“You can decipher most squiggles”

At the Washington Papers, research editor Kathryn Gehred recently wrote about the questions and challenges involved in transcribing people’s handwritten letters.

After all, our scribbles are often inconsistent and sometimes ambiguous, but we know what we mean to write.

Gehred’s first main example came from young George Washington’s notes on his voyage to Barbados.

In the center paragraph of the notebook, Washington wrote that the crew had “catched a Dolphin.” I wouldn’t want to correct his grammar here, as it shows the way Washington wrote, and likely spoke, when he was 19 years old.

Let’s look as well at the two times he spelled the word “dolphin.” The first time, Washington clearly wrote “Dolphin”; but in the second instance, it looks like he wrote “Dalpin.” There’s not a lot of difference between a script “o” and “a,” and Washington clearly spelled the word correctly once. Should I correct the spelling in the second instance?

I believe on this point editors would disagree on what to do. If this were the only time Washington used an “a” in place of an “o” for the word dolphin, I would correct it, figuring that the “o” looked like an “a” due to sloppy penmanship. However, since he repeatedly wrote “Dalpin” or “Dalphin” elsewhere in the journal, we chose to keep the letter as “a.” I believe showing that young Washington misspelled words, even words he had spelled correctly earlier in the paragraph, carries historical meaning.

I write the above to give readers who do not have a background in transcription a glimpse into some of the issues that transcribers face. In some cases, the handwriting is so bad that you really do need to rely on context for what the author meant to say, even if what you’re looking at on the page is pretty much just a squiggle. Eventually, if you become familiar enough with a person’s handwriting, you can decipher most squiggles.

But what do you do when a person is writing a name? It’s tough to figure out a name from a letter’s context. And you can’t always trust that the person writing the name knows how to correctly spell it—as anyone reading Alexander Hamilton’s and George Washington’s multiple attempts to spell “Kosciuszko” can tell you.

Indeed, Founders Online tells us that in August 1780 Washington and his military aides sent out letters referring to “Kosciusko” and “Kosciusco.” And that was just after Col. Thaddeus Kosciuszko sent headquarters a letter, demonstrating the spelling he obviously preferred.

That said, I can’t spell Kosciuszko myself. I just look it up and copy-and-paste when I need it.

(The image above is a sketch of a dolphin-shaped fountain ornament from eighteenth-century Britain, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

A “Revolutionary Trio” of Videos

Maureen Taylor, author of the Last Muster collections of photographs of people who lived through the Revolutionary War, recently posted videos about her investigations of three of those people.

The professionally produced videos, each about fifteen minutes long, can be seen on this page.

The subjects are:

• Eleazer Blake of Rindge, New Hampshire, where the historical society turns out to have a trove of artifacts related to his service in the war.
• Agrippa Hull of Stockbridge, Massachusetts (shown above), a black soldier who served Thaddeus Kosciuszko and is a well-remembered character in his home town.
• Molly Akin of Pawling, New York, a Quaker woman who legend nonetheless says aided the Continentals by firing a gun in a British army camp, alerting the Americans to their presence. But how far back does that story go?

In these cases, Taylor appears to have started her investigation after seeing a reprinted photograph or an engraving or other portrait based on a photo. She then went hunting to find the original daguerrotypes—the most common form of portrait photography in the 1840s as the Revolutionary generation was dying out.

Some of Taylor’s searches were more successful than others, but along the way she also collected information about the people’s lives. For example, in one of these videos the original daguerrotype turns out to be so faded that it’s almost entirely illegible—but there’s documentation of the appointment with the photographer.

In this podcast, Taylor talks with Pamela Pacelli Cooper and Rob Cooper of Verissima Productions about their collaboration on “Revolutionary Trio” videos.

Exploring the Tunnel at Ninety Six

This spring archeologists, local firefighters, and National Park Service staff started to explore a tunnel dug during a siege in South Carolina in 1781. This is apparently the only tunnel created during a Revolutionary War siege to survive, and in fact it survived in good shape.

