“A great part of my disease immediately gave way to your Chemical Essences”

When the historian Catharine Macaulay contacted Dr. James Graham, he was changing his field of medical practice.

In his advertisements in American newspapers, similar notices in Bristol, and his 1775 London pamphlet, Graham presented himself as a specialist in problems of the eyes and ears.

But in 1776 he published another pamphlet whose title suggested new treatments for many more ailments:

A Short Inquiry into the Present State of Medical Practice, in Consumption, Asthmas, Gout in the Head or Stomach, Hysterical, Spasmodic, or Paralytic Affections of the Nerves in Every Species of Nervous Weakness and in Cancerous and Other Obstinate Ulcers and a More Elegant Speedy and Certain Method of Cure by Means of Certain Chemical Essences, and Aërial, Ætherial, Magnetic, and Electric Vapours, Medicines, and Applications—Recommended.

To which is added an Appendix on the Management and Diseases of the Teeth and Gums

In this pamphlet Graham declared that the electrical lectures he had attended in Philadelphia had inspired him to develop new methods of curing people. (He also mentioned trips to Germany and Russia, which must have been very short because I have no idea when he fit them in.)

This essay may well have been what prompted Macaulay to consult with Graham. And she was pleased with the results. On 18 Jan 1777 she wrote to the doctor from the home she shared with the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson in Bath:

…I was unfortunately born with a very delicate constitution, and a weak system of nerves; that from my earliest infancy to the age of maturity, my health was continually disturbed with almost every species of fever, with violent colds, sore throats, and pains in the ears, attended with all the variety of symptoms which accompany a relaxed habit, and an irritable state of nerves.

In this very weak state of health, I undertook the writing the History of the Stewarts; and I do not know whether it is not impertinent to add, that seven years severe application reduced an originally tender frame to a state of insupportable weakness and debility: continual pains in the stomach, indigestion, tremblings of the nerves, shivering fits, repeated pains in the ears and throat, kept my mind and body in continual agitation; and marked, those which would otherwise have been the brightest of my days, with sorrow and despair.

In one of these fits of despair, your pamphlet came to my hands. Its contents awakened my curiosity; I sent for you; you undertook my cure with alacrity, and gave me the pleasing hope of a restoration of health, or rather a new state of constitution; and I have the happiness to declare, that a great part of my disease immediately gave way to your Chemical Essences, your Ætherial, Magnetic, and Electric Applications; the pains in my ears and throat subsided, the fevers and irritations of my nerves left me, and my spirits were sufficiently invigorated to break from a confinement of six weeks, and to exercise in the open air.

Macaulay told Graham that she gave him “full liberty to publish this declaration,” and he seized the opportunity. He included the letter in a second edition of his Short Inquiry pamphlet and put her name on its title page, twice.

For that 1777 edition Dr. Graham also added an effusive 31 March letter back to Macaulay that filled seven printed pages, addressed her as “Madam” nine times, and used fifteen exclamation points (as well as slipping in “most hearty acknowledgements” to “the Revd. Dr. Wilson”).

In April 1777, as I wrote before, Wilson organized a grand celebration of Macaulay’s birthday. As a gift he gave her a gold medal that Queen Anne had presented to one of her negotiators at the Treaty of Utrecht—a historical artifact for a historian. The published description of that event then went on:

Next advanced the ingenious Dr. GRAHAM, to whom the world is so much indebted for restoring health to the Guardian of our Liberties, and thereby enabling her to proceed in her inimitable History;—he with great modesty and diffidence presented her with a copy of his works, containing his surprising discoveries and cures…

Furthermore, one of the odes presented to the lady that day and then printed was titled “On reading Mrs. Macaulay’s Letter to Dr. Graham.” It described Clio, “Th’ HISTORIC MUSE,” worrying about the lady’s health, even seeing the statue of her Wilson sent to his church in Walbrook as a “marble tomb.” But finally the god of healing Apollo promises:

“To stop the ravage of the foe,
My GRAHAM instantly shall go,
And set thy Fav’rite free;
No more let sorrow still thine eye—
On GRAHAM’s skill secure rely,
For he was taught by me.”

Those two 1777 publications—the doctor’s pamphlet and the birthday odes—publicly linked Graham and Macaulay. As he always acknowledged, her celebrity helped his pioneering ideas about “Chemical Essences, and Aërial, Aetherial, Magnetic, and Electric Vapours, Medicines, and Applications” reach a wider audience.

Later in the year, however, Catharine Macaulay took ill again.

COMING UP: Search for a cure.

