“The Rout taken by Capts Malcom and Holmes, from Quebec”

Yesterday’s posting brought John Malcom back to Boston in August 1760 after more than eight months as a prisoner of war in French Canada.

On 24 November, the Boston Evening-Post reported that “Capt. Malcom…arrived here last week from Ireland.” That was probably John’s younger brother, Daniel Malcom, but there’s just enough time for John to have made that round trip as a way to get his sea legs back, so I can’t say for certain.

It looks more likely that John returned to trading with a voyage to a different port: Québec!

One might think he’d had enough of that region. But viewed another way, it made sense for John Malcom to start sailing to the British Empire’s new city. In his months in Canada, he probably learned the language, observed the culture, made some contacts.

That first voyage turned out to be harder than he planned. According to the 16 Feb 1761 Boston Evening-Post, Malcom’s sloop Wilmot got iced in on the St. Lawrence River, along with a score of other ships.

Malcom and John Holmes, master of the Sally out of Philadelphia, decided to return by land.

The same issue of the Evening-Post explained:

On the 8th of January they left Quebec in a Sleigh, in company with 12 other Sleighs having Goods for Montreal, and travel’d on a good Road to Trois Rivieres: From thence they went up the River on the Ice, and passing over Sorrell, arrived at Montreal in 2 Days:—

After tarrying there 2 Days they proceeded in their Sleigh to Chamble, St. John’s and Isle au Noix, which they reached in 3 Days more: During this Time the Season was moderate for Winter.—

From the Isle au Noix they travel’d 45 Mile on Lake Champlain in one Day, but the next Morning after going some Miles, finding the Ice grow weak, they left their Sleigh, and went ashore with their Horse and Baggage on the South-East Side of the Lake; it being bad Travelling in the Woods, it was 5 Days and as many Nights before they arrived at Crown Point.—

On their Way they met an Officer with Dispatches for the Governors of Montreal and Quebec; with Accounts of the Death of his late Majesty King George the Second, & of the Accession of his present Majesty King George the Third to the British Throne.—

At Crown Point they tarried one Day, and having procured another Sleigh, they proceeded to Ticonderoga, and over Lake George to Fort George: Thence proceeded to Fort Edward, but the Road not being broke they travelled with only their Horse:—

From Fort Edward they went in a Sleigh to Albany: From whence they came to Town by Land on Monday last the 9th of February.

The captains brought news that Maj. Robert Rogers was on his way to Detroit, another new British possession. That information came from Capt. Jonathan Brewer and other officers in the rangers.

When Malcom and Holmes made this trip, they were traversing a route that just a couple of years earlier had crossed the border between two rival empires. I think that was why the Fleets devoted so much of their newspaper to this account: for their readers, the possibility of traveling or shipping goods over land to Montreal and Quebec really was news.

TOMORROW: John Malcom makes his move.

“Capt. John Malcom arrived here in 10 Days from Louisbourg”

On 26 July 1758, the French inside Louisbourg surrendered to a besieging British force led by Gen. Jeffery Amherst.

John Malcom may have been part of the British military in this campaign rather than the one in 1745. In any event, he quickly became a link between that new addition to the British Empire and Boston.

On 15 Jan 1759 the Boston Gazette told readers:

Last Saturday Night Capt. John Malcom arrived here in 10 Days from Louisbourg, who informs us, That the Day he came out he met his Majesty’s Ship Arundel commanded by Capt. Martin [actually Richard Matthews], who desired of him a Pilot that was acquainted with the Harbour of Louisbourg, which he put on board; Capt. Martin inform’d him he had a large Quantity of Money on board for the Garrison, and a Packet:

In Capt. Malcom came Passengers Capt. [Robert] Rogers of the Rangers, Capt. Bennet of the Brig Sally belonging to Philadelphia, lately cast away there.

Capt. Malcom also informs, That he saw a large Ship to the Eastward of the Arundel, which he suppos’d to be one of the Fleet that came out with her.

Meanwhile, younger brother Daniel Malcom was also at sea, according to the 19 February Boston Gazette:

Late last Night Captain Parrot arrived here in 18 Days from South-Carolina, in whom came Capt. Malcom of this Town, who sail’d from Falmouth 8 Weeks ago, in the Earl of Leicester Packet, Capt. Morris, bound to New-York; but meeting with Captain Parrot last Monday, bound hither, he went on board him. . . .

