American Revolution Conference in Williamsburg, 19-20 Mar.

I’d missed this good news, but America’s History L.L.C. is hosting its Ninth Annual Conference of the American Revolution in Williamsburg, Virginia, on 19-20 March 2022.

The presenters will be:

• Edward G. Lengel, head of faculty: “Some Desperate Glory: The Battles of Connecticut Farms and Springfield, June 1780”
• Michael Gabriel, “‘To Induce the Officers & Soldiery to Exert Themselves’: Plunder and Trophies in the Revolutionary War” 
• Michael Harris, “Germantown: The Battle for Philadelphia, October 1777” 
• T. Cole Jones, “Captives of Liberty: British, German and Loyalist Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance”
• Larry Kidder, “Ten Crucial Days: Washington’s Campaign against Trenton and Princeton”
• Mark Edward Lender, “Cabal!: The Plot against George Washington” 
• James Kirby Martin, “Reconciliation or Independence: Understanding the Rebel Insurgents of 1775-1776”
• David Preston, “General George Washington: Echoes of the Seven Years’ War in the Revolutionary War”
• Eric Schnitzer, “Make Way for New Interpretations: Don Troiani’s Campaign to Saratoga – 1777”
• Gary Sellick, the Dr. Robert J. Christen Emerging Scholar: “Black Men, Red Coats: The Creation of the Carolina Corps in Revolutionary South Carolina”

Bruce Venter and his America’s History team had to cancel the last two years of conferences because of the pandemic, with all the anxiety and frayed relations that produces. I’m pleased to see this event back on the calendar for Revolutionary War buffs even though I can’t attend.

In future, I hope the topics will once again broaden to include more than the military side of the Revolution, and the presenters will be similarly diverse. But after all the organizational angst of the last two years, it’s good to see this conference in any form.

“To day I have recd the Lt. Governors Cheese”

In 1797, Moses Gill (1734-1800, shown here in 1764) was the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. He was a Republican candidate for governor that spring, but came in a distant third after superior court justice Increase Sumner and attorney general James Sullivan. He handily retained the lieutenant governor’s office, though.

Gill was born in Charlestown and started his career as a merchant in Boston, but since 1767 he had lived the life of a country gentleman. Twice widowed and childless, Gill was the patriarchal squire of the town of Princeton and also the recent namesake of the town of Gill.

On 27 March, Lt. Gov. Gill wrote from Boston to the newly inaugurated second President of the United States, John Adams:

my Dear Sir.

By Capn. Constant Norton of the Schooner Jay you will receive a large Princeton Cheese, as by the inclosd. receipt, which you will Please to Accept from me, as a Small token of my affection and esteem; it is Packd in a Box and Divided, for the President of the United States, it will be in eating the first weake in may, And it woud be well to unpack it, and Keep it from the Sun in a Cold dry Cituation.

President Adams had received Gill’s letter only a week later and wrote home from Philadelphia to his wife, Abigail:

Lt Governor Gill has sent me one of his Princetown Cheeses, of such a Size as to require handspikes to manage it, according to Father Niles’s old Story.

“Father Niles” was what Adams called the Rev. Samuel Niles of Braintree, an acquaintance from decades before.

The President hadn’t actually seen the cheese yet, as his cordial thank-you letter to Gill the next day acknowledged:

Dear Sir

I have received your favor of the 27th of March and very Kindly thank you, for both the Letter and the generous Present of a Cheese from Princeton, I know very well the Value that is to be attached to Princeton and its inhabitants and Productions, Its Cheese in particular I know to be Excellent, and I shall prize it the higher for the place of its growth, I shall share it, and boast of it, and praise it and admire it as long as it lives,

I dare Say before I See it, that our America produces no thing Superior to it in its Kind your directions concerning it shall be observed

And Jonathan Sewall said Adams didn’t know how to flatter people.

Ten days later, the cheese finally arrived at the Presidential Mansion. John reported to Abigail on 14 April:

To day I have recd the Lt. Governors Cheese—like a charriot forewheel boxed up in Wood & Iron. it will last till you come.

According to the editors of the Adams Papers, presumably based on consulting the shipping papers, this wheel of cheese weighed 110 pounds. For comparison, Williams-Sonoma offers (for $3,000) a wheel of Parmesan cheese that was about the same weight before curing; it’s 18" across and 9" thick.

TOMORROW: Cheese for Abigail Adams.

What Frederick the Great Thought of Washington

The Bicentennial dubbed the time between the Continental Army’s expedition against Trenton on 25 Dec 1776 and the Battle of Princeton on 3 Jan 1777 the “ten crucial days” of the New Jersey campaign. More recently, William L. Kidder wrote a book of that name.

One widely repeated statement about that period appeared in a footnote of Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, by His Adopted Son, George Washington Parke Custis in 1859. The “illustrative and explanatory notes” of that volume were written by Benson J. Lossing.

One of those notes concluded:

It is said Frederick the Great of Prussia declared, that the achievements of Washington and his little band of compatriots, between the twenty-fifth of December, 1776, and the fourth of January, 1777, a space of ten days, were the most brilliant of any in the annals of military achievements.

Lossing provided no source for this statement. Indeed, by prefacing it with the phrase “It is said…” he acknowledged that he didn’t have an identifiable source and was relying on hearsay at best. Lossing also didn’t use quotation marks, signaling that he wasn’t claiming to reproduce Frederick’s words, even in translation.

In the following decades Lossing wrote more books about the Revolution, including school textbooks, in which he repeated this statement with no “It is said” beginning. Other authors quoted the phrases about “Washington and his little band of compatriots” and “the most brilliant of any in the annals” from Lossing, using quote marks. That made it appear that those words came from a reliable translation of Frederick’s own words.

