John Linzee and “the appearance of mental derangement”

On 4 Oct 1792, about two months after giving birth to her tenth child in Boston, Susannah Linzee died. She was thirty-eight years old.

That baby, named George Inman Linzee, died the following 21 March.

His next oldest sister, Mary Inman Linzee, died on 18 May.

Within a year, retired Royal Navy captain John Linzee had lost his wife and their two youngest children. He was still responsible for six older children.

(The oldest, Samuel Hood Linzee, was by then a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He had gotten a head start in the seniority system by being listed as his father’s servant and senior clerk aboard H.M.S. Falcon in 1775, when he was less than two years old.)

The death of Linzee’s wife also led to him losing his house on Essex Street in Boston. The merchant John Rowe had left it to his niece Susannah in his will, but only after the death of his widow, Hannah Rowe.

Rowe had her own house nearby, but she decided to reclaim this one now that Susannah hadn’t survived to inherit it. In July 1794 the widow told the court she owned the

House & Land…demised to the said John Linzee for a Term that is past, after which it ought to return to her again, but the said John Linzee still withholds the said House & Land & their appurtenances

She sued the retired captain for £1,000. Sheriff Jeremiah Allen certified that he had “attached a chair as the property of the within named John Linzee and left a summons at his last and usual place of Abode.”

John William Linzee’s 1917 history of the family reprints a couple of documents from that court case but doesn’t show how it was resolved. He declared, “this disagreement was of short duration,” pointing to how Hannah Rowe left bequests to the Linzee children. However, that will was written in 1803, after John Linzee had died. It would be just as consistent with Hannah Rowe strong-arming him out of the scene and raising her great-nephews and great-nieces herself.

In fact, there’s evidence that the death of his wife cast Linzee into a depression that alienated him from people. The merchant Samuel Breck, who praised the captain as “a good officer” in earlier years, recalled:

At her death the eccentricities of the captain assumed the appearance of mental derangement. He retired to a small box in the neighborhood of Milton, where he lived entirely by himself, rode out armed, and tapped his cider-cask by firing a ball into the head.

As he was seldom to be seen at home, he fixed a parcel of hooks in his kitchen for the butchers to hang their meat on, giving a standing order to put daily a joint upon one of the hooks. It so happened on one occasion, when he was detained in Boston about a fortnight by sickness, that he found on his return home fifteen or sixteen pieces of meat hanging around the walls of his kitchen.

Linzee died in 1798. He left his estate, worth almost $18,000, to his children and grandchildren and asked to be buried next to his wife.

The Linzees’ oldest daughter, Hannah, married Thomas C. Amory. Their son John Inman Linzee served as treasurer of Massachusetts. A granddaughter married a grandson of Dr. John Warren, a great-granddaughter married a grandson of Paul Revere, and, as I wrote here, another granddaughter married a grandson of William Prescott.

“Severall Cannon the property of said Ingraham”

As I described yesterday, my suggestion in The Road to Concord that the people of Concord divested the Loyalist-leaning Duncan Ingraham of four cannon in October 1774 caught the eye of Robert A. Gross, dean of Concord scholars.

I based my guess on brief mentions in the Massachusetts house of representatives’ published records of Ingraham petitioning to be compensated for those cannon in 1778 and 1791. His first attempt was unsuccessful; there was a war on, and, even though Ingraham hadn’t gone over to the enemy and had even served a short time as a militia officer, people may still have had their suspicions about him.

In 1788 Ingraham worked his way into his neighbors’ graces to be elected to the Massachusetts house himself. He served three terms, forming connections that made it easier for him to lobby for his cause. In March 1792 the state granted him £58.13s.4d. for the cannon.

Behind the legislature’s officially reported petitions and votes were more documents, not published but (we hope) saved in the Massachusetts Archives. Bob Gross asked John Hannigan, curator at the state archives, what papers survived from Ingraham. It turned out his 1778 petition and supporting documents were tossed out at some point, but the 1791 request remains. And those papers offer more detail about how the merchant captain lost control of his cannon.

I’d assumed that since Duncan Ingraham moved to Concord in 1772, he brought all his property—including stray artillery—with him. Thus, the cannon must have been confiscated in Concord. But it turns out he left a lot behind in Boston. Which makes sense since the traditional use for such small, privately owned cannon was to arm merchant ships during wartime, and the closer the guns were to a port the more valuable they were—as long as Ingraham had a business agent he could trust in town.

The affidavits Ingraham collected to support his 1791 petition show that back in 1774 he still owned a house in Boston that he rented to Samuel Breck (1747-1809), a young merchant (and father of the Samuel Breck whose childhood experiences I’ve cited).

Breck’s partner in a business at the “Corner of Greene’s Wharf” was Benjamin Hammatt, Jr. (1746-1829). The partnership dissolved in 1778, and the Brecks eventually moved to Philadelphia, but Hammatt remained in Boston and was available to testify in 1791. He wrote:

severall Cannon the property of said Ingraham were conveyed away from the Stable of said House, and I fully believe by the Authority and for the Use of the State.

So Ingraham lost his cannon from a stable he’d rented out in Boston, not in Concord.

TOMORROW: Just who “conveyed away” those cannon?

[The image above is a detail of Duncan Ingraham’s gravestone.]

