A Portrait of a Gentleman at Matawan

Earlier this year the Asbury Park Press published an article about a man who owned the Matawan, New Jersey, house of the poet and journalist Philip Freneau and started looking for a reported portrait of Freneau as a young man by John Singleton Copley.

The Frick Art Reference Library listed such a painting in the collection of the Plimpton family. It was put up for auction in 2018 as “Portrait of a Gentleman” and “attributed to Circle of Copley,” but failed to sell at the estimated price of $5-7,000.

The homeowner contacted the Plimptons and convinced them to donate the portrait to the Matawan Historical Society. On retrieving the canvas, he discovered that “The nameplate on the frame identified the subject as Philip Freneau, and the artist as John Singleton Copley.”

The local newspaper presents this as evidence of an exciting rediscovery of an authentic portrait. It’s merely evidence that at some point that painting was labeled and sold as Copley’s portrait of Freneau.

But we knew that already. The American Art Annual for 1923 reported that painting had sold the previous year for $260. Undoubtedly its price was higher for having the names of a famous artist and a famous subject attached—but by whom? There’s no evidence Copley made such a portrait and no mention of this canvas before that date.

In the 1920s, as I discussed back here, the Copley Gallery in Boston sold a lot of eighteenth-century portraits as products of colonial America. Those canvases probably showed little-known British gentlemen as painted by little-known British portraitists. But their value increased if rich Americans believed they came from the few artists working in North America before the Revolution and showed people whose names appeared in our history books.

In 1941 Lewis Leary published the biography That Rascal Freneau: A Study in Literary Failure. In a footnote he wrote:

Another “Freneau portrait,” listed in the Frick Art Reference Library, 1121 14Q, as by Copley, represents a young man dressed in the attire of a dandy of about 1770. It is not mentioned by Barbara Neville Parker and Ann Bolling Wheeler, John Singleton Copley, American Portraits in Oil, Pastel and Miniatures with Biographical Sketches, Boston, 1938. The portrait is at present part of the George A. Plimpton Collection, Columbia University Library. “I cannot find,” says Mrs. Plimpton in a letter (June 24, 1938) to the writer, “that we have anything but the dealer’s word for the authenticity of the Freneau portrait.” I have been convinced that it is neither by Copley nor of Freneau. 

The Frick Art Reference Library continues to list that painting as “not by Copley.” As for the “Circle of Copley,” in 1770 that circle consisted entirely of Henry Pelham, who didn’t travel with his stepbrother to the New York area when he supposedly painted this canvas.

Are You Ready for a Cabinet Meeting?

For Presidents Day, we look in on George Washington’s meetings with his cabinet on 1-2 Aug 1793.

The issue on the table was what to do about Edmond-Charles Genet, the French diplomat who was stirring up support of Revolutionary France, resentment of Britain, and friction within the U.S. of A.

The cabinet members—Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph—all agreed to ask France to recall Genet. They differed on how peremptorily to do so. They really differed on whether to report the decision and the reasons for it to the American public.

Hamilton liked the idea of an official “appeal to the people,” despite not usually being interested in public opinion, because it offered an opening for a full-throated critique of Revolutionary France. According to Jefferson’s notes:

Hamilton made a jury speech of 3/4 of an hour as inflammatory and declamatory as if he had been speaking to a jury. E.R. opposed it. I chose to leave the contest between them.

The President adjourned that meeting until the next day. “Hamilton spoke again 3/4 of an hour,” Jefferson wrote then. “I answered on these topics.” He kept minimal notes on Hamilton’s remarks and detailed notes on his own, indicating that he didn’t write those notes at the time but afterwards, and he really didn’t care about Hamilton’s opinion.

Eventually it became clear which way Washington was leaning:

The President manifestly inclined to the appeal to the people. He said that Mr. [Robert] Morris, taking a family dinner with him the other day went largely and of his own accord into this subject, advised this appeal and promised if the Presidt. adopted it that he would support it himself, and engage for all his connections.—The Presidt. repeated this twice, and with an air of importance.—

Now Mr. Morris has no family connections. He engaged then for his political friends.—This shews that the President has not confidence enough in the virtue and good sense of mankind to confide in a government bottomed on them, and thinks other props necessary.

Jefferson distrusted campaigns for public opinion by his political opponents. He was, of course, promoting his own ideas with allies like James Madison. He had also recruited Philip Freneau to come to Philadelphia and start the anti-Federalist National Gazette, giving the writer a sinecure in the State Department.

Then the meeting took an awkward turn.

Knox in a foolish incoherent sort of a speech introduced the Pasquinade lately printed, called the funeral of George W—n and James W[ilso]n, king and judge &c. where the President was placed on a Guillotin.

The Presidt. was much inflamed, got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself. Run on much on the personal abuse which had been bestowed on him. Defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest motives. That he had never repented but once the having slipped the moment of resigning his office, and that was every moment since. That by god he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation. That he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world and yet that they were charging him with wanting to be a king. That that rascal Freneau sent him 3. of his papers every day, as if he thought he would become the distributor of his papers, that he could see in this nothing but an impudent design to insult him. He ended in this high tone.

