“In a most Deploreable and Dangerous Setuation”

Yesterday I quoted the Massachusetts Spy report on the 25 Jan 1774 mob attack on John Malcolm.

Here’s the Customs officer’s own account, as quoted by Frank W. C. Hersey from a “memorial” (memorandum) to the Massachusetts government asking for compensation:

…a Number of People assembled at the House of your memorialist in Boston and after insulting him with opprobrious Language, under a False pretence of his haveing the Same day used a Boy Ill in the Street, they Broke his windows and endeavourd forcibly to Take him out of his House, but from the Natural Opposition he made, or Some friendly Interposition they thought Proper to Desperse—

That about Eight OClock in the Evening of the same Day a vast Concourse of people again beset the House of your memorialist, Who were Armed with axes Clubs &ca and Broke open the door and Windows of the Lower appartments on which he Retired to an upper Chamber to make what Deffence he Could but One Mr Russell Declareing himself to be the friend of your memorialist, Came Into the Room with all the appearances of Friendship, shook hands and at same Time Desired he might be permitted to Look at the sword of your memorialist which was the only weapon he had for his immediate Deffence, which request being granted he siezed the sword and Calling out to the people assembled as afore said, they immediately Rushed in, and by violence forced your memorialist out of the House, and Beating him with Sticks then placed him on a sled they had Prepaird and Draged him before the Custom House where they gave three Huzza’s they afterwards Took him out of the sled and put him into a Cart, and Notwithstanding the severitty of the weather, Tore of his Clothes, and Tarrd and Featherd his Naked body, and in that setuation Carried him before the Provience House and ordered him to Curse The Governor and say he was an Enemy to his Country but your Memorialist Refused—

from thence they prosceeded with him to Liberty-Tree so Called, where they again ordered him to Curse the governor and the board of Commissioners, and say they were Enemyes to this Countrey, and Commanded him also to Resigne his Commission; all which he Refused.

that your Memorialist asked the People what he who was their friend had Done to Desplease them, they answered he was an Enemy to the Countrey and that they would soon serve all the Custom House officers in Like manner—

that from Liberty Tree they Carryed your Memorialist to the Gallows, put Round his Neck a Rope and threatned to Hang him if he would not Do as they had before ordered him, but he still Refused Desiring and praying they would put their threats in Execution Rather than Continue their Torture, they then Took the rope off his Neck and Tying his hands Fastned him to the Gallows, and beat him with Ropes and Sticks in most savage manner, which Compeled him to Declare he would do any thing they Desired, upon which they unbound him, and obliged him to Curse the governor and the Board of Commissioners, and Declaring at the same Time they would serve the governor in the Same manner, and Extorted a promise from him to assist &ca

and Returning with him to Liberty Tree then they made him Repeat several oathes, among which one was that he would not Discover [i.e., identify] any of the persons then present; and Carting him through the Town stopd before the Provience House and made him Repeat the above mentioned oathes.

Dureing these Transactions several Humane gentlemen at Divers Times offerd him gairments to Cover him but his Tormentors would not suffer that Indulgence, at Length they Carried yr memorialist to his House, in a most mizerable setuation Deprived of his senses

that your Memorialist is now Confined to his bed, in a most Deploreable and Dangerous Setuation in Consequence of the afore said Treatment,…

Malcolm’s account agrees in most respects with the newspaper report, as unsympathetic as that was to him.

Ann Hulton, sister of Customs Commissioner Henry Hulton, also described the attack in a letter, including some details Malcolm didn’t mention:

• “his arm dislocated in tearing off his cloaths”
• “This Spectacle of horror & sportive cruelty was exhibited for about five hours.”
• “they demanded of him to curse his Masters The K: Govr &c which they coud not make him do, but he still cried, Curse all Traitors.”
• “They say his flesh comes off his back in Stakes [steaks]”

Living in Brookline, Hulton was almost certainly passing on secondhand information. Some of her added details might be correct while others, such as Malcolm being encouraged to curse “The K[ing]:,” were probably exaggerated.

One detail in both Malcolm and Hulton’s accounts was that the Customs man was “naked” when he was tarred and feathered. The Spy stated he was stripped “to buff and breeches.” The latter is probably more accurate for our understanding, the term “naked” being less absolute in meaning then.

TOMORROW: Bringing tea into it.