Authors continue to repeat that so-called quotation from Frederick in this century. The words appear in Ron Chernow’s biography of Washington and Michael E. Newton’s book on Alexander Hamilton’s rise. My curiosity about the words was piqued by a tweet from Mount Vernon last month. But all the citations lead back to Lossing’s footnote, with its lack of a direct quotation and highly fudged attribution. (I didn’t find any mention of Frederick the Great in Larry Kidder’s book, nor in David H. Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing.)

In 1874, the American historian and diplomat George Bancroft published the tenth volume of his History of the United States, covering some of the war years. In the preface he described studying many archives in Europe, and especially in Berlin, where he was posted. But he wrote: “I sought for some expression, on the part of Frederic, of a personal interest in Washington; but I found none.” Bancroft really wanted to find such evidence, and he came up empty.

In 1904 Paul Leland Haworth published an article in the American Historical Review titled “Frederick the Great and the American Revolution.” By then the Prussian king’s papers had been archived, transcribed, and published. That let Haworth demonstrate how Frederick’s interest in the distant war in North America arose entirely from his pleasure at seeing the British Empire diminished. In his conclusion Haworth echoed Bancroft’s statement: “there is nowhere in Frederick's correspondence any trace of a personal interest in Washington.“

Whatever we might think of the Continental Army’s maneuvers at the end of 1776 and the start of 1777, we can’t ascribe that opinion to Frederick the Great.

TOMORROW: The letter, the portrait, and the sword.

Virtual Visits to Trenton on the Battle Anniversary

Today is the anniversary of the first and more famous Battle of Trenton. This year, in lieu of a reenactment and other in-person events, the Old Barracks Museum is hosting a series of online presentations.

This means that those of us from outside the area can make a virtual visit to Trenton while still enjoying our holiday weekend at home. And we don’t have to brave the cold, either.

The museum schedule includes these afternoon events:

• 12:00 noon: “The Trouble with Trenton Virtual Puppet Show!” Register here.
• 1:00 P.M.: “Hogmanay,” a traditional Scottish celebration of the New Year, presented by the Trent House Museum with the Practitioners of Musick. Suggested donation $10. Register here.
• 2:00: “The Real Story of the Battle of Trenton” followed by live questions and answers with Asher Lurie, Chief of Historical Interpretation. Register here.
• 3:00: “Blacks at the Battles of Trenton,” a talk by Algernon Ward, Jr., of Trenton. Register online.
• 4:00: “The Gentler Conflict: Dancing in 18th-Century America” with Sue Dupre and Early Music Princeton. Register here.

At 5:00, William (Larry) Kidder will speak online about Revolutionary Princeton, 1774-1783: The Biography of an American Town in the Heart of a Civil War. His new book details the lives of Princetonians who lived through the Revolutionary War, building on his previous work in Crossroads of the Revolution: Trenton 1774-1783 and Ten Crucial Days: Washington’s Vision for Victory Unfolds. Register for the talk here.

Finally, at 7:00, Don Hagist will discuss his new book Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution, which brings life to the redcoats, describing their training, experiences, and outcomes. Drawing on military records and other primary sources in British, American, and Canadian archives, and the writings of dozens of officers and soldiers, Noble Volunteers shows how a peacetime army responded to the onset of war, how professional soldiers adapted quickly to become tactically dominant, and what became of the thousands of career soldiers once the war was over. Register for that talk here.

All of these events are free, but in signing up there’s an opportunity to donate to the museum to keep its programs going. You can also order books by Kidder and Hagist through the museum’s online store.

Three Online Events on Revolutionary History Tonight

September usually brings a burst of historical events as the academic calendar restarts while museums and tourist sites keep appealing to visitors. This year the pandemic means that a lot of those events are being organized online, and are thus available to much broader audiences. Plus, they’re often recorded and made available online for later.

All of which exponentially increases the number of historical talks and panels one feels guilty about not attending in some way. Here are three scheduled for tonight alone.

The Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society gets under way for the year. Prof. Lauren Duval of the University of Oklahoma has shared a paper titled “The Horrid Deeds of our Enemies.” Prof. Carolyn Eastman of Virginia Commonwealth University will be the principal commenter, but this will be a discussion session.

The American Revolution was waged not only on the battlefield, but in the realm of culture. American homes and the wartime violence within them—particularly directed against women—were prominent subjects in novels and historical paintings. Reimagining women’s interactions with British soldiers solely as relationships of violence and deception, not volition, these narratives promoted a gendered vision of wartime domestic invasion and violation that would, in memory, come to define the war’s devastation and contribute to emergent ideas about the meaning of independence.

To subscribe to the papers in this series and other seminars hosted by the M.H.S., use this link; the cost is $25. Register for tonight’s event here. This seminar will run from 5:15 to 6:30 P.M. Unfortunately, there are no sandwiches and conversation afterward except what we provide ourselves.

Monticello is offering a series of “Tom Talks,” and tonight’s is grandly but not inaccurately titled “The Election of 1800: A Battle for the Soul of America.”

Jefferson recalled the Election of 1800 as the “revolution of 1800;” the first peaceful transfer of power from one political party to another in the young United States. Yet it was shaped by a bitter campaign in the press as the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties battled to decide the nation's future course. Join John Ragosta, Historian at the International Center for Jefferson Studies, and Jeff Looney, Editor of the Jefferson Papers: Retirement Series as they discuss the political maneuvering that led to Jefferson’s presidency.

That event begins at 6:00 P.M., and access costs $25. Monticello is also posting many free videos on other aspect of the third President’s life.

Finally, History Author Talks features two experts speaking on “The Ravages of War in New York and New Jersey.” William L. (Larry) Kidder, author of Ten Crucial Days: Washington’s Vision for Victory Unfolds and the upcoming Revolutionary Princeton, 1774-1783: The Biography of an American Town in the Heart of a Civil War, and Todd Braisted, author of Grand Forage 1778: The Battleground Around New York City and Bergen County Voices from the American Revolution: Soldiers and Residents in Their Own Words, will discuss military maneuvers in the crucial corridor between the two largest cities in North America.

