread across the British Empire, making people believe that Virginia, the oldest and largest of the British colonies in the New World, had taken an even firmer stand against the Stamp Act than it ever had.

Virginia Takes an Even Less Firm Stand Against the Stamp Act

None of Virginia’s established political leaders liked the Stamp Act. Gov. Francis Fauquier (shown here) had advised his superiors in London against it. John Robinson, speaker of the House of Burgesses, and Peyton Randolph, attorney general, had both protested the possibility.

But once Parliament did pass the Stamp Act in early 1765, those politicians felt that Virginia should be careful about defying it. Certainly more careful than rookie lawmaker Patrick Henry was in the debates on 29-30 May 1765.

Despite that powerful opposition, which also included the highly respected lawyer George Wythe, Henry won over the “young hot and giddy” members of the house. On 30 May 1765 they passed five bold resolutions insisting that only a Virginia legislature could tax Virginians. The fifth went so far as to say that a law like the Stamp Act “has a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.”

Then Henry headed home, as most of the other burgesses already had. Gov. Fauquier and the other establishment figures seized the opportunity. The governor explained to London:

On Friday the 31st there having happened a small alteration in the House there was an attempt to strike all the Resolutions off the Journals. The 5th which was thought the most offensive was accordingly struck off, but it did not succeed as to the other four.

A letter printed in the London Gazetteer joked that “Resolves were passed one day, and erased the next.” Indeed, the official record of the House of Burgesses for 1765 doesn’t acknowledge the fifth of Henry’s resolutions. And none of the resolutions, even those that remained on the record, appeared in any of the Virginia Gazette newspapers then being published in the capital.

On 1 June, Gov. Fauquier dissolved the legislature to keep things under control. The House of Burgesses wouldn’t convene again for over a year.

The governor knew that opponents of the Stamp Act were fervent, but he hoped they had been contained. His report to London added:

I am informed the gentlemen had two more resolutions in their pocket, but finding the difficulty they had in carrying the 5th which was by a single voice, and knowing them to be more virulent and inflammatory; they did not produce them.

Those resolutions would eventually come out. I’ll get to them later this year.

It’s notable that Randolph and Wythe, who argued strenuously against all five resolutions, later became leading supporters of the Patriot movement. (Robinson and Fauquier died within three years.) They weren’t ready to be radical in 1765, but eventually Patrick Henry’s arguments became the norm.

Virginia Takes a Less Firm Stand Against the Stamp Act

On this date 250 years ago the Virginia House of Burgesses took up the resolutions against the Stamp Act that Patrick Henry had drafted the previous day. Those same legislators had narrowly approved them as a committee of the whole, but this was the official vote.

A Frenchman traveling through Virginia happened to be in Williamsburg that day and wrote this account:

May the 30th. Set out early from half-way house in the chair and broke fast at York[town], arived at Williamsburg at 12, where I saw three negroes hanging at the galous for having robbed Mr. Waltho of 300 pounds. I went immediately to the Assembly which was seting, where I was entertained with very strong debates concerning dutys that the Parlement wants to lay on the America colonys, which they call or stile stamp dutys.

Shortly after I came in, one of the members stood up and said he had read that in former time Tarquin and Julius had their Brutus, Charles had his Cromwell, and he did not doubt but some good American would stand up in favour of his Country; but (says he) in a more moderate manner, and was going to continue, when the Speaker of the House rose and, said he, the last that stood up had spoke traison, and was sorey to see that not one of the members of the House was loyal enough to stop him before he had gone so far.

Upon which the same member stood up again (his name is Henery) and said that if he had afronted the Speaker or the House, he was ready to ask pardon, and he would shew his loyalty to His Majesty King George the third at the expence of the last drop of his blood; but what he had said must be attributed to the interest of his country’s dying liberty which he had at heart, and the heat of passion might have lead him to have said something more than he intended; but, again, if he said anything wrong, be begged the Speaker and the House’s pardon. Some other members stood up and backed him, on which that afaire was droped.