Capt. Malcom brought no English Prints, as he left the Packet in a hurry, which he imagines arriv’d at New-York last Wednesday.

By this time, it appears, the Boston Gazette printers expected readers to know “Capt. Malcom of this Town” was Daniel, returning from England.

The 28 May Boston Evening-Post reported:

Friday last arrived here Capt. Malcom in 9 Days from Louisbourg, and informs, That a Snow had arrived there from Admiral [Philip] Durell, with Advice that the Ice coming down in such great Quantities he was not able to get above half Way up to Gaspey, and before the Snow left him was drove down again almost to the Mouth of the River, but that the Admiral intended to make another Attempt to get up.—

That last Wednesday se’nnight his Majesty’s Ship Northumberland of 70 Guns, Lord Colvill, arrived there in 37 Days from England; and that the next Day Admiral [Charles] Saunders came in with 12 Sail of the Line from Halifax:

Capt. Malcom also informed, that off Caparouse Bay he spoke with the Nightingale Frigate, having under her Convoy 12 Transports from New-York, with Col. [Simon] Fraser’s Highland Regiment on board, also bound to Louisbourg: And that prodigious large Quantities of Ice were still floating about near the Harbour of Louisbourg.

This was still within the “Little Ice Age.”

It’s striking how much information Malcom and the printers were passing on in a time of war. No “Loose lips sink ships” concern there! Instead, the newspapers were telling the world where the British military payroll was, and when Adm. Durell might make into the St. Lawrence River in time to support Gen. James Wolfe’s push on Québec.

I think that reflects something Hannah Tucker described in a 2018 seminar in the context of commercial shipping, as I summarized:

the uncertainty of Atlantic crossings, the difficulty of communication, and merchants’ and ship owners’ inability to supervise sea captains closely meant that they preferred an open information system to a closed one. It was in nearly everyone’s interest to know about other people’s business. If you tried to keep information within your firm, you could easily find yourself cut off with no information at all.

The same culture might have prevailed in a time of war. After all, there was little chance that a French agent could pick up information from a Boston newspaper and transmit it in time to use that advantage. So why not gossip about every ship you saw at sea? That information could actually be helpful to your side.

TOMORROW: But the empires were still at war.

The Speakman Chronicles, or, That Escalated Quickly

Last month, I said I didn’t know whom Christian Barnes was referring to when she wrote in June 1770 about “a young gentleman who has formilly headed the mob in Boston and now resides” in Marlborough.

I’ve since figured out who that young man is. But I’ll make a running start at him, beginning at the turn of the eighteenth century.

William Speakman (c. 1685-1748) was a baker from England, possibly Lancashire, who moved to Boston in the early 1700s. The town was growing, and he prospered. On his death the Boston Evening-Post said Speakman was “one of the rarest Instances of Industry and Diligence, that perhaps ever was in the Country.”

Speakman was also a pillar of the local Anglican church. He owned the land that the first Trinity Church (shown above) was built on and served as one of its first wardens. But he grew so wealthy that by the end of his life he was back at King’s Chapel, which had become the upper-class Anglican congregation.

William Speakman married Hannah Hackerel (spelled various ways) in 1719, and they had three children who grew to adulthood:

• Thomas, born in 1722, who who went off to Harvard College in the late 1730s (a bit later than typical).
• Hannah, born in 1725, who married merchant John Rowe.
• Susannah, born in 1727, who married merchant Ralph Inman.

Clearly the Speakmans were rising in the world, and forging connections with other Anglican families.

Then Thomas fell off the collegiate track. He left Harvard in March 1740. When his classmates were about to graduate two years later, Thomas asked the college if he could get a diploma, too. The authorities decided “it would be neither agreeable to the Laws of this Society, nor for the Honour and Interest thereof.”

By then Thomas had married and become a father—hopefully in that order. We don’t have a date for his marriage to Mary Warner, but their first child, William, arrived in September 1740. So Mary was already well into her pregnancy when Thomas left college.