This conversation will start at 7:00 P.M. To register, use this link. The History Author Talks website has links to recordings of many previous conversations between authors this year, including mine with Nina Sankovitch and Paul Lockhart.

Don’t you feel more guilty already?

“Virginia Billy” Comes of Age

The Princetonians profile of William Burnet Brown is a wonderful model of wringing a character study out of limited evidence.

Brown left almost no trace on the records of what became Princeton University except in the account books, but James McLachlan and his editorial team still created this portrait of a young man:

William entered the College’s grammar school on September 24, 1755. There he bought copies of the Newark Grammar, Isaac Watts’s Psalms, a Latin Erasmus, Guthrie’s translation of Cicero, and other books.

In the six months between his entrance and March 24, 1756, he ran up one of the highest bills of any student on whom President [Aaron] Burr kept records—a total of £41.4s.10d., at a time when the annual salary of a college tutor was £40. Between the time Browne arrived in Newark and the time he left Princeton he spent money on items such as the following: £1.2s. for having shirts made; £2 for special tutoring by John Ewing (A.B. 1754); £4.7s.1d. for having special closets and shelves built into his room; £3.16s for furnishing his room; and £2.4s. for painting his room.

His largest expenditure was for a horse, which he bought for £12.1s. on March 21, 1756. On the same day he paid £4.2s. for a saddle and bridle and £2.5s. for thirty bushels of oats. The horse was costly to keep, especially on February 22, 1757, when President Burr had to pay £4.16s.6d. “for redeeming his Mare yt he [Browne] had foolishly exchang’d.”

The date on which Browne entered the College is unknown, but that he entered it is certain, for he bought College texts and was charged for “tuition” rather than “schooling.” On May 26, 1757, President Burr recorded that Browne was “sent to Boston, not returned.” His last steward’s bill was rendered as of June 29, 1757.

William Burnet Brown was eighteen years old when he returned to Salem, Massachusetts. Two of his brothers and a sister had died the year before, and other siblings would die in the next few years.

As the eldest son, when Brown came of age, he inherited a large amount of property from his late mother. Then his father died in 1763, and Brown’s holdings grew even bigger. In addition to the estate on Folly Hill in Essex County, he owned other property there as well as real estate in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York. He wasn’t tethered to any one British colony.

While in New York in 1764, Brown married Judith Walker Carter. She was from the Virginia Carters, an extended family that included some of the richest planters in North America. For a couple of years they lived in Salem, probably in the old mansion Brown had inherited from his father (shown above before it was taken down in the 1910s). They started having children.

Sometime in those years Judith’s sister Maria visited her, and a friend, Maria Beverley, wrote to her with unabashed gossip about marriages within their circle in Virginia. Beverley added:

But can you hear of so Vast many of our Sex about to change their Estate, without enlisting yourself in this Number? I cannot think the young gentlemen of New England so Vastly depraved in their way of thinking as not to have made you many applications of that sort. I remember your Grandmother told me you had a great Variety of Suitors.

Judith’s sister Maria eventually married a man from back home.

Brown served as a warden of Salem’s Anglican church in 1766 and 1767, but already his neighbors were calling him “Virginia Billy.” And already he was selling off his New England real estate.

TOMORROW: The big move.

William Burnet Brown, Skinny Legs and All

Like his first cousin William Browne, William Burnet Brown was a wealthy man and therefore rather well documented in eighteenth-century sources and nineteenth-century accounts.

However, almost none of those accounts connect him to the fight between John Robinson and James Otis, Jr., in the British Coffee-House in September 1769. That’s because he wasn’t even living in Massachusetts at the time.

In fact, the longest modern profile of Brown was written for Princetonians, the reference series on all men who went to Princeton College. It doesn’t mention the Otis incident at all, instead saying Brown “sank almost without trace” from prominence after 1767. So let’s start filling some gaps.

William Burnet Brown was born on 7 Oct 1738 in Salem. (Brown spelled his name both “Brown” and “Browne” in newspaper advertisements, and later sources spelled his middle name as “Burnett.” I’m using the simplest form.) At the time middle names were rare in New England, but little William’s parents gave him one for two reasons:

• To distinguish him from his first cousin, the future Massachusetts Justice William Browne, born the previous year.
• To remind people of his illustrious maternal line, including his great-grandfather, His Grace Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), bishop of Salisbury; and his grandfather, the Hon. William Burnet (1688-1729), governor of both New York and New Jersey (1720-1728), and then both Massachusetts and New Hampshire (1728-1729).

William Burnet Brown’s father was Col. William Browne (1709-1763), a wealthy man and officeholder in Essex County. His mother was born Mary Burnet in 1723, married at the age of fourteen, and died of consumption at twenty-two, when her eldest son was about seven. Col. Browne later remarried.

After his cousin William went to Harvard College, William Burnet Brown headed south to join the class of 1760 at the College of New Jersey. The Princetonians profile speculates that this was because Col. Browne “was much given to theological speculation and controversy” and disliked the orthodox Congregationalists of New England.

I think it’s more notable that William B. was old for a college student. His cousin graduated from Harvard at the age of eighteen a few weeks before William B., a few weeks shy of seventeen, entered the New Jersey college’s grammar school for remedial lessons before becoming a freshman. So it’s possible the family chose that young college because it was the only one that would take him.