Likewise, a letter from Virginia published in the 13 Aug 1765 London Gazetteer said:

Mr. ————— [Henry] has lately blazed out in the Assembly, where he compared —————— [George III] to a Tarquin, a Caesar, a Charles the First, threatening him with a Brutus, or an Oliver Cromwell; yet Mr. —————— [Henry] was not sent to the Tower: but having prevailed to get some ridiculous violent Resolutions passed, rode off in triumph…

Some recountings of the day say speaker of the house John Robinson wasn’t there, and attorney general Peyton Randolph presided in his place. However, Gov. Francis Fauquier reported to London:

The most strenuous opposers of this rash heat were the late Speaker, the King’s Attorney and Mr. [George] Wythe; but they were overpowered by the young hot and giddy members. In the course of the debates I have heard that very indecent language was used by a Mr. Henry a young lawyer who had not been a month a Member of the House; who carryed all the young Members with him; so that I hope I am authorised in saying there is cause at least to doubt whether this would have been the sense of the Colony if more of their Representatives had done their duty by attending to the end of the Session.

Henry himself recalled the event as a narrow victory. Late in life he wrote of his resolutions: “Upon offering them to the House violent debates ensued. Many threats were uttered, and much abuse cast on me by the party for submission. After a long and warm contest the resolutions passed by a very small majority, perhaps of one or two only.”

Fauquier’s letter confirmed that the house was closely divided, “the greatest majority being 22 to 17; for the 5th Resolution, 20 to 19 only.”

The official record of the house says:

Mr. Attorney, from the Committee of the whole House, reported, according to Order, that the Committee had considered of the Steps necessary to be taken in Consequence of the Resolutions of the House of Commons of Great Britain relative to the charging Stamp Duties in the Colonies and Plantations in America, and that they had come to several Resolutions thereon; which he read in his Place, and then delivered in at the Table, where they were again twice read, and agreed to by the House, with some Amendments, and are as follow:

Resolved, That the first Adventurers and Settlers of this his Majesty’s Colony and Dominion of Virginia brought with them, and transmitted to their Posterity, and all other his Majesty’s Subjects since inhabiting in this his Majesty’s said Colony, all the Liberties, Privileges, Franchises, and Immunities, that have at any Time been held, enjoyed, and possessed, by the people of Great Britain.

Resolved, That by two royal Charters, granted by King James the First, the Colonists aforesaid are declared entitled to all Liberties, Privileges, and Immunities of Denizens and natural Subjects, to all Intents and Purposes, as if they had been abiding and born within the Realm of England.

Resolved, That the Taxation of the People by themselves, or by Persons chosen by themselves to represent them, who can only know what Taxes the People are able to bear, or the easiest Method of raising them, and must themselves be affected by every Tax laid on the People, is the only Security against a burthensome Taxation, and the distinguishing Characteristick of British Freedom, without which the ancient Constitution cannot exist.

Resolved, That his Majesty’s liege People of this his most ancient and loyal Colony have without Interruption enjoyed the inestimable Right of being governed by such Laws, respecting their internal Polity and Taxation, as are derived from their own Consent, with the Approbation of their Sovereign, or his Substitute; and that the same hath never been forfeited or yielded up, but hath been constantly recognized by the Kings and People of Great Britain.

Those final resolutions showed some small changes in the language from Henry’s draft, such as adding the word “Liberties” multiple places. But the big change was that the fifth resolution didn’t appear in the record at all, though even Gov. Fauquier admitted it had passed, 20–19.

TOMORROW: How the empire struck back.

Virginia Considers a Firm Stand Against the Stamp Act

Britain’s North American colonies had a chance to weigh in on the Stamp Act before Parliament passed it, as described back here. All of them said it would be a Bad Thing. Few or none offered any alternative way for the Crown to raise revenue for its army on the continent. So Prime Minister George Grenville proposed the law, and it sailed through.

News of the Stamp Act arrived in North America in early May 1765. Virginia was the oldest, largest, and most populous of Britain’s colonies on the continent at that time, and 250 years ago today its House of Burgesses took up the matter.

That legislature’s official record for 29 May 1765 concludes like this:

On a Motion made,

Resolved, That the House resolve itself into a Committee of the whole House immediately, to consider of the Steps necessary to be taken in Consequence of the Resolutions of the House of Commons of Great Britain relative to the charging certain Stamp Duties in the Colonies and Plantations in America.

The House accordingly resolved itself into the said Committee, and after some Time spent therein Mr. Speaker resumed the Chair, and Mr. Attorney reported that the said Committee had had the said Matter under their Consideration, and had come to several s Resolutions thereon, which he was ready to deliver in at the Table.

Ordered, That the said Report be received Tomorrow.

By becoming a committee of the whole, the burgesses could set aside their usual procedures and record-keeping to debate more freely.