Memories of “Mr. Balch’s Mimickry”

As I detailed yesterday, Nathaniel Balch (shown here, courtesy of Balchipedia) was a hatter. But at heart he was an entertainer, known across Boston for his humor and charm.

When Josiah Quincy, Jr., was traveling in the southern colonies on 6 Mar 1773, he wrote in his diary: “In walking with ——— occurred a singular event, of which Balch could make a humorous story.” Unfortunately, Quincy didn’t record that event and we don’t know what Balch made of it.

Most of our descriptions of Balch come from after independence, when he became known as a bosom friend of Gov. John Hancock. The French political reformer Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754-1793) wrote of an encounter in 1788: “Governor Hancock…has the virtues and the address of popularism; that is to say, that without effort he shews himself the equal and the friend of all. I supped at his house with a hatter, who appeared to be in great familiarity with him.”

The most lively pictures of Balch appear in the memoirs of men writing in the mid-1800s who had been boys growing up in Hancock’s Boston. E. S. Thomas wrote about Gov. Hancock in 1840:

He was very fond of joke and repartee, so much so, that a worthy citizen of Boston, Nathaniel Balch, Esq., a hatter, who never failed to appear among the invited guests at his hospitable board, obtained the unenvied appellation of “the Governor’s Jester.”

Sidney Willard wrote in 1855:

For his three-cornered hat, his cocked hat, my father resorted to Nathan Balch, a very worthy and respectable man, sometimes irreverently called Nat. Balch; a frequent guest of Governor Hancock, and entertainer of his other guests, adding zest to the viands and the vina at the dinner-board by anecdotes and stories, mimetric [sic] art, humor, witticism, and song, drawn from his inexhaustible storehouse.

And Samuel Breck’s posthumously published memoir said:

We had a medley of eccentric tradesmen in Boston in 1788, who were a compound of flat simplicity in manners and acute cleverness in conversation, shrewd, perhaps somewhat cunning; often witty; always smart and intelligent.

…above all, Balch, the hatter. His shop was the principal lounge even of the first people in the town. Governor Hancock, when the gout permitted, resorted to this grand rendezvous, and there exchanged jokes with Balch and his company, or, as sometimes happened, discussed grave political subjects, and, tout en badinant, settled leading principles of his administration.

So what material did Balch pull out for the Sons of Liberty dinner in August 1769, with more than three hundred of Boston’s leading gentlemen present?

According to John Adams:

After Dinner was over and the Toasts drank we were diverted with Mr. Balch’s Mimickry. He gave Us, the Lawyers Head, and the Hunting of a Bitch fox.

Hmm. I guess you had to be there.

TOMORROW: The party’s over.

“King Hancock” After the Revolution

Yet another complication in interpreting the phrase “King Hancock” in 1775 is John Hancock’s later political career. In 1780 he became governor of Massachusetts. That prominence affected how people spoke about him, and quite possibly about how people remembered others speaking about him.

As careful as he was to maintain his political popularity, Hancock developed rivals and enemies. In the new republic, one easy way to attack a rich politician was to tag him as having monarchical ambitions. Samuel Breck, born in Boston in 1771, recorded a sarcastic reference to Hancock in a political verse:

Madam Hancock dreamt a dream;
She dreamt she wanted something;
She dreamt she wanted a Yankee King,
To crown him with a pumpkin.

According to Breck, the line about “a Yankee King” was a commentary on Hancock’s political ambitions in the early federal period, when he enjoyed being the most important officeholder in New England and supposedly took as little notice as possible of the national government.

Within a couple of decades after Breck’s memoirs were posthumously published in Philadelphia in 1863, authors were saying the British had sung those lines in Boston at the start of the Revolutionary War. But back in early 1775 there was no “Madam Hancock” wishing her husband to be a king. (Or, rather, “Madam Hancock” was John’s aunt Lydia.) Hancock didn’t marry Dolly Quincy until after the war began. Breck had actually written that British soldiers had sung other words to “Yankee Doodle,” which he didn’t record.

I suspect that later memories of Hancock as an American politician also colored John Adams’s 1815 recollection about the Continental Congress’s choice of commander-in-chief:

Who, then, should be General? On this question, the members were greatly divided. A number were for Mr. Hancock, then President of Congress, and extremely popular throughout the United Colonies, and called “King Hancock” all over Europe.

In fact, in June 1775 Hancock wasn’t popular “throughout the United Colonies”; he was well known in New England, and folks elsewhere might have heard about Gen. Thomas Gage’s proclamation offering amnesty to any rebel but him and Samuel Adams. But Hancock had become president of the Congress only on 24 May and had hardly enough time to grow “extremely popular.”

Adams carefully avoided saying any Americans referred to the man they supposedly admired as “King Hancock,” but he did claim that people “all over Europe” used that phrase. Most likely, however, few Europeans had ever heard of John Hancock before the Declaration of Independence. When he visited England as a young businessman, Hancock was heartily annoyed at how little respect he got; he was used to being the biggest frog in Boston’s Frog Pond.

No evidence besides Adams’s letter forty years after the fact suggests that any Congress delegates wanted to appoint Hancock commander-in-chief. As with other details of Adams’s recollection, what he wrote about “King Hancock” makes me doubt the reliability of his storytelling.

