Thomas Jay McCahill Fellowships for 2026–27

The Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Hampshire, in partnership with American Revolution Institute in Washington, D.C., and the American Independence Museum in Exeter, is offering two Thomas Jay McCahill III Fellowships for researchers in the 2026–27 academic year.

The announcement says:

The McCahill Fellowship will provide up to $75,000 for a one-year period to support the cost of research, travel, housing and per diem expenses for one or more scholars to undertake advanced research on a topic germane to American history in the colonial and revolutionary periods. Fellows will have sustained access to collections and professional staff in a quiet study room at the American Revolution Institute’s headquarters, Anderson House, in Washington, D.C.

The McCahill Fellowship is open to graduate students and advanced and independent scholars who are conducting research that may benefit from various primary resources, with an emphasis on the collections of the American Revolution Institute and/or the American Independence Museum.

The McCahill Fellow’s research is expected to be on one or more of the following periods:

• the Revolutionary War
• colonial British America, preferably for research leading in some way to an issue of the revolutionary period
• the early American republic, preferably for research leading in some way to an issue of the revolutionary period.

Applicants should submit the following:

• Curriculum vitae, including educational background, publications and professional experience.
• Brief outline of the research proposed (not to exceed two pages), along with an expectation of how the fellow might use the research library and collections of the American Revolution Institute.
• Writing sample of 10-25 pages in the form of a published article, book excerpt, or paper submitted for course credit, which can be submitted in Word or P.D.F. format.
• Budget for proposed research project to include a schedule and related costs for housing and travel.
• For current graduate students only: Two confidential letters of recommendation from faculty or colleagues familiar with the applicant and his or her research project. Note: If letters are to be mailed independently, please include the names of recommenders when submitting the application.

The deadline for application is 31 October 2025. Applicants will be notified of the selection committee’s decision by the end of January 2026.

The upcoming year’s McCahill fellow is Prof. Christine DeLucia of Williams College, writing on “Land, Diplomacy, and Power in the Revolutionary Northeast.”

“He lost some of the country dialect”

Osgood Carleton, the cartographer mentioned yesterday, advertised a lot in Boston newspapers between 1787 and 1808.

In those years he had his school of mathematics and navigation to promote. He had almanacs and other books to sell for a while. Then he sold his maps. He sold design services, and more.

The man’s oddest newspaper notice appeared in the Herald of Freedom in 1790:

Osgood Carleton,
HAVING been frequently applied to for a decision of disputes, and sometimes wagers,* respecting the place of his nativity, and finding they sometimes operate to his disadvantage: Begs leave to give this public information—

that he was born in Nottingham-west, in the State of New-Hampshire—in which state he resided until sixteen years old; after which time, he traveled by sea and land to various parts, and being (while young) mostly conversant with the English, he lost some of the country dialect, which gives rise to the above disputes.

* Several Englishmen have disputed his being born in America.

BOSTON, AUGUST 20, 1790.

In an article for the Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, David Bosse tentatively linked Carleton’s accent with a statement in a 1901 profile: as a teen-aged soldier he became a clerk for John Henry Bastide, the British military engineer. If Carleton indeed spent his late adolescence in a British household, his might have ended up with more England than New England in it.

Bosse documents that Carleton lived in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, from 1763 to 1768, marrying there before returning to his home province. Again, that would have exposed him to more British natives than living on a farm in Nottingham, New Hampshire.

But why was it important to make this public pronouncement? One possibility is that being thought British made a man vulnerable to naval impressment. However, the Royal Navy wasn’t at war in 1790, and Carleton wasn’t traveling.

Another is that Carleton understood his potential customers were looking for an American, especially so soon after the war. But Bostonians were quite friendly to British ex-pats in this period, usually welcoming them as converts to republicanism. In a field like cartography, being able to claim European training was probably a plus.

