“This letter betrays the state of the poor Colonel’s mind”

One of the key nodes in the spread of the “Powder Alarm” was Israel Putnam. On 3 Sept 1774 he summoned the militia in eastern Connecticut and sent urgent messages to other parts of the colony.

On 6 September one of those messages arrived at the First Continental Congress. Robert Treat Paine recorded that from Putnam’s letter “we were informed that the Soldiers had fired on the People and Town at Boston.”

In fact, British soldiers had done no such thing. That became clear over the next few days.

Whigs spun the false alarm into a Good Thing, saying it showed how the populace was united and ready to defend Boston in an actual military emergency. “It is surprising and must give great satisfaction to every well-wisher to the liberties of his country, to see the spirit and readiness of the people to fly to the relief of their distressed brethren,” said an item in the 9 September Connecticut Gazette.

But other newspaper writers were more critical. Most of the front page of Hugh Gaine’s New-York Gazette on 19 September was filled with an open letter “To the Inhabitants of North-America” from “A New-York Freeholder” that said in part:

Col. PUTNAM’s famous letter, (forwarded by special messengers to New-York and Philadelphia) and the consequences it produced, are very recent and fresh in our memories. He informs Capt. [Aaron] Cleaveland [of Canterbury]---

“That the men of war and troops had fired on Boston—that the artillery played all night—that six were filled at the first shot, and a number wounded—that the people were universally rallying from Boston as far as Pomfret in Connecticut—and he begs the captain would rally all the forces he could, and march immediately for the relief of Boston.”

The evident confusion of ideas in this letter betrays the state of the poor Colonel’s mind, whilst writing it, and shews he did not then possess that calm fortitude which is so necessary to insure success in military enterprizes. . . .

What the design of this infamous report was—whether to inflame the other colonies, and to learn how they would act on such an emergency if real, or to influence the deliberations of our congress now sitting, I shall not taken upon me to determine.

One thing it has eventually made evident past all doubt, that many in the New-England colonies are disposed and ripe for the most violent measures: For it is certain that some thousands of armed men, in consequence of it, proceeded on their march from Connecticut towards Boston. . . .

These circumstances are mentioned with no other view than to shew that the apprenhension of a civil war is justly founded; and it is no more than justice to say that I think Col. PUTNAM himself was deceived when he wrote the above letter, tho’ still he acted imprudently in writing it. The authors of the report are to me unknown.

The “New-York Freeholder” went on to write about the horrors of a civil war, closing with Tobias Smollett’s poem “The Tears of Scotland,” composed after the Jacobite uprising of 1745. That would have annoyed the New England Whigs, not just because they were telling people that a firm, unified militia response would help stave off civil war but also because they hated being equated with Jacobites.

TOMORROW: How Putnam responded.

A Critical Review in The Critical Review

In 1764 James Otis, Jr., published The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, which based the campaign against Parliament’s new colonial revenue laws on the ideas of natural rights and (though this term wouldn’t be formulated for another four years) “no taxation without representation.”

The Critical Review was a British political magazine founded in 1756. It was firmly conservative or Tory. The founding editor was the doctor and writer Tobias Smollett, but he left in 1763 and I’m not sure who helmed the magazine the following year.

In November 1764 The Critical Review ran a critique of Otis’s argument. Typical for the magazine, much of the space devoted to that book consisted of long extracts from it. At the end the reviewer wrote:

The author then…affirms, that government is founded on the necessity of our nature; and that the supreme absolute power existing in, and presiding over, every society, is originally and ultimately in the people, who cannot freely nor rightfully renounce that divine right. These are maxims far from being new; but as the author endeavours to prove that ancestry cannot renounce the rights of posterity, we wish he had thrown in an argument to demonstrate, by a parity of reasoning, that posterity ought to renounce all benefits from ancestry.

Perhaps our reader may be curious to know the definition Mr. Otis gives of a plantation, or colony; which, he says, ‘is a settlement of subjects in a territory disjoined or remote from the mother country, and may be made by private adventurers, or the public; but in both cases the colonists are entitled to as ample rights, liberties, and priviledges, as the subjects of the mother country are, and, in some respects, to more.’