COMING UP: A myth about another king.

Mary Lobb: divorced Catholic church lady

Being a widow with young children didn’t make Mary Lobb unusual in eighteenth-century Boston. Even living apart from her second husband probably wasn’t that odd, especially after the disruption of the war. What makes Mary Lobb notable is that she became a stalwart Catholic.

It’s quite possible that Mary Lobb had long thought of herself as a Catholic. The 1944 History of the Archdiocese of Boston says Mary Lobb was “Born in 1734, the daughter probably of Patrick Connell, mariner and sea-captain,” but it’s also possible she came from Ireland. Though she was married and saw her children baptized in Boston’s Anglican churches, those might simply have been her best choice before the 1780s. Up until the Revolution, after all, Boston was a site of violent annual anti-Catholic parades.

In November 1788 a priest named Abbé Claude F. B. de la Poterie, who had arrived in Boston as chaplain to the French fleet, celebrated the Roman mass in what had been the Huguenot Church on School Street. He was soon joined by another priest named Louis Rousselet. This was the beginning of a formal Catholic presence in the town. It wasn’t a smooth start—both men had scandals in their past, and the new bishop for the U.S. of A., headquartered in Baltimore, dismissed each after a short time.

The Rev. John Thayer took up duties as Boston’s priest in June 1790. He was a native of the town, born in 1755 and raised Protestant. In 1781 he had traveled to France to learn the language, then did more study in Europe. In May 1783 Thayer was in Rome, where he chose to convert to Catholicism, as he described in a memoir published five years later.

Samuel Breck, who had met Thayer in Europe during a brief period of being a Catholic himself, described the reopening of the church:

We fitted up a dilapidated and deserted meeting-house in School-street that was built in 1716 by some French Huguenots, and it was now converted into a popish church, principally for the use of French Romanists. A subscription put the sacristy or vestry-room in order, erected a pulpit, and purchased a few benches. A little additional furniture and plate was borrowed.

Thomas H. O’Connor’s Boston Catholics says:

One of the first and most active members of Father Thayer’s little congregation was Mrs. Mary Lobb (née Mary Connell), widow of a sea captain…

Thayer was a bit of a loose cannon; in 1790 the bishop in Baltimore wrote that he had “proved turbulent, ambitious, interested,” and combined “much ignorance with consummate assurance.” The bishop sent him to do missionary work in Kentucky. Thayer then had the better idea of starting a Catholic school for American girls, and went to Europe to raise funds. He died in Limerick in 1815.

The Rev. Dr. Francis Matignon (1753-1818) arrived in 1792, first serving as an assistant to Thayer and then taking over. He had been driven out of France by the Revolution. Abbé Jean-Louis Lefèbvre de Cheverus (1768-1836), Matignon’s former student, arrived in October 1796 to assist him. And their landlady was Mary Lobb.

That 1944 history of the archdiocese says, “Father Matignon lived at the house of Mrs. Mary Lobb, in Leverett’s or Quaker Lane (now Congress Street), in what was a small Catholic section.” Lobb donated money to help build the new Church of the Holy Cross, which stood from 1803 to about 1862 (shown above late in its existence). As late as 1810, Mary Lobb was a subscriber to a book by John Milner answering an anti-Catholic tract.

TOMORROW: Mary Lobb and her family get involved in a landmark lawsuit.

Benjamin Andrews’s “Death by Misfortune”

Last week I mentioned Benjamin Andrews, who helped investigate the Boston Massacre. I can’t resist that opening to share one of Revolutionary Boston’s juiciest bits of gossip, the circumstances of Andrews’s sudden death on 9 Jan 1779, at the age of thirty-eight.

This anecdote comes to us from his sister’s son, Samuel Breck:

Benjamin Andrews, Esq.,...was well educated, active, useful, beloved; in short, a very distinguished citizen. Mr. Benjamin Hichborn, his friend, and a lawyer subsequently of eminence, was with my uncle assisting him to prepare for a journey that was to commence the next day.

While Mr. Andrews was writing, Hichborn was trying a pair of pistols and putting them in order for the journey. He had snapped them against the chimney-back, he said, and, supposing them to be unloaded, was in the act of handing one of them to my uncle when it went off, hit him with the wad in the temple and killed him on the spot.

The Boston Gazette account of Andrews’s death was:

Sitting in his Parlour with Mrs. Andrews and aFriend—He had been comparing an elegant Pair of Pistols which he had bought the preceding Day with a Pair which he had had some Time before, and which were supposed to be unloaded—upon one of these Mr. Andrews observed some Rust in a Place left for the Engraver to mark the Owner’s Name upon—his friend undertook to rub it off—having accomplished it he was returning the Pistol to Mr. Andrews, who was sitting in a Chair at the Table by the Fireside—

Unhappily as he took it from his Friend he (Mr. Andrews) grasp’d it in such a Manner as brought his Thumb upon the Trigger, (which happened to have no Guard) and it instantly discharged its Contents into his Head near his Temple, and he expired in less than Half an Hour—

It is remarkable that, a few Minutes before, he had taken the Screw Pins from both these Pistols, and one of them almost to Pieces, and had handled them without any Caution, and in every Direction against his own Body, and those who were in the Room with him.