Significantly, Carleton’s ad pointed to “Several Englishmen” disputing or even betting on his background. That might be a way to avoid criticizing local customers, or it might reflect the truth: the men insisting Carleton was British were English themselves.

Carleton was a former Continental Army officer, having enlisted as a regimental quartermaster with the rank of sergeant in May 1775 and risen to lieutenant in January 1777. At the end of 1778 he asked to be listed in the Corps of Invalids for health reasons. Carleton still served until April 1783, taking on administrative tasks like moving money around. After the war, he joined the Society of the Cincinnati.

British visitors to Boston might have heard Carleton speak of those experiences in his British-sounding voice and hinted that he was disloyal—and he might not have liked that. But those visitors weren’t his customers. 

In the end, I suspect that Carleton decided to declare the facts about his birth simply because they were facts. As a teacher, cartographer, and surveyor, he valued precision. He was already a regular advertiser in the Herald of Freedom, so it would have been easy to run this announcement for a week.

Carleton’s singular notice might have arisen from the same impulse depicted in the famous xkcd cartoon: “Someone is wrong on the internet!”

Spilling the Tea on an Artifact

The American Independence Museum in Exeter, New Hampshire, will open for the season on Wednesday, 4 May.

Its first “Tavern Talk” of the year will be one week later, on 11 May. Alan R. Hoffman will speak on “Lafayette and Human Rights” at 6:30 P.M.

While visiting the museum website, I was intrigued by this webpage on a reported sample of “Boston Tea Party Tea,” part of a series called “30 Stories for 30 Years.” About the vial shown above, it says:

This tea is believed to have originated from Patriot Thomas Melvill (1751-1832), who participated in the Boston Tea Party. . . . It is believed that this vial contains the tea saved from Melvill’s shoe and was passed through the generations until it was eventually acquired by William Lithgow Willey [1857–1949] and donated to the Society of the Cincinnati.

However, that’s followed by a “Contemporary Interpretation” that says:

A document found in the Society’s archives pertaining to Willey’s estate following his death states that the vial is “labeled in W.L.W’s printing,” suggesting that the vial may not be the same one labeled by Melvill’s wife. The label has been dated to the nineteenth century, creating further doubt. . . . To date, no documentation has been found to determine how and where Willey acquired this vial, and its origins remain a mystery.

What’s more, the Old State House Museum in Boston holds a vial of tea from the Melvill family that was described as early as 1821, pictured in 1884, and donated to that collection in 1900, as I tracked here. That vial is featured on the Old State House’s website.

The two artifacts do look similar, which might have made them easy to confuse. Or was one created in imitation of the other?

“A respectable and well-known Officer”

For Thomas Seward, his military service in the Continental artillery, rising from lieutenant to brevet major over eight years, remained an important part of his identity after the war.

Seward was an original member of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati and served on its standing committee in the 1790s.

Like a lot of networked Continental Army officers, he eventually accepted a job in the federal government, becoming an officer of the United States Customs in Boston in 1796.

When Alexander Hamilton was vetting officers for the “Quasi-War” with France in 1798, Henry Knox apparently told him that Seward was “advanced in years & corpulent,” and would be best as a “Garrison Capt” rather than in the field, but there were “few better Officers.”

Thomas Seward’s namesake son, a merchant captain, married in 1799. The following year, the major’s wife, Sarah, died in March.

On 28 Nov 1800 the Massachusetts Mercury reported in its Deaths section:

Yesterday, Major Thomas Steward, aged 60. A respectable and well-known Officer in the revolutionary army of the United States. His funeral will be from his late dwelling at the bottom of Middle-street, near Winnisimet-Ferry, this afternoon, which his relations and friends are requested to attended, without further invitation.

[pointing hand] The Members of the Cincinnati are respectfully requested to attend the funeral.

The next day’s Jeffersonian Constitutional Telegraph repeated the sentence describing Seward as a “respectable and well-known Officer” and added a new line: “A firm and determined Republican.” The major had taken sides in the nation’s political divide.