The History Blog reported this story, based on local television coverage:

The 125-foot tunnel was designed by Polish humanist, engineer and Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko during the 1781 siege of the earthen Star Fort in the town of Ninety Six, South Carolina. The plan was for the tunnel to extend underneath the Star Fort so that it could be mined from below and blown up. British reinforcements arrived before the tunnel was finished, which is why it, unlike its more successful brethren, managed to survive the war.

The earthworks of Star Fort are still in existence and the entire site is now a National Park. The Park service and experts from the University of South Florida sent Greenwood firefighter Russel Cline down into the tunnel with breathing equipment since they had no idea what kind of air quality he would encounter. He found that it was remarkably good, considering the three-and-a-half foot high tunnel is more than 230 years old. The video records that the vaulted tunnel is lined with brick and mortar which at first glance, at least, still impressively sound, a testament to Kosciuszko’s skill and attention to detail.

That detail would have been obliterated if Kosciuszko had been able to complete his plan and set off explosives under the fort. But the Loyalists at Ninety Six held out long enough for reinforcements to approach, driving the Continentals away.

[Image above courtesy of FOX Carolina.]

“More Moving Parts to This Machine”

The public discussion of Thomas Jefferson and slavery continued this month as The Atlantic Monthly’s Ta-Nehisi Coates posted an essay about a comment that the third President was caught in an “economic system of which no alternative was readily available.” That appears to be a quotation from a commenter, but Coates didn’t single out the author. It has been, as he wrote, a rather common claim.

Coates noted how Jefferson had counterexamples within his own circle, genteel planters who freed their slaves in different ways: President George Washington, his own cousin John Randolph, young correspondent Edward Coles, and the religiously-minded Robert Carter III. As I’ve written someplace before, the idea of emancipation was definitely in the marketplace of ideas during Jefferson’s career. He chose not to buy into that idea because ultimately he found the price too high.

Jefferson made his choice despite what Coates called his extraordinarily eloquent condemnation of slavery. In past decades authors glossed over the mismatch between the third President’s rhetoric and behavior, but that topic appears at the heart of many recent books. However, earlier portrayals of Jefferson as a champion of liberty for all still influence popular conceptions. That means complaining against the received image of Jefferson depends on what one has actually read.

In his next posting, Coates addressed the controversy over Thaddeus Kosciuszko’s will. He also wrote:

There's a temptation here to rage against a man who preached the evils of slavery in public, actually tried to talk others into continuing to hold slaves in private, and then refused to act on his own words, even when it would have cost him nothing. I think this instinct only works if you understand slavery strictly as an economic system. But as we've discussed before, slavery was the foundation of antebellum society. . . .

It seems clear to me that one can salute the ideas of a founding father, and at the same time condemn his cowardice when it came to putting them in practice. In other words, Jefferson can be both the intellectual father of this country and a notorious violator of the very ideas he put forth.

This fall the Kosciuszko will has been one item of dispute between Henry Wiencek, author of Master of the Mountain, and Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello. A commenter said Coates’s summary of the issue was too simple, and he agreed.

But then Coates went on to quote Gordon-Reed’s critique of Wiencek as a “defense of Jefferson” that “implicitly assumes that Jefferson bears no moral culpability, that Kosciuzko is ultimately (and seemingly totally) at fault.” I think that was also simplistic, seeing a “defense” in a reminder that the situation was more complicated than described in the book she was reviewing.

Gordon-Reed sent a reply, which Coates featured in yet another post. It noted racist statements even from emancipator Edward Coles and concluded:

Many today do not want to face the fact that white supremacy was as much a part of the founding ideology as republicanism. Beating up on TJ, as if he were some singular case, is part of the denial

That prompted more discussion, which Gordon-Reed, Coates, and Wiencek all joined. This might have been the most interesting discourse of the series.

Coates and some of his commenters argue that it’s valid to criticize Jefferson more harshly than other slaveholders of his time because he wrote so well about the harms of slaveholding. As commenter “abk1985” wrote to Gordon-Reed:

The difference here on this blog from what you do is that we are much more likely to make moral evaluations rather than simply attempt to understand historical personages. So there's a kind of built in conflict here.