The speaker of the house was John Robinson. He was also the province’s treasurer. He had held both offices since 1738, or for more than a quarter-century. That turned out to have been a Bad Thing, as Virginians discovered the next year when he died suddenly and they checked his books.

The colony’s attorney general was Peyton Randolph, shown above. He had been the principal author of the colony’s objections to the proposed Stamp Act, which had yet to receive an official reply from London. Randolph had also served in his office for a long time: since 1744, with a one-year interruption. His father had held the same office before him. Virginia didn’t like change.

The principal author of the proposed resolutions, however, was a newcomer: a young lawyer named Patrick Henry. He had been elected partway through the year to fill an empty seat and had arrived in Williamsburg only nine days before. Nonetheless, he had things to say about the new Stamp Act.

Near the end of his life, Henry wrote:

I had been for the first time elected a Burgess a few days before, was young, inexperienced, unacquainted with the forms of the House, and the members that composed it. Finding the men of weight averse to opposition, and the commencement of the tax at hand, and that no person was likely to step forth, I determined to venture, and alone, unadvised, and unassisted, on a blank leaf of an old law-book, wrote the within.

This is what the older Henry put down as his draft version of the resolutions:

Resolved, That the first Adventurers and Settlers of this his Majesties Colony and Dominion brought with them and transmitted to their Posterity and all other his Majestie’s Subjects since inhabiting in this his Majestie’s said Colony all the Priviledges, Franchises & Immunities that have at any Time been held, enjoyed, & possessed by the People of Great Britain.

Resolved, That by the two royal Charters granted by King James the first the Colonists aforesaid are declared intituled to all the Priviledges, Liberties & Immunities of Denizens and natural born Subjects to all Intents and Purposes as if they had been abiding and born within the Realm of England.

Resolved, That the Taxation of the People by themselves or by Persons chosen by themselves to represent them who can only know what Taxes the People are able to bear and the easiest Mode of raising them and are equally affected by such Taxes themselves is the distinguishing Characteristick of British Freedom and without which the ancient Constitution cannot subsist.

Resolved, That his Majestie’s liege People of this most ancient Colony have uninteruptedly enjoyed the Right of being thus governed by their own assembly in the Article of their Taxes and internal Police and that the same hath never been forfeited or any other Way given up but hath been constantly recognized by the Kings of People of Great Britain.

Resolved, Therefore that the General Assembly of this Colony have the only and sole exclusive Right & Power to lay Taxes & Impositions upon the Inhabitants of this Colony and that every Attempt to vest such Power in any Person or Persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly aforesaid has a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.

Those were very strong words for 1765.

Gov. Francis Fauquier complained to his superiors in London about how this complaint was brought up:

just at the end of the Session when most of the members had left the town, there being but 39 present out of 116 of which the House of Burgesses now consists, a motion was made to take into consideration the Stamp Act, a copy of which had crept into the House, and in a Committee of the whole House five resolutions were proposed and agreed to, all by very small majorities.

Though the top brass of the Virginia burgesses didn’t like the Stamp Act, they really didn’t like change. Still, once the committee of the whole had approved those resolutions, the house had to vote on them.

TOMORROW: Debate in the House of Burgesses.

“Ellis’s strategy of building his narrative around four exemplary men”

Back in July 2013 I discussed historian Joseph J. Ellis’s focus on, in his words, “the most prominent members of the political leadership during this formative phase” of the nation, as opposed to the larger mass of less wealthy, privileged, and successful Americans.

Some reviews of Ellis’s latest book, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789, fault that approach when it comes to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.

In the New York Times Book Review, R. B. Bernstein wrote:

Ellis sees American nationhood as the creation of a few politicians working from above. But what of sentiments of ­national identity among the American people? ­Ellis rejects the idea that American ­nationalism existed before 1787, even reproving Abraham Lincoln for making that claim; his endnotes airily dismiss scholarship arguing otherwise. Nonetheless, currents of nationalism before 1787 helped make possible both the American victory in the Revolution and the Constitution’s adoption. . . .

Another large question concerns Ellis’s understanding of politics itself. The path to the Constitution was studded with pivotal choices, critical decision points and balking institutions. . . . These and other choices resulted from political decisions by the Confederation Congress, the state legislatures and the state ratifying conventions, all outside the control of Ellis’s four heroes [Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay].

