From the “Lower Counties” to an Independent State

Earlier in the week, I wrote about the fewer-than-thirteen colonies represented in Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 “JOIN, or DIE.” cartoon in the Pennsylvania Gazette.

The snake parts included Pennsylvania but not Delaware. From one perspective, Delaware was merely a part or adjunct of Pennsylvania. From another, it was a separate polity. The question wasn’t settled until 1776.

The area on the west side of what we call the Delaware River was the home of the Lenape, Nanticoke, and possibly Tuscarora people at the start of the seventeenth century. In 1631 the Dutch established a colony near the site of today’s Lewes, but that lasted about a year.

In 1638 Sweden tried imperial expansion and set up a colony at what’s now Wilmington. The Dutch returned in strength and took back the territory in 1655. Then the English seized Delaware from the Dutch in 1664.

That English expedition was acting on behalf of Prince James, Duke of York, later James II. Baron Baltimore, proprietor of Maryland, argued that the land should belong to his colony, but a duke had more clout than a baron. York turned his territory over to William Penn in 1682.

Penn was pleased that Philadelphia now enjoyed access to the sea along the Delaware River. He included his new “lower counties” in the Pennsylvania general assembly. But the old and new parts of the province didn’t work well together. In 1704 a separate Delaware assembly began meeting at New Castle.

In the top-down view of the Penn family and the imperial government in London, Pennsylvania and Delaware remained a single entity. They always had the same appointed governor. In 1765 the ministers in London named John Hughes as stamp master for all of Pennsylvania, including the ”lower counties.”

Franklin’s emblem showed a similar perspective. Though as a member of the Pennsylvania assembly he knew that the lower counties met separately, he didn’t think Delaware needed to be treated as a whole colony on its own. It was just an appendage to rapidly growing Pennsylvania, lacking western lands and a major port.

Other newspapers copied the Pennsylvania Gazette emblem, also leaving out Delaware. When Isaiah Thomas and Paul Revere adapted the original snake into a more dangerous kind for the Massachusetts Spy masthead, they added Georgia—but still filed Delaware under “P.”

What changed the way people looked at Delaware? I think the arrival of continent-wide Congresses was a big factor. (Ironically, the “JOIN, or DIE.” emblem was created to promote the first such gathering, the Albany Congress, which didn’t really work.)

Colony legislatures, not governors, sent delegates to the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 and later gatherings. That meant Delaware acted separately from Pennsylvania. The two delegations had equal votes in the Congresses. American Whigs happily counted twelve colonies at the First Continental Congress, thirteen at the second.

By 1776, those politicians were proclaiming that power rose from the people—or at least that top slice of the people who elected representatives. From that bottom-up perspective, Delaware was already separate from Pennsylvania. During that year, the Delaware legislature’s declarations and resolutions formally established the state as independent not only from Britain but also from its northern neighbor.

“A man of genteel but frantic appearance”

John Frith, formerly a lieutenant in the 37th and then the 10th Regiment of Foot, returned to Britain in the late 1780s, convinced he had been unfairly pushed out of the army.

And all because he, while serving in the West Indies, had a divine vision that convinced him Jamaica wasn’t real, and the British government was covering that up. 

In December 1787, according to Steve Poole in The Politics of Regicide in England, 1760–1850, Frith petitioned the House of Commons to “desire His Majesty to enforce his executive power of martial prerogative” and put him back on the rolls.

Frith then appears to have traveled around. I see references to him arriving in Liverpool and visiting Holland, and he commissioned a memorial at his mother’s burying-place in Hempstead.

At the end of December 1789, Frith was back in London promulgating a “manifesto” and a Protest Against the Democracy of the People of the Kingdom of Great Britain. He pinned the latter paper “on the whalebone in the courtyard of St. James’s” and at the Royal Exchange, press reports said. What’s more:

he publicly read it, and, in the most wild and extravagant manner, exhorted the persons who heard him, to espouse his cause, and not to see the constitution of their country subverted.

In Frith’s mind, his dismissal from the army had become a constitutional offense because the king, privy council, and Parliament were shirking their duty to address his petition. He warned:

After waiting upwards of four months and no attention paid, I don’t hesitate to pronounce our Ancient Constitution has given a mortal blow to her libertys and we have only the outward form of government.