This report ended with the detail that a “Jury of Inquest” had already met and determined that Andrews “came to his Death by Misfortune.” Hichborn was already a prominent lawyer—he’d delivered the town’s Massacre oration in 1777—and the Gazette kept his name out of the news.

But locals must have started gossiping about Hichborn’s actions again in March 1780. Here’s Samuel Breck with the rest of the story:

My aunt was a fine-looking, well-bred woman, fond of dress and fashionable dissipation. She had five or six children and an indulgent husband. Suddenly she saw herself a widow overwhelmed with consternation and dismay.

This affair has always appeared mysterious, and made a great noise at the time; and, very strange as it may seem, Hichborn proposed as a remedy and atonement the only measure that could be adduced as a motive for the commission of murder. “I have been guilty,” said he, “of this unintentional manslaughter; Mr. Andrews was my friend; by my instrumentality his children are left fatherless. I will be a parent and protector to them; the best amends I can make is to marry the widow.”

He did marry her, and during a long life he was to her and her children a kind and generous friend, father and husband.

The marriage took place on 2 Mar 1780. Hichborn killed Andrews, married Andrews’s widow, and was admired for it. That would indeed make “a great noise.”

(The picture above shows the Pierce-Hichborn House, now part of the Paul Revere House operation. At the time of this story, it was the home of Benjamin Hichborn’s brother Nathaniel. They were both cousins of Revere on his mother’s side.)

Madam Hayley in Massachusetts

The latest issue of the online journal Common-place includes Amanda Bowie Moniz’s article about Mary Wilkes Hayley (c. 1728-1808) and her time in Boston shortly after the Revolution. Hayley was the younger sister of John Wilkes, the English radical politician whom the Boston Whigs admired in the 1760s. She was also the widow of a merchant with substantial business in America, and no qualms about collecting the debts that her trading partners owed her.

Moniz writes:

In May 1784, Mrs. Hayley arrived in Boston. Before she set sail, she had already made a savvy decision to shape Americans’ perceptions of her. According to a newspaper report, she had bought the American frigate, the Delaware, which had been captured by Britain during the Revolutionary War, and had renamed it the United States. (It sailed under Captain James Scott, who was often employed by John Hancock [and would eventually be the second husband of Dolly Hancock].)

The stunt paid off. Hayley’s arrival in Boston was reported in newspapers from New England to South Carolina. Here, Americans were seeing somebody very different from the woman they met through business correspondence or the London press. This visitor was neither an aggressive merchant nor an object of ridicule but an enlightened friend of the new republic.

As Abigail Adams wrote, “nothing but the ardent desire she had to visit a Country so distinguished for its noble and ardent defence of the rights of Mankind could have tempted her at her advanced age to have undertaken a sea voyage.” . . .

Ever alert to burnish her image, in October 1784, on the third anniversary of Lord Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown, Mrs. Hayley commemorated the American victory with “a very brilliant firework” display in her garden. She again signaled her political sympathies when, with much pomp, she presented John Hancock with a new chariot. The gesture, one newspaper explained, “was a mark of her respect for the good conduct of this great patriot during the war.” In addition, she helped fund a variety of public and charitable projects—a very uncommon role for a woman. She contributed to a meeting house in Charlestown [the old one had burned during the Battle of Bunker Hill]; gave three pounds to a fund for improvements to the Boston Common; was a founding member of the Massachusetts Humane Society, an organization devoted to the rescue and resuscitation of drowning victims; donated blankets to Boston prisoners and wood to Boston's poor.

Samuel Breck, born in Boston in 1771, provides a more eccentric portrait of Hayley, perhaps exaggerated by the passage of years:

She had certainly passed her grand climacteric, and in her mouth was a single tooth of an ebon color. Her favorite dress was a red cloth riding-habit and black beaver hat. In these she looked very like an old man. . . .

This most excellent woman had surrounded herself with a menagerie, so that the court-yard was filled with cockatoos, poll-parrots, and monkeys. . . . She gave frequent dinners, at which I was often invited. We were sometimes annoyed by her monkeys and other pets, which, like spoilt children, were brought into the parlour at the fruit-dessert to gather nuts and gorge with raisins and apples. It was the custom at her table to place a well-filled punch-bowl in the centre as soon as the last cloth was removed. Surrounded by the choicest wines, there stood the huge vessel, always brought in with a little parade. On one occasion, when this ample bowl occupied its accustomed place, a mischievous monkey who was skipping about the table seized the wig of an Amsterdam merchant, old Mr. de Neuville, and, running to the bowl, soused it in.

In 1786 Hayley married a British-born merchant in Boston named Patrick Jeffrey. The marriage didn’t last, and people gossiped that he “treated her with great brutality.” Six years later the former Madam Hayley returned to England without her young husband or much of her old property. Jeffrey bought Thomas Hutchinson’s former estate in Milton from James Warren, husband of Mercy Warren, and in the late 1800s Edmund J. Baker wrote a history of that estate which said:

He had the furniture, library, paintings, plate, relics, and ornaments that had graced the mansion of his wife’s first husband while an alderman and a mayor of London. With his two housekeepers and a retinue of servants he kept up a magnificent style of living. Dr. [Charles] Jarvis, the leading politician, Robert Hollowell [Gardiner], and the late Governor [William] Eustis were members of the club that dined with him weekly.