(The picture above is an engraving published in London in October 1774. Titled “A New Method of Macarony Making as practised at Boston in North America,” it depicted the attack on Malcolm without using his name. This cartoon shows one of the attackers wearing a hat with the number “45” on it, linking this incident back to support for John Wilkes’s court cases in the early 1760s.)

A January 1776 Sketch of the Flag on Prospect Hill

We have two remarks from British observers inside besieged Boston about the flag the Continentals raised on Prospect Hill in what’s now Somerville in January 1776.

Peter Force’s American Archives included a letter from the captain of a British ship to his employers in London, dated 17 January, which says:

I can see the rebels’ camp very plain, whose colors, a little while ago, were entirely red; but on the receipt of the king’s speech, which they burnt, they hoisted the union flag, which is here supposed to intimate the union of the provinces.

Richard Frothingham’s History of the Siege of Boston quoted a British officer:

Lieut. [William] Carter...was on Charlestown Heights, and says, January 26: “The king’s speech was sent by a flag to them on the 1st instant [i.e., of this month]. In a short time after they received it, they hoisted an union flag (above the continental with the thirteen stripes) at Mount Pisgah; their citadel fired thirteen guns, and gave the like number of cheers.”

Back in 2006 in the vexillogical journal Raven Peter Ansoff argued that if the “union flag” meant the British flag, then perhaps “the continental with the thirteen stripes” was a second banner flown below it.

In 2013 Byron DeLear responded in favor of the traditional understanding that the army was flying the new Continental Navy banner, including examples of “union flag” as a blanket term for many banners with a Union Jack canton.

Fortunately, we also have an image from a British officer of the flag flying over the Continental fortification. It’s dated 4 Jan 1776—the same day that Gen. George Washington wrote about the flag to his former military secretary, Joseph Reed.

That image was sketched by Lt. Archibald Robertson as part of a multi-page panorama view from his posting on Bunker’s Hill. His notebook is now owned by the New-York Public Library, which digitized those pages. Back in 2015 Boston 1775 reader Marc Shelikoff pointed out how Robertson had shown Prospect Hill.

And here is the sketch:

That’s a detail from this page.

No wonder the British in Boston thought the Continentals were ready to surrender—they were flying a white flag!

Well, not really. Obviously Robertson simply sketched the outline of the union flag that others mentioned. He was an engineer, interested in topography and fortifications rather than flag design.

But Robertson’s drawing still contributes to our understanding of the Prospect Hill flag. First of all, this strongly suggests it was a single banner, not one over another. Second, it was big! That’s probably what Washington meant when he referred to a “great Union Flag.”

TOMORROW: The Pennsylvania Packet sources.

The Return of the Angels at Old North Church

This fall, in addition to archeological work in its crypt, Old North Church had its four carved angels conserved and repaired.

Old North Illuminated explained the origin of these artifacts:

The four Baroque angels date to the 1620s and were likely carved in what is now known as Belgium. It is unknown where they spent their first century. In 1746, however, they were on board a French ship en route to a Catholic Church in Quebec.

During this time period, England and France were almost constantly at war, and one of the ways the war was waged was economic: ships, and their cargo, were fair game. Privateers were legally sanctioned to act like pirates and pillage the ships they captured. British privateer Captain Thomas Gruchy captured the French ship on its way to Quebec and seized its cargo, including these angels.

He and his investors sold most of the goods, but Captain Gruchy, a North End resident, donated the four angels to Old North Church, where he worshiped.

The angels are thus decades older than the church, which is itself one of the oldest buildings in Boston.

Originally all four figures held trumpets, but only two of those instruments survived. Chris Gutierrez of Manzi Appraisers & Restoration also noted “evidence of previous damage that nearly split one of the angels in half,” as well as cracks that had developed over the decades.

Gutierrez and his team cleaned the figures, fabricated two new trumpets, and touched up the painted surfaces to make the two-foot-tall angels look good without hiding their age.

The angel statues returned to their places on the gallery railing in front of the church’s pipe organ in time for the Christmas season.

Peering into a Prison in 1799

Richard Brunton (1749–1832) came to America to fight for his king as a grenadier in the 38th Regiment. That lasted until 1779, when he deserted.

As Deborah M. Child relates in her biography, Soldier, Engraver, Forger, Brunton struggled to make an honest living in New England with his talent and training as an engraver.

One product he kept coming back to was family registers and other genealogical forms. Another was counterfeit currency.

