“He would raise a thousand Men at his own expence”?

At last night’s presentation on the John and Abigail Adams and George Washington, I related an anecdote that circulated at the First Continental Congress. It raised a question, so I decided to take a closer look at the record.

On 31 Aug 1774, John Adams dined with South Carolina delegate Thomas Lynch, Sr. (1727-1776, shown here) and wrote this into his diary:

He told us that Coll. Washington made the most eloquent Speech at the Virginia Convention that ever was made. Says he, “I will raise 1000 Men, subsist them at my own Expence, and march my self at their Head for the Relief of Boston.”

Silas Deane of Connecticut heard the same story about George Washington, writing home to his wife in the middle of September:

It is said that in the house of Burgesses in Virginia, on hearing of the Boston Port Bill, he offered to raise and arm and lead one thousand men himself at his own expense, for the defence of the country, were there need of it. His fortune is said to be equal to such an undertaking.

Adams recalled his conversation with Lynch in the autobiography he wrote in the early 1800s:

Mr. Lynch a Delegate from South Carolina, who, in conversation on the Unhappy State of Boston and its inhabitants, after some Observations had been made on the Eloquence of Mr. Patrick Henry and Mr. Richard Henry Lee, which had been very loudly celebrated by the Virginians, said that the most eloquent Speech that had ever been made in Virginia or any where else, upon American Affairs had been made by Colonel Washington.

This was the first time I had ever heard the Name of Washington, as a Patriot in our present Controversy, I asked who is Colonel Washington and what was his Speech?

Colonel Washington he said was the officer who had been famous in the late french War and in the Battle in which [Gen. Edward] Braddock fell. His Speech was that if the Bostonians should be involved in Hostilities with the British Army he would march to their relief at the head of a Thousand Men at his own expence. This Sentence Mr. Lynch said, had more Oratory in it, in his Judgment, than all that he had ever heard or read.

And in an 11 Nov 1807 letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Adams included the story among the influential “anecdotes” that preceded Washington:

Mr Lynch of South Carolina told me before We met in Congress in 1774 that “Colonel Washington had made the most eloquentt speech that ever had been Spoken upon the Controversy with England, viz That if the English Should Attack the People of Boston, he would raise a thousand Men at his own expence and march at their head to New England to their Aid.”

It’s a pity that there’s no basis to Lynch’s story. Sources from Virginia, where people were after all most likely to have heard Washington speak, say nothing about it.

Lynch and Adams spoke at the end of August. The Virginia delegation to the Congress started to arrive on 3 September, with Washington coming the next day. Yet the story continued to spread among the New England delegates, as shown by Deane repeating it in the middle of September. Even decades later, when Adams repeated the story, he didn’t write about now knowing it was untrue.

Evidently people were so impressed by Washington’s reported promise to march a thousand men to Boston that no one actually asked him about it.

The Stamp Act Congress’s Three Messages to London

On the same day that the Stamp Act Congress approved its Declaration of Rights and Grievances, which was mostly for public consumption, it also appointed three committees to draft formal messages to different branches of the British government:

• Robert R. Livingston of New York (shown here), William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, and William Murdock of Maryland to compose “an address to his majesty,” George III.
• John Rutledge of South Carolina, Edward Tilghman of Maryland, and Philip Livingston of New York to write “a memorial and petition to the lords in parliament.”
• Thomas Lynch of South Carolina, James Otis of Massachusetts, and Thomas McKean of Delaware to pen “a petition to the house of commons of Great Britain.”

The next day was Sunday. On Monday, 21 October, all three committees presented their drafts. Probably for some reason of protocol, the “address” to the king became a “petition.” The congress read, debated, and amended the documents, approving the first two on the 22nd and the third on the 23rd.