In 1763 William B. Brown’s father died, and he came into a big inheritance. The colonel’s will, quoted by Ezra Dodge Hines in Browne Hill and What Has Happened There, with Some Account of the Browne Family, states these bequests to his eldest son:

All my farm and lands at Royall Side with my land at Porter’s Neck [in Danvers], with the farm house and out houseing, stock and utensils, and the house on said farm, which I have built and named “Browne Hall” after the place in Lancashire, England, from whence my ancestors originally came, to William and the heirs male of his body lawfully begotten, and for want of such issue, the remainder to my son Samuel, and heirs male of his body lawfully begotten, and for want of such issue male, remainder to son Benjamin and heirs male, of his body lawfully begotten, and for want of such issue male, remainder to son Thomas, and heirs male of his body lawfully begotten, and for want of such issue in him to revert to my proper heirs. And to prevent any doubt whom I mean by heirs male in this devise, and in other parts of this my last will, I do hereby declare them to be, what by the laws of England they would be understood to be, and are not to be construed otherwise by any colour of any particular law or laws of any of the Colonys of America.

To William all pictures Tapestry, Library and medals, the same to be deemed heirlooms, and to pass with my said house called “Browne Hall,” to the heirs males, to whom my said house is limited as aforesaid. But my other sons and all their issue male, are to have the perusal of any of the books, in the said Library and liberty of borrowing them from time to time, as they have occasion for them, giving receipts for them in a receipt book, fixed to the Catalogue of the said Library, and useing them carefully and returning them safely, after a reasonable time allowed them for the reading thereof, when the receipts given are to be cancelled.

To William, one gilt cup, embossed with silver which was my said wife’s and formerly belonged to her grand-mother, Bishop Burnet’s Lady, which grand-mother was descended of the Duke of Buccleugh’s family. This is to be deemed an heir loom, and to pass with my said house of “Browne Hall” to the heirs males, to whom my said house is limited, that so it may remain as a memorial of their noble extraction. . . .

To William, two dutch knives, in a sheath of velvet, powdered with pearl; being a marriage covenant of Apollonius Scott, and Maria Vanderhoog, the father and mother of the said Bishop’s Lady.

The mansion that Col. Browne proudly called “Browne Hall” was known to locals at least as early as 1796 as “Brown’s Folly.” It stood on what’s still called Folly Hill in Beverly. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about the mansion in 1860, but someday I’ll discuss the real story behind it. For now, I’ll just say that in 1763 William Burnet Brown inherited a very valuable property.

The “pictures” that came with the estate included “a copy of Holbein’s portrait of Sir Anthony Browne, Viscount Montacute,” “a fine [painting] of the Bishop,” and portraits of his parents, perhaps by John Smibert. The “Tapestry” consisted of “Gobelin tapestry hangings, the gift to Bishop Burnet of William of Orange.” And there was “an inlaid box, in which the episcopal sermons were kept.”

In sum, William Burnet Brown was about as close to a British aristocrat as one could find in Salem, Massachusetts. Which was advantageous for him, because he had been sent home from Princeton after less than two years.

TOMORROW: A true American aristocrat.

Fort Plain Washington’s Birthday Symposium, 16 Feb.

On Saturday, 16 February, the Fort Plain Museum will host its first annual George Washington’s Birthday Symposium.

The scheduled speakers are:

• Edward G. Lengel, “Setting the Example: George Washington’s Military Leadership”
• Bruce Chadwick, “George & Martha”
• William Larry Kidder, “George Washington’s Ten Crucial Days: Trenton and Princeton”
• Norman J. Bollen, “George Washington and the Mohawk Frontier”

This event will be held at the Fulton-Montgomery Community College, located at 2805 NY-67, Johnstown, New York. It will start at 8:15 A.M. and end at 3:30 P.M. Registration costs $35 in advance, $40 at the door, and $20 for students. Admission includes a sandwich lunch buffet and refreshment breaks. The authors’ books will be available for purchase and signing.

To register, email fortplainmuseum@yahoo.com with your name, phone number, email address, and street address. Send a check to the Fort Plain Museum, Attn: GW BDAY, P. O. Box 324, Fort Plain, NY 13339, or call 518-774-5669 with credit-card information. (If you get connected to voicemail, leave a phone number for a volunteer to call you back.)

A Busy Month in Princeton

If you’re anywhere around Princeton, New Jersey, tomorrow, consider checking out the Princeton Battlefield Society Education Forum. This year’s theme is “Soldiers and Civilians in Princeton Winter 1776 to 1777,” focusing on the “Ten Crucial Days” bridging the Battle of Trenton and the Battle of Princeton.

The speakers at this year’s forum are:

• Larry Kidder on the disruptive experiences of the people living in and near Princeton during those busy months. Kidder is the author of A People Harassed and Exhausted: The Story of a New Jersey Militia Regiment in the American Revolution, Crossroads of the American Revolution: Trenton 1774 to 1783, and Ten Crucial Days: Washington’s Vision for Victory Unfolds.
• Don N. Hagist on His Majesty’s 17th Regiment of Foot, which fought at Princeton, analyzing the nationalities, ages, background, and experience of the common British soldiers. Don is managing editor of Journal of the American Revolution and maintains the British Soldiers, American Revolution blog. His most recent books are The Revolution’s Last Men: The Soldiers behind the Photographs and British Soldiers, American War.
• Joseph Seymour on the Philadelphia Associators, a Pennsylvania militia “association” formed to defend the neighboring state. Seymour is a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History. He is the author of Pennsylvania Associators, 1747-1777 and several articles on the subject.
• Glenn F. Williams is the afternoon’s moderator. A Senior Historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Dr. Williams is a retired Army officer who wrote the award-winning Year of the Hangman: George Washington’s Campaign against the Iroquois and Dunmore’s War: The Last Conflict of America’s Colonial Era.

This forum will take place from 1:30 to 5:00 P.M. in the Stockton Education Center of Morven, the estate that once belonged to Richard Stockton. The registration cost is $20.

The Princeton Battlefield Society has other events coming up this month.