Frith compared the situation to “Sweden in 1772,” when King Gustaf III led a coup to introduce absolute monarchy. No matter that Frith was asking the king to act absolutely on his behalf.

On 21 Jan 1790, Frith visited the Treasury Solicitors’ Office for help, only to be turned away. In St. James’s Park he saw George III ride by in his gilded carriage to open a session of Parliament. Frith waved a roll of paper at the king, who by tradition accepted petitions from his subjects. But then the former officer shouted, “You tyrant! You villain! You are going to be hanged like a rogue, as you are guarded by a parcel of rogues of constables!”

The newspapers reported, “a person of genteel appearance threw a large stone with great violence at the carriage, but fortunately missed the royal person.” People immediately seized “a man of genteel but frantic appearance” with “a bunch of orange-coloured ribband” sewn in the middle of his cockade. The press reported on one eyewitness:

Samuel Spurway…saw the prisoner, when his majesty’s carriage was passing him, throw a stone with all his force against it, the stone hit the coach about two inches below the glass, but his majesty was so engaged in conversation as not to observe it. The stone, Mr. Spurway picked up, and found it large and heavy.

On questioning the prisoner as to his motives for so horrid an attempt, he replied, ‘He was very sorry the stone had not hit the king!’ Mr. Spurway ordered Jordan, a constable, to seize him, who also saw him throw the stone.

That prisoner was, of course, John Frith. On searching him, the constables found twopence and a bag containing a copy of his manifesto. Frith identified himself as a former army officer and said he was seeking “a public examination” to restore his good name.

The authorities took Frith to the Whitehall office of the Duke of Leeds, secretary of state for foreign affairs. In crowded many more royal officials: “the lord president, lord privy seal, chancellor of the exchequer, duke of Richmond, two secretaries of state, earl of Chatham, lords Hawkesbury and Kenyon, master of the rolls, attorney and solicitor generals, and sir Sampson Wright,” chief magistrate at Bow Street.

The constables described seeing Frith throw the stone. An unidentified female relative “spoke strongly to the appearance of the prisoner’s derangement of mind, previous to his committing this rash act.” Other people who knew Frith also answered questions about him.

As for Frith himself, he was recorded as telling the magistrate:

Until His Majesty is better advised and gives a Martial Redress…the Liberty of the British Soldier and Subject are Infringed by Despotism which may end in Anarchy and Confusion. . . . our chartered rights in the Tower will Supply the Deficiency to Carry on the Law of the Land. Now the Compact is Disolved as in the case of James II, June 1688.

The august council decided to commit John Frith to Newgate Prison and put him on trial for treason.

COMING UP: Frith at the bar.

Public Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestic

Last month on H-Net, Tristan Stubbs reviewed D. H. Robinson’s The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, published in 2020 by Oxford University Press.

Stubbs wrote:

…this highly impressive work offers a genuinely new paradigm through which to view the years leading up to 1776. Americans made the fateful decision to secede not for the economic reasons offered over a century ago by Charles Beard and the Progressive historians; they were not the “radicals” drawn by Gordon S. Wood; and their motivations cannot be ascribed solely to civic republican ideals of virtue and liberty favored by the “canonical intellectual histories” of Bernard Bailyn and J. G. A. Pocock.

Instead, Americans had seen themselves for a long time before the Declaration of Independence as intimately connected to European geopolitics, took a deep interest in the balance of power across the ocean, and were disappointed by the metropolitan Tory government’s failure to shoulder its responsibilities in defending continental liberties against the overweening power of France and Spain. . . .

it spends an impressive amount of time on the effect on metropolitan and colonial opinions of Sweden’s 1772 reversal to absolutism and of the British government’s failure to support the Republic of Corsica against what colonists viewed as French attempts to impose Catholic “universal monarchy” not only on that Mediterranean island but throughout the French sphere of influence—including in America.

This hypothesis truly does seem like a “new paradigm,” in that I hadn’t considered inadequate protection from Catholic empires to be a major concern for the Americans resisting Crown measures from 1765 to 1775.