We are next entertained with a dissertation on the natural rights of colonists, where the author gives us some quotations from Grotius, Puffendorff, Domat, Strahan, and others; who, it is plain, knew nothing of the British constitution, or of the relation which our colonies have with the mother country. The sum total of what our author contends for, seems to be that our ‘northern colonies, who are without one representative in the house of commons, should not be taxed by the British parliament.' Good Mr. Otis, give Great-Britain fair play, and do not put into the heads of Leeds, Hallifax, Birmingham, Sheffield, that part of the duchy of Lancaster which lies at the very gates of the Royal Palace, and many other places of great opulence, that they are not bound to pay any taxes imposed by a British parliament, because they have no representative in that body.

We applaud Mr. Otis’s zeal, and should, be glad that he had published a scheme of reciprocal independence between our colonies and Great Britain, which may be done in the way of debtor and creditor, and which very possibly might awaken him and his vigorous friends from their visionary dreams of independency upon their mother country. There is nothing like fair counter-reckoning, good Mr. Otis.

I don’t find “Our system is unfair to lots of people, not just you” to be a convincing argument not to change. The reviewer rests his dismissal mostly on the idea that the North American colonists had inherited a great many advantages from the British system, political and economic, and should be grateful rather than seeking equality based on philosophical principles.

Source of “the volley fired by a young Virginian”?

In The Fight with France for North America (1902), Arthur Granville Bradley wrote:

The killing of Jumonville raised a great commotion not only in the colonies but in Europe. “It was the volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America,” says Horace Walpole, “that set the world on fire.”

That line referred to George Washington, then a young major in the Virginia militia, ordering his men to fire on the French officer Jumonville in 1754.

That’s the earliest example I’ve found of that quotation attributed to Walpole. In the following decades it was whittled down to: “The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.” I see it appearing mainly in local histories of places important in the French and Indian War, but in the late twentieth century it started to appear in biographies of Washington. Lots of them.

So far as I can tell, those biographies cite previous biographies rather than any collection of Walpole’s writings. I’ve seen the line quoted by such authoritative authors as Peter Henriques, Ron Chernow, Russell Shorto, and various National Park Service resources.

In The Loyal Son (2017), Daniel Mark Epstein noted the similarity of that line to one attributed to Voltaire (shown above), and suggested “the belletrist Horace Walpole [was] translating the words of Voltaire.”

Indeed, in his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756), Voltaire wrote:

La complication des intérets politique est venuë au point qu’un coup de canon tiré en Amérique peut être le signal de l’embrasement de l’Europe.

That was translated a few years later by the Scottish editor and novelist Tobias Smollett as:

So complicated are the political interests of the present times, that a shot fired in America shall be the signal for setting all Europe together by the ears.

That idiom about ears not only means nothing today but it didn’t replicate Voltaire’s metaphor. “Embrasement” means setting on fire. In 1884, the historian Francis Parkman offered a better translation in Montcalm and Wolfe:

Such was the complication of political interests, that a cannon-shot fired in America could give the signal that set Europe in a blaze.

There was, to be sure, no cannon involved in Washington’s action. But Voltaire was playing on readers’ knowledge of signal cannon.

How did Walpole come into the picture? I can’t tell. He and Voltaire did correspond about Maj. Washington’s attack on the Jumonville party in 1768, but Walpole’s letters of 21 June and 27 July don’t contain the phrase about “a young Virginian in the backwoods.”

Some authors cite Walpole’s Memoirs of the Reign of George II for the line about Washington. That long book does include one paragraph about young Washington, but not this line.

I’ve found some French versions of the line about “a young Virginian in the backwoods.” However, they all render “backwoods” differently, suggesting that they’re modern translations from the English rather than a phrase that Voltaire set down in French centuries ago.

At this point, therefore, I suspect that the oft-repeated line attributed to Walpole was actually created by A. G. Bradley, mixing up what Parkman said Voltaire wrote about the Jumonville incident with what Walpole wrote about Washington.

If anyone can find the quotation in question in Walpole’s voluminous writings, or anywhere else before Bradley’s book, I’d welcome the additional information.

TOMORROW: What Walpole definitely wrote about young Washington.