Ellis dedicates “The Quartet” to his friend and colleague Pauline Maier, one of the finest historians of the American Revolution and the Constitution’s origins. He writes movingly of her in ways that bring her to life for all fortunate enough to have known her. And yet Maier’s work cuts against “The Quartet.” She focused on politics and political processes; her deft illumination of them produced a story more persuasive than that of “The Quartet.”

That book would be Maier’s Ratification. And Ellis’s skill is indeed bringing such big personalities to life.

The Economist, which doesn’t name its contributors, said something similar:

But in focusing on a few exceptional men, Mr Ellis also deprives his narrative of vital context. From the beginning it is an unequal contest, pitting the visionaries against the narrow-minded, the righteous few against the feckless many. None of their opponents—with the possible exception of Patrick Henry, who makes a cameo appearance near the end of the book engaging in oratorical fisticuffs with Madison over Virginia’s ratification of the constitution—rises to the stature of Mr Ellis’s heroes, or even their supporting cast. Their most doughty opponent, it turns out, is the amorphous “spirit of ’76”, which makes the book less a clash of titans than an exercise in shadow boxing.

Mr Ellis’s strategy of building his narrative around four exemplary men certainly makes for more compelling reading than delving into tax rolls or birth registers. Inevitably, though, it also carries its own subtle bias. Although he occasionally draws the reader’s attention to the moral limitations of the Founding Fathers, for instance calling their treatment of the native population one of the “less attractive features of the western story”, this is largely a triumphalist tale. Mr Ellis is not blind to the moral compromises made in Philadelphia in 1787, but he accepts rather too complacently the notion that the constitution that emerged represented the best possible agreement under the circumstances.

I haven’t read this book yet, but I’ve enjoyed some of Ellis’s previous books. I’ve found his analyses of personalities and conversations between two or three figures to be compelling. However, I’m not convinced that approach works as well in illuminating huge enterprises like nation-building.

Founders’ Favorite Quotations, part 3

Here’s the final run of “quotations” from America’s founders as chosen by some current tech company founders earlier this year. I put “quotations” in quotation marks because not all of them are, in fact, quotations from the people said to have said them.

I’m not holding these sayings to the original standards of punctuation, capitalization, or spelling, but I do want to see all the same words in the same order for them to qualify as quotations.

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” –Thomas Paine
From Paine’s The American Crisis.

“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.” –Patrick Henry
From Henry’s 23 Mar 1775 speech to the Virginia Convention, the same that includes the phrase “Give me liberty or give me death”—at least as reconstructed by Henry’s biographer William Wirt in 1817. But a lot of Henry’s contemporaries thought Wirt’s work was bogus.

“Fear is the passion of slaves.” –Patrick Henry
Henry said this in a speech to Virginia’s ratifying convention in 1788. At the time he was arguing against the new U.S Constitution.

“The circulation of confidence is better than the circulation of money.” –James Madison
Madison said this in a speech to Virginia’s ratifying convention in 1788. At the time he was arguing for the new U.S. Constitution.

“Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.” –Abraham Lincoln
This use of the word “hustle” would have been anachronistic for Lincoln, and he was, again, not a Founder.

“Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, we pursued a new and more noble course: We accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society.” –James Madison
Madison wrote something like this in The Federalist, Number 14, in 1787. However, this misquotation says “we pursued” and “We accomplished” when Madison wrote “they,” referring to “the leaders of the revolution.” Madison was only twenty-four when the Revolutionary War began and didn’t claim to be a leader of that movement.

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” –Benjamin Franklin
Oh, please—that’s not eighteenth-century style. This appears to be a modern translation of a Chinese proverb, but that could be a myth as well.

“Lost time is never found again.” –Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard’s Almanac for 1748. Franklin later elaborated on this sentence in “The Way to Wealth,” so I’m willing to give him credit even if he had a habit of quoting old sayings.

“The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.” –James Madison
Someone took a longer sentence that Madison wrote to a friend in 1825 and stitched together this short sentence; at the very least there should be an ellipsis mark after “knowledge.”

“Diligence is the mother of good luck.” –Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard’s Almanac for 1736. But the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations dates it to the late 1500s.

Out of these ten statements, five are correctly attributed to prominent American Founders, though one of those attributions has been debated since it appeared. Two more are significantly changed from what a man wrote, one is a much older saying, and two are falsehoods.