In 1799 the state of Connecticut sent Brunton to the Old New-Gate Prison in East Granby for forging coins. To pay his accompanying fine, he made art, including a portrait of Gov. Jonathan Trumbull, a seal of the state arms, and a picture of Old New-Gate itself.

That prison, also known as the Simsbury Mines, was notorious as a place where the state held Loyalists underground during the Revolutionary War. However, in 1790 the state took over the property and rebuilt it according to a modern philosophy of criminal punishment, based on locking people up for years doing labor instead of physically punishing or hanging them. Brunton depicted the place he came to know during his two-year sentence. 

The Boston Rare Maps page for this print says:

The view suggests that coopering (barrel making) was a major activity for prisoners, as two figures can be seen at upper right engaged in the task, while another at the bottom seems to be bringing a completed barrel to a shed.

Also visible are what appear to be two African-American figures carrying buckets can be seen in the view; these figures, which are completely blackened, stand out conspicuously from the others in the view. It is documented that enslaved African-Americans worked in the copper mine that had earlier operated in the location of the prison. Whether African-American were also engaged at the prison as well is a question for further research raised by this work.

Although the engraving contains an image of a prisoner receiving the lash, as a state prison Newgate followed a relatively humane approach for the period; a prisoner could be given no more than 10 lashes, and there was a limit on time served there. Participation in labor was required of all prisoners, and in addition to coopering they also engaged in nail making, blacksmithing, wagon and plow manufacture, shoe making, basket weaving and machining.

After being released, Brunton went back to Boston, where he was arrested for counterfeiting again in 1807. He served more years in a Massachusetts state prison and finally lived out his life in Groton.

The copperplate for Brunton’s Old New-Gate image survived until about 1870, when a few more prints were made. Only a handful of copies survive, and it’s impossible to tell whether they came from the initial run or the reprint decades after the artist died.

The example shown above was recently acquired by the John Carter Brown Library in Rhode Island. Other prints are at the Connecticut Historical Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

“The Imp at the Cardinal’s bolster”

Sir Joshua Reynolds completed his painting of “The Death of Cardinal Beaufort,” based on a scene from Henry IV, Part 2, in 1789.

The Shakespeare Gallery in London had commissioned this canvas for 500 guineas (£525).

Immediately some colleagues criticized the canvas for including the face of a demon.

In Shakespeare’s play the king says: “O! beat away the busy, meddling fiend that lays siege unto this wretch’s soul.” But people said that was just a metaphor; no real fiend appeared on stage, much less at the historical event.

A correspondent wrote in The Times of London on 7 May:

The Imp at the Cardinal’s bolster cannot spoil the Picture, but it does no credit to the judgement of the Painter. We rather apprehend that some Fiend had been laying siege to Sir Joshua’s taste, when he determined to literalise the idea. The license of Poetry is very different from that of Painting; but the present subject itself is complete in itself, and wants not the aid of machinery from Heaven or Hell. In this enlightened period astonishment and pity wait upon it.

The landscape designer Humphry Repton said that if Shakespeare had listed an evil spirit as one of his characters, then it might deserve a place in the painting. But otherwise not.

After Reynolds’s death another Royal Academy instructor, Edward Edwards, declared:

The Death of Cardinal Beaufort is an admirable specimen of colouring, but the introduction of the little Imp or Devil on the pillow of the Cardinal, as tormenting the wretched sinner in his last moments, is too ludicrous and puerile to escape censure; and it has been matter of great surprize, that a man of Sir Joshua’s understanding could persevere in the admission of such an object, even against the advice of his friend Mr. Burke, to whose judgment he ever paid great deference.

The portraitist William Beechey told a story of hearing Edmund Burke tell Reynolds that the devil’s face was “an absurd and ridiculous incident, and a disgrace to the artist.” After some exchange about Burke’s ability to argue either side of an issue (if paid, implicitly), Reynolds said that the fiendish face “was a thought he had conceived and executed to the satisfaction of himself and many others; and having placed the devil there, there he should remain.”

One observer who agreed with that choice was Dr. Erasmus Darwin, writing in 1791:

…why should not painting as well as poetry express itself in a metaphor, or in indistinct allegory? A truly great modern painter lately endeavoured to enlarge the sphere of pictorial language, by putting a demon behind the pillow of a wicked man on his death bed. Which unfortunately for the scientific part of painting, the cold criticism of the present day has depreciated.