Mary was a daughter of Gilbert Warner, an Anglican distiller. The newlyweds’ fathers were both investors in the settlement of New Boston, New Hampshire. Mary’s father gave them property on Essex Street in Boston’s South End.

Thomas Speakman went into business in Boston. His father died in 1748, leaving a considerable estate, including a distillery in the South End. Mary’s father died in 1753, leaving the Speakmans more. They acquired substantial property in Marlborough. By this time Thomas and Mary had two sons and three daughters.

In 1755, Thomas Speakman volunteered to be a captain in a military force that Gov. William Shirley was assembling to fight the French. He served at first in Nova Scotia in the period when the British expelled thousands of French colonists. At the end of 1756 Speakman marched west to join in the fighting along Lake George and Lake Champlain.

Speakman and his company were assigned to the corps of rangers under Maj. Robert Rogers. On 17 Jan 1757, Speakman (whom Rogers referred to in his journal as “Spikeman”) joined in a “march on the ice down Lake George.” Also on this mission were Lt. John Stark and a gentleman volunteer with the 44th Regiment named Baker. After the major sent some injured soldiers back to Fort William Henry, there were 74 men in all.

By 21 January, Rogers wrote, the expedition was camped “about mid-way between Crown Point and Ticonderoga.” They spotted some sleds moving between the forts and captured seven prisoners, only to learn there were hundreds of French soldiers in the two posts and more coming. And some of the sled-men had gotten away, so they were no doubt warning their comrades of enemy rangers nearby. “I concluded it best to return,” Rogers wrote.

At about two o’clock that afternoon, as the British made their way through a small valley “in single file,” the enemy ambushed them from a hilltop. Two men were killed instantly, several more wounded. Rogers ordered his men back to another hill. In the withdrawal, he wrote, “We were closely pursued, and Capt. Spikeman, with several of the party, were killed, and others made prisoners.”

However, in early 1760 a young soldier named Thomas Brown returned to Charlestown from captivity and told a more grisly story. According to him, Speakman, the volunteer named Baker, and he were “all very badly wounded” and left behind as Rogers led the rest of the force away that night under darkness.

The three men built a fire on the snowy ground and talked about surrendering. Before they could, an “Indian came to Capt. Speakman, who was not able to resist, and stripp’d and scalp’d him alive.” Baker tried to kill himself with a knife, but the Native soldier stopped him and dragged him away. Only Brown had managed to hide in the woods.

Left for dead, Speakman called out to Brown “to give him a Tomahawk, that he might put an end to his life!” Brown urged the captain instead to pray for God’s mercy. “He desired me to let his Wife know (if I lived to get home) the dreadful Death he died.”

The next morning, Natives found Brown but treated his wounds and turned him over to the French. He recalled how they took him to see “Captain Speakman, who was laying in the place I left him; they had cut off his Head & fix’d it on a Pole.”

Maj. Rogers made it back to Fort William Henry on 23 January with 54 men. He had been shot himself; the New Hampshire soldier John Shute recalled seeing “one of the Rangers cutting off Rogers’ cue [queue] to stop the hole in his wrist.” Lt. Stark was given temporary command of Speakman’s company.

Capt. James Abercrombie, aide de camp to Gen. James Abercrombie [yes, I know], responded to Rogers’s report on the mission by writing, “I am heartily sorry for Spikeman…, who I imagined would have turned out well, as likewise for the men you have lost; but it is impossible to play at bowls without meeting with rubs.”

TOMORROW: Thomas Speakman’s wife and sons.

Adams on Rogers on Bernard on Adams

On 21 Sept 1775, John Adams met Robert Rogers, the famous army ranger from the French and Indian War.

After that war, Rogers fought in the British war against Pontiac. Then he tried governing a far west territory, only to get into a feud with Gen. Thomas Gage and rack up a lot of debts. Rogers spent the early 1770s in London—some of that time in debtor’s prison. He returned to North America after the new war broke out.

On that Thursday in September, the veteran was in Philadelphia, chatting with members of the Continental Congress. Here’s how Adams recorded their conversation:

The famous Partisan Major Rogers came to our Lodgings to make Us a Visit. He has been in Prison—discharged by some insolvent or bankrupt Act.