So what have we learned? First, for generations Americans have been attributing pithy things to Benjamin Franklin that he didn’t write or didn’t originate. More recently, we’ve been doing the same with Thomas Jefferson—not just on political matters but also lifestyle wisdom.

Finally, as the dueling speeches from Henry and Madison about the Constitution show, we can’t expect to treat the Founders as a single bloc of wise folk when they had hearty disagreements and temperamental differences among them.

“It was thought proper to enliven the occasion by discharges of cannon”

Yesterday I quoted a 1779 newspaper from Williamsburg, Virginia, briefly describing an “elegant entertainment” in honor of Gen. George Washington on the 22nd of that February.

Decades later, in 1835, the Southern Literary Messenger published a longer, franker account of the same event:

We are permitted by RICHARD RANDOLPH, ESQ. to publish the following extract, from a Journal kept by his father, the late David Meade Randolph, when a Student at William & Mary College in 1779 under the patronage of PROFESSOR [Robert] ANDREWS. It is a curious anecdote and will be read with interest.

Washington’s Birth Night. On the 22d February, 1779, the students of William & Mary College, and most of the respectable inhabitants of Williamsburg, prepared a subscription paper for celebrating Washington’s birth night; and the pleasure of presenting it, was confided to certain students immediately under the patronage of Professor Andrews.

Governor [Patrick] Henry was first waited on, and offered the paper: he refused his signature! “He could not think of any kind of rejoicing at a time when our country was engaged in war, with such gloomy prospects.” Dudley Digges [1729-1790], and Bolling Starke [1733-1788], members of the Council, were both waited on by the same persons, and received less courteous denials, and similar excuses.

The ball, nevertheless, was given at the Raleigh. Colonel [James] Innis [1754-1798], more prominent than any other member of the association, directed its proceedings. It was thought proper to enliven the occasion by discharges of cannon. There were two pieces at the shop of Mr. [Josias?] Moody that had lately been mounted. There was a Captain commanding a company of soldiers, under the orders of Governor Henry; but the cannon were under no other care or authority at the time, than that of Mr. Moody the mechanic. Colonel Innis, with a party seconded by Colonel [William] Finnie [1739-1804], brought the two pieces before the door of the Raleigh. On the way from the shop to the Raleigh, not two hundred yards, Colonel Innis saw Captain Digges passing up the street. Whilst the party concerned were collecting powder, and preparing for firing, Lieutenant [William?] Vaughan appeared before the Raleigh with a platoon, demanding possession of the cannon. He was carried in; took some punch; and said that he was ordered by Captain Digges to take away the pieces, by force, if they were not surrendered peaceably. This was refused. Vaughan repeated his orders: He was prevailed upon to return to his quarters, and report to Capt. Digges. Captain Digges waited on the Governor, and reported the state of things; and soliciting instructions how to proceed. The Governor referred Captain Digges to his own judgment.

Southern gentlemen! Cannon! Punch! Surely this disagreement will be resolved through rational discussion unaffected by questions of relative honor and masculinity.

TOMORROW: So how did this evening turn out?

[Gov. Patrick Henry observes the proceedings above.]

Three Early American Studies

Three items in the latest issue of Early American Studies caught my eye last month because of their Revolutionary-era content:

The Wheatleyan Moment
David Waldstreicher
Despite the recent profusion of interest in Phillis Wheatley by literary scholars, who increasingly recognize her artfulness and her challenge to slavery, she has not been seen as a political actor in real time. This essay argues for her canny timing and careful interventions in the politics of slavery from 1772 to 1784. The “Mansfieldian Moment” in the politics of slavery can also be called a Wheatleyan Moment, when leading whites were forced to respond to the art and politics of slaves and their allies. Wheatley garnered specific and consequential responses from Lord Dartmouth, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. A more interactive approach to the politics of slavery explains much about Wheatley strategies as well as the range of specific responses to antislavery among participants in the American Revolution—responses which cannot be ascribed merely to racism or the lack thereof.

Rattlesnakes in the Garden: The Fascinating Serpents of the Early, Edenic Republic
Zachary McLeod Hutchins
This essay considers the various ways in which writers and visual artists deployed the rattlesnake in order to advance and, later, destabilize nationalist agendas between the French and Indian War and the Civil War. During the intervening century the rattlesnake, with its powers of fascination, evolved into a multifaceted symbol used to represent a wide range of ideas: British colonial unity; American national identity; (white) fears of interracial conflict and miscegenation; and the lingering belief that original sin represented a serious threat to a secular republic whose well-being could only be insured by the virtuous behavior of its citizens. Between 1751 and 1861 visual artists like Benjamin Franklin and Charles Gadsden, together with writers such as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur and Oliver Wendell Holmes, made the rattlesnake a symbol of the national transition from imported art to endogenous culture, from indigenous inhabitants to European emigrants, from innocence to experience.