Soon after “The Death of Cardinal Beaufort” debuted, Caroline Watson produced an engraving of the picture. However, within a year, apparently to meet public desire, the controversial demon’s face was rubbed out of the copper plate, leaving just a few light squiggles on later prints, such as this one from the Royal Collection (shown above).

I linked to an ArtNetUK image of “The Death of Cardinal Beaufort” yesterday. Looking at it, you might ask: What demon? Where is this imp? What were people so upset about?

That’s because, although Reynolds never altered his painting to please its critics, over the years other people’s layers of varnish and paint did. The face of the fiend disappeared.

This year the National Trust had the painting restored, and the fiend is back, as shown in the detail below.

“Whose black and bushy beard he had paid him for letting grow”

A couple of years ago I wrote about how the painter Joseph Wright of Derby employed a particular model when he wanted to portray bearded men.

Because beards were well out of fashion in eighteenth-century Britain, it wasn’t easy to find models for paintings of events in the past, when artists knew men wore beards.

I just ran across a relevant anecdote about Sir Joshua Reynolds, from his friend the Rev. William Mason.

Reynolds was painting “The Death of Cardinal Beaufort,” a scene taken from Henry IV, Part Two. That would have been in the late 1780s. Mason wrote:

He had merely scumbled in the positions of the several figures, and was now upon the head of the dying Cardinal. He had now got for his model a porter, or coalheaver, between fifty and sixty years of age, whose black and bushy beard he had paid him for letting grow; he was stripped naked to the waist, and, with his profile turned to him, sat with a fixed grin, showing his teeth.

I could not help laughing at the strange figure, and recollecting why he had ordered the poor fellow so to grin, on account of Shakespeare’s line,

Mark how the pangs of death do make him grin.

I told him, that in my opinion Shakespeare would never have used the word “grin” in that place, if he could have readily found a better; that it always conveyed to me a ludicrous idea; and that I never saw it used with propriety but by Milton, when he tells us that death

 grinned horribly
A ghastly smile.

He did not agree with me on this point, so the fellow sat grinning on for upwards of one hour, during which time he sometimes gave a touch to the face, sometimes scumbled on the bedclothes with white much diluted with spirits of turpentine.

After all, he could not catch the expression he wanted, and, I believe, rubbed the face entirely out; for the face and attitude in the present finished picture, which I did not see till above a year after this first fruitless attempt, is certainly different, and on an idea much superior. I know not whether he may not have changed the model. Yet the man who then sat had a fine, firm countenance of the swarthy kind…

I remember I told him so; and a few days after, when I called upon him, he had finished a head of St. Peter, which he told me he took from the same subject.

It’s a pity we don’t have the perspective of the porter himself, getting a few days’ off manual labor in exchange for letting his beard grow and contorting his face for a painter man.

TOMORROW: Another face revealed in that painting.

Book Signings in Boston and Newport

On Monday, 23 October, the Old South Meeting House will host the launch of the paperback edition of Stacy Schiff’s biography The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.

After the hardcover appeared last year, the Wall Street Journal named The Revolutionary one of its Best 10 Books of 2022 and Barack Obama listed it among his recent favorites.

Schiff will discuss the book in the space where a town meeting on 6 Mar 1770 empowered Adams to lead a town committee demanding that the royal government remove all troops from the streets of Boston. John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Adams depicts that effort.

The Old South will open its doors at 6:30 P.M., and the event will begin at 7:00. It is free and open to the public, but Revolutionary Spaces encourages people to register at this link.

The next night, Tuesday, 24 October, Schiff will appear with Brooke Barbier, author of King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father, at the Colony House in Newport, Rhode Island.

This authors’ discussion will look at the Boston Tea Party as a milestone in the collaboration of the two Boston politicians. Adams and Hancock served together in the Massachusetts General Court in the 1760s and 1770s and later were back-to-back governors in the 1790s. (There were some serious bumps in their relationship in between.)

This event is scheduled to run from 6:00 to 7:30 P.M. The Newport Historical Society is hosting, and admission is $20, or $15 for members. Charter Books will have copies of the two biographies available for purchase. Register here.

Whither the Weathercock?

Today’s Boston 1775 posting comes from Charles Bahne, a local historian based in Cambridge. In this “guest blogger” essay, Charlie discusses an artifact of the North End in the early 1700s and Cambridge in the late 1800s, making the case to preserve and reproduce it locally.

One of the most historic elements of the Cambridge skyline is coming down sometime soon: the big brown church with the rooster on top is losing its rooster.