He thinks We shall have hot Work, next Spring. He told me an old half Pay Officer, such as himself, would sell well next Spring. And when he went away, he said to S[amuel]. A[dams]. and me, if you want me, next Spring for any Service, you know where I am, send for me. I am to be sold.—

He says the Scotch Men at home, say d——n that Adams and [Thomas] Cushing. We must have their Heads, &c. [Francis] Bernard used to d——n that Adams—every dip of his Pen stung like an horned Snake, &c.

[Charles] Paxton made his Will in favour of Ld. Townsend, and by that Maneuvre got himself made a Commissioner [of Customs]. There was a great deal of Beauty in that Stroke of Policy. We must laugh at such sublime Strokes of Politicks, &c. &c. &c.

Many authors have since repeated that Gov. Bernard said that “every dip of [Samuel Adams’s] Pen stung like an horned Snake.” But was Rogers a reliable source? There are a few reasons to think not.

Rogers was offering his military services at a price. That means he had good reason to butter up the Massachusetts delegates with flattery or news they wanted to hear. The idea of “the Scotch Men at home” fit into Whig suspicions that Lord Bute (long retired) was pulling strings in the government, for instance. The report that Commissioner Paxton had bought his way into his job was delicious gossip. And what Adams wouldn’t want to know he’d gotten under the skin of Gov. Bernard?

What’s more, Rogers’s offer may not have been sincere. Within a few months, American politicians decided that he was actually gathering information for the British. When the major visited Cambridge, Gen. George Washington declined to meet with him. Back in Philadelphia, the Congress ordered Rogers locked up. If he didn’t already support the Crown, that certainly cemented him as a Loyalist. He escaped, made his way to New York, and tricked Nathan Hale into revealing that he was on a secret mission. If Rogers was trying to wheedle his way into the Adamses’ trust as a British operative, he’d have even more reason to lie to them.

Finally, Rogers may have been unreliable for everyone by this point because of his drinking. Though he took command of the Queen’s Rangers in August 1776, he was removed in early 1777 and never achieved anything meaningful during the war.

Gov. Bernard definitely didn’t like Samuel Adams and his writing. But he never used a snake metaphor for that writing or anything else in his correspondence between 1759 and 1769, as published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. In fact, as an aristocratic gentleman and government authority, Bernard generally tried to shrug off the “stings” of his opponents’ rhetoric.

Thus, while it’s possible Bernard really did liken Samuel Adams’s pen to a snake’s tooth, I think it’s safer to write that Maj. Rogers quoted him as saying so.

Fake News from Overseas in 1777

On 17 June 1777, the young Rev. John Eliot wrote from Boston to his New Hampshire friend and colleague, the Rev. Jeremy Belknap.

Eliot’s letter discussed, among other topics, foreign press coverage of the ongoing Revolution:

We have here among us some Irish Magazines which Capt [Samuel] Smedly took lately [in a naval capture]. I wish you could see them. There is plenty of matter edifying & entertaining. Your brother & I think them far beyond any thing of the kind that we have seen. But ye reason of my mentioning them at this time is to let you know how they speak of our politicians & hero’s. They appear to be friend[s] to America & say much in our praise; but they seem to be very much mistaken in ye Characters, or else speak contrary, from their Hibernian dialect.

The frontispiece is the President of our Continental Congress [John Hancock]. It is said he is a person of surprising eloquence, a fine writer, argumentative & cool, as may be seen in the addresses of the Congress, all which were penned by him; that he hath lately married one of the most accomplished ladies on the continent, who has bro’t him a great addition to his paternal fortune. So much for him.

Okay, to get the joke you really had to be there—in Revolutionary Boston. Because Eliot, Belknap, and all the other learned young gentlemen in their circle knew that Hancock was no writer. The biggest piece of eloquence in his name was his Massacre oration of 1774, which the Rev. Samuel Cooper and others had written for him. As chairman of the Congress, Hancock simply signed what other delegates wrote. Furthermore, his father had left no fortune (he inherited from an uncle), and his wife was from the poorer branch of the Quincy family.