Seward died without a will, so probate judge George R. Minot appointed his late wife’s sister Abigail Brett to work out the estate. The inventory she filed shows that Seward owned many artifacts of gentility: a silver watch, a Bible and seventeen other books, an angling rod, two canaries in a cage, a $35 desk, $100 worth of wearing apparel. The house contained twenty pictures of various sizes, including two of “Bounaparte & Lady”—reflecting early Republican admiration for France.

That inventory also confirms that Seward owned a pew in the Rev. John Murray’s Universalist meetinghouse. At some point he had moved from an orthodox Congregationalist meeting to this liberal new sect. Among other converts to Universalism was Col. Richard Gridley, the artillery officer Seward had served under back in 1775.

TOMORROW: Why we remember Thomas Seward.

Warren on “America’s First Veterans,” 13 Jan.

On Wednesday, 13 January, the American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati will offer an online talk by executive director Jack D. Warren, Jr., about the new book America’s First Veterans.

The institute’s announcement says:

Over a quarter of a million men served in the armed forces that won our independence. Those who survived became America’s first veterans. Using eighty-five manuscripts, rare books, prints, broadsides, paintings, and other artifacts, America’s First Veterans introduces the stories of the men—and some women—who bore arms in the Revolutionary War. The book follows their fate in the seventy years after the war’s end and traces the development of public sentiment that led to the first comprehensive military pensions in our history.

“These and thousands of other veterans of the Revolution,” Jack Warren writes, “were ordinary people, made extraordinary by their service in the struggle for American independence.” They believed in the American cause, he explains, and “many suffered for it, in ways their fellow Americans learned to honor and that we should honor as well.” In the words of Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie, who wrote the foreword to the book, their generation “seized an historic opportunity that forever changed the world.”

Warren’s talk will last about an hour on Zoom starting at 6:30 P.M. This event is free with registration here.

The institute is offering signed copies of America’s First Veterans through this page (and I haven’t found it on sale anywhere else). This book is tied to an ongoing exhibit at Anderson House, which unfortunately we can’t visit in person.

We can sample another recent publication of the American Revolution Institute online here. In The Art of War in the Age of the American Revolution: 100 Treasures from the Fergusson Collection, Ellen McCallister Clark highlights books, manuscripts, maps, broadsides, engravings, paintings, and other objects in the Society of the Cincinnati’s holdings.

Pvt. James Melvin’s Journal in Manuscript

The American Revolution Institute, part of the Anderson House museum and library of the Society of the Cincinnati, has acquired the manuscript journal of Pvt. James Melvin.

Melvin was born in Concord in 1749, according to John Melvin of Charlestown and Concord, Mass. and His Descendants (1905), but different calculations of his age suggest he was born as late as 1753. James’s father moved the family to Chester, Nova Scotia. After his father’s remarriage and an unhappy indenture, James returned to Concord to live with an older brother. He mustered for the April 1775 alarm and enlisted in the army from yet another Massachusetts town, Hubbardston.

In the summer of 1775, Melvin joined Col. Benedict Arnold’s expedition through Maine to Québec. His journal covers that journey from the soldiers’ departure in September through imprisonment in Canada to freedom on parole in August 1776.

Pvt. Melvin’s journal was transcribed and published in 1857. That text was issued twice more on its own, most recently in 1902. The total number of copies from those editions was 450.

Kenneth Roberts reprinted the whole Melvin journal in March to Quebec while also suggesting its text had been copied and developed from the diary of another soldier, Moses Kimball.

However, Stephen Darley collected all the known journals of the Quebec mission in Voices from a Wilderness Expedition (2011). He reports the Melvin and Kimball journals each have material not found in the other, with Melvin’s continuing for months after its supposed source. On the other hand, Darley says the Melvin diary offers “no special content,” meaning no historical events that other diaries don’t already document.