Jarvis and Eustis were leading Democratic politicians, which might give a hint to Jeffrey’s own politics.

The Lessons of Writing School

Having discussed what Boston’s Latin School boys were studying, I now turn to the bigger question: what the larger crowd of Writing School boys were taught. Boston had three public Writing Schools, one on Bennet Street in the North End, one on West Street near the Common, and one in what later became Scollay Square. Together they contained four times the number of boys as the two Latin Schools in 1770.

The main subject at the Writing Schools was—no surprise—writing. Writing five-paragraph essays? Writing book reports or short stories or political essays? Nope. Literally, the main lesson plan was learning to write beautifully with a quill pen.

As Ray Nash stated in American Writing Masters and Copybooks: History and Bibliography Through Colonial Times, published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts in 1959:

The writing master was ready to show him [the scholar] how to hold the pen properly between fingers and thumb, how to sit correctly at the desk, where to place the paper or ruled writing book in front of him.

Then came the demonstration of the strokes of the letters in due order, of the letters themselves, and eventually of the letters joined into words and the words arranged in improving sentences that are still remembered in the pejorative term “copybook maxims.”

The master wrote the model for the lesson at the top of a fresh page in the learner’s writing book—this was called setting the copy. It was then the pupil’s business to reproduce the copy as nearly as he could, studying each thick and thin, every curve and join, line after line to the bottom of the page under correction of the master.

Much of the master’s time was occupied in the making and mending of pens.

Diderot’s Encyclopédie offers us illustrations of the proper posture and tools for writing and how to cut a quill pen.

For their advanced students, the Writing School masters copied elaborate pages from books, particularly George Bickham’s Universal Penman, published in London in installments in the early 1740s. Here are two large examples of Bickham’s model pages, both on the theme of writing itself. You can also view a bunch of smaller Bickham page images from Davidson Galleries, and two more examples from DK Images.

Above is a facsimile of a smaller Bickham production, The Young Clerk’s Assistant, or Penmanship made easy. This edition has been reprinted by Sullivan Press, which makes a specialty of the paperwork forms and manuals of the Revolutionary War. The title page alone shows how many styles of handwriting which a gentleman and/or businessman was expected to know.

The 1748 edition of George Fisher’s The American Instructor, published by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, included five styles of writing:

• “the Italian Hand”: slanted, flowing, with spiral flourishes
• “the secretary Hand”: upright, thick, old-fashioned
• “An easy copy for Round Hand”: slanted but thicker, with less pronounced flourishes
• a “Flourishing Alphabet”: all capital letters
• a neat style of printing

With all correspondence conducted by handwritten letters, all financial accounts kept by hand, and no practical way to copy documents but to rewrite them, a man in business did a lot of writing. Furthermore, if that man had pretensions to be a gentleman, his handwriting, like the way he dressed and carried himself, was supposed to show effortless grace and propriety. Therefore, smooth, clear handwriting was a valuable skill in colonial American society.

Boston’s Writing Schools also taught the “ciphering,” or arithmetic, that young businessmen would need to know, such as long division, “vulgar fractions,” “the rule of three,” “tare and trett,” “single fellowship,” &c. Thanks to the Georgia state government, we can page through a copybook created by Thomas Perry, Jr., in 1793, which lays out many mathematical processes in a flourishing hand. (At the end of Perry’s book are examples of another thing Writing School students probably practiced copying: exemplary business documents. As far as I can tell, the boys were never encouraged to compose anything original.)

Many Boston boys who dropped out of a Latin School started going to a Writing School instead; that was the path traveled by Samuel Breck. Others, such as William Molineux, Jr., and Thomas Handysyd Perkins, seem to have spent their entire scholastic careers in Writing Schools, preparing for the business world.

Even for the boys left in Latin School, good handwriting was such an important skill that they often took writing lessons during their midday dinner breaks or at the end of their school days. Such Latin School boys as John Hancock, Joshua Green, and Harrison Gray Otis took such private lessons from writing masters.

And boys weren’t the only young people who needed good handwriting. Upper-class women were expected to write neatly, too. Anna Green Winslow was one girl who attended Master Samuel Holbrook’s private writing lessons, at least when the weather was good.

Samuel Breck Encounters Two Insane Gentlemen

Here’s another vivid extract from the Recollections of Samuel Breck, the Philadelphia businessman who was born in Boston in 1771. In this passage he discussed William Knox (1756-c. 1797), who had been Gen. Henry Knox’s younger brother and aide during the difficult mission out to Fort Ticonderoga in 1775-76.

He was a well-bred gentleman, extremely well educated, but possessed of feelings too sensitive for his future happiness on earth. He had been American consul at Dublin, and became deeply enamored of a lady there who did not reciprocate his love. It was a wound that neither time nor absence could cure. It preyed upon his spirits until it brought him to a mad-house. He lost his reason, and such was the cause assigned.

This leads me to relate a circumstance of an affecting nature which in its conclusion was closely associated with poor Knox. In one of my rides into New Hampshire, accompanied by my sister, I passed through Andover, a town where insane people are well nursed and comfortably boarded. Suddenly a man darted through the gateway of a good-looking house and ran up to my carriage. I knew him. He was a Mr. [George] Searle [1751-1796], a merchant of Newburyport, whom I had frequently seen at Mr. [John] Codman’s [Breck’s first employer]. He recollected me immediately, and after some conversation inquired for news. I happened to have a Boston paper of that morning, and gave it to him. He thanked me and retired.

