The Museum of the American Revolution Hosts a Film Premiere, 9 Oct.

In August I visited the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, which opened to great fanfare earlier this year.

Like the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, which I wrote about here, the Philadelphia museum combines the historical artifacts of an older, traditional collection with new technology. For the M.O.A.R., the parent institution was the Valley Forge Historical Society.

The museum also inherited the site of a visitor center built for the Bicentennial, close to Independence Hall and other historic sites in old Philadelphia. Like the Yorktown museum, it pays particular attention to the events that happened in the region. It thus offers the best treatment of the Trenton and Princeton maneuvers that I’ve seen as well as some about Brandywine, which didn’t turn out so well for the Continentals.

But the M.O.A.R. aims to tell the full story of the Revolution, starting with the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the political disputes of the late 1760s and early 1770s, and the campaigns all over eastern North America. The exhibit designers took pains to include the perspectives and choices of poor men and women, African-Americans free and enslaved, sailors, and other people not always included in the narrative. It becomes hagiographic, I thought, only in the final exhibit, the unveiling of Gen. George Washington’s campaign tent. And that really is a neat artifact.

One hallmark of the M.O.A.R. are life-size figures recreating dramatic moments, such as Israel Trask’s memory of the snowball fight in Harvard Yard, the tearing down of George III’s statue in New York in July 1776, and a charge by Col. Banastre Tarleton’s horsemen. But there are also plenty of electronic interactive exhibits and genuine artifacts to intrigue all sorts of visitors.

I felt some special jolts of recognition. Some folks in the films and dioramas looked quite like reenactors I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. The introductory film shows the “No Taxation without Representation” phrase printed as I wrote about it here. And the museum has a large portrait of Capt. William Crosbie, the likely owner of the pistols captured at Lexington that I wrote about here.

The M.O.A.R. has a gallery dedicated to explaining the Oneida contribution to the Continental cause. The Oneida Indian Nation was also one of the institution’s major benefactors. That space may feel out of proportion to the influence the Oneida had on the war, but it serves as a metonymy for all the Native American groups on both sides, for whom the War for Independence proved terribly significant.

Tomorrow, in commemoration of Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the museum will host the first showing of “People of the Standing Stone,” a film about the Oneida nation in American history. Directed by Ric Burns and narrated by Kevin Costner, the 25-minute film explores the Oneida alliance with the Continental Congress and what followed in the early republic—the unjust appropriation of much of the nation’s land.

This weekend, ahead of the movie, Darren Bonaparte of the Mohawk community at Ahkwesáhsne is performing in the museum’s Patriots Gallery. On Monday at 11:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. dancers from the Oneida Indian Nation will perform traditional Haudenosaunee social dances there.

The movie will be shown at 6:00, followed by “a panel discussion on how the roles of many of our country’s multiethnic ancestors have often been misrepresented in—or altogether excluded from—the telling of our nation’s history.” The panelists will be:

• Kevin Gover, Director of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
• Ray Halbritter, Oneida Nation Representative, Nation Enterprises CEO, and a M.O.A.R. Board Member
• Rosalyn J. McPherson, president of The ROZ Group, which managed community relations and oversaw historical content for The President’s House Project in Philadelphia
• R. Scott Stephenson, the M.O.A.R.’s Vice President of Collections, Exhibitions and Programming

Tickets to the special screening and discussion are $15 for general admission, or $5 for Museum members and students.

Munroe Tavern Redux

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting the Munroe Tavern in Lexington, which has just formally reopened after an extensive refurbishment and reconception. It will continue to welcome visitors in the afternoons through October.

As described in this Boston Globe article, Col. Percy used this tavern as a hospital and headquarters when he took command of the British troops in the field on 19 Apr 1775.

The Lexington Historical Society has long owned that building, along with Buckman Tavern beside the town common and the Hancock-Clarke House a couple of blocks away. Those sites interpret the day largely from the American point of view.

The Munroe Tavern is now set up to show the British soldiers’ perspective on the battle. Its main display is a map and timeline of their march to Concord and back, rather than the Massachusetts militia alarm. Its video about the firing on Lexington common quotes British officers’ reports. Its first-floor artifacts are remnants of the royal troops’ activity in Lexington, as well as William Munroe’s tavern sign and furnishings typical of such an establishment.

Among those artifacts are the society’s “Pitcairn pistols,” on display once more. Their label reads in part:

The coat of arms and monogram engraved on the oval escutcheons in the pistol grips have recently been attributed to the Crosbie family of Wikloe County, Ireland.

That process began back here. We’re all still wondering about how those pistols went out on the march.

Another improvement in the Munroe Tavern experience: The first floor of the building, which includes the main display about the march, is wheelchair-accessible.

The ceremony opening the tavern was hampered for those of us back in the crowd by a remarkable sound system which actually made people sound quieter when they talked into the microphone than when they simply addressed the crowd, as reenactor Paul O’Shaughnessy showed. But there was no way to miss the community spirit on display.

TOMORROW: John Raymond, killed outside Munroe’s Tavern.

How Those Pistols Really Got Here

At the risk of turning Boston 1775 into “all Major Pitcairn, all the time” (and we still haven’t addressed the whereabouts of his body), I return once more to the question of the pistols on display in Lexington that were said to belong to that British Marines officer.

As I reported earlier this week, the heraldic emblem on those pistols is actually that of the Crosbie family, and a Capt. William Crosbie was listed among the British army’s wounded officers that spring.