The fact that so many men on the Quebec mission kept journals shows how significant they and their descendants felt that undertaking was. Some of those diaries are near copies of others while some are quite individual. Some documents appear to have been the actual papers men carried on the trek while others are later copies.

After returning to the U.S. of A. in late 1776, Melvin remained in the army, stationed for the most part at the artillery laboratory in Springfield, making gunpowder. He married a widow there in 1778 after they conceived a child and lived the rest of his life in Springfield and Chester, Massachusetts. Melvin lived at least until 1828, when he unsuccessfully applied for a pension.

Melvin’s record was still in her family’s hands when it was first published, but then it went underground—until now. The American Revolution Institute plans to digitize the manuscript and share the images. It reports the manuscript also contains a couple of essays titled “Treatise upon Air” and “An Explanation of Scripture Taken from the Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to the Gallations.” There’s no report of text on the Québec march that we haven’t seen before, but we’ll see Melvin’s account in its oldest surviving form.

A Master Teachers Seminar in Washington, July 2019

The American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati will offer a weeklong Master Teachers Seminar in Washington, D.C., on 8-12 July 2019. The theme is “The American Revolution and the Cause of Independence: ‘Between Submission and the Sword.’” Independence is, the seminar description says, “one of the four major achievements of the American Revolution and a central concept of the American Revolution Institute Curriculum.”

This Master Teachers Seminar is a week-long residential program for middle- and high-school teachers focusing on the American Revolution. It is held each summer at Anderson House, the headquarters of the Society of the Cincinnati near Dupont Circle. The seminar includes morning lectures and discussions about teaching the Revolution and afternoon sessions working with the resources of the Institute’s library and museum. The best lesson plans that participating teachers develop during the session are published on the Institute website with credit to their authors.

Teachers chosen to participate in the seminar will receive a stipend for travel to and from Washington, D.C., and be treated to meals and lodging at Anderson House. Since Anderson House is a Gilded Age mansion, those quarters are not spartan. (The photo above of one of my talks there reveals the difficult conditions under which I sometimes have to work.) Each participant will also receive a letter documenting sixty hours of professional development.

The institute will be accepting applications for the 2019 Master Teachers Seminar until 22 February.
The application must include a cover letter describing how students will benefit from one’s participation in the program, a résumé, and a draft Revolutionary War lesson plan dealing with the idea of independence and spanning two class periods. For more detail, see this webpage. Applications will be judged on the potential of the lesson plans with preference given to those that include a preliminary bibliography on the chosen topic that uses the Institute’s collections.

Applicants should upload their material through this webpage by 22 Feb 2019. Questions can be sent to Stacia Smith, Director of Education at Anderson House.

“I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen”

Now it’s true that at one point Benjamin Franklin suggested that the turkey, rather than the bald or American eagle, should be the emblem of the new nation.

But Franklin didn’t make that remark in 1776 during the earliest discussions of the U.S. national seal. He wrote that in January 1784 after learning about the public debate over the Society of the Cincinnati, the new hereditary organization of Continental Army officers and their male heirs.

Still the U.S. minister to France, Franklin wrote to his daughter Sarah Bache (pronounced “Beach”):

I received by Captn. Barney those relating to the Cincinnati. My opinion of the institution cannot be of much importance. I only wonder that when the united wisdom of our nation had, in the Articles of Confederation, manifested their dislike of establishing ranks of nobility, by authority either of the Congress or of any particular state, a number of private persons should think proper to distinguish themselves and their posterity, from their fellow citizens, and form an order of hereditary Knights, in direct opposition to the solemnly declared sense of their country.

In interpreting this letter, it’s useful to recognize how Franklin handled it. Yes, he addressed his daughter and kept the tone folksy. But he rarely discussed politics with Sarah Bache, and this letter didn’t include any personal news that she would presumably want to hear. He was simply using the form of a family letter to get some political thoughts off his chest.

Even more significantly, Franklin actually never sent this letter to his daughter. Instead, in the spring of 1784 he shared it with a couple of French friends, the abbé André Morellet and the comte de Mirabeau. He also continued to revise the text.