Likewise:

Mr S[amuel]. Adams is a gentleman who hath sacrificed an immense fortune in the service of his country. He is an orator likewise, & there is a famous oration upon the independance of America, which, it is said, he delivered at Philadelphia, January, 1776, but which was never seen in America before.

Adams never had “an immense fortune,” and his moderate inheritance was gone long before the Revolutionary turmoil. He also wasn’t a great public speaker because of a tremor that could affect his throat; I discussed that putative oration last month.

General [George] Washington, they say, was first a private in the King’s Guards, & fought against the Rebels in [the Jacobite uprising of] 1745. Afterwards he went to America, & was promoted till he rose to be the accomplished gentleman the world now views him.

We all know Washington was born in Virginia, never went to Britain, never served in the regular British army, and never was a private past the age of eighteen.

Old [Israel] Putnam was a long time in the service of the King of Prussia.

Putnam had seen military action from Fort Detroit to Cuba, but never under the Prussian king.

In short, if you had nothing to judge from but the Characters, you would suppose it to be entirely burlesque. But from the whole of the Magazine you must impute it to ignorance. It is my own opinion that some Irishmen set down & conjectured what might be the characters of the American worthies, & dealt them out according to his own sentiments.

The most surprising circumstance is that they suppose Major [Robert] Rogers is a general in our army, & that he left the British service upon the disgust he took at his treatment some years ago. After giving his general character, they enlarge upon the ingratitude of Britain in treating such men as he, [Charles] Lee, [Richard] Montgomery, &c., in such a manner.

At the start of the war Rogers concealed his loyalties, but by 1777 Americans knew he was back with the British. Evidently the editors of this Irish magazine didn’t.

Finally, Eliot closed with a little personal news:

These things have diverted me during my confinement, which has been off & on these three weeks, owing to lameness. I was so terribly galled by a hard trotting horse sometimes that I could scarcely walk for a week, & when I did walk it was in such a manner that I was obliged to tie a handkerchief round my leg to save appearances. The next week a bad sore came in that very place where the hankerchief was tied. And last night, when my leg had got pretty well, I sprained my knee, & am unable to stir out of my chair today, & am in great pain. It would divert you to see me, however.

The picture above is a portrait of Gen. Washington, not taken from life at all but published in Germany during the war to satisfy public interest, courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Brumwell on Washington in Cambridge, 18 Oct.

At 6:00 P.M. on Friday, 18 October, Stephen Brumwell, author of George Washington: Gentleman Warrior, may speak at the Cambridge estate that was Gen. Washington’s headquarters from July 1775 to April 1776.

Brumwell is a British military historian who lives in the Netherlands. His earlier books include Redcoats, on British soldiers in the French and Indian War; White Devil, about Robert Rogers; and Paths of Glory, about Gen. James Wolfe.

Brumwell’s study of Washington focuses on his military career in the 1750s and how he returned to that work in his forties as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. It emphasizes how Washington looked to British models of both genteel behavior and military organization. Earlier this year Brumwell won the Washington Book Prize from Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and Mount Vernon.

I wrote that Brumwell may speak on Friday because that venue, Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, is part of the National Park Service. If the House Republican caucus can agree to fund our federal government again, then Brumwell’s talk and book-signing will go ahead as planned. If not, then the site will remain closed and its staff furloughed. Call 617-876-4491 to confirm that the event will take place as scheduled and to reserve a seat.

Brumwell is also scheduled to speak at Old South Meeting House on the preceding night starting at 6:30. That building is a local non-profit, not affected directly by the national gridlock, so it remains open. Both talks are free.

250 Years After Pontiac’s (and Others’) War

On 4-5 April, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia will host a conference titled “The War Called Pontiac’s, 1763-2013.” As you can see, this year marks the 250th anniversary of that frontier conflict, which is usually overshadowed by the French & Indian War.

The conference description says:

The 250th anniversary of what has long been known as “Pontiac’s War” offers scholars an opportunity to reexamine the conflict and its impact on the history of North America. The role of the Odowa leader Pontiac and the widespread scope and the varying aims of other Native participants in the conflicts of the mid-1760s defy easy categorization, a problem well summed up by historian Francis Jennings’s phrase, “The War Called ‘Pontiac’s.’”