(Some Boston 1775 discussion of the rattlesnake starts here.)

The First Gerrymander? Patrick Henry, James Madison, James Monroe, and Virginia’s 1788 Congressional Districting
Thomas Rogers Hunter
While the term gerrymander was coined following Massachusetts’ state Senate districting in 1812, many scholars have posited that it was actually Patrick Henry who first practiced this art, by designing an unnatural district that would ensure rival James Madison’s defeat in Virginia’s first Congressional elections in early 1789. Historians have ample evidence to buttress such claims, for numerous Founding Fathers bitterly complained that Henry was going out of his way to design a district for Madison’s defeat. Through hard and smart campaigning, however, Madison managed to defeat his opponent James Monroe — thus marking the only Congressional election in American history pitting two future Presidents. This article closely examines Virginia’s 1788 Congressional districting, and finds that contrary to the accepted wisdom, “ingenious and artificial combinations” were not used to design Madison’s district, for it was composed of a compact group of whole counties entirely within the Piedmont region, and bounded on all sides by natural geographic features; Madison’s true problem was not the district’s formulation, but that he lived in an area that was predominantly Anti-Federalist. In fact, Virginia’s entire 1788 districting scheme shows no marks of partisan purpose, for it was both fair politically, and one of the most geographically logical plans in all of American history.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll share some thoughts on Phillis Wheatley and her reception in pre-Revolutionary Boston.

A Dinner for General Washington

On 18 June 1775, George Washington wrote in his diary:

Dined at Mullens upon Schoolkill. Spent the Evening at my lodgings.

The next day he recorded dinner at the house of Joseph Reed, soon to be his first military secretary. And then, on the day he received his formal commission as general from the Continental Congress, Washington stopped keeping his diary for a few years.

Years later, Dr. Benjamin Rush described what was probably that dinner at a tavern along the Schuylkill:

A few days after the appointment of General Washington to be commander in chief of the American armies, I was invited by a party of delegates and several citizens of Philadelphia to a dinner which was given to him at a tavern on the banks of the Skuilkill below the city. Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, Mr. [Thomas] Jefferson, James Wilson, Jno. Langdon of New Hampshire and about a dozen more constituted the whole company.

The first toast that was given after dinner was “The Commander in chief of the American Armies.” General Washington rose from his seat, and with some confusion thanked the company for the honor they did him. The whole company instantly rose, and drank the toast standing. This scene, so unexpected, was a solemn one. A silence followed it, as if every heart was penetrated with the awful, but great events which were to follow the use of the sword of liberty which had just been put into General Washington’s hands by the unanimous voice of his country.

In his autobiography Rush added another anecdote:

About this time I saw Patrick Henry at his lodgings, who told me that General Washington had been with him, and informed him that he was unequal to the station in which his country had placed him, and then added with tears in his eyes “Remember, Mr. Henry, what I now tell you: From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation.”

That story seems out of character for Washington to me. But of course he worked hard at presenting a certain character to the world, and we’re not privy to many unguarded moments. A slight change in the words Henry remembered—“I fear that from the day I enter…,” or some such—makes it easy to imagine those words from Washington’s mouth.

John Adams Sums Up

As I described yesterday, John Adams didn’t like how William Wirt’s 1817 biography of Patrick Henry gave the Virginian credit for sparking the American Revolution. Adams wanted Massachusetts to get the credit for being first.

The only problem was that Henry really did deliver incendiary remarks against the Stamp Act in the Virginia House of Burgesses on 29 May 1765. Wirt’s version of that speech ended, “If this be treason, make the most of it!” That may not be accurate, but there was no doubt that Henry attacked the Stamp Act months before Boston’s big public protests in August.

So the only way for Adams to win back Massachusetts’s primary role was to argue that the Revolutionary conflict had begun even earlier than that—with the writs of assistance case in 1761. On 29 Mar 1818 Adams sent his former law clerk William Tudor a long, detailed, and dramatic—at times melodramatic—description of the case, ending:

But [James] Otis was a flame of Fire! With a promptitude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of legal authorities, a prophetic glare of his eyes into futurity, and a rapid torrent of impetuous eloquence he hurried away all before him.