On Saturday, 8 December, it will host a gathering of children’s-book creators at the Princeton Friends School:

• Trinka Hakes Noble, author of The Scarlet Stockings Spy, The New Jersey Reader, and many other books.
• William P. “Wil” Mara, author of If You Were a Kid During the American Revolution, If You Were a Kid in the Thirteen Colonies, and dozens of the biographies for young readers.
• Rob Skead, coauthor of Patriots, Redcoats, and Spies and Submarines, Secrets, and a Daring Rescue.

Find more information and registration for that event here.

Finally, on the morning of Sunday, 30 December, the society will host its “Battle of Princeton in Real Time Tour” featuring local reenactors and Gen. George Washington on horseback. For more information, go here.

Princeton Battlefield

Last month the American Battlefield Trust (formerly the Civil War Trust and its Campaign 1776 initiative) announced that it had completed the “$4 million purchase of 14.85 acres associated with the 1777 Battle of Princeton.” News of the purchase was picked up by such news outlets as Planet Princeton.

That land had been owned by the Institute for Advanced Study, which had planned to build new housing on it until archeology suggested that it was indeed militarily significant.

The press release announcing the sale looks an awful lot like this Institute press release from December 2016, down to identical sentences. That was when the initial plan for this purchase was announced. Boston 1775 shared the news then.

At that time, the parties hoped to complete the sale by June 2017. But it wasn’t until the following fall that the institute received approval from the local authorities for its revised housing plan with a smaller footprint.

Now at last the purchase is complete. Eventually the American Battlefield Trust will transfer ownership of the land to the state of New Jersey, which owns the Princeton Battlefield Park.

And finally we can look ahead. Last year the American Battlefield Trust “received a federal grant to create a five-year preservation and interpretation plan for the Princeton battlefield, to help prepare the battlefield for its 250th anniversary in 2027.”

Enoch Brooks’s Curious Bible

On 1 May 1785, Enoch and Hannah Brooks of Princeton, Massachusetts, had a son. The couple already had children Elisha (born in 1772), John (1774), Ezra (1776), Samuel (1779), and Hannah (1781).

Enoch Brooks had been the town’s assessor for four years before becoming its treasurer from 1780 until 1816, with only a couple of years off. He had also been a minuteman in 1775 and at some point a militia officer.

The Brookses named their new baby Enoch, after his father. (Another son, Stephen, would come in 1787.)

As little Enoch approached his fourth birthday, someone bought him a very special present: a copy of A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible, or, Select Passages in the Old and New Testaments, Represented with Emblematical Figures, for the Amusement of Youth.

On the first page someone wrote in large, clear letters:

Enoch Brooks’
Book
Princeton
March, 13th. 1789.

As shown on the interior page above, this book retold stories from the Bible in rebus form. Isaiah Thomas had issued it from his Worcester press in 1788, copying a volume published in London five years before. (The British edition had in turn been modeled on German picture Bibles, which went back to the late 1600s.)

To create his edition, Thomas had to collect or commission 500 small woodcuts—more than had appeared in any other American book up to that time. But he could reuse those illustrations in other publications. Thomas found children’s books blending entertainment and instruction to be a lucrative field in the new American republic. Ultimately he published more than a hundred titles, most copied like this one from British originals.

Only four copies of Thomas’s Curious Hieroglyphick Bible are known to have survived the little hands of their early owners. Enoch Brooks’s copy is now at the Library of Congress, digitized for all.

As for young Enoch Brooks himself, he grew up in Princeton, married Polly Gregory in 1816, and had children of his own. Like his father, he held town office. He died in 1859. His wife lived until the age of ninety-nine, dying in 1890. Their gravestones stand side by side in Princeton’s Meetinghouse Cemetery.

“The Government of this Colledge is very Strict”

Yesterday I quoted the start of John Adams’s description of his first visit to Princeton in August 1774, when he was on his way to the First Continental Congress.

Adams viewed the college’s Nassau Hall, the mansion of Judge Richard Stockton, the Rittenhouse orrery, and equipment for electrical experiments (which didn’t work in New Jersey’s humid August).

Adams’s account continues:

By this Time the Bell rang for Prayers. We went into the Chappell, the President [John Witherspoon, shown here] soon came in, and we attended. The Schollars sing as badly as the Presbyterians at New York. After Prayers the President attended Us to the Balcony of the Colledge, where We have a Prospect of an Horizon of about 80 Miles Diameter.

We went into the Presidents House, and drank a Glass of Wine. He is as high a Son of Liberty, as any Man in America. He says it is necessary that the Congress should raise Money and employ a Number of Writers in the Newspapers in England, to explain to the Public the American Plea, and remove the Prejudices of Britons. He says also We should recommend it to every Colony to form a Society for the Encouragement of Protestant Emigrants from the 3 Kingdoms [i.e., England, Scotland, and Ireland].

The Dr. waited on us to our Lodgings and took a Dish of Coffee. He is one of the Committee of Correspondence, and was upon the Provincial Congress for appointing Delegates from this Province to the general [i.e., Continental] Congress. Mr. William Livingston and He laboured he says to procure an Instruction that the Tea should not be paid for. Livingston he says is very sincere and very able in the public Cause, but a bad Speaker, tho a good Writer.

Here we saw a Mr. Hood a Lawyer of Brunswick, and a Mr. Jonathan Dickenson Serjeant, a young Lawyer of Prince town, both cordial Friends to American Liberty. In the Evening, young [Samuel] Whitwell, a student at this Colledge, Son of Mr. [Samuel] Whitwell at Boston to whom we brought a Letter, came to see us.

By the Account of Whitwell and [fellow student John] Pidgeon, the Government of this Colledge is very Strict, and the Schollars study very hard. The President says they are all Sons of Liberty.

It’s notable how many of the men Adams met in Princeton eventually became New Jersey delegates to the Continental Congress: college president Witherspoon, professor William Huston, and lawyer Sergeant, not to mention neighbor Stockton.