Desk Job

Since I spent much of the afternoon assembling furniture, of the cheap, practical kind, I’m linking to this exploration of a writing desk made about 1778.

Part of Google’s Arts & Culture collaboration with museums around the world, this page combines close-up images of the desk with an analysis of how it was made, and by whom.

The ébéniste (furniture maker), Martin Carlin, put the entire piece together, including carving the wooden parts and applying the plaques and bronzes. A locksmith installed the locking mechanism for the drawer. A different person supplied the leather for the bureau top.

Dominique Daguerre not only coordinated all this work, but also designed the piece and purchased the materials. Daguerre, an art and furnishings merchant called a marchand-mercier, sold the finished piece to a very special buyer . . .

Catherine the Great, Czarina of Russia from 1762-1796, commissioned Pavlovsk as a gift for her son Paul Petrovitch and his wife, Maria Feodorovna

Sold by the Soviet government in 1931, the desk is at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, but we can appreciate it from our homes.

Thomas on Louisa Catherine Adams in Quincy, 8 March

I’m breaking into the wall-to-wall Boston Massacre coverage for an extra posting about an event coming up in Quincy.

On Wednesday, 8 March, the Adams National Historical Park will host Louisa Thomas, author of Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams, the first full biography of Louisa Catherine Adams, the sixth U.S. First Lady.

The event description:

Born in London to an American father and a British mother on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Louisa Catherine Johnson was raised in circumstances very different from the New England upbringing of the future president. She was taught to consider herself an American and, more important, to marry one. John Quincy’s life had been dedicated to public service from the earliest age. They had a tempestuous courting yet fell in love despite their differences.

No longer residing in gilded England, she was on the road–a diplomat’s wife on a diplomat’s small stipend. Louisa and John Quincy lived in Prussia where they were viewed suspiciously as upstart rebels and in Tsarist Russia where Louisa was favored at the royal court by Alexander I. They experienced the height of the Napoleonic Wars, and Louisa famously traveled with her young son from wintry Russia to France, encountering hostile troops on the voyage. This lifestyle of traveling back and forth from America and country to country was difficult to bear; she suffered miscarriages, the death of her infant daughter, separation from her two eldest sons, and many illnesses.

Later, when permanently back in the United States, she began to form her own public persona by paying close attention to politics and the actions of former first ladies while keeping in mind John Quincy’s presidential aspirations. She supported his crusade and focused her own efforts on what she called “my campaigne”–hosting parties to promote her husband’s popularity. His presidency was a trying time for them yet it strengthened their already deeply close marriage, which would last half a century.

In her unpublished diaries and memoirs, Louisa writes not only the details of her days but also of, more significantly, her rich inner life, her thoughts and feelings, and her thirst for knowledge. Throughout her life Louisa often felt isolated. This was deepened by her views on gender equality, which were formed early and ripened over time. “I cannot believe that there is any inferiority in the sexes, as far as mind and intellect are concerned,” she wrote.

This program will start at 12:00 noon at the park visitor center, and a book signing will follow. Validated parking is available in the garage at Presidents Place Galleria on Hancock Street. The program itself is free and open to the public.

Reviews of American Revolutions

Probably the biggest Revolutionary War book out this year, in terms of its scope and the professional status of its author, is Alan Taylor’s American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804. Here are extracts from four reviews I’ve seen.

Matthew Price in the Boston Globe:

Stretching from Nova Scotia to New Orleans, Taylor’s account proceeds chronologically through a series of themed chapters (“Colonies,” “Partisans,” “Slaves,” and so on) showcasing the author’s mastery of the period. He has synthesized work old and new, especially scholarship from the last 30 years that reflects his interest in Native American history and the role of slaves and women in the period. . . .

The last third of Taylor’s book details the political maneuvering that followed the peace settlements of 1783. There was little unanimity in what course to follow, and the new nation’s leaders were bedeviled by the same problems that proved unmanageable to British authorities. For one, to pay off war debts, they had to enforce higher taxes. (Loyalists, the so-called losers of the war, enjoyed lighter taxes in Canada, where the British instituted reforms to show up the upstart republic to the south. There is a suggestion throughout that the empire, typically caricatured as tyrannical, was more enlightened than its rebel offspring.)

Eric Herschthal at Slate:

As long ago as the Progressive era, historians argued that the Founding Fathers’ war against Britain was waged not for lofty democratic ideals but rather to suit their own material interests. In recent decades, academic historians have exposed the critical role women, blacks, and Native Americans played in the War of Independence, as well as the larger imperial struggles of which the Revolution was just a bit part. In American Revolutions Taylor synthesizes this more recent scholarship but astutely combines it with the Progressive-era argument about the way the Founding Fathers manipulated populist anger to their own ends. Written with remarkable clarity and finesse, this will be the gold standard by which all future histories of the period will be compared. . . .