All three documents made the same argument, with varying degrees of obsequiousness, detail, and appeals to economic benefits. Here, for example, is how each appeal began. To the king:

That the inhabitants of these colonies, unanimously devoted with the warmest sentiments of duty and affection to your sacred person and government, and inviolably attached to the present happy establishment of the protestant succession in your illustrious house, and deeply sensible of your royal attention to their prosperity and happiness, humbly beg leave to approach the throne, by representing to your majesty, that these colonies were originally planted by subjects of the British crown, who, animated with the spirit of liberty, encouraged by your majesty’s royal predecessors, and confiding in the public faith for the enjoyment of all the rights and liberties essential to freedom, emigrated from their native country to this continent, and, by their successful perseverance, in the midst of innumerable dangers and difficulties, together with a profusion of their blood and treasure, have happily added these vast and extensive dominions to the Empire of Great Britain.

To the Lords:

That his majesty’s liege subjects in his America colonies, though they acknowledge a due subordination to that august body the British parliament, are entitled, in the opinion of your memorialists, to all the inherent rights and liberties of the natives of Great Britain, and have ever since the settlement of the said colonies, exercised those rights and liberties, as far as their local circumstances would permit.

To the Commons:

That the several late acts of parliament, imposing divers duties and taxes on the colonies, and laying the trade and commerce under very burthensome restrictions; but above all, the act for granting and applying certain stamp duties in America, have filled them with the deepest concern and surprise, and they humbly conceive the execution of them will be attended with consequences very injurious to the commercial interests of Great Britain and her colonies, and must terminate in the eventual ruin of the latter.

Even as the delegates approved those documents, their united front was cracking. Although men from Connecticut and South Carolina had helped to draft the messages to Britain, those delegations insisted on not being listed among the colonies endorsing those documents. The instructions from their legislatures, they said, didn’t authorize them to approve such petitions to London. That meant only half of the colonies originally invited to the Congress were visibly getting behind its results.

And when the delegates discussed how to sign those documents, their unity would break down further.

COMING UP: A challenge to a duel?

Henry Knox Turns Down a Commission

The same 23 Oct 1775 conference at Gen. George Washington’s headquarters that decided to ease Col. Richard Gridley out of the command of the Continental Army’s artillery regiment also determined that Henry Knox should be appointed Assistant Engineer with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Until then, Knox had not been part of the Continental Army at all—he was a gentleman volunteer. In the prewar Massachusetts militia, his highest rank had been lieutenant in Boston’s grenadier company. He was only twenty-five, and the regiment included older men with more militia experience and higher army rank, so this appointment was a real sign of confidence in Knox.

And he turned it down.

Knox didn’t think the rank of lieutenant colonel was high enough, as he explained to John Adams in a letter from Cambridge dated 26 October:

A number of the Generals desir’d me to act as engineer and said that when the delegates from the Continental Congress came here the matter should be settl’d—myself as cheif engineer with the rank and pay of Colonel and a Lt. Col. [Rufus] Putnam as second also with the rank of Col.—but the Gentlemen (two of them, Dctr. [Benjamin] Franklin was of another opinion) delegates did not see proper to engage for any other rank than that of Lt. Col. and I believe have recommended us in that order to your Congress.

I have the most sacred regard for the liberties of my country and am fully determined to act as far as in my power in opposition to the present tyranny attempted to be imposed upon it, but as all honor is comparative I humbly hope that I have as good pretensions to the rank of Col. as many now in the service, the declining to confer which by the delegates not a little supriz’d me. If your respectable body should not incline to give the rank and pay of Col. I must beg to decline it, not but I will do every service in power as a Volunteer.

It is said and universally beleived that the officers and soldiers of the train of artillery will refuse to serve under their present Commander, the reasons of which you no doubt have heard. If it should be so and a new Col. Appointed I should be glad to suceed to that post where I flatter myself I should be of some little service to the Cause. The other field officers of the regiment wish it and I have great reasons to beleive the Generals too. This would be much more agreable to me than the first and would not hinder me from being useful in that department.

Continental Congress delegates Thomas Lynch and Benjamin Harrison had apparently balked at making Knox a full colonel, and the conference had thus recommended appointing him as lieutenant colonel, giving the same rank to Rufus Putnam (who was already in the army).

So as of late October, Gen. Washington had an artillery commander who needed to be replaced, superiors who disagreed with the replacement his generals had suggested, a replacement who had turned down the job, and a shortage of heavy guns, mortars, and gunpowder. Aside from that, the siege was going fine.