Many contemporary British observers and combatants sought some conceptual clarity by casting the blame on French-inspired treachery. Many Native people located the treachery among the British. In the mid-nineteenth-century, Francis Parkman constructed an epic tale of a single charismatic Indian leader and the last gasp of a doomed people. More recent work offers a much more complex interpretation of an inter-Native movement grounded in Native spirituality and aiming to regain status as well as land for its Native participants in the new geopolitical world after the Seven Years War.

Among commanders in the siege of Boston, Gen. Thomas Gage oversaw the British army in North America in the latter part of this war, and Israel Putnam was part of the force recruited by Robert Rogers to reinforce Fort Detroit. Among the political legacies of the war was the British government’s conviction that enforcing the Proclamation Line of 1763 and maintaining significant troops in North America were both necessary for keeping the peace, even after that year’s victory over the French Empire. Both policies would, of course, lead to discontent in the Atlantic colonies.

This conference will consist mainly of discussions of pre-circulated (and hopefully pre-read) papers rather than lectures. It’s free and open to the public, but to gain access to those papers online attendees have to register at the conference website.

“A Negro servant Man, belonging to Major Robert Rogers”

There’s an old joke in academic science that the authors of a paper believe the theory it puts forward but know the data is really crap. In contrast, all their colleagues believe the data and think the theory is crap.

I was reminded of that knee-slapper while reading the third of the three eighteenth-century papers in the 2012 issue of the Massachusetts Historical Review: Antonio T. Bly’s “A Prince Among Pretending Free Men: Runaway Slaves in Colonial New England Revisited.”

Prof. Bly recently published a compendium of newspaper advertisements titled Escaping Bondage: A Documentary History of Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century New England. That’s part of a larger project he calls the Inter-Colonial Runaway Slave Database, based on about 5,000 ads printed from Massachusetts to South Carolina between 1700 and 1789.

His paper includes some of the data from that study, and the findings are quite interesting. He can chart when people were most likely to flee slavery in Massachusetts, peaking in summer and in their twenties. He can document the rise of “Country born” and “Mulatto” escapees in the second half of the century. He can show that runaways in Massachusetts were more likely to be described as speaking English well than people in Pennsylvania, and far more than people in Virginia and South Carolina. Many more female escapees appeared in ads from South Carolina. There was a spike in Pennsylvania ads relative to the enslaved population during the 1760s.

But this paper starts with the nominal goal of deducing more about a particular man who escaped from New Hampshire in 1760, an effort that gets off on the wrong foot and never recovers. That man is described in a notice in the 28 Apr 1760 Boston Post-Boy signed by James Rogers which began like this:

RAN-away from the Widow Rogers of Rumford, in New-Hampshire, about a Month ago, a Negro servant Man, belonging to Major Robert Rogers, named Prince, of a middling Stature, about 30 Years of Age, has had the Small-Pox, looks very serious and grave, and pretends to a great deal of Religion.—

Since his Departure, he has sold most of his Cloaths, and now is but meanly dressed; he was in the Service the last Year, and has offer’d to inlist sundry Times, pretending himself to be a Free-man: He was lately taken up, but by his insinuating Discourse made his Escape again.

There’s a lot to be picked out there, but I think the paper sails right past the crucial starting-point. Bly writes of Prince, “In all likelihood, he fought alongside his master, who had been an officer in the militia. Had he seen Major Rogers fall in battle?”

No, he hadn’t, because Maj. Robert Rogers of New Hampshire was the founder of the famous Rogers’ Rangers, later the captor of Nathan Hale and a Loyalist exile until his death in 1795. His life is quite well documented. At the time this advertisement was placed, Maj. Rogers was commanding soldiers at Crown Point, New York, and his younger brother James, a captain, was recruiting more men. That’s why, even though the major was Prince’s master, his relatives were handling the search for him.

It might be possible to find the will of Rogers’s father James to determine if he had owned Prince years before. It does seem likely that Prince accompanied Rogers in the previous year when the major’s men destroyed the Abenaki town of St. Francis. We also know that Rogers and his eventually estranged wife Elizabeth had enslaved servants when they lived in Portsmouth in the later 1760s, including a youth captured at St. Francis.