Taylor rightly underscores that slavery—its protection and extension—was a central fact of the Revolution and its aftermath. But he tends to downplay the simultaneous restructuring of black life that happened in the war’s wake. As he notes, enslaved blacks in the North, often with the help of white allies, petitioned their new state governments to ban slavery. Elizabeth Freeman, enslaved in Massachusetts, used the new state constitution’s language, which stated that “All men are born free and equal,” to sue for and win her freedom in 1781. Her victory set the precedent that abolished slavery in Massachusetts, and by the end of the century, all the Northern states would abolish slavery. In focusing on the contradictions, indeed the hypocrisies, of the white Patriot elite, Taylor inadvertently overshadows this quieter revolution in freedom that that was growing up alongside it. The truth is that when we talk about liberty and equality for all today, we mean it in the way these black founders meant it, not the Patriot elite. It is a point worth emphasizing.

Brendan Simms in the Wall Street Journal:

Britain’s attempt to tax the North American settlers without their consent did indeed play a major role in the rise of a revolutionary spirit, but so did the western question, too often overlooked in its full significance. Building on recent work by historians such as François Furstenberg and Paul Mapp, Mr. Taylor places the 13 colonies within a “continental” context, in which the French most of all—but also the Spanish, the Russians (briefly) and of course Native American tribes—battled with British colonists for supremacy in the vast territories west of the Appalachian Mountains. . . .

What infuriated the settlers, as much as London’s proposed taxes, was the British government’s determination not to provoke the French and Spanish or the Indians. The policy was encapsulated in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbade the colonists to move beyond the Appalachians. The British settlers perceived that some of the money extracted from them by the crown would be used to enforce this line of demarcation.

Insult was added to injury when London tried to appease the Catholic French-speaking colonists of Canada by awarding them considerable autonomy through the Quebec Act of 1774. This law horrified the colonists not only because it promoted the toleration of Roman Catholicism (inherently tyrannical, in their view) but also because it awarded a vast tranche of the western lands to the province of Quebec. In effect, though Mr. Taylor does not quite put it this way, the colonists were threatened by ideological and geopolitical encirclement. Mr. Taylor rightly speaks of the revolution having “western roots”: The imperial crisis was a product of “western land as well as eastern taxes.”

The 1763 Proclamation was not a big issue here in New England because New York (and, for Connecticut, northern Pennsylvania) already claimed the land to the west. But the Quebec Act was a very big deal, given the region’s fundamental anti-Catholicism. Which makes the pivot to the French alliance all the more striking.

Gordon Wood in the New York Times Book Review:

In a prodigious display of historical research, Taylor has drawn on nearly a thousand books and articles, listed in his 55-page bibliography. Because he has expanded the chronology of the Revolution into the 19th century and has included so much beyond the well-known headline events, he has some difficulty fitting everything in. He often packs so many incidents into each paragraph, with actions succeeding and crowding in upon one another, that there is no space to expand and develop any one of them. Consequently, they tend to get bunched up and leveled, and the narrative often comes to seem unusually compressed and flattened.

Insofar as anything is highlighted in Taylor’s narrative, it is the many Patriot hypocrisies and contradictions. Southerners, Taylor suggests, engaged in the Revolution principally to protect their property in enslaved Africans, but “implausibly blamed the persistence of slavery on the British.” The Patriots’ talk of liberty was very limited. They “defended freedom for white men while asserting their domination over enslaved blacks.” Occasionally the Patriots were not very patriotic. Following the surrender of the American forces trying to take Quebec in 1775, “a quarter of the captured Patriots switched sides to enlist with the British.”

Sometimes Taylor’s emphasis on irony and contradiction slips into anachronism. Because the colonial legislatures denied women, free blacks and propertyless white males the vote, he concludes that “colonial America was a poor place to look for democracy.” But where in the 18th century was there a better place to look for democracy? Despite restrictions on the suffrage, the colonies still possessed the most democratic governments in the world at that time.

But isn’t the question whether the state and national governments that followed the American Revolution were more democratic? Or were they just better designed to serve the “ordinary white men” whose “bad behavior” Wood says Taylor emphasizes?

Visiting Vigée Le Brun in New York

In addition to that little exhibit on Mathias Buchinger, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is also hosting a rare major retrospective of the portraits of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), one of pre-Revolutionary France’s leading artists.