John Adams’s First Visit to Princeton

On 27 Aug 1775, John Adams visited the College of New Jersey in Princeton. He arrived in town about noon, checking into Jacob Hyer’s tavern at the “Sign of Hudibrass,” near the college’s Nassau Hall (shown here).

In his diary Adams recorded his impressions:

The Colledge is a stone building about as large as that at New York [i.e., what is now Columbia]. It stands upon rising Ground and so commands a Prospect of the Country.

After Dinner Mr. [John] Pidgeon a student of Nassau Hall, Son of Mr. [John] Pidgeon of Watertown [actually Newton] from whom we brought a Letter, took a Walk with us and shewed us the Seat of Mr. [Richard] Stockton a Lawyer in this Place and one of the Council, and one of the Trustees of the Colledge. As we returned we met Mr. Euston [William Houston], the Professor of Mathematicks and natural Philosophy, who kindly invited Us to his Chamber. We went.

The Colledge is conveniently constructed. Instead of Entries across the Building, the Entries are from End to End, and the Chambers are on each side of the Entries. There are such Entries one above another in every Story. Each Chamber has 3 Windows, two studies, with one Window in each, and one Window between the studies to enlighten the Chamber.

Mr. Euston then shewed us the Library. It is not large, but has some good Books. He then led us into the Apparatus. Here we saw a most beautifull Machine, an Orrery, or Planetarium, constructed by Mr. [David] Writtenhouse of Philadelphia. It exhibits allmost every Motion in the astronomical World. The Motions of the Sun and all the Planetts with all their Satellites. The Eclipses of the Sun and Moon &c. He shewed us another orrery, which exhibits the true Inclination of the orbit of each of the Planetts to the Plane of the Ecliptic.

He then shewed Us the electrical Apparatus, which is the most compleat and elegant that I have seen. He charged the Bottle and attempted an Experiment, but the State of the Air was not favourable.

For more about Rittenhouse’s orreries, see here.

TOMORROW: Adams’s college tour continues.

Orreries in a Time of War

Silas Deane was the first American diplomat in Paris during the Revolutionary War, trying to win support for the Continental Congress from the French government.

Since France was a monarchy, Deane decided to do some old-fashioned fawning, presenting influential people with special gifts from America.

On 28 Nov 1776 he wrote to the Congress’s Committee of Secret Correspondence, which was directing foreign policy:

I wish I had here one of the best saddle-horses of the American or Rhode Island breed. A present of that kind would be money well laid out with a certain personage. Other curious American productions at this time would, though trifles in themselves, be of consequence rightly timed and placed. I mentioned Mr. [David] Rittenhouse’s orrery in a former letter, and I think Arnold’s collection of insects, etc., but I submit any step of this kind to your mature judgment.

I haven’t come across that “former letter,” but a few days later, on 3 December, Deane wrote to John Jay with the same bright ideas—and an identification for that “certain personage”:

The queen is fond of parade, and I believe wishes a war, and is our friend. She loves riding on horseback. Could you send me a narrowhegansett horse or two; the present might be money exceedingly well laid out. Rittenhouse’s orrery, or Arnold’s collection of insects, a phaeton of American make and a pair of bay horses, a few barrels of apples, of walnuts, of butternuts, etc., would be great curiosities here, where everything American is gazed at, and where the American contest engages the attention of all ages, ranks, and sexes.

On 10 May 1777, John Adams wrote to his wife:

Upon a Hint, from one of our Commissioners abroad, We are looking about for American Curiosities, to send across the Atlantic as presents to the Ladies. Mr. Rittenhouse’s Planetarium, Mr. Arnolds Collection of Rareties in the Virtuoso Way, which I once saw at Norwalk in Connecticutt, Narragansett Pacing Mares, Mooses, Wood ducks, Flying Squirrells, Redwinged Black birds, Cramberries, and Rattlesnakes have all been thought of.

Is not this a pretty Employment for great Statesmen, as We think ourselves to be? Frivolous as it seems, it may be of some Consequence. Little Attentions have great Influence. I think, however, We ought to consult the Ladies upon this Point. Pray what is your Opinion?

I haven’t found Abigail Adams’s reply to the idea of shipping rattlesnakes and other curiosities to Queen Marie Antoinette.

The man behind “Arnold’s collection of insects” was Edward Arnold of Norwalk. On his way to the Congress in May 1775, Robert Treat Paine “Went to see Mr. Edward Arnold and saw his Museum a very large Collection of Birds, Insects, Fossils, Beasts, Fishes &c w’h he has been 9 yrs collecting.” Those curiosities did eventually make its way to Europe. According to Adams, Arnold sold his collection to William Tryon, royal governor of New York, who shipped it to London. Those specimens went into Sir Ashton Lever’s private museum.

It’s not clear to me how Deane expected the Congress to obtain a Rittenhouse orrery for Marie Antoinette. Was the Congress to buy or confiscate one of the devices from the college at Princeton or Philadelphia? [The one at Philadelphia appears above.] Or did he want the legislature to commission a new device from Rittenhouse, despite the going price of £300-400?

In January 1777, soon after Deane wrote, the British and Continental Armies battled over the town of Princeton, each occupying the college buildings in turn. The Congress’s envoy to Spain, Arthur Lee, told Deane and Benjamin Franklin that “The barbarity of these Sarracen Invaders went so far as to destroy the Philosophical Apparatus at Princeton College, with the Orrery constructed by Dr. Rittenhouse.” That report was exaggerated, but after that news Deane stopped asking about shipping over an American orrery for the queen.

TOMORROW: Boston’s own orrery.

Princeton in the Snow

I did some public history work last weekend: read in some books, participated in a meeting about this year’s Boston Massacre, drafted some Boston 1775 postings while sitting out the snow.