All three men appear to have agreed that it would be impolitic for Franklin to publicize his views of the Cincinnati under his own name. Instead, Mirabeau quoted portions of the letter without attribution later that year in a London pamphlet titled Considérations sur l’ordre de Cincinnatus, ou imitation d’un pamphlet anglo-américain. Morellet published a complete French translation after Franklin’s death in 1790. (The Society of the Cincinnati included a French branch as well as one for each of the thirteen states, so French noblemen knew about the debate.)

Franklin’s whole letter didn’t appear in English until his grandson William Temple Franklin published a collection of writings in 1817. By then the founding of the Cincinnati was no longer a burning political issue. The comments about the national emblem were more striking, even if Franklin had originally drafted them to make sarcastic points about a particular issue:

Others object to the bald eagle [of the Cincinnati medal, example show above], as looking too much like a Dindon or turkey. For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly.

You may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. With all this injustice, he is never in good case, but like those among men who live by sharping and robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank coward: the little king bird not bigger than a sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district.

He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America, who have driven all the king birds from our country, though exactly fit for that order of knights which the French call Chevaliers d’Industrie [i.e., “knights of the road”]. I am on this account not displeased that the figure is not known as a bald eagle, but looks more like a turkey.

For in truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours, the first of the species seen in Europe being brought to France by the Jesuits from Canada, and served up at the wedding table of Charles the ninth. He is besides, (though a little vain and silly tis true, but not the worse emblem for that) a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.

(Ironically, that American emblem the turkey was named after a European country, either because Turkish merchants sold New World turkeys in early modern Europe or because sixteenth-century Englishman conflated turkeys with guinea fowl that Turkish merchants imported from Africa.)

The musical 1776 therefore has a slight foundation for portraying Benjamin Franklin in the song “The Egg” as wanting the turkey to be the U.S. of A.’s national bird.

However, as I discussed yesterday, there’s no evidence for John Adams championing the eagle, as in that song. And I’ve found no evidence for Thomas Jefferson suggesting that the national symbol should be a dove.

The whole debate in “The Egg” was a last-minute creation of songwriter Sherman Edwards. During the tryouts of 1776 in New Haven, Edwards and his colleagues decided the show needed a light-hearted number in the second act. The musical’s poster, designed by Fay Gage, showed a patriotic eagle hatching. With the inspiration of that art and Franklin’s 1784 letter, Edwards imagined his lead characters arguing over the national bird.

And a few years later, I watched that scene as an impressionable schoolboy and assumed it had some solid basis in fact. Another Bicentennial myth shattered!

2017 American Revolution Master Teachers Seminar

The American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati will host eleven secondary-level teachers at its sixth annual American Revolution Master Teachers Seminar, to be held June 26 to July 1 in Washington, D.C.

The society’s announcement says:

The goals of the seminar are to enrich understanding of the American Revolution in ways that translate to the classroom, to introduce outstanding teachers to the resources of the Institute, to develop lesson plans that can be published on the Society’s website as a resource for teachers nationwide, and to recognize and reward outstanding history teachers.

Mornings in the seminar are occupied with lectures and discussions of the Revolutionary War and teaching strategies. Afternoons are spent exploring the rich library and museum collections of the Institute, which include rare books, pamphlets, maps, prints, manuscripts, art and artifacts from the revolutionary era. The week will close with a study trip to a local site. Teachers will receive a letter documenting sixty hours of professional development. The Institute will pay for room and board, along with travel to and from Washington.

This year’s seminar will emphasize the American Revolution as part of a broader global war between France and England. Interested teachers should submit an original Revolutionary War lesson plan that addresses a topic related to international dynamics of the war. The lesson should span two class periods and correspond to their own state standards. Participants will be selected based on the potential of their lessons to enrich student understanding and appreciation of the Revolutionary War and of the Society’s collections to enrich those lessons. Preference will be given to applicants who submit a preliminary bibliography using the Institute’s online catalog related to their chosen topic.