We pursued our journey, asking each other what could have brought Mr. Searle there. On our return we heard for the first time the cause. It was a singular one. Searle was connected in maritime commerce with a Mr. [Joseph] Tyler, by the firm of Searle & Tyler. In the prosecution of their business they had been so extravagantly successful that Searle’s mind was overset. The first symptoms of a disordered intellect were shown by a purchase which Searle made on his return to Newburyport from Boston of all the property between the two places—a distance of forty miles. His malady soon increased, but I thought no more about it.

A year or two after, being in Philadelphia, some members of Congress invited me to accompany them to the Pennsylvania Hospital [cornerstone shown above]. On entering the long room down stairs, the first object near the door was a man clad in a blanket with one leg chained to a block. I looked on him with pity, and immediately recognized Searle. He knew some of the gentlemen. One he called his Tully, another his Cato, but he addressed me by name. “Samuel Breck,” said he, “I have to thank you for the newspaper you lent me at Andover.”

He had scarcely pronounced my name when I heard it very loudly repeated in a distant part of the room. On looking round I saw a sick person in bed beckoning to me to go to him. I approached the bed, and to my sorrow and astonishment found William Knox in it. The occurrence was unexpected and melancholy. The poor fellow did not detain me after begging a cent to buy snuff. Both these unhappy gentlemen were soon relieved by death, Searle dying first in consequence of a wound in his thigh, and Knox following a month or two after.

This joint anecdote shows how Breck and his contemporaries tried to understand insanity. They sought causes for the men’s mental difficulties in the events of their lives, even if those explanations proved contradictory. As Breck wrote, “the cause assigned” for Knox’s insanity was that he had failed in wooing while Searle supposedly went insane because he succeeded all too well in business. Both men were more likely laid low by their brain chemistry, influenced but not created by their experiences.

Another interesting detail is Searle’s statement that his companions were Tully (now more often referred to as Cicero) and Cato. The first generation of American gentlemen valued the heroes of the Roman republic, so much so that those men appeared in their delusions.

Christmas Anticks in Post-War Boston

Here's a seasonal memory from Samuel Breck, born in Boston to a well-to-do merchant during the Revolutionary War; Recollections of Samuel Breck was published posthumously in Philadelphia in 1877.

I forget on what holiday it was that the Anticks, another exploded remnant of colonial manners, used to perambulate the town. They have ceased to do it now, but I remember them as late as 1782.

They were a set of the lowest blackguards, who, disguised in filthy clothes and ofttimes with masked faces, went from house to house in large companies, and, bon gré, mal gré, obtruding themselves everywhere, particularly into the rooms that were occupied by parties of ladies and gentlemen, would demand themselves with great insolence. I have seen them at my father’s, when his assembled friends were at cards, take possession of a table, seat themselves on rich furniture and proceed to handle the cards, to the great annoyance of the company.

The only way to get rid of them was to give them money, and listen patiently to a foolish dialogue between two or more of them. One of them would cry out, "Ladies and gentlemen sitting by the fire, put your hands in your pockets and give us our desire." When this was done and they had received some money, a kind of acting took place. One fellow was knocked down, and lay sprawling on the carpet, while another bellowed out,

"See, there he lies, But ere he dies
A doctor must be had."

He calls for a doctor, who soon appears, and enacts the part so well that the wounded man revives.

In this way they continue for half an hour; and it happened not unfrequently that the house would be filled by another gang when these had departed. There was no refusing admittance. Custom had licensed these vagabonds to enter even by force any place they chose.

Folks who know about English folklore have no doubt recognized these "Anticks" as traditional Christmas mummers.

Such misrule was one of the reasons the Puritan founders of Massachusetts were so down on Christmas (along with the little matter of the date not being mentioned in the Bible). By the time of Breck's childhood, however, such disapproval no longer prevented young men from enjoying this form of begging and theater.

I haven't found any mentions of Anticks in Boston before the Revolutionary War, so I suspect the tradition took hold in those years, that it wasn't a relic of colonial times but actually a new import from Britain. That was probably partly due to the shake-up of society that the war brought about, and partly to the end of Pope Night as a holiday when young Bostonians could dress up, cavort, and demand coins from the upper class.

So Afraid They Could Not Study

Looking back on Boston's South Latin School under Master John Lovell, the Rev. Jonathan Homer declared, “Lovell was a tyrant, and his system one of terror. . . . The boys were so afraid they could not study.” Homer's testimony was recorded by school reformer William B. Fowle in the 1800s.

Another student, Nathaniel Smibert, became a portrait painter, and an acquaintance recalled:

I remember that one of his first paintings was the picture of his old master, John Lovel, drawn while the terrific impressions of the pedagogue were yet vibrating upon his nerves. I found it so perfect a likeness, that I did not wonder when my young friend told me that a sudden undesigned glance at the head often made him shudder.

Similarly, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper, one of Boston's most respected ministers in the 1770s, told a colleague “that he had had dreams of school [nearly] till he died.”

