“The Government of this Colledge is very Strict”

Yesterday I quoted the start of John Adams’s description of his first visit to Princeton in August 1774, when he was on his way to the First Continental Congress.

Adams viewed the college’s Nassau Hall, the mansion of Judge Richard Stockton, the Rittenhouse orrery, and equipment for electrical experiments (which didn’t work in New Jersey’s humid August).

Adams’s account continues:

By this Time the Bell rang for Prayers. We went into the Chappell, the President [John Witherspoon, shown here] soon came in, and we attended. The Schollars sing as badly as the Presbyterians at New York. After Prayers the President attended Us to the Balcony of the Colledge, where We have a Prospect of an Horizon of about 80 Miles Diameter.

We went into the Presidents House, and drank a Glass of Wine. He is as high a Son of Liberty, as any Man in America. He says it is necessary that the Congress should raise Money and employ a Number of Writers in the Newspapers in England, to explain to the Public the American Plea, and remove the Prejudices of Britons. He says also We should recommend it to every Colony to form a Society for the Encouragement of Protestant Emigrants from the 3 Kingdoms [i.e., England, Scotland, and Ireland].

The Dr. waited on us to our Lodgings and took a Dish of Coffee. He is one of the Committee of Correspondence, and was upon the Provincial Congress for appointing Delegates from this Province to the general [i.e., Continental] Congress. Mr. William Livingston and He laboured he says to procure an Instruction that the Tea should not be paid for. Livingston he says is very sincere and very able in the public Cause, but a bad Speaker, tho a good Writer.

Here we saw a Mr. Hood a Lawyer of Brunswick, and a Mr. Jonathan Dickenson Serjeant, a young Lawyer of Prince town, both cordial Friends to American Liberty. In the Evening, young [Samuel] Whitwell, a student at this Colledge, Son of Mr. [Samuel] Whitwell at Boston to whom we brought a Letter, came to see us.

By the Account of Whitwell and [fellow student John] Pidgeon, the Government of this Colledge is very Strict, and the Schollars study very hard. The President says they are all Sons of Liberty.

It’s notable how many of the men Adams met in Princeton eventually became New Jersey delegates to the Continental Congress: college president Witherspoon, professor William Huston, and lawyer Sergeant, not to mention neighbor Stockton.

Christopher Ludwick and the Prisoners of War

Yesterday I spotlighted a new picture book called Gingerbread for Liberty!, about a baker named Christopher Ludwick and his activity during the Revolutionary War. Author Mara Rockliff’s main source for that book was Dr. Benjamin Rush’s friendly short biography written shortly after Ludwick died, so how much documentary support is there for his feats?

In fact, Ludwick shows up a bunch of times in the papers of the Continental Congress and Gen. George Washington’s headquarters. He had served in the Austrian and Prussian armies before settling in Philadelphia, so he could speak to the Crown’s Hessian soldiers in their native German language and with some shared experience.

In August 1776, Ludwick was with the Continental forces in New Jersey, perhaps observing the system for supplying the men with bread. On the 14th the Congress resolved to offer fifty acres of land and guaranteed religious freedom to any foreigner who deserted from the British army. That offer was translated into German and copied for distribution among the Hessian troops. But who would pass out those handbills?

Gen. Hugh Mercer summoned Ludwick and on 19 August sent him to Washington’s headquarters. Later that day quartermaster general Joseph Reed, who had (badly) handled Washington’s first espionage efforts back in Massachusetts, passed Ludwick on to William Livingston, about to be governor of New Jersey, writing:

Mr. Ludwig the bearer of this, puts his Life in his Hand on this Occasion in order to serve the Interests of America. We cannot doubt your kind Advice & Assistance as to Mode but must beg it may not be communicated farther least a Discovery may be made which must prove fatal to Mr. Ludwig

Ludwick crossed the Raritan River to Staten Island late on 22 August and returned the next day. Livingston told Mercer, “Ludwig is just now returned disappointed.” But the baker apparently tried again. On 26 August Gen. Washington reported to the Congress: “The papers designed for the Foreign Troops have been put into several Channels in order that they might be conveyed to ’em, and from the Information I had yesterday, I have reason to beleive many have fallen into their Hands.”

