Twitter Feed, 17-27 June 2010

• Day by day @CC_1787 tweets the Constitutional Convention. (Or rt's @philly1787's tweets as last year.) Will it turn out the same? #
• From @natlheritage, a silver platter commemorating the Battle of Bunker Hill and its Masonic connections: bit.ly/cAZGJt #
• What 18th-century American town records look like: bit.ly/d5SNns And these are the well-kept ones! #
• RT @gordonbelt: 650 lbs. of bronze transformed into reproduction 67-inch 18th-century cannon at Colonial Williamsburg: bit.ly/dlWZlN #
• RT @gordonbelt: Rooms with a View: New Monticello boss opens rarely seen rooms at @TJMonticello bit.ly/b2x3st #
• RT @2palaver: Gulf crisis highlights concerns over potential drilling off Gloucester bit.ly/91JxZq #
• RT @56Signers: 56DaysofSigners/Hooper See #statue at #grave in #Greensboro: flic.kr/p/5RR2fN // Hooper, NC signer, grew up in Boston. #
• Last night attended James Fichter's talk on book SO GREAT A PROFFIT about early American trade with east Asia. Tea ruled! #
• Story of Capt John Callender's shame at Bunker Hill and redemption the following year: bit.ly/ak11IP #
• RT @HistoryNet: 1st novel written by an American and published in America. bit.ly/atyxD3 // Was roman à clef on Boston sex scandal! #
• Tonight attended signing by Thomas J. Fleming for reissue of NOW WE ARE ENEMIES, history of Bunker Hill. #
• Tomorrow will head to Deerfield for Dublin Seminar on "Dressing New England: Clothing, Fashion & Identity": bit.ly/9IJdP0 #
• Thomas Paine portrait vandalized in Daytona Beach Museum: bit.ly/aY7bd1 Random act or political statement? #
• Ken Burchell explores origin of Thomas Paine portrait in Florida: bit.ly/92g3AN #
• "Poetry with a Purpose" workshop for history & language arts teachers at Boston-area history sites in August: bit.ly/9TUgB2 #
• Laying out a plot of land in 18th-c Windham, Conn.: "to a heap of stons neer walnut tree…" bit.ly/aan8Pe #
• Smallpox in Boston in 1721 throws together two funeral gatherings, black and white: bit.ly/dta9wv #
• RT @NewYorkHistory: Ranger Guided Evening Strolls at Saratoga Battlefield: bit.ly/bn9hYA #
• RT @rjseaver: posted will of Elizabeth Smith (died 1758) of RI in Amanuensis Monday post - tinyurl.com/AMESmith #genealogy #
• RT @universalhub: BPL president: Still plan to shut four branch libraries, just not at end of summer. #
• Curly-haired angel/soul on gravestone of Pompey Brenton in Newport, RI, 1772: bit.ly/alglqN #
• Gravestone of Adam, 12-year-old servant (slave?) who died in Newport, RI, in 1792: bit.ly/dbsI9O #
• AP literature students have trouble recognizing that poem "The Century Quilt" reflects African-American history: bit.ly/dALZcd #
• RT @Readex: Poetry indexed in "The Performing Arts in Colonial American Newspapers, 1690-1783." www.colonialmusic.org/ #
• RT @history_book: Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox - by Gareth Williams - Palgrave Macmillan. amzn.to/cxApmC #
• RT @gordonbelt: E Pluribus Confusion: the tangled history of apportioning representation since 1787: bit.ly/clCbPT #
• Colonial Williamsburg preparing to mold brass cannon, major 18th-c technical challenge, on 23 June: bit.ly/c26XLf #
• Death of Revolutionary historian and memorializer Ellen Hardin Walworth in 1915: bit.ly/agYjWl #
• RT @56Signers: 56DaysofSigners/Walton Captured signers often treated with respect befitting officers. (Not true of men from lower classes.) #
• RT @SecondVirginia: New Book: "Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution" by Ira D. Gruber fb.me/A7YpQhYk #
• RT @jmadelman: Glad to see support for Washington's HQ in Westchester - places like this got me interested in history bit.ly/bPGuD5 #
• Questions raised by 1766 gravestone in Lexington: bit.ly/chj70Z #
• RT @WilliamHogeland: More on states' declaring individual independence - Smith's (@amhistorymuseum) comment: tinyurl.com/32fcc22 #
• RT @AmerCreation: No, Mr. Beck, Jefferson Did Not Date His Documents "In the Year of Our Lord Christ" nblo.gs/5abnZ #
• RT @amhistorymuseum: 1776 one-shilling bill "emitted by a Law of the Colony of New Jersey." ow.ly/22RIX #
• At Boston1775 blog, do folks want a more detailed analysis of this gun? bit.ly/drCSYU (Not by me; by someone who knows something.) #
• Harvard has appointed Annette Gordon-Reed, scholar of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a professor of law and history. #
• Call for papers from Boston's newly formed North End Historical Society: bit.ly/bLQhcg #
• Rediscovering Sgt. Horatio J. Homer, Boston's first black police officer, on force from 1878 to 1919: bit.ly/b9dNJo #
• RT @history_book: The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714-1837 - Cambridge University Press. bit.ly/cHH0r4 // Dimension? #
• RT @history_book: Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750-1914 - by Christine MacLeod amzn.to/9k1fJN #
• Expert doubts photograph of enslaved children announced weeks back: bit.ly/cOvmLK Most likely post-Civil War plantation nostalgia #
• Eyewitness accounts of George Washington's visit to (progress thru?) Boston in 1789: bit.ly/aYVQ50 #