American independence was then and there born. The seeds of patriots and heroes to defend the Non Sine Diis Animosus Infans; to defend the vigorous youth were then and there sown. Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born. In fifteen years, i.e. in 1776, he grew up to manhood and declared himself free.

Adams allowed that letter to be published in newspapers and a new collection of his “Novanglus” essays, thus making it available to historians just as the fiftieth anniversary of independence approached.

In March 1818 the North American Review printed young Jared Sparks’s critique of Wirt’s Patrick Henry, saying it relied too much on “tradition” instead of “truth.” The article listed several ways that Massachusetts instigated the Revolution. (That magazine was, after all, based in Boston.) Sparks went on to edit the first collection of George Washington’s writings.

Over the next couple of years Adams convinced the editor of that magazine, William Tudor, Jr., to write the biography of Otis that he had imagined. The Life of James Otis, of Massachusetts appeared in 1823, quoting heavily from Adams’s letters to the author’s father.

Thus, before he died on 4 July 1826, John Adams had managed to establish a historiography of the American Revolution that starts in Boston in 1761, with James Otis, Jr., delivering the opening speech. Or was that, as Adams had complained about Wirt’s book, largely “a romance”?

“Jealous, very jealous, of the honour of Massachusetts”

The Virginia lawyer and politician William Wirt (1772-1834, shown here courtesy of the Library of Virginia) had two big accomplishments in 1817. First, he finally published Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, a biography that he’d been working on for years. Second, he was appointed Attorney General of the United States. He remained in that post for twelve years, through the administrations of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams.

Wirt’s biography of Henry is the earliest source for many anecdotes about the Virginia politician’s life, and for many of his famous quotations, including “Give me liberty or give me death!” Nobody recorded those speeches at the time, the author complained, so he had to do extra work reconstructing them as they ought to have been.

Some of Henry’s contemporaries (and occasional rivals) noticed. Thomas Jefferson, who had been one of Wirt’s sources, said privately that the biography was “a poor book, written in bad taste.” But it was also a successful book, and one of the foundation stones of the literature of the American South.

Up in Massachusetts, John Adams borrowed a copy. On 5 Jan 1818, before he had even finished reading, he sent a letter to Wirt, damning the book with faint praise as “rich entertainment.” He went on:

If I could go back to the age of thirty five, Mr. Wirt, I would endeavour to become your rival; not in elegance of composition, but in a simple narration of facts, supported by records, histories, and testimonies, of irrefragable authority. I would adopt, in all its modesty, your title, “Sketches of the life and writings of James Otis, of Boston.” . . .

I envy none of the well merited glories of Virginia, or any of her sages or heroes. But, sir, I am jealous, very jealous, of the honour of Massachusetts.

The resistance to the British system, for subjugating the colonies, began in 1760, and in the month of February, 1761, James Otis electrified the town of Boston, the province of Massachusetts bay, and the whole continent, more than Patrick Henry ever did in the whole course of his life. If we must have panegyrics and hyperboles, I must say, that if Mr. Henry was Demosthenes, and Mr. Richard Henry Lee, Cicero, James Otis was Isaiah and Ezekiel United.

Wirt replied on 12 January with a complimentary copy for Adams and assurance that he didn’t mean to set off a regional rivalry. In Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, Scott E. Casper called this “an unconvincing assertion from an author who had asserted the Old Dominion’s preeminence in the Revolution.”

Wirt’s book continued to rankle Adams. The fourth Josiah Quincy recalled one visit to the former President’s house in Braintree on 6 Sept 1820 with some men from Virginia:

His visitors asked him his opinion of Patrick Henry, and whether he was not the greatest orator he had ever heard.

His reply was: “No, gentlemen. Much of Wirt’s life of him is a romance. Why, I have heard that gentleman’s father (pointing to one who was present [probably the third Josiah Quincy, son of the Patriot lawyer]) speak in a strain of eloquence to which Patrick Henry could never pretend. . . . You know Virginian geese are always swans.”

Notwithstanding these remarks, the gentlemen seemed very much pleased with their visit.

This wasn’t the first time Adams had grumbled about Virginians saying all their geese are swans, but not seeing Massachusetts credited with coming first in the Revolution really rankled him.

TOMORROW: John Adams strikes back.