Historical Diaries Panel at Plymouth, 13 May

On Tuesday, 13 May, I’ll be at the Plymouth Public Library as part of a panel discussion on using diaries in historical research. This event will run from 7:00 to 8:30 P.M. in the Otto Fehlow Meeting Room, and is free and open to the public.

The other panelists will be Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, author of One Colonial Woman’s World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit, and Ondine Le Blanc, Director of Publications at the Massachusetts Historical Society and thus one of the people behind the publication of Ellen Coolidge’s travel diary.

I’ll describe my work on boys’ diaries in the Revolutionary period, including those of John Quincy Adams, Peter Thacher, and Quincy Thaxter. I also plan to share secrets from the diary of John Rowe.

Donna Curtin, Executive Director of the Plymouth Antiquarian Society, will moderate the discussion and question session to follow.

As long as I’m talking a bit about me, here are links to a couple of articles that appeared on the web last week:

• I’m continuing to review episodes of the Turn television series for Den of Geek, and also wrote a profile of John Graves Simcoe, the real British officer behind [far behind—almost invisible in the distance behind] one of that show’s main villains. For more on Simcoe, check out Todd Braisted’s terrific article on Rachel Smith’s excellent new blog, Turn to a Historian.
• At the Journal of the American Revolution, Ray Raphael and I teamed up to write a pair of articles about the figure of a musket-toting woman shown above. Can A.P. U.S. History test-takers fairly deduce anything about that image without context? And where did it originate?

Nonfiction Recommendations for Kids

Earlier this month a Boston 1775 reader asked me if I had any recommendations for a boy who wanted to learn more about the life of a typical New England boy of the Revolutionary period—i.e., a boy growing up on a farm.

The most authentic, unvarnished source that I could think of is a manuscript held at the Massachusetts Historical Society: the diary of Quincy Thaxter of Hingham. It’s little more than a long list of chores and (when it was too rainy for farmwork) visits to school. Quincy’s handwriting, spelling, and punctuation (or lack thereof) suggest that he could have benefited from more hours in school. Here are some typical entries.

15 June 1774: “my self Jacob went to trai lect M lectter Mr Gay preached the Sermon Uncle Smith the prayer Mr Gays text in axts the 12 Chapter 20 verse my self went training and Jacob up in the plain in the aftenoon Catons pasten Captins Ba Barker Captin Lincoln Captin Cushing Captin Whittin Captin Lads Lastrop train.”

16 June: “myself Went to school all the day to Jacob weaded the loar Garding in the forenoon and in the aftenoon Cato and Jacob hoed behind the house after Sch School was done Fathe Fa FATHER and my self went dowon to the Worldend to see the cattle an get some strawberries.”

17 June: “my self Went to school all the day Jacob Worked over to the shop all the day Cato staid at home and thrased out corne all the day fowl fowl Weater all the day.”

But since that’s unpublished and hard to read even you have a copy, I recommended Diary of an Early American Boy: Noah Blake, 1805, filled out and illustrated by Eric Sloane (1905-1985). This comes from the generation after the Revolution, of course, but farm life hadn’t changed that much. Sloane used his talents as a draftsman and his knowledge of farming technology of the period to fill out Blake’s terse record of a few months—also mostly a litany of chores.

I’ve long wondered whether Diary of an Early American Boy was based on a real diary, as Sloane described. I’m pleased to report that, with enough Googling, I found a footnote in another book saying the manuscript is in the collection of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield, Massachusetts.

For folks more interested in Eric Sloane, his work forms part of the Sloane Stanley Museum in Kent, Connecticut.

And for more non-fiction books on the American Revolution written expressly for young readers, here’s a list of recommended titles for different grade levels from The Horn Book magazine. I’ve read some of these, and praised Marc Aronson’s The Real Revolution a while back.

Colonial Boston Vocabulary: "loar Garding"

Quincy Thaxter was born in Hingham in 1762, the son of a gentleman farmer. His older brother John went to Harvard and in August 1774 headed to Braintree to learn the law from John Adams. Since Adams soon set off for the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia and Patriot protests closed the Massachusetts court system, John Thaxter had no way to see the law in action. He ended up working as John Quincy Adams's tutor—a not insignificant contribution to American history.

Back home in Hingham, twelve-year-old Quincy Thaxter was spending most of his days going to school and working on the family farm. We know that because he was also keeping a diary, which the family seems to have saved simply because it included the fateful day of 19 Apr 1775 ("in the forenoon Civil War begun"). That document is now at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Quincy had, let's say, an unorthodox writing style. For a number of months after he started the diary he referred to himself as "my Self," not "I." He crossed out a lot of words halfway through. Nearly every entry is punctuated as a single sentence no matter how many subjects and verbs it has. And his spelling is often phonetic, though only in the sense that "the brown heffar carved" means that the brown heifer had a calf. (And compounding those oddities are the challenges of deciphering any handwritten document, so "heffar" might just as well be "hessan".)

I had particular difficulty deciphering something Quincy wrote on 16 June 1774:

myself Went to school all the day to Jacob weaded the loar Garding in the forenoon and in the aftenoon Cato and Jacob hoed behind the house after Sch School was done Fathe Fa FATHER and my self went dowon to the Worldend to see the cattle an get some strawberries.

What was this "loar" that Quincy was "Garding"? Or was the "loar" something that Jacob "weaded" while Quincy did something called "Garding" that morning? No, Quincy was at school all day until he went with his father to "Worldend," a term that shows up repeatedly in the diary as part of the family farm. Perhaps "loar" and "Garding" are archaic agricultural terms, I thought; but, not being a farmer or even a gardener, I'd never recognize them.

Finally I decided to assume Quincy Thaxter was the worst speller in the world, but was doing his best to spell out a common phrase...

loar Garding
lo-ar Gardin'
lower garden!