The Executive Council of the First Church in Cambridge—the stone church on Garden Street, across from the Common—has decided to bring the cockerel weathervane down for its own safety. According to the church’s website, drone videos have revealed significant and dangerous erosion of the gilding on one side of the cockerel, especially its large tail feathers. After extensive consultation, nationally recognized experts in the field of American Folk Art and historic weathervanes have strongly advised removal. The date for its descent is still being determined, but the goal is to make the move as soon as possible.

The church adds, “Once the cockerel is safely down and securely stored, church leaders and the congregation will need to consider next steps in the stewardship of this national treasure, including discerning whether the time has come to consider selling it. Another future decision is whether the Shem Drowne original should be replaced with a replica or something else.”

At 302 years of age, the five-foot gilded fowl is one of the oldest weathervanes still in use in America. Perhaps the first rooster weathervane, or “weathercock,” made in this hemisphere, he was fashioned in 1721 by Shem Drowne, the same coppersmith who crafted the grasshopper vane atop Faneuil Hall.

For a century and a half—nearly half of his existence—he has dominated the corner of Garden and Mason Streets, a landmark for Cantabrigians. And before he landed in Cambridge, the cockerel perched atop a church in Boston’s North End, where he led quite an interesting life.

The weathervane originated with a 1719 dispute among members of a North End parish, over the ordination of a pastor named Peter Thacher. Following Rev. Thacher’s rather tumultuous installation, the dissenting parishioners seceded from the original congregation and erected a new meeting house just three blocks away. As a deliberate insult to their former colleagues, they commissioned the cockerel weathervane for their new building: an allusion to Peter’s betrayal of Christ at the crowing of the cock. Upon placing the new vane on its spindle, “a merry fellow straddled over it, and crowed three times to complete the ceremony.”

Officially the “New Brick Meeting House,” their 1721 structure was commonly known as the “Cockerel Church” in honor of its weathervane; and some people (perhaps not so jokingly) called it the “Revenge Church of Christ.”

Paul Revere worshipped in the Cockerel Church for most of his life; the back yard of his house abutted the meeting house property. The weathercock appears prominently in Revere’s 1769 print of “A View of Part of the Town of Boston,” where he towers over the North End neighborhood.

Before he changed his career from the ministry to writing, Ralph Waldo Emerson preached sermons under the cockerel weathervane for three years, as pastor of the Second Church in Boston, which had merged with the original New Brick parish.

A new building followed in 1845, on the same Hanover Street site, and the weathercock was placed atop it. When that building came down for an 1870 street-widening project, the vane was sold at auction. William Saunders, an antiquarian and a member of the First Church Cambridge congregation, bought it, and the cockerel found his new home, roosting atop First Church’s new stone building. Since 1873 he has graced the corner of Garden and Mason streets, overlooking Cambridge Common.

So our friend the rooster has quite a story to tell, over and above the weather forecast. It’s a story that’s unique to Boston and Cambridge. It’s important that he remain in our community, where he can continue to tell it to us. He must not be allowed to fly the coop, and land somewhere else.

In an ideal world, the historic fowl would be repaired and restored to the Garden Street perch where he has served for 150 years, fulfilling his ancient purpose of informing us which way the wind is blowing.

Should that ideal not be possible, for fragility or other reasons, then all of us in Cambridge and Boston have a stake in the decision. After a century and a half in our town—and another century and a half across the river—the cockerel weathervane has become a valuable member of our entire community. He’s an important part of our shared heritage, and not just an asset belonging to only one organization.

It is understandable, but always sad, when an institution chooses to monetize its patrimony, exchanging its heritage for financial gain. Given the significance of this historic weathercock, it would be a tragedy if he were sold to a distant museum, and exiled to a place where his story cannot be fully appreciated. It would be an even greater tragedy if he were sold to a private collector and locked behind closed doors where the public cannot appreciate him.

If the cockerel weathervane is to be sold, it is imperative for him to remain on public display locally, at the Museum of Fine Arts or a similar organization.

And what of us Cantabrigians who look skyward? We too will be losing a familiar friend, a piece of our history. If Shem Drowne’s classic cockerel is too fragile to remain on his perch above the Common, then he should be replaced with a likeness. Any monetary gain that First Church might realize from the sale should be used to finance the creation of a replica, to keep this fowl’s memory alive atop the tower which has been his home for so long.

After all, what is a big brown church without a rooster on top?