This seminar is a residential program, with participants staying at the palatial Anderson House. (Seriously, I’ve been through it. It’s palatial.)

The instructions say, “To apply, please submit a cover letter including how your participation would benefit your students, a résumé, and a draft Revolutionary War lesson plan.” Applications are due by 6 Feb 2017 to Eleesha Tucker, Director of Education, at etucker@societyofthecincinnati.org.

Ebenezer Stevens Exhibit in New York

The New-York Historical Society is featuring what I expect is a small but thorough exhibit on Ebenezer Stevens, a lieutenant colonel in the Continental artillery.

Stevens was a Boston mechanic who participated in the Tea Party, carefully avoiding the view of his brother-in-law Alexander Hodgdon, a mate aboard one of the ships. Sometime in the next few months Stevens and John Crane, a fellow carpenter and Tea Party veteran, moved to Rhode Island—perhaps because Boston’s economy was squeezed by the Boston Port Bill, perhaps because they feared arrest.

In December the Rhode Island assembly voted to form an artillery unit. As I’ll discuss in a talk for the Newport Historical Society late this year, the commanders of that unit were men from Boston, including Crane and Stevens. They returned to Massachusetts at the start of the siege.

At first Stevens served as one of Col. Crane’s subordinate officers, but he had further ambitions. He led a separate Provisional Artillery Battalion in the Saratoga campaign. Finally, he switched to Col. John Lamb’s artillery regiment to become a lieutenant colonel.

After the war, Stevens settled in New York and raised his family there while building a mercantile business. His descendants included the novelist Edith Wharton. And his papers and souvenirs of military service went to the New-York Historical Society. This exhibit includes “Stevens’ Society of Cincinnati badge and officer’s tailcoat.”

The Ebenezer Stevens display will be up through 2 October. That means it coincides with some other exhibits of interest at the N.Y.H.S.:

• Summer of Hamilton through August.
• Battle of Brooklyn, starting 23 September.
• Mo Willems’s Pigeon, Knuffle Bunny, and Elephant and Piggie.

Knockoffs of Cincinnati Chinaware

A while back, a longtime Boston 1775 reader alerted me to this story in the New York Times:

Shirley M. Mueller…, an independent scholar and collector of Chinese export porcelain in Indianapolis,…is looking for dinnerware painted with winged goddesses, holding aloft trumpets and bald eagles, which are symbols of the Society of the Cincinnati. Elite military officers formed the Society in 1783, and they commissioned custom porcelain from artisans in China. Those artisans applied the American insignia on standard white ceramic wares, with blue scrollwork and leaves around the undulating rims.

Chinese factories also exported plain versions of the blue-edged products. Some nefarious painters have lately been adding goddesses and eagles to the centers of authentic but boring 18th-century plates.

Ms. Mueller has so far tracked down a few freshly embellished pieces. In 2009 she borrowed one suspect for lab testing at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, comparing it with an authenticated platter in her own collection that had been widely exhibited and featured in publications. The pigments on the forgery contained levels of chromium, zinc and cobalt that do not appear in those used by Chinese ceramists.

The whole back of the fake had the wrong tint. “The necessary refiring of the later dish to add the central embellishment left a partial gray surface on the back,” Ms. Mueller and the Winterthur scientist Jennifer Mass wrote in a 2011 article for The Magazine Antiques.

The porcelain shown above is a genuine fake. It’s a modern reproduction of George Washington’s Cincinnati chinaware, sold by Mount Vernon.

Franklin: “I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen”

As long as I was writing about Benjamin Franklin and turkeys, I thought I’d look into the oft-repeated statement that he preferred the turkey to the bald eagle as a symbol of the new republic.