There would be at least a great irony if colonists adopted independence due to fear of France and Spain given how the young U.S. of A. soon allied with France and Spain. And then felt threatened by Spain/Napoleonic France as well as Britain on its new borders without the protection of a large empire.

To be sure, the Revolution in New England was fueled by suspicion of popery and ended with national freedom of religion, and the war in large slaveholding states was fueled by fear of slave uprisings and ended with slavery coming to an end in other parts of the country. So a paradoxical outcome doesn’t negate a possible cause of the conflict.

But the idea that colonial American discourse about European geopolitics strongly influenced resistance to Parliament’s new taxes and royal officials seems very tenuous. Ebenezer Mackintosh named a son after Corsican independence leader Pasquale Paoli and Loyalists claimed that William Molineux wanted “Paoli” as a nickname himself, but I really don’t see the farmers of Hampshire County shutting down their courthouse because they felt the London government hadn’t supported Paoli’s Corsican cause enough six years before. (Indeed, it was well known the British Crown granted Paoli a pension, supporting him as an asset against France.)

Today we Americans live in a much more democratic society, meaning more people are involved in political decisions. We’re privy to more news from around the world. Our economy is more globalized, as are our military forces. By all measures we should be more concerned with international relations than eighteenth-century farmers. And yet foreign policy is rarely a big factor in our politics, so was it a factor in theirs?

Robinson’s argument appears to rest on what he calls “the discursive evidence,” the same body of evidence that he says should also rule out historical hypotheses about the Revolution based on “relations between classes and genders...racism and material cultures.”

As Stubbs writes, “the discourse under investigation here was led primarily by white, male, anglophone professionals.” And in this case “professionals” appears to mean the sliver of educated, usually wealthy white men who wrote essays for the newspapers.

I have no doubt those essays used contemporary Sweden as an example of the danger of autocracy, the same way they used the Stuart monarchs and the Roman emperors. But I doubt those writings from such a narrow, well, class really got at all the forces driving political change at the time. And I’m skeptical that developments well outside the British Empire motivated colonial Americans to rebel as much as “pocketbook issues.” 

“A New Method for Extracting the Foul Air out of Ships”

As the Royal Navy expanded in the early eighteenth century, its leaders became more concerned about shipboard illnesses.

Warships carried big crews, not only all the men needed to sail those large ships but extra men to fight other ships and to take them over as prize vessels. All those people living in close proximity belowdecks, taking turns in the bunks and hammocks, were easy prey for diseases.

According to the latest medical thinking, the biggest threat was bad air. Doctors declared that was the cause of typhus (actually a bacterial disease), scurvy (actually a dietary deficiency), and more. And given how badly some ships smelled, that seemed like an obvious theory.

As Arnold Zuckerman related in a 1976 article in Eighteenth-Century Studies, in 1741 two Englishmen came forward with plans for shipboard ventilators, which would ostensibly remove the bad air from below decks and produce a healthier environment. Those men were:

• Rev. Stephen Hales (1677-1761), which envisioned a system of bellows worked by pumps.
• Samuel Sutton (d. 1749), a brewer and coffeehouse owner who had a good technical mind; his system used tubes full of warm air expanding naturally from the oven in the galley.

(A third inventor, the Swedish military architect Martin Triewald, produced his own system the same year. It used bellows, like Hale’s.)

Sutton described his idea to naval officers in his coffeehouse, only to hear one of them talk about him “as being really mad, and out of my senses.” He finally got an appointment with the Surveyor of the Navy, Sir Jacob Acworth, who kept him waiting for long periods and then declared, “no experiment should be made, if he could hinder it.”

The inventor sought help from Dr. Richard Mead (1673-1754, shown above), a royal physician. Mead was impressed. He introduced Sutton to the president of the Royal Society, read a paper about the brewer’s invention to that society, and later helped Sutton publish a pamphlet on his system. Mead used his connections to appeal to the Admiralty.

In September 1741, Sutton demonstrated his ventilation system to naval officials on a hulk at Deptford. That went well enough that in November the Royal Navy authorized him to install the tubes on H.M.S. Norwich, about to sail to Africa and the Caribbean. The tropical region was, of course, known to be ridden with disease.