Isaac Davis, who first entered the South Latin School in 1772 and probably left after a couple of years, summed up Master Lovell this way:

passionate in his temper and tyrannical in his government; and his pupils perhaps improved less under his instructions than they w[oul]d. under some men of much inferior learning & abilities.

To be sure, other former Latin School boys did not criticize the Lovells' system of corporal punishment. Harrison Gray Otis, whose recollection of the teachers' beating styles I quoted yesterday, seemed also jovial about the experience—but then he probably avoided the worst. He was from a wealthy, influential family and was a consistently top student. (Otis did write to an alumni group about a disagreement with the Lovells' successor, Master Samuel Hunt, but kept quiet on the details: "He and I kept a most even account, error excepted in one case only on his part, and we parted on excellent terms. Any further explanation shall be promptly afforded, whenever you favor me with a call.")

Boys saw an economic element in the teachers' beatings. Homer recalled that the writing teacher his parents paid for lessons “was gentle, but his being a private teacher accounts for it.” A private tutor could not afford to anger individual customers. Even more blatantly, Samuel Breck recalled that Master Hunt

was a severe master, and flogged heartily. I went on, however, very well with him, mollifying his stern temper by occasional presents of money, which my indulgent father sent to him by me.

So the boys weren't convinced that the schoolmasters' punishments were part of a just system.

Did parents object to how the teachers treated their sons? In 1770 Boston’s selectmen recorded that “Mr. Thomas Parker entered a Complaint against Mr. Samuel Holbrook master of the South Writing School, for giving his Son as he says an unreasonable Correction.” No similar complaint was ever filed against the Lovells, who commanded more deference and more pay than other teachers because of their collegiate learning. (Parents did eventually complain that Master Hunt was unable to maintain discipline.)

Latin scholars recalled one father telling Master Lovell, "Sir, you have flogged that boy enough." However, that was a special case. The father in question was James Lovell, the schoolmaster's son and assistant, and the boy was James's own son—perhaps the one born illegitimately in 1758. (Gossip about that to come later.) So it's easy to imagine the old master being especially harsh on this boy, or the assistant being especially lenient. More likely the former since the scholar tried to find a more comfortable education:

The boy went off determined to leave school, and go to Master Proctor’s [i.e., the Writing School on Queen Street]; but he met one of Master Proctor’s boys, who asked him whither he was going, and when informed, warned him not to go, for he would fare worse.

Perhaps the most useful and broad-based measure of educational success is how well boys got through the South Latin School. And in this case the record is very clear. More than two-thirds of the boys who entered the Lovells' school in the decades before the Revolution left before finishing. Some then appear on the (very sparse) records of the town's Writing Schools. Others, such as Henry Knox and Henry Pelham, went to work. Only a handful each year—the survivors of a grim and limited course of study—went on to college. The Lovells' "system of terror" might have been acceptable in their society, but it did not serve most of their pupils well.

Dr. John Jeffries: physician, Loyalist, aeronaut, part 7

This series of postings, starting with Part 1, has brought Dr. John Jeffries from his early medical practice in Boston to floating across the English Channel on a balloon in January 1785. Jeffries then returned to London, apparently hoping for adulation as a man of science and adventure.

And to some extent his feat was recognized. Jeffries was made a "Baron of the Cinq Ports," a minor honorary title. His position as a fashionable doctor seemed assured. But he didn't receive the financial reward and pension that the French king had given his companion, Jean Pierre Blanchard.

In 1787, at the age of forty-two, Jeffries remarried, to a twenty-two-year-old Englishwoman named Hannah Hunt. They had several children together, though two died sadly young, according to family records: Harriet Maria “smothered" before her first birthday, and Robinson Ardesoif “burnt to death" at the age of five. Some of their other children lived considerably longer, including a John Jr. who also became a doctor and practiced for 57 years until his death in 1876.

In 1789, Jeffries received letters from family in Massachusetts "urging the necessity of his immediately repairing to Boston, to secure some property which had devolved to him by the death of a near relative.” He returned to his native town with his new wife and children. His father, town treasurer David Jeffries, had never left. Even his medical mentor and fellow Loyalist, Dr. James Lloyd, had ridden out the war in Boston. In April 1790, Jeffries decided to stay and become an American citizen.

Within a few years Dr. Jeffries was a popular local physician, respected despite his service with the British military. Local writers accepted his stories of identifying Dr. Joseph Warren's body on Bunker Hill and finding new ways to treat smallpox, though they were often self-serving. The 1801 Massachusetts Register listed Jeffries as practicing on "Franklin-Street, near the Tontine."

As for the small French aeronaut Blanchard, his republican beliefs made his home country somewhat unwelcoming in the 1780s, so he traveled Europe, making the first or early balloon ascents from Frankfurt-am-Main, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Leipzig, Berlin, Breslau, Warsaw, and Vienna. After the French Revolution, the new government in Paris continued the pension that the king had granted the traveler.

On 9 Dec 1792, Blanchard arrived in Philadelphia on a ship from Hamburg, bringing "4200 weight of vitriolic acid." That was, he announced in the newspapers, "the quantity necessary to effect my own ascension, once." He no longer cared for aerial companions. On 9 Jan 1793, Blanchard made the first balloon flight in America, taking off from the grounds of the Walnut Street Prison, as shown in the engraving above.