That came from a letter to his daughter, Sally Bache, written from France on 26 Jan 1784. Franklin had just received news of the Society of the Cincinnati, and he didn’t really care for it. Most of his letter was about “the absurdity of descending honors.” As for the Cincinnati “ribbands and medals,” Franklin called them “tolerably done,” but then went on to repeat other people’s criticisms.

One of those complaints concerned the eagle that formed the basis of the medal. (The example shown here belonged to Gen. Henry Knox.) Franklin reported, “Others object to the Bald Eagle as looking too much like a Dindon or Turkey.” Derived from “d’Inde” or “from the Indies,” “dindon” was the French word for “turkey.”

Thoughts of eagles and turkeys launched Franklin into a comparison of their symbolic qualities:

For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him. With all this Injustice, he is never in good Case but like those among Men who live by Sharping & Robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy.

Besides he is a rank Coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the District. He is therefore by no means a proper Emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America who have driven all the King birds from our Country. . . .

I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America. Eagles have been found in all Countries, but the Turkey was peculiar to ours. He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.

Franklin’s understanding of bald eagle behavior left a lot to be desired, according to that bird’s fans. But he liked drawing political lessons from an animal’s supposed habits, as in this letter about rattlesnakes (probably).

While people often quote Franklin’s words in regard to the Great Seal of the United States, he wasn’t discussing that depiction of the eagle. He’d made other suggestions about a U.S. seal back when he was a member of the Continental Congress, but never wrote publicly about the design eventually adopted. This family letter wasn’t published until decades after his death.

I’m therefore inclined to think Franklin offered his turkey suggestion mostly as a joke, like his proposal of daylight saving time the same year.

Virtual Exhibits on Dr. Johnson, Virginia, and Hair

Houghton Library at Harvard is exhibiting some of the items from its Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson through November. There’s also an online exhibit and a printed catalogue with its own blog.

This collection includes such treasures as the copy of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson with catty marginal comments by Hester Piozzi, who was a rival biographer and friend and, scholars now theorize, the doctor’s dominatrix lover.

Last weekend Joshua Kendall wrote in the Boston Globe about America’s love-hate relationship with Johnson—love on our side, hate on his:

As a look at Johnson’s writings reveals, he showed little interest in reciprocating our affection, instead showering Americans with a more or less ceaseless rain of scathing epithets. In 1769, he called Americans “a race of convicts [who] ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.”

Johnson never set foot on our shores and met few Americans, but had a clear idea how he felt about the colonists. In response to the First Continental Congress, an apoplectic Johnson was compelled to dash off - he tended to write in manic bursts - “Taxation no Tyranny,” a 40-page pamphlet, vilifying the rebellious colonists as “these lords of themselves,” “these kings of Me,” and “these demigods of independence.”

As a hardline Tory and firm believer in governmental authority, Johnson feared that “the madness of independence” would destabilize the cosmic order. He was infuriated not just by our adolescent protests against parliamentary rule, but by our hypocrisy over the issue of slavery. “How is it,” Johnson wondered, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

I do wonder, though, who was paying Dr. Johnson to write those words. After all, he told Boswell, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

In other exhibit news, Anderson House, the headquarters and museum of the Society of the Cincinnati in Virginia, has just opened a new exhibit on “Virginia in the American Revolution,” which will run through next March. But anyone can download a PDF file of the catalog from the exhibit home page.

Finally, on the least serious level BibliOdyssey highlights the high hair in eighteenth-century satirical images.

Ebenezer Stevens's Punchbowl

From the collection of the Metropolitian Museum of Art in New York:

This extraordinary punchbowl features a remarkably faithful replica of an engraved certificate, dated December 1785, issued to Ebenezer Stevens (1751-1823) by the Society of the Cincinnati. Stevens was a major-general in command of the New York artillery and was vice president of the New York branch of the society. . . .

A related bowl, a polychrome [this kind, not this kind] version, was made for Colonel Richard Varick (1753–1831). Varick was president of the New York branch of the society while Stevens was vice president.