But I sure didn’t do what a bunch of dedicated reenactors and living historians did in central New Jersey. The Princeton Battlefield Society, Morven Museum & Garden, and Old Barracks Museum teamed with His Majesty’s 17th Regiment of Infantry, Charles Wilson Peale’s Company of Philadelphia Associators, historian Will Tatum, and other individuals to reenact the British army’s occupation of Princeton in 1776-77.

And then the snowstorm arrived. The same snow we got here in Massachusetts, but earlier. And my goodness, that was photogenic!

The image above appears in a Facebook gallery by Wilson Freeman of Drifting Focus Photography. I heartily recommend clicking through the whole gallery. If there are other online collections of photos from this event, please recommend them in the comments.

Here’s a report on the event from Kitty Calash. No fingers or toes were lost in the snow, it’s good to know. And the participants and local spectators seem to have enjoyed an unforgettable experience.

The Crucial Days After Trenton

The Battle of Trenton on 26 Dec 1776 was just the beginning of the Continental Army’s strike back against the British in central New Jersey after a very rough campaign season.

Revolutionary New Jersey, the Crossroads of the American Revolution, explains:

After ferrying their Hessian prisoners across the Delaware to Pennsylvania on December 26, Washington’s troops returned to New Jersey to engage the British at Trenton once again on January 2, 1777. Fighting along the Assunpink Creek ended at dusk. During the night, Washington led his troops along a back route to Princeton, where he attacked General Cornwallis’ rear guard on the morning of January 3, 1777.

While the second Battle of Trenton (also known as the Battle of the Assunpink) had no military outcome, it enabled another American victory, at Princeton. In the ten days succeeding Christmas, Washington had engaged the enemy in three battles and by winning two had restored belief in the possibility of ultimate victory.

The Ten Crucial Days organization offers videos, maps, and other information about those events. Its tours cover the Washington’s Crossing sites on both sides of the Delaware, the Old Barracks Museum in Trenton, and the Princeton Battlefield.

The small local publisher Knox Press, linked to Ten Crucial Days, offers David Price’s book Rescuing the Revolution: Unsung Patriot Heroes and the Ten Crucial Days of America’s War for Independence.

(Above is Boston’s own slice of Washington’s crossing, “The Passage of the Delaware” by Thomas Sully at the Museum of Fine Arts.)

Preservation Breakthrough in Princeton

Last week, just before I traveled to Princeton, there was a breakthrough in the long-running controversy over new construction on part of the Princeton Battlefield.

Of course, a lot of Princeton was involved that battle, especially if we include troop movements, but some portions of the area had never been built on.

One of those sections is owned by the Institute for Advanced Study, which famously provided a home for Albert Einstein after he had to leave Europe. The I.A.S. had contributed much of the land for the current Princeton Battlefield State Park, but was planning to build more housing for its faculty on adjoining property it retained.

The Princeton Battlefield Society was convinced that acreage was also historically significant. It opposed that plan, using nearly every tactic short of civil disobedience.

A number of public reports trace the controversy. In 2010 John Milner Associates assembled a report for the Princeton Battlefield Society with funding from the National Park Service’s battlefield preservation programs (P.D.F.). It argued that a road crucial to the battle, now lost, crossed that land.

The I.A.S. asked historians to review that argument. We can read the skeptical responses of Fred Anderson (P.D.F.) and Mark Peterson (P.D.F.).

The I.A.S. later commissioned an archeological review of the area in question by the Ottery Group, released in 2015 (P.D.F.). That reported that the area designated for housing contained some signs of the battle:

Hunter Research was successful at identifying 41 Revolutionary War artifacts from surface soils within the faculty housing area. Their finds include 15 lead balls in various sizes and conditions of deformity, 14 grape shot, lead flint wraps, a short bayonet fragment, a brass ramrod holder, a portion of a cartridge box, and other militaria.

I don’t know how that compares to other parts of the town. Nonetheless, that news seems to have changed the situation, though it may have taken a while for the parties to privately work through possibilities.

This month the parties announced a compromise:

Under the plan, the Civil War Trust, through its Campaign 1776 initiative to protect Revolutionary War battlefields, will purchase 14.85 acres of land from the Institute for $4 million, to be conveyed to the State of New Jersey as an addition to the existing Princeton Battlefield State Park. The acquisition includes approximately 2/3 of the Maxwell’s Field property, along with an additional 1.12-acre tract north of the property that has been identified by historians as part of the battlefield.

For the I.A.S., the housing will change from seven single-family homes to eight townhouses; that new plan still needs approval by a couple of local boards. Campaign 1776 is now raising money for the purchase.

Revisiting Richard Stockton in Princeton

Way back in 2008, I wrote a series of postings about Richard Stockton, who voted for and signed the Declaration of Independence as a Continental Congress delegate from New Jersey. Then, around the end of November 1776, the Crown forces captured him.

As I discussed at length, a legend grew up in the early 1800s, supplemented with imaginary details in subsequent decades, that the royal authorities mistreated Stockton in jail, ruined his health, and left him in poverty. In fact, eighteenth-century records show that Stockton spent a few weeks in captivity at most, left considerable property for his son, and was said by his son-in-law Dr. Benjamin Rush to have “fully recovered” from his detention before dying of an oral cancer.

In 2009, Todd Braisted shared a document confirming how briefly Stockton was in custody. (Look for Todd’s book about the war around occupied New York, The Grand Forage of 1778: The Revolutionary War’s Forgotten Campaign, coming early next year from Westholme.)

A while back I came across more evidence that Stockton had returned to regular business by mid-1777. College business, at least—he was a neighbor and trustee of Princeton College.

That source is the published edition of A Brief Narrative of the Ravages of the British and Hessians at Princeton in 1776-1777, an anonymous manuscript dated 18 Apr 1777. Toward the end the editor, Varnum Lansing Collins, wrote this footnote:

In his warmth [about British army damage to Princeton College and the Presbyterian Meeting House] the author loses sight of the fact that the first two of these edifices had suffered probably as much damage from the American soldiery as from the British and Hessian. The church had been used by both armies. . . .