“Not Cutting the Flesh”

While searching for examples of Continental soldiers losing feet to rolling cannon balls (none found so far), I came across some interesting examples of other curious cannon-ball injuries from volume 17 of the Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association.

According to this volume, Ephraim Abbott (1752-1778) was a volunteer at the Battle of Bennington on 16 Aug 1777. “A cannon ball wrenched his body, not cutting the flesh, and made him lame for life.” Or what few months were left of it.

Gen. John Nixon (1725-1815) was likewise bloodlessly wounded at the first battle of Saratoga on 19 Sept 1777. “A cannon ball passed so near his head as to permanently impair the eye and ear on one side.”

After the second battle of Saratoga, surgeon James Thacher described treating this even more curious injury:

A brave soldier received a musket ball in his forehead, between his eyebrows; observing that it did not penetrate the bone, it was imagined that the force of the ball being partly spent, it rebounded and fell out, but on close examination by the probe, the ball was detected, spread entirely flat on the bone under the skin, which I extracted with the forceps.

No one can doubt but he received his wound while facing the enemy, and it is fortunate for the brave fellow, that his skull proved too thick for the ball to penetrate.

Thacher’s journal entry for 24 Oct 1777 discusses other unusual wounds.

(Photo of the Saratoga Monument by Samantha Decker, via Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

Saratoga Not the Turning Point?

The Smithsonian website offers Prof. John Ferling’s article “Myths of the American Revolution”. Ferling explores how some common generalizations about the war aren’t completely correct, and may in fact be mostly incorrect. As an example:

Saratoga was not the turning point of the war. Protracted conflicts—the Revolutionary War was America’s longest military engagement until Vietnam nearly 200 years later—are seldom defined by a single decisive event. In addition to Saratoga, four other key moments can be identified.

The first of those four moments is the combination of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, which, one might argue, was a starting point rather than a turning point. But those events did mark a turn from a political conflict with threatening military moves by both sides to a shooting war.

I’ll let you discover the three other “turning points” Ferling mentions. To make it harder, not all of them are battlefield developments. To make it easier, they all involve the tide turning in favor of the Americans.

But surely there had to be moments when the war turned in favor of the British, right? Otherwise, the war wouldn’t have lasted so long. Gen. William Howe’s sweeping reconquest of New York in 1776 wiped out a lot of the American momentum after successful campaigns at Boston and Charleston. Similarly, Howe’s victory at Brandywine sent the Congress scrambling out of its capital and erased the memory of Gen. George Washington’s smaller battlefield triumphs months before.