Gordon-Reed’s reply:

Writing history is for me a moral enterprise, but there are different ways to show that. I don't think anyone who has read my books and articles about TJ would think I have not been critical of him when appropriate, witheringly critical at times. My point in writing this post was to make it clear that there were more moving parts to this machine than have been described. As I said in another post, I've existed in this strange position where some people are absolutely convinced that all I want to do is destroy Jefferson and others are absolutely convinced that all I want to do is to protect him. I don't approach TJ, or the founders, with any notion that my goal is to hold them to a standard. I don't "expect more". I don't expect anything beyond what my knowledge about them, gleaned from my study of them, suggests they are capable of doing at any given point of their lives, and what their society would have allowed them to do.

Academic History, Popular History, and Jefferson’s Slaveholding

A more salient element of the debate over Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves than differing interpretations is the divide between popular and academic history.

Wiencek is an “independent scholar,” not an academic. And more power to him. He’s written two books on American slavery and its legacy, The Hairstons and An Imperfect God, that received good reviews from in and outside academia.

Master of the Mountain’s loudest critics have come from inside the academy. Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of history and law at Harvard. Jan E. Lewis is a professor of history at Rutgers. David Waldstreicher, also quoted in the recent New York Times article about the controversy, is a professor at Temple. Another researcher who raised her voice on their side, Lucia Stanton, recently retired as historian at Monticello.

But there’s no real enmity between scholarly and popular historians. There’s even some overlap, with some professors publishing through commercial presses that don’t use peer review and some popular writers winning research fellowships. It may well be more of a system of mutual envy from both sides of the fence. Independent scholars might wish for the regular salaries, library access, and prestige of professors. Academic authors might wish they had no teaching responsibilities and could reap big advances by retelling great stories that break no new historiographical ground. But that situation has been in place for years; it inspires more bemusement than passion.

Book marketing might be a source of more friction. Basically, all history books these days have to be promoted as “the untold story.” Even if a book is about a topic that dozens of people have already covered, its publisher wants to be able to announce that it offers important new information. And academic and popular historians have different yardsticks for what’s new. For a professor, the innovation might lie in a research finding, interpretation, or methodology. In contrast, popularizers often define what’s “new” as what overturns the understandings of the general public, which can lag the scholarly discussion by decades.

In writing about Thomas Jefferson and his slaves, Wiencek certainly isn’t traversing unexplored territory. The last fifteen years of Jefferson historiography have been largely consumed with assessing the man’s attitude toward slavery, with particular regard to the strong evidence that he had children with his slave Sally Hemings. Though there were important antecedents, that trend picked up after Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy was vindicated by D.N.A. findings in 1998. Lots of books followed, including some by scholars who had previously dismissed the Hemings evidence and were catching up.

Furthermore, that sea change in interpreting the Jefferson-Hemings relationship made the newspapers. It prompted new depictions of the third President in popular entertainment. Today Americans are probably more sensitive than ever before to how Jefferson exploited enslaved people. To be sure, there are diehard Jefferson “defenders,” just as there are a few examples of what Wiencek refers to as “slavery’s retrospective apologists.” But there really aren’t enough of those folks to make the case that it’s “new” to reveal Jefferson as a slaveholder.

Master of the Mountain strives for novelty in arguing that Thomas Jefferson was a harsher slaveholder than previous authors have described. In some respects it does this by presenting new arguments. The book is the first to make much of two documents I noted yesterday: Jefferson’s 1793 letter about the growth of slave economies and the 1801 letter about whipping boys in the nail factory. Wiencek’s depiction of Jefferson committing himself to lifelong slaveholding in the early 1790s is new—and debated. But such interpretations aren’t what’s got the academics so upset.

Rather, Master of the Mountain increases its claim to novelty by complaining that previous writing on Jefferson (all of it? a lot? too much?) has minimized or excused the man’s slaveholding. Among those titles Wiencek includes not just older works but some of the groundbreaking academic books of recent years. And some of the arguments in his book appear “new” only in that they don’t acknowledge similar arguments in recent studies.