Come hear me talk about how Washington managed to reengineer the artillery regiment at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site this Thursday at 6:00 P.M.

Richard Gridley: “become very obnoxious to that corps”

A lot of the research we rely on about Col. Richard Gridley, first commander of the Massachusetts and then Continental artillery regiment, comes from Daniel T. V. Huntoon, a writer in the late 1800s.

Huntoon was from Canton, Massachusetts, the town where Gridley settled a few years before the war when it was still part of Stoughton. Huntoon was, like Gridley, a Freemason.

Huntoon wrote and rewrote several articles about Gridley and included a long section on the colonel in his history of Canton. He argued that Gridley—whom he called a major general—deserved a bigger monument, and eventually the town installed the impressive grave marker shown here.

One document that I don’t see quoted in any of Huntoon’s writings about Gridley is the minutes of the conference at Gen. George Washington’s headquarters on 23 Oct 1775. Along with the general and his aides were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Lynch, and Benjamin Harrison, delegates to the Continental Congress. Those men had all been meeting with representatives from Massachusetts and other New England governments, but they saved some topics for a smaller group.

Item 14 on their agenda said:

Very unhappy disputes prevailed in the Regiment of Artillery. Colonel Gridley is become very obnoxious to that corps, and the General is informed that he will prove the destruction of the Regiment, if continued therein. What is to be done in this case?

That as all Officers must be approved by the General, if it shall appear, in forming a new Army, that the difference is irreconcileable, Colonel Gridley be dismissed in some honourable way; and that the half pay [pension from the Crown] which he renounced, by entering into the American Army, ought to be compensated to him.

The notes of that meeting were published in the mid-1800s and available to Huntoon. He quoted other documents that appeared in Washington’s papers and American Archives that complimented Gridley. But if you read Huntoon’s several articles, you’d never know that Washington thought removing Gridley from command was the only way to avoid “the destruction of the Regiment.”

I’ll be discussing Washington’s management challenge this Thursday at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site at 6:00 P.M.

(Photo above from the Canton Citizen, whose 2011 article about Gridley relies too much on Huntoon’s writing.)

The Myth of the Professor’s Flag

Often the legend of the “Speech of the Unknown,” retold yesterday, is paired with another legend of an unidentified man advising the Founders, in this case about the American flag. To the conspiracy-minded, these two men must be the same. To anyone concerned with history based on contemporaneous documents and primary sources, the stories are equally ludicrous.

The oldest version of the flag story appeared in Our Flag, or the Evolution of the Stars and Stripes including the Reason to Be of the Design; the Colors, and Their Position, Mystic Interpretation Together with Selections Eloquent, Patriotic and Poetical, published by Robert A. Campbell in 1890. An extract appears on this webpage. It sets the scene this way:

In the fall of 1775, the Colonial Congress, then in session at Philadelphia, appointed Messrs. [Benjamin] Franklin, [Thomas] Lynch and [Benjamin] Harrison as a committee to consider and recommend a design for the Colonial Flag. General [George] Washington was then in camp at Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the committee went there to consult with him concerning the work in hand.

The Continental Congress did in fact appoint those three delegates as a committee to consult with the commander, but not on the flag. They met in a council of war, which also included other top generals and representatives from the New England colonies, at Washington’s headquarters on 23-24 Oct 1775. Congress’s records show that Lynch and Harrison were back in Philadelphia accepting new committee assignments in early November.

Campbell’s book differs, saying that “The committeemen arrived at Cambridge on the morning of December 13th.” And it describes three more participants in the discussion between Washington and the Congress delegates: “one of the patriotic and well-to-do citizens” of Cambridge, who hosted the visitors; that man’s wife; and

a very peculiar old gentleman who was a temporary sojourner with the family. . . . Little seems to have been known concerning this old gentleman; and in the materials from which this account is compiled his name is not even once mentioned, for he is uniformly spoken of or referred to as “the Professor.”

Since there were few colleges in North America at the time, there were very few professors, and those gentlemen were all very prominent. This man, in contrast, seems to have been some sort of anonymous professor.