We even have another data point about Prince. In the 22 Nov 1762 Boston Post-Boy James Rogers ran another ad:

RAN away from me the Subscriber at Londonderry, in the Province of New Hampshire, on the 18th of September, a Negro Man Servant named Prince about 40 Years of Age, about 5 feet 5 inches high, speaks good English, had on when he went away a green Coat, blue plush Breeches, diaper Jacket, several pair of thread Stockings with him; he looks very serious and grave, and pretends to be very religious: He is the property of Major Rogers and has been several Years to the Westward, and pretends to be free.

Aside from aging ten years in two, this appears to be exactly the same man, returned and gone again. (There’s supplemental data about black soldiers in Rogers’s company in yet another ad, in the 30 July 1759 New-York Mercury, describing an African man named Jacob who claimed to have earned his freedom by serving for three years. Did Prince feel he was entitled to the same status?)

Instead of spotting that clue and following it up, Bly theorizes based on little evidence. He treats the widow Rogers as the author of this ad even though James Rogers signed it and his mother was hundreds of miles away. One paragraph says that Prince left “with nothing but an additional suit of clothes,” and the next that he had “gone off with quite a bit of clothing”; the ad isn’t specific either way. Bly suggests that Prince was “a gifted orator,” but that’s a different skill from “insinuating Discourse.” He concludes that Prince’s ability to move within New England society meant he must have been born here, but there are examples of Africa-born captives learning to maneuver well.

Almost a full page of the essay and two pages of notes are devoted to the idea that Prince’s parents might have been inspired to give him that name by the “Election Day” celebrations documented in New England from about eleven years after his birth. But I see no evidence that Prince was born in America, that his parents raised him, that they saw such a celebration, that they had the freedom to name him, that the term “prince” was linked to those festivities, &c.

The paper even acknowledges another escapee named Prince, from Watertown’s John Hunt in 1774. Prince was, in fact, a fairly common name among New England slaves, probably chosen by white owners with the same sarcasm that inspired them to name so many other baby boys Caesar, Pompey, and Scipio. (A study by Gary Nash shows that African-Americans in Philadelphia swiftly dropped those names in the generation after emancipation.)

After those four pages of conjecture, Bly’s paper settles down to a much more solid examination of the information to be found in runaway-slave advertisements. There are still occasional odd glitches, like citing a 1675 law about periwigs in the context of an ad from 1767, when fashions in hairdressing had completely changed. One detail I didn’t see discussed is “country marks,” or facial scarring and dental mutilation characteristic of some west African cultures (PDF download). Perhaps those were rare in New England, though Bly quotes a 1714 ad for a man who had “lost his Fore-upper Teeth.”

So in the end I had strongly mixed feelings about this paper. I was impressed by the data and would have been happier with much less theorizing. I hope Bly uses the Robert Rogers lead to draw a more grounded profile of the man named Prince.

Remembering Robert Rogers

In today’s Boston Globe, Michael Kenney reviews War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America's First Frontier, by John F. Ross. The reviewer admits:

Rogers has been a heroic figure for this reader since first encountering him some 60 years ago in Kenneth Roberts’s classic 1937 novel, Northwest Passage.

Roberts’s story indeed reinvigorated Rogers’s legacy in America. Or, as the Dictionary of Canadian Biography says:

The considerable Rogers cult that has been in evidence in the United States during the last generation probably owes a good deal to K. L. Roberts’ popular historical novel...

After all, American culture doesn’t usually admire Loyalist officers. Especially one apparently involved in capturing another national hero—in this case, Nathan Hale. (Whether Hale deserves his prominence in American lore is another question.)

Both Roberts’s novel and Ross’s new book focus on Rogers’s part in the British Empire’s wars against the French and some Native American nations during the 1750s and 1760s. That means they can describe the high points of the man’s life and avoid the iffy decades that followed till his death in 1795.

Many accounts of Rogers’s career note that he began to drink heavily, which must have contributed to his erratic behavior. But he was courting trouble even in his early twenties, when he was arrested in New Hampshire for leading a counterfeiting ring. He never seems to have done well playing by the rules. The mid-century frontier wars may simply have created the environment in which Robert Rogers flourished.