For example, Wiencek discusses how Jefferson handled Thaddeus Kosciuszko’s bequest suggesting that he free some of his slaves. Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Hodges were exploring that episode back in 2007. They published a book on the topic: Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull. As far as I can tell, Master of the Mountain doesn’t mention their work at all.

But even that, I don’t think, is what’s fueling the current critique. For decades academic authors have watched popularizers write books that are twenty years behind scholarly findings and take those “new” stories onto the bestseller lists. Something else is happening in this case.

TOMORROW: How Master of the Mountain treats Gordon-Reed’s work.

Jefferson, Kosciuszko, and a Matter of Money

One of Boston 1775’s earliest readers sent me this announcement of a seminar at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania a couple of weeks back. I found both the topic and its treatment interesting:

Thomas Jefferson and Tadeuz Kosciuszko:
Slavery and Freedom, Honor and Betrayal

Gary B. Nash, UCLA, and Graham Russell Hodges, Colgate University

Thaddeus Kosciuszko’s return to the United States in 1797 initiates the narrative we present in this paper. Although crippled by deep wounds, Kosciuszko returned in triumph to reside in Philadelphia as a revolutionary hero. Americans applauded him for his leadership in Poland’s vain uprising from 1792 to 1794. Americans cherished him in the hearts and memories that linked his glory during the American Revolution with their anxieties over the conservative policies of President John Adams. Kosciuszko had more than adulation in mind; he intended to collect some $12,000 plus interest in overdue pay from the American Revolution. The American Congress, aware of his enormous popular appeal, quickly voted to allot the back pay, which, with interest rose to over $15,000.

Kosciuszko remained in Philadelphia, where he befriended Vice President Thomas Jefferson. The pair talked of Poland, France, liberty and slavery long into the night on numerous occasions in the winter of 1797-1798. International anxieties promoted secret actions. Kosciuszko was worried about the newly passed Alien and Sedition Acts and wanted to travel to Paris to gather support for the revitalization of Poland. Jefferson was distraught over the possibility of war between the United States and France and asked Kosciuszko to act as a covert ambassador.

What to do with Kosciuszko’s pension? He gave Jefferson power of attorney; the two men drafted an extraordinary will that gave the American Patriot the power to use the cash to purchase, manumit, educate and give land and cattle to as many enslaved people as could be afforded. Jefferson even had the right to “buy” his own enslaved people and free them. It was a solemn pact between two noble men.

Our narrative then jumps two decades to the time of Kosciuszko’s death in late 1817 and Jefferson’s realization that his promise was now due. We then discuss at length Jefferson’s decision to relinquish executorship of the estate, now worth in excess of $20,000. Nonetheless, we view Jefferson’s eventual decision to shed his oath of honor to Kosciuszko as a betrayal of a promise rich in potential to shift American attitudes about slavery, While Jefferson’s attitudes about black potentials for American citizenship have long been considered, we consider his inaction in this affair of honor deeply troubling for a man deemed America’s greatest symbol of liberty.

Not mentioned in this summary is who took over Kosciuszko’s assets after Jefferson stepped away. How well were the Polish freedom-fighter’s wishes carried out? According to Prof. D. Benjamin Barros’s PropertyProfBlog, the estate was still being litigated in 1834, years after Jefferson had died. (Prof. Barros’s posting also contains the text of Kosciuszko’s will. Thanks to Prof. Mary L. Dudziak’s Legal History Blog and Google for helping me find that.)

I think it’s getting fairly late for American historians to be shocked, shocked at Jefferson’s reluctance to consider African-Americans as equals and work toward their emancipation. Especially at the end of his life, when his debts became more burdensome, Jefferson clearly froze the principles of liberty he wrote about, always putting off emancipation and often arguing against other men’s more immediate plans. Nevertheless, in this case Jefferson’s reluctance might also have been motivated by feeling not up to the administrative tasks. Financial management was not, after all, his strength.

(Today’s illustration, courtesy of the Library of Congress, is a portrait of Jefferson after a painting by Kosciuszko.)