After a great deal of detail that makes one wonder if Campbell was trying to fill out pages, he states that the group formed themselves into a committee to discuss the flag. Naturally, the one woman at the table becomes the secretary—this is a late nineteenth-century story, after all.

The mysterious Professor addresses the needs for a flag:

“Comrade Americans: We are assembled here to devise and suggest the design for a new flag, which will represent, at once, the principles and determination of the Colonies to unite in demanding and securing justice from the Government to which they still owe recognized allegiance. We are not, therefore, expected to design or recommend a flag which will represent a new government or an independent nation, but one which simply represents the principle that even kings owe something of justice to their loyal subjects. . . .

“General Washington, here, is a British Subject; aye, he is a British soldier; and he is in command of British troops; and they are only attempting to enforce their rights as loyal subjects of the British Crown. But General Washington will soon forswear all allegiance to everything foreign; and he will ere many months appear before his own people, the people of these Colonies, and before the world, as the general commanding the armies of a free and united people, organized into a new and independent nation.

“The flag which is now recommended must be one designed and adapted to meet the inevitable—and soon to be accomplished—change of allegiance. The flag now adopted must be one that will testify our present loyalty as English Subjects; and it must be one easily modified—but needing no radical change—to make it announce and represent the new nation which is already gestating in the womb of time; and which will come to birth—and that not prematurely, but fully developed and ready for the change into independent life—before the sun in its next summer’s strength ripens our next harvest. . . .”

Having predicted the future—without any apparent response from the officials around him—the Professor then goes on to describe the ideal source for the Continental Army’s flag:

“I refer to the flag of the English East India Company, which is one with a field of alternate longitudinal red and white stripes, and having the Cross of St. George for a union. I therefore, suggest for your consideration a flag with a field composed of thirteen equally wide, longitudinal, alternate, red and white stripes, and with the Union Flag of England for a union.”

So the same company that American Patriots were lambasting as a source of corruption just two years before, during the tea crisis, would be the best source for the new national emblem?

It’s true that the East India Company’s red and white stripes (shown above in one version) looked a lot like the stripes that would eventually be on the American flag. Almost half a century after Our Flag appeared, Sir Charles Fawcett made the same connection. However, since the company’s ships were in the Indian Ocean, not many Americans had seen that flag. (For Peter Ansoff’s interesting detective work on how the company’s flag came to appear in an engraving of the Philadelphia waterfront in 1754, scroll down this page to the American Revolution Round Table’s 4 Mar 2009 event.)

Back to Campbell’s fictional Professor. He expounds on the symbolism of the banner he’s designed:

“Such a flag can readily be explained to the masses to mean as follows: The Union Flag of the Mother Country is retained as the union of our new flag to announce that the Colonies are loyal to the just and legitimate sovereignty of the British Government. The thirteen stripes will at once be understood to represent the thirteen Colonies; their equal width will type the equal rank, rights and responsibilities of the Colonies.

“The union of the stripes in the field of our flag will announce the unity of interests and the cooperative union of efforts, which the Colonies recognize and put forth in their common cause. The white stripes will signify that we consider our demands just and reasonable; and that we will seek to secure our rights through peaceable, intelligent and statesmanlike means—if they prove at all possible, and the red stripes at the top and bottom of our flag will declare that first and last—and always—we have the determination, the enthusiasm, and the power to use force, whenever we deem force necessary.

“The alternation of the red and white stripes will suggest that our reasons for all demands will be intelligent and forcible, and that our force in securing our rights will be just and reasonable.”

Our Flag states that this design was instantly adopted, with “General Washington and Doctor Franklin giving especial approval” (since no one in 1890 really cared what Harrison or Lynch might have thought). The book describes the debut of the Professor’s first flag in Cambridge on 2 Jan 1776—Washington “with his own hands” raising the standard and the Congress delegates still on hand. (More standard accounts discussed starting here.)

In Flags of the World, Past and Present (1915), W. J. Gordon called Campbell “greatly daring” for having claimed to reproduce the Professor’s long speech verbatim, especially since it contained historical errors about the British and East India Company flags. But Gordon nevertheless retold the story—and put that speech into Franklin’s mouth!

TOMORROW: Campbell’s legend continues—in Philadelphia.