A couple of days later, Ludwick was on his way back to Philadelphia, carrying a letter to John Adams complaining about the bread supply—a hint he may have already been lobbying for that business.

The following months didn’t go well for the Continental Army, but they did take some German-speaking prisoners. Ludwick ended up overseeing eight such men. In November Gen. Washington wrote to the Congress “to request you will negotiate an Exchange of the Hessian Prisoners at Elizabeth Town under the Care of Mr Ludwick as soon as possible. They have been treated in such a Manner during their Stay in this City, that it is apprehended, their going back among their Countrymen, will be attended with some good Consequences.”

Ludwick argued that treating Hessians well before exchanging them would make those men eager to desert at their next opportunity, and to bring others with them. Rush’s biography of Ludwick suggested that tactic was sucessful. However, Daniel Krebs’s recent study A Generous and Merciful Enemy: Life for German Prisoners of War During the American Revolution (its title taken from Ludwick’s writing) states that none of the eight Hessian men exchanged in late 1776 ever deserted.

In March 1777 Ludwick was still making that argument to Congress, recommending that it designate a “discreet & humane German Person” as “Guardian of the German Prisoners” to be “their Counsel & solemn Witness in Contracts which they may make with their Employers.” He assured the Congress that

Many of the Hessians and Waldeckish Prisoners of War especially single men are so well pleased with this Country and the Way of its Inhabitants that at all Events they would rather prefer to settle here than to return to the dreary abodes of Bondage from whence they came.

Krebs notes that Ludwick might have been hoping to gain the labor of these prisoners for little money. But he also seems to have been genuinely motivated by charity and enthusiasm for life in America. In the end, the Congress didn’t adopt that plan, and few of the German-speaking soldiers captured in that campaign defected to the U.S. of A.

Instead, the Congress asked Ludwick to take on another position.

TOMORROW: “Baker General.”

Mary Livingston Maturin Mallett

For many years, the John Singleton Copley portrait I showed yesterday was tentatively identified as showing William Livingston (1723-1790), wartime governor of New Jersey and signer of the Constitution.

That was probably because in the late 1800s it was owned by a New Yorker named Livingston. Another possible connection lay in how that portrait’s frame matched one around Copley’s portrait of a woman named Mary Mallett, born Mary Livingston in New York.

However, the man in the portrait wears the coat of a British army aide-de-camp, and William Livingston never held any rank in the British army. Furthermore, other portraits of Gov. Livingston suggest he looked nothing like this man. So who was in the Copley portrait?

As Christopher Bryant described in his 2012 article, the key to this mystery was genealogy. The woman born Mary Livingston married Dr. Jonathan Mallett, an American surgeon attached to British army, in 1778. But before then, from 1765 to 1774, she had been married to Capt. Gabriel Maturin, military secretary (and thus an aide) to Gen. Thomas Gage.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, the Malletts evidently sailed for Britain with three canvases Copley had painted in 1771, portraits of the surgeon, his wife, and the late Capt. Maturin—i.e., her first husband. After being widowed a second time, Mary Mallett sent her own portrait to her sister in New Jersey and gave her husband’s portrait to one of his nephews, who gave it to a brother, who brought it to America. Then, apparently by coincidence, that Maturin sold the captain’s portrait to a man named Livingston.

Bryant made a convincing case that Copley had painted a matching pair of portraits for the Maturins, a pair that was (like the couple themselves) separated by circumstance. Is it possible to reunite them?

The Mary Mallett painting hasn’t been seen publicly since the early 1980s, when the Chrysler Museum deaccessioned it. (Its frame had already been removed to put around another portrait.) The Gabriel Maturin portrait is scheduled to be auctioned in New York by Bonhams on 21 May, with an estimated price above half a million dollars.

[Recreation of the Mallett painting in its original frame courtesy of Maturin.org.]