There was a pause. Some difficulty in resuming our question—it was however after a little while presented again, and he said there seemed to be no necessity for deciding it now: the propositions before agreed on might be put into a train of execution, and perhaps events would shew whether the appeal would be necessary or not.

It took another three weeks for the cabinet to complete their dispatch to the American minister in Paris, Gouverneur Morris, telling him to ask the French government to withdraw Genet. Meanwhile, it became clear to Washington that most informed Americans disapproved of the French diplomat’s behavior, so he no longer saw any need for a public appeal.

Francis Wrigley, Philadelphia Journeyman

Yesterday I shared the New Year’s greeting for 1783 that Philip Freneau composed specifically for Francis Wrigley to share with his customers.

Wrigley was a journeyman printer working for the Philadelphia newspaper Freneau edited, The Freeman’s Journal. Wrigley’s death notices say he was eighty-five years old when he died in October 1829, meaning he had been born in 1744.

According to William McCulloch, a younger Philadelphia printer who corresponded with Isaiah Thomas, Wrigley was born in England. In Some Degree of Power: Preindustrial American Printing Trades, 1778-1815, Mark A. Lause suggested that Benjamin Franklin himself sent Wrigley across the Atlantic with a letter of recommendation. (But again, we Americans like to credit Franklin with everything.)

During the Revolutionary War, according to Wrigley’s obituary, he “printed for the Old Congress while [it was] sitting in Philadelphia, and accompanied them from this city to Baltimore [in 1776], where he printed the ‘Old Continental Money,’ which was at that time in circulation.”

In 1785 Wrigley set up his own print shop and sold ink and stationery on South Street in Philadelphia. The following year, he supported a strike by the city’s journeymen printers demanding a wage of six dollars per week. That effort was successful, and shortly afterward he and other printers formed the Franklin Society, a mutual-aid society for the profession.

Wrigley worked with various partners in the subsequent decades. In the early 1790s Philadelphia was the national capital, and that brought a boon of printing jobs, both governmental and political. At other periods he worked from less prominent, and probably cheaper, addresses. Wrigley specialized in printing books rather than newspapers and periodicals.

Hezekiah Niles noted his passing in Niles’s Weekly Register:

Died, on the 28th ult. at Philadelphia, our venerable friend Francis Wrigley, printer, in the 86th year of his age. He printed for the old congress, was one of the best pressmen of his day, and, perhaps, performed as much personal labor in the printing business as any man that ever lived. He was remarkable for the goodness of his heart, and fidelity and kindness to all men, but especially to those of the craft—very gentle and patient with young apprentices, as the senior editor of the Register experienced, and affectionately remembers.

Those biographical details help to explain why in late 1782 Freneau wrote one New-Year’s verse for Wrigley and another for “the Lad who carries” the Freeman’s Journal. In his late thirties, Wrigley was no longer a “Lad.” And he was also notable for being a nice guy.

A New Year’s Greeting from Philip Freneau

Philip Freneau (1752-1832) graduated from Princeton College in 1771, already in the habit of writing poetry. He tried teaching and studying for the ministry, but all he really wanted to do was write, which was a nice lifestyle but not a lucrative one.

Despite supporting the Patriot cause on paper, Freneau spent the first years of the Revolutionary War in the Caribbean, writing nature poems. In 1778 he sailed back to the U.S. of A., landing only after being captured and released by the Royal Navy.

After publishing more poetry, Freneau enlisted as supercargo on a ship to the Azores. That trip required evading British vessels. In May 1780 he set out again for the island of St. Eustatia, this time as a paying passenger.

That ship started its voyage by seizing a small sloop from Crown hands in Delaware Bay. Its captain therefore had no leg to stand on when British ships counterattacked the next day. I mean that literally: Freneau wrote that “a twelve-pound shot…struck Captain Laboyteaut in the right thigh, which it smashed to atoms.”

Freneau expected the British would again set him free as a non-combatant passenger. Instead, his captors shoved him in with their other prisoners. His treatment wasn’t as bad as it could have been because he was soon treated as an officer. Nonetheless, Freneau found himself on one of the infamous British prison-ships in New York harbor.

And he stayed on that ship for six weeks before falling quite ill and being released. Freneau spun that experience into more fervid Patriotism and his most famous poem, The British Prison-Ship. (Michelle Porter discussed that composition at the Journal of the American Revolution.)

In April 1781 Freneau began to edit the Freeman’s Journal, published in Philadelphia by printer Francis Bailey. In that capacity he wrote two verses for the newspaper’s carriers at the end of 1782, plus another for the apprentices of the Pennsylvania Evening Post. Here’s one of those:

To those Gentlemen who have been pleased to favour
Francis Wrigley, News Carrier, with their custom.
January 1, 1783.