Samuel Breck, a Boston native who became a businessman in Philadelphia, met both Jeffries and Blanchard. He wrote of their voyage over the Channel:

I have heard the account of this trip from Blanchard given with feelings of asperity that were not reciprocated in my hearing by the doctor. The Frenchman was from some cause or other displeased, and being intent upon revenge took a very public manner of insulting his companion. He employed Fielding, the best coachmaker of Philadelphia, to build him a vehicle that was to go without horses. The machinery that moved it was worked by a man standing on the footboard behind, who by the alternate pressure of his feet set the wheels going and expanded the wings of an eagle, that by constantly flapping them seemed to draw the carriage along by its flight. On the panels of this carriage, which was exhibited in all the large towns in the United States, he caused the doctor to be painted in the balloon, with a bottle of brandy to his mouth, intimating by the motto beneath that without the aid of this Dutch courage his fortitude would have wholly forsaken him.

Jeffries apparently kept his notes and his cool throughout the flight, so this seems to be Blanchard's jealousy about having to share any glory with his patron and passenger.

Blanchard died in 1809 after suffering a heart attack during a balloon ascent. His widow, Madeléine-Sophie Blanchard, became a famous aeronaut in her own right; she died on 7 July 1819 when her hydrogen balloon caught fire and she fell to the Paris street below.

Two months later, on 16 Sept 1819, Dr. John Jeffries died in Boston of, a medical colleague wrote, “an inflammation in his bowels, originating in a hernia, occasioned by great exertions in his first aërial voyage."

Nathaniel Tracy serves frogs for dinner

Samuel Breck was born in Boston in 1771. Later his family moved to Philadelphia, and after his death his memoirs were published there. That book contains some delightful anecdotes about the Revolution, no doubt a bit polished by repeated tellings.

Here are Breck's remarks on the reception of the French fleet in Boston after the king of France started to formally support the American independence movement. France had of course been the enemy for British colonists since the late 1600s. Patriots complained that the London ministry was becoming as tyrannical as "France or haughty Spain." As late as the fall of 1774, New England buzzed with rumors that the Crown would bring "the French" down from Québec to oppress them.

And then Silas Deane, Benjamin Franklin, and Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais forged an alliance between the new U.S. of A. and France. Suddenly the French were no longer enemies, but helpers. The anti-Catholic Pope Night holiday disappeared. Indeed, just after the war a Roman Catholic church with a French priest even opened in Boston on the corner of School Street and modern Washington Street (where the Irish Famine Memorial now, um, stands).

But old stereotypes die hard, as Breck recalled.

Every vulgar story told by John Bull about Frenchmen living on salad and frogs was implicitly believed by Brother Jonathan, even by men of education and the first standing in society. When, therefore, the first French squadron arrived in Boston, the whole town, most of whom had never seen a Frenchman, ran to the wharves to catch a peep at the gaunt, half-starved, soup-maigre crews. How much were my good townsmen astonished when they beheld plump, portly officers and strong, vigorous sailors!

This apparently refers to the arrival of French transports in Boston in May 1781. Those ships brought about 6,300 soldiers who would march south to the siege of Yorktown.

That same year, Newburyport privateer owner and merchant Nathaniel Tracy had bought a mansion in Cambridge that had been confiscated from the Loyalist John Vassall. (That mansion is now known as Longfellow House, a National Park Service site open for tours Wednesday through Sunday for the rest of the summer.) He decided to host the French naval officers and consul.

Mr. Nathaniel Tracy, who lived in a beautiful villa at Cambridge, made a great feast for the admiral and his officers. Everything was furnished that could be had in the country to ornament and give variety to the entertainment. My father was one of the guests, and told me often after that two large tureens of soup were placed at the ends of the table. The admiral sat on the right of Tracy, and Monsieur de l’Etombe on the left. L’Etombe was consul of France, resident at Boston. Tracy filled a plate with soup, which went to the admiral, and the next was handed to the consul. As soon as L’Etombe put his spoon into his plate he fished up a large frog, just as green and perfect as if he had hopped from the pond into the tureen. Not knowing at first what it was, he seized it by one of its hind legs, and, holding it up in view of the whole company, discovered that it was a full-grown frog. As soon as he had thoroughly inspected it, and made himself sure of the matter, he exclaimed, "Ah! mon Dieu! un grenouille!" then, turning to the gentleman next to him, gave him the frog. He received it, and passed it round the table. Thus the poor crapaud made the tour from hand to hand until it reached the admiral. The company, convulsed with laughter, examined the soup-plates as the servants brought them, and in each was to be found a frog. The uproar was universal. Meantime Tracy kept his ladle going, wondering what his outlandish guests meant by such extravagant. merriment. "What’s the matter?" asked he, and, raising his head, surveyed the frogs dangling by a leg in all directions. "Why don’t they eat them?" he exclaimed. "If they knew the confounded trouble I had to catch them in order to treat them to a dish of their own country, they would find that with me, at least, it was no joking matter." Thus was poor Tracy deceived by vulgar prejudice and common report. He…had caused all the swamps of Cambridge to be searched in order to furnish them with a generous supply of what be believed to be in France a standing national dish.