The New York Times review by Roberta Smith explained how she launched her career:

Vigée (pronounced Vee-ZHAY) Le Brun was born with a surfeit of natural talent and ambition as well as beauty, charm, a head for business and making connections, and a gift for conversation that kept her sitters entertained. Her father, a successful artist of pastel portraits, recognized his daughter’s gifts and taught her to paint but he died when she was 12.

To distract her from her grief and from a step-father she loathed, her mother, a hairdresser of some reputation, chaperoned her daughter on visits to private and public collections around Paris. Vigée briefly attended a small drawing academy run by a fan painter, and received informal instruction from the landscape painter Joseph Vernet. The best of her early portraits depicts her mother as a woman of refinement with a gentle but appraising gaze; a 1778 portrait of Vernet holding brush and palette in beautifully painted hands is similarly sensitive.

Mostly, Vigée taught herself by looking and copying and starting to work. Even in her late teens she was helping to support her family — so productively that in 1774, when she was 19, the authorities sealed her studio until she joined a guild. (She was operating without a license.)

To escape home life, she made a marriage of convenience in 1776 with Jean Baptiste Pierre Le Brun (1748-1813), a painter and prominent art dealer, who wooed Vigée by lending her paintings to copy. He took her to Holland and Flanders to see those of Rubens and the Dutch masters, promoted her work and partly lived off her money. Soon Madame Le Brun, as she was known, became one of the most sought-after portraitists of her moment. Her position was solidified by Marie Antoinette, whose favor included helping the painter gain entry into the Royal Academy, which excluded artists married to art dealers, in 1783.

When the Revolution came, Vigée Le Brun was so closely associated with Marie-Antoinette and her court that she went into exile for her safety. She traveled to other European courts, working particularly in Russia, before returning to France under Napoleon. Vigée Le Brun remained in demand as a portraitist into her fifties. She published her memoirs in the 1830s.

Meanwhile, to the West

Another new book on Revolutionary-era America actually looks at what else was happening on the continent while Britain’s thirteen colonies along the middle Atlantic coast fought for independence.

Claudio Saunt, author of West of the Revolution: An Uncommon Look at 1776, explained his approach in an article for the Boston Globe:

Spanish soldiers and missionaries were establishing the first permanent European colonies on North America’s Pacific Coast. (Native Americans, who observed Spanish schooners emerge on the horizon as if rising from the depths, called the newcomers “people from under the water.”)

Further north, Russians were seizing control of the Aleutian Islands and would soon push into the Alaskan mainland—territory they would not relinquish until 1867.

In the heart of the continent, Native Americans—who were as numerous as the Colonists then in revolution—sought to exploit the economic and geopolitical tumult engendered by European colonization on the coasts.

Specifically, Saunt wrote, “According to one traditional Lakota history, the Lakota (Sioux) Indians discovered the Black Hills in 1775-1776.” That memory was recorded by American Horse (1840-1908) in 1879—earlier than some Revolutionary traditions in textbooks and histories today.

In a short review for the Globe, Kate Tuttle wrote: “One persistent undercurrent to Saunt’s narrative is how much history hinges on misunderstanding and ignorance, along with greed and fear — not a pretty picture, but a necessary and timely addition to the heroic creation story we celebrate on July 4.” Here are other reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus.

Henrikson on J. Q. Adams and the Ghent Treaty, Quincy, 30 Apr.

John Quincy Adams entered the American diplomatic service in 1781 at the age of fourteen. He was the French-speaking secretary of Francis Dana, the U.S. of A.’s first designated minister to Russia.

That mission wasn’t a success. Catherine the Great, ever canny, avoided meeting Dana to accept his credentials, thus keeping her empire out of western Europe’s argument over whether the British colonies should be independent. In 1783, Dana and Adams headed back west.

Adams went on to other posts, including American minister to Holland, Portugal, Prussia, Russia (for reals this time), and Great Britain. Eventually he was Secretary of State under James Monroe. But his most important diplomatic service to America was as chief negotiator of the treaty to end the War of 1812.

The keen mind for details that served Adams well as a politician, and the total stubbornness that usually didn’t, allowed him and his colleagues to wear down the British negotiators. The U.S. hadn’t been doing well in the war, but its diplomats pulled out an advantageous peace.

Prof. Alan Henrikson of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University will deliver an illustrated lecture on “John Quincy Adams in Ghent: The Diplomacy of the War of 1812” at the Adams National Historical Park in Quincy on Monday, 30 April. In addition to his expertise as the school’s Director of Diplomatic Studies, Henrickson photographed many of the sites in Belgium where Adams and the other delegates worked.

This lecture, which starts at 7:00 P.M, is free and open to the public. For more information, visit the park site.