Nat Taylor, who’s been trying to nail down the family history of Capt. Crosbie, asked about the story behind the pistols. How good is the evidence that they really came from a British officer unhorsed on 19 Apr 1775? How did they come into the hands of descendants of Gen. Israel Putnam, who wasn’t in Massachusetts that day? How did they come back to Lexington?

The evidence for the traditional provenance looks quite solid. The first mention of those pistols that I could find appeared in Samuel Swett’s 1818 addition to David Humphreys’s An Essay on the Life of the Honourable Major General Israel Putnam. The very same paragraph that discusses how “a black soldier named Salem” killed Pitcairn then goes on to say:

It was he [Pitcairn] who caused the first effusion of blood at Lexington. In that battle his horse was shot under him, while he was separated from his troops; with presence of mind he feigned himself slain; his pistols were taken from his holsters, and he was left for dead, when he seized the opportunity and escaped.

A footnote then adds, “This trophy afterwards belonged to General Putnam, and yet remains in his family, from whom we have the above anecdote.”

Nine years later, Ezra Ripley supplied more detail in A History of the Fight at Concord:

From this time, there was a general though not entire cessation of firing, until the enemy had entered the bounds of Lexington, when Capt. [John] Parker’s company attacked the British from the woods on the south of the road. When the enemy were rising Fiske’s hill in the west part of Lexington, they were very hardly pressed, the Americans having run forward and placed themselves advantageously behind trees and fences. The British faced about, and a very spirited and bloody contest ensued. Here Maj. Pitcairn was wounded and unhorsed: his horse, pistols, &c. were taken.

And Ripley has his own footnote:

The horse was taken to Concord and sold at Auction. Capt. Nathan Barrett bought the pistols, and afterwards offered them to Gen. [George] Washington, but he not accepting them, they were given to Gen. Putnam.

We know the Barrett family, headed by Col. James Barrett, was deeply involved in the events at Concord that day. And it makes sense that the Putnam family didn’t know or preserve the detail that their ancestor wasn’t the first choice to receive the pistols. We appear, therefore, to have independent sources corroborating each other. (Note, however, that the Ripley account means Putnam did not have the pistols at Bunker Hill, as some later authors say; Washington didn’t arrive in Boston until July 1775, so Barrett couldn’t have tried to give him the guns until then.)

William Cutter’s Life of Israel Putnam, published in 1859, reported of the guns: “They are still in the possession of one of his grandsons, John P. Putnam, Esq., of Western New York. They are represented as being of exquisite workmanship.” So Cutter learned about them but didn’t see them.

John P. Putnam’s widow Elizabeth loaned the pistols to Lexington for its centennial observance of the battle in 1875. According to Mary E. Hudson, writing in 1900, she had no children to pass them on to. The Secretary of War made noises about buying the pistols, and in 1880 the Lexington historian Charles Hudson [father of Mary?] said Elizabeth Putnam had “several liberal offers in coin” to buy the guns. But she decided to donate them to the town of Lexington, and there they remain.

So the only doubtful part of the pistols’ legend was the most questionable part from the start: how people could be so sure that they came from Maj. Pitcairn as opposed to some other, less notorious British officer unhorsed in the battle. After all, the man didn’t stick around to give autographs.

Speaking of autographs, though, I came across another detail of those pistols while researching this post. Yankee Magazine‘s July/August 2007 issue reported: “These foliate-engraved, ram’s-head-butted pistols bear Pitcairn’s monogram or initials amid the scrollwork.” Or is that wishful looking?

Where Those Pistols Really Came From

On Sunday I showed these pistols, reportedly taken from the saddle of Maj. John Pitcairn’s runaway horse during the Battle of Lexington and Concord. I didn’t actually have much to say about them; I just thought they were pretty.

On Monday I had dinner with Mike Monahan of the recreated 5th Regiment of Foot, among other fine folks, and he alerted me that there’s some doubt as to whether these really are Pitcairn’s pistols.

And indeed, this Cambridge history site says:

The pistols were made by the famous John Murdoch of Doune. However, the crest on the escutcheon plate is not that of the Pitcairns. Some historians hold to the legend of General [Israel] Putnam and the Pitcairn pistols, but other historians theorize that there was an error in identifying from whose horse the pistols were taken.

And this page on Pitcairn says:

the heraldic crest engraved on the escutcheon plates depicts three swords, with a snake twined around the middle one. This does not resemble the known crest of the Pitcairns of Forthar, a moon rising from a cloud. So whose the pistols really were is uncertain.

And Marianne Gilchrist’s article on Pitcairn at AmericanRevolution.org says both those things.

I’m not surprised to learn that these pistols probably aren’t Pitcairn’s. As I wrote back in my discussion of his death at Bunker Hill, because he was in command of the troops that fired on Lexington common, Pitcairn became the British officer that rural New Englanders loved to hate. So if they knocked any officer off his horse and grabbed his pistols, they’d likely decide that was Pitcairn.

In addition, I don’t think the Putnam family mentioned these pistols publicly until decades after the war—plenty of time for “memory creep” to improve a story.

A bit of Googling tells me that many heraldic authorities say “three swords, handles upwards, one in pale and two in saltier, environed by a snake,” is the family crest of Crosbies. (A bit more Googling could tell me what “one in pale and two in saltier” means.) So was there any British officer with Crosbie connections on Battle Road?

Yes, there was Capt. William Crosbie of the 38th Regiment’s grenadier company. He was apparently wounded on the first day of the war, and went on to serve as an aide de camp to Gen. Sir William Howe and Gen. Sir Henry Clinton. He shows up in Walking the Berkshires’ series on Knyphausen's Raid.