The minutes of the Trustees of the College of New Jersey for September, 1776, record the fact that Dr. [John] Witherspoon was to move in Congress “that troops shall not hereafter be quartered in the College.” And three months to a day after our unknown author penned his last paragraph [dated 18 Apr 1777], Dr. Witherspoon, Dr. Elihu Spencer and Richard Stockton, Esq., a committee from the Board of Trustees of the College, presented a petition to Congress praying that no Continental troops be allowed hereafter to enter the College or to use it as a barracks.

The petition recites that every party of provincials marching through Princeton takes possession of the building, and partly through wantonness and partly under pretence of not being supplied with firewood “are daily committing the greatest ravages upon the Building, in breaking up the floors, and burning every piece of wood they can cut out of it.”

Collins reported that the petition was in the manuscripts of the Continental Congress.

Thus, within half a year of his release from supposedly torturous conditions under the British army, Stockton was signing a complaint about damage done by the Continental Army.

Princeton Battle Lecture in Arlington, Va., 4 Sept.

On Wednesday, 4 September, the the American Revolution Round Table of the District of Columbia will host an illustrated lecture by Wade P. Catts titled “As great a piece of Generalship as ever was performed: Reinterpretation of the Battle of Princeton, 3 January 1777.”

The group’s announcement says:

This illustrated lecture will present new information and in some cases, reinterpretation, of the battle of Princeton. The culminating battle of the “Ten Crucial Days,” Princeton was a remarkable military maneuver that had far-reaching results for the American cause, and a major setback for the Crown. Undertaken by the Princeton Battlefield Society and funded by a grant from the American Battlefield Protection Program, the recently completed study utilizes historical records, maps, topography, GIS, and archeology to examine the battlefield.

Catts is historic preservation consultant based in Pennsylvania who served the Princeton project as a historical archeologist. He’s worked on many other Revolutionary War sites as well.

“Piece of generalship” was a popular eighteenth-century expression for what we’d now call a clever strategy. On 7 Jan 1777, Stephen Moylan, volunteering as one of Gen. George Washington’s aides after a short, terrible tenure as quartermaster general, wrote to Robert Morris describing the battle:

By Heavens, it was the best piece of generalship I ever read or heard of. An enemy, within musket shot of us [at Trenton], determined, and only waiting for daylight, to make a vigourous attack. We stole a march, got to Princeton, defeated, and almost totally ruined, three of the best regiments in the British service; made all their schemes upon Philadelphia, for this season, abortive; put them into such a consternation, that if we only had five hundred fresh men, there is very little doubt but we should have destroyed all their stores and baggage, at Brunswick, of course, oblige them to leave the Jerseys, (this they must do)…

The British didn’t leave New Jersey, but they withdrew to the north of the state for the rest of the winter. The Trenton and Princeton victories cheered American Patriots, especially after the bigger British victories around New York, and helped the new republic last into the new year.

The ARRT of DC meets at the Fort Myer Officers Club in Arlington, Virginia, four times a year. See the website for more information on attending or joining. In November, the group will welcome Don N. Hagist, author of British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution, 1775-1781.

A Remarkable Instance

Early last week I shared some predictions about John Hancock and Dr. Joseph Warren that didn’t turn out to be that far-sighted since there’s no evidence they were written before the late 1800s.

This post is about another forecast of significant activity by a man who came to prominence in the American Revolution—in this case George Washington.

On 17 Aug 1755, the Rev. Samuel Davies addressed a company of Virginia troops. It was a little more than a month after Native and French soldiers had devastated the expedition of Gen. Edward Braddock in the Pennsylvania wilderness. Virginians were anticipating a longer, bigger campaign, and Davis titled his sermon “Religion and Patriotism the Constituents of a Good Soldier.”

The minister had that sermon published the next year in Philadelphia, and then a London printer put out an edition as well. Here’s the title page of the London printing:

Davies told the new soldiers before him:

Our Continent is like to become the Seat of War; and we, for the future (till the sundry European Nations that have planted Colonies in it, have fixed their Boundaries by the Sword) have no other Way left to defend our Rights and Privileges. And has God been pleased to diffuse some Sparks of this Martial Fire through our Country? I hope he has: And though it has been almost extinguished by so long a Peace [Britain hadn’t been at war against France since 1748, or a whole seven years], and a Deluge of Luxury and Pleasure, now I hope it begins to kindle: And may I not produce you my Brethren, who are engaged in this Expedition, as Instances of it?

Davies meant that rhetorical question to inspire his audience. In the printed version he added a footnote to that passage, as shown on page 12.

As a remarkable Instance of this, I may point out to the Public that heroic Youth Col. Washington, whom I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved in so signal a Manner, for some important Service to his Country.

Davies was referring to how Washington had survived Braddock’s defeat without being killed or even wounded. The day before he spoke, Gov. Robert Dinwiddie had commissioned the ambitious young planter as colonel in charge of all the Virginia troops. By the time Davies published his sermon, he knew that he was recruiting men who would fight under Washington.

Col. Washington stepped down from his military post at the end of 1758. Davies became president of the college at Princeton the next year, and then died in 1761 (five weeks after delivering a New Year’s sermon with the repeated refrain, “This year you may die…”). It’s not clear whether Davies considered that Washington had by then rendered “some important Service to his Country” worthy of his providential preservation.

Washington must have seen this sermon circulating in Virginia. He was probably flattered by it, perhaps intimidated. In late 1777, a London admirer sent him another copy. Davies’s prediction was a lot to live up to, especially in that gloomy season.

One last note: in 1791 Davies’s son introduced himself to President Washington by writing: “I am the Son of a Prophet, whose prediction with respect to yourself hath been remarkably verified—I am much, very much in want of an office of profit…”