Finally, as Ferling notes elsewhere in the article, the British military’s southern strategy looked very good after the battle of Camden, with Georgia back in the Empire, Charleston firmly in British hands, and many Americans sick of the war. At that point, the Americans really needed a new turning point.

Lecture Program at West Point, 27 June

Peter Feinman of the Institute of History, Archaeology, and Education sent me an announcement for a series of Revolutionary War lectures in the military academy at West Point on Friday, 27 June. The program is free, but security and parking considerations require that all participants register for the program by Tuesday, 24 June.

Winning the war, Winning the Peace: The American Revolution Historyhostel

10:00 “The Battles of Brooklyn and Saratoga and the Strategic Importance of the Hudson Valley”
Maj. Jeffery Lucas, Department of History, U.S.M.A., and Ray Raymond, S.U.N.Y.–Ulster and U.S.M.A.

The campaigns of 1776-1777 were Britain’s one and only chance to crush the American Revolution. The key was control of the Hudson, which would have cut off New England from the rest of the colonies. These lectures will assess why Britain failed to deliver a knockout blow at Brooklyn and why it lost the strategically vital battle of Saratoga.

12:00 Lunch

1:00 “Reassessing Yorktown and the Southern Insurgency”
Maj. Lucas and Prof. Raymond.

These lectures will reassess Yorktown and the Southern insurgency led by Gen. Nathanael Greene, which eventually won the Revolutionary War. They will address such questions as:

• Was Yorktown more of a French military victory than an American one?
• Was Yorktown’s real importance political rather than military?
• How close did the British military come to rescuing Cornwallis?

2:15 walking tour of the U.S.M.A. grounds from an American Revolution perspective

3:30 bus trip to Fort Putnam (not normally open to the public)

4:30 “Fort Putnam: The Thomas Cole Perspective”
Peter Feinman, IHARE

Thomas Cole is known as the founder of the Hudson River School of painting. When he emigrated from England, one of the first subjects he chose to paint was Fort Putnam. What did this site mean to him and to American culture in the 1820s?

To register, email Dr. Feinman or call 914-933-0440.

The Maguire Brothers Find Each Other

Last month I quoted a letter from a provincial officer describing how a deserter from the British garrison at Boston discovered his brother in the American camp.

Brendan Morrissey, who actually wrote the book called Boston 1775 from Osprey Publishing, as well as Saratoga 1777 (at left), reminded me of a similar incident from the end of Gen. John Burgoyne’s push down into New York from Canada.

This anecdote comes from Roger Lamb’s An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences during the Late American War, published in Dublin in 1809. At the time he described, Sgt. Lamb and a few thousand more British troops had just surrendered at Saratoga.

During the time of the cessation of arms, while the articles of capitulation were preparing, the soldiers of the two armies often saluted, and discoursed with each other from the opposite banks of the river, (which at Saratoga is about thirty yards wide, and not very deep,) a soldier in the 9th regiment, named Maguire, came down to the bank of the river, with a number of his companions, who engaged in conversation with a party of Americans on the opposite shore.

In a short time something was observed very forcibly to strike the mind of Maguire. He suddenly darted like lightning from his companions, and resolutely plunged into the stream. At the very same moment, one of the American soldiers, seized with a similar impulse, resolutely dashed into the water, from the opposite shore.

The wondering soldiers on both sides, beheld them eagerly swim towards the middle of the river, where they met; and hung on each others necks and wept; and the loud cries of “My brother! my dear brother!!!” which accompanied the transaction, soon cleared up the mystery, to the astonished spectators.

They were both brothers, the first had emigrated from this country, and the other had entered the army; one was in the British and the other in the American service, totally ignorant until that hour that they were engaged in hostile combat against each other’s life.

No other news on what happened to the Maguires.