For the next year, Sutton kept hoping to receive good news, and a payment, from the Admiralty. But he heard nothing. Not until the end of 1743 did the agency reply to his inquiries. And then it turned out the captain of the Norwich had reported two things. First, he’d had trouble getting all the ventilator tubes to work right. Second:

I was not able to judge of their use, having been so healthy as to bury only two men all the time I was on the coast.

The Royal Navy wouldn’t support a system designed to keep sailors from getting sick because too many sailors had stayed well.

TOMORROW: Vindication for ventilation.

Elements of Marie Antoinette’s Letters

The Swedish count Axel von Fersen (1755-1810) came to Rhode Island in 1780 to serve as an aide-de-camp to Gen. Rochambeau, commander of the French troops in North America. He met the American commanders and took part in the Yorktown campaign.

Unlike some European officers, Von Fersen wasn’t motivated by republican leanings. Instead, he had to leave France because his close friendship with the young queen, Marie Antoinette, was becoming close to a scandal. The two had meet in 1774 as teenagers, then renewed the acquaintance in 1778. Advisors felt it wiser for the count to go to another continent for a while.

Count Von Fersen returned to Europe in 1783 and was soon back in France as a diplomat for the king of Sweden. In 1787 that king appointed the count as his secret personal envoy to Louis XVI, which also gave him more time with Marie Antoinette. When the French Revolution broke out, Von Fersen became a close advisor to the royal couple.

By June 1791 the French government was holding the royal family in Paris, with Lafayette in charge of the guards. Count Von Fersen organized an escape plan, personally driving the family in a carriage out of the city.

Then the party split up. Louis and his family made it as far as Varennes before a crowd recaptured them and returned them to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. What little trust the government and people had in the royal family evaporated. Von Fersen fled across the border.

The count continued to correspond with Marie Antoinette in the months that followed. In 1982 his descendants sold a cache of those letters to the French national archives. Someone had scribbled over parts of fifteen letters, rendering phrases impossible to read.

In recent years scientists have developed new ways to analyze such cross-outs by mapping how they respond to types of radiation. These methods mean analysts no longer need to destroy samples of the paper or chemically alter the ink.

One example reported in 2013 involved the original score of Luigi Cherubini’s 1797 opera Médée. Large sections of the final pages were blotted out. According to tradition, Cherubini disliked critics telling him the opera was too long and bluntly cut it short.

Because Cherubini had written his score using standard iron gall ink and marked it over with charcoal, X-ray sensors could easily distinguish the elemental signatures of those two types of black.

The letters between Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen were a bigger challenge, though, because both the original writing and the scribbles were made with iron gall ink. That meant both layers were full of iron and sulfur.

However, as Anne Michelin, Fabien Pottierand, and Christine Andraud just reported in the journal Science Advances, the chemical composition of eighteenth-century inks could vary; “additional metal elements—that are present as impurities in the vitriol (iron sulfate) used to prepare the ink—are also found in diverse amounts.”

In particular, they found that on eight of the letters the upper layer of ink has a lot more copper than the lower layer. By mapping where the less cupric ink lay, they revealed enough of the underlying writing to decipher such phrases from Marie Antoinette as “ma tendre amie” (my tender friend) and “vous que j’aime” (you who I love).

The next question was who had made those changes. The authors write:

The most common hypothesis was that redaction was carried out in the second half of the 19th century by the great-nephew of the Count of Fersen, the Baron of Klinckowström, or perhaps by a different member of the Fersen family, before the publication of this correspondence to preserve their reputation.

However, the analysts were able to match the elemental signature of the scribbles to the ink that Von Fersen used to write his letters. In other words, he probably crossed out those sensitive phrases himself after reading them to protect the queen.

King Louis XVI was sent to the guillotine in January 1793, charged with conspiring with France’s foreign enemies. Marie Antoinette followed nine months later.

Count Von Fersen never married. He became active in Swedish politics, rising to be Marshal of the Realm, the highest non-royal official in the government. In 1810, during a heated public dispute over the royal succession, a mob stomped him to death.