ACCORDING to custom, once more I appear
With the verse you expect at the dawn of the year:
For at length we have got into EIGHTY AND THREE;
And in spite of proud Britain, are happy and free.
If the times have been hard, and our commerce gone wrong,
We still have been able to struggle along.
If some, through misfortunes, are slack in the purse,
It is not so bad but it might have been worse.—
Great things, the year past, were reveal’d to our eyes:
The Dutch have confess’d us their friends and allies,
And humbled the pride of our haughty invaders,
By fighting their fleets and destroying their traders,
If the English succeeded in taking the COUNT,
To what, in the end, did their conquest amount?
With their boasts, and their brags, and their shouts of applause,
It but sav’d them from ruin—not ruin’d our cause.

BUT leaving the weight of political cares
To those, who are plac’d at the helm of affairs,
To the humours of fortune in all things resign’d,
I mean by my visit to put you in mind,
That, as true as a clock, both early and late,
With the news of the day I have knock’d at your gate,
And gave you to know what the world was a doing,
What LOUIS intended, or GEORGE was a brewing.
If sometimes the papers were trifling and flat,
And the news went against us,—I cou’dn’t help that;
If parties were angry, and vented their spite,
I bro’t you their wranglings—not help’d them to write.
I therefore presume (and not without reason)
You’ll remember your NEWSMAN, and think of the season;
The markets are high, and the weather is cold;
No party I serve, and no pension I hold.
We Hawkers are men, and have children and wives
To comfort our hearts, and to solace our lives:
But if I say more, you’ll think it is stuff;
And a word to the wise is, in reason, enough.

Freneau wrote similar verses to celebrate the start of 1784 before that spring quitting the Freeman’s Journal to take another trip to the Caribbean. Two years later, Bailey collected his erstwhile editor’s poetry, including six carrier verses. Freneau wrote a couple more in later life, and he included those poems in the editions of his work that he oversaw himself, indicating that he didn’t see his carrier verses as mere occasional ephemera.

COMING UP: Who was Francis Wrigley?

Taking the General Monk

Yesterday I left the Pennsylvania navy vessel Hyder Ally and the Royal Navy sloop General Monk in the middle of a fight in Delaware Bay on 8 Apr 1782.

The young captain of the Hyder Ally, Joshua Barney, told his helmsman to do the opposite of what he ordered and then yelled, “Hard a-port!” The helmsman steered to starboard. Meanwhile, the commander of the General Monk, trying to keep alongside the smaller American vessel, heard Barney and ordered a turn to port.

The General Monk’s jib boom plunged into the Hyder Ally’s rigging. In that position, the Americans could fire their port guns at the British vessel, but most of the British cannons were useless. The Hyder Ally crew rushed to keep the two ships entangled and started to fire. They even turned some of their starboard guns around.

The Hyder Ally cannon blasted canister and grape shot across the deck of the General Monk—thirteen broadsides in all. Barney had recruited riflemen from the Pennsylvania countryside as marines, and they joined in the firing from the rigging. After twenty-six minutes of battle, twenty of the British crew of 136 were dead, thirty-six wounded, including the captain. A British midshipman surrendered the General Monk.

Meanwhile, the Royal Navy frigate Québec was sailing up the main channel of the Delaware River, chasing the battle. That meant Barney and Lt. Justus Starr, whom he sent to command the new capture, had to work fast to separate the two ships and start upriver toward Philadelphia. They bought time by hoisting British flags and exchanging friendly signals with the Québec until it halted.

Once the Hyder Ally and General Monk had left the enemy frigate behind, Barney called over and learned the name of his prize. Lt. Starr also reported back that of the larger ship’s twenty-four guns, six were only “Quaker guns”—logs carved like cannon to intimidate other ships into surrendering. So the fight wasn’t as much of a mismatch as it had seemed.

The 10 April Freemen’s Journal, published in Philadelphia, reported:

Yesterday the Hyder Ally, a vessel fitted out for the protection of this river and its trade, returned to Chester after a severe conflict with a vessel of superior force, which with great gallantry and good conduct, on the part of captain Barney and his crew, has been captured and brought into port.

The General Monk was eventually made a Continental Navy ship, once more called the General Washington. Philip Freneau wrote a poem on the fight, which became known as the Battle of Delaware Bay. Years later, Barney commissioned Louis-Philippe Crépin to paint “Hyder Ally Captures the General Monk,” shown above; that picture is now owned by the U.S. Naval Academy Museum.

Barney went on to a long naval career, which included capture by British privateers in 1793, service in the navy of Revolutionary France, and a command in Chesapeake Bay during the War of 1812. He was wounded at the Battle of Bladensburg and died, reportedly of complications from that wound, in 1818.

During the same war, with America once again awash in anti-British sentiment, a privateer named Hyder Ally was launched from Maine. This ship thus indirectly preserved the name of an Indian government official who had died decades earlier.