First Church is giving the community a chance to reflect on, ask questions about, and consider next steps following the decision to remove the cockerel, which was announced to the congregation on Sunday, September 10. A first listening session will be on Sunday, October 8, at 12:30, followed by a weeknight Zoom session on a date to be announced. For more information, including photos and videos of the weathervane’s current condition, visit the First Church website.

(And thanks to Cousin Lynn and the late Ol’ Sinc of “Hillbilly at Harvard” for coining the phrase “big brown church with the rooster on top,” many years ago.)

Thanks, Charlie! The Rev. Peter Thacher who prompted that rupture in the New North Meeting wasn’t the same Rev. Peter Thacher who was active during and after the Revolution, but they were collateral relations.

Boston 1775 readers may recall that another weathervane attributed to Shem Drowne was put up for sale through Sotheby’s in January with an asking price around $400,000. I can’t find the result of that auction, but it shows the potential value of this sort of famous folk art.

The Seals of Massachusetts

As I discussed yesterday, state flags weren’t a big deal in the early decades of the U.S. of A. They weren’t official symbols. Indeed, since flags were national emblems, raising a state flag usually signaled an attempt to break away from the nation.

In contrast, colonial and state governments needed seals to make laws and other government documents official. State seals were therefore a big deal from the start.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony received authority to use a seal in its charter from King Charles I in 1629, and it continued to use the same seal design long after Charles lost his head.

That first seal included a figure of a Native American, clad only in leaves, carrying a bow and arrow pointed to the ground. This man even had a word balloon twirling from his mouth: “Come over and help us,” based on Acts 16.

That picture nodded to the Massachusett people the colony took its name and land from, and to the Puritans’ self-appointed mission to convert those locals. The downward-pointing arrow symbolized peace.

Massachusetts received a new charter in 1692, making it officially a province instead of a colony. The official seal then became the royal coat of arms.

When in July 1775 the Massachusetts General Court took on the role of governing most of the colony without the input of Gov. Thomas Gage, it needed a new seal. After all, Gage and his appointees had the old one inside besieged Boston.

The legislature turned to the most prominent Patriot engraver: Paul Revere. He produced the image the lawmakers requested: a typical contemporary Massachusetts man holding a sword and the Magna Carta. That was Massachusetts’s official seal from 1775 to 1780.

At the end of 1780, the state had a new constitution and a new governor, and the General Court adopted a new seal. Or rather, it returned to the old figure of a Native American man with a bow and arrow. Nathan Cushing proposed the design, and Revere was once again the first engraver. Over the years, there were many little variations on that basic design.

An 1885 law went much further in specifying the details of the seal, including:

an Indian dressed in his shirt and moccasins, holding in his right hand a bow, and in his left hand an arrow, point downward, all of gold; and in the upper corner above his right arm, a silver star with five points. The crest shall be a wreath of blue and gold, whereon is a right arm, bent at the elbow, and clothed and ruffled, the hand grasping a broadsword, all of gold.

Heraldically, the man and the arm aren’t part of the same scene. However, brandishing a broadsword over the head of someone representing the original people of the region doesn’t make for a peaceful look. Not as awkward as the long-used seal of Whitesboro, New York (which was considerably changed a couple of years after this posting), but still.

Massachusetts’s flag is one of many state flags created simply by putting the state seal on a solid field. And in our case, that field is plain white. So the state flag isn’t terribly imaginative or eye-catching, even beyond the question of appropriating a Native American figure and then waving a sword over him.

In May 2022 a Massachusetts commission recommended changing the state’s seal to better reflect its values. That in turn would change the flag, or open the door for a new flag design. However, the commission couldn’t agree on an alternate proposal before its legal mandate ran out. So by default we’re sticking with an Indian whose presence goes back to 1629 and an arm with a sword perhaps borrowed from Paul Revere’s Patriot of 1775.

Matthias Hammond’s House and Anne Proctor’s Doll

With all these stories about Founders’ children and dolls, I thought I should show an actual doll from the period.

The Hammond-Harwood House Museum stands in Annapolis, Maryland. The architect William Buckland designed it just before he died in 1774, and his assistant John Randall completed the building for a young tobacco planter named Matthias Hammond (1750–1786).

Hammond had just been elected to the Maryland General Assembly by Annapolis’s anti-taxation party. He was also a new member of the vestry of St. Anne’s Parish. With those responsibilities, he presumably wanted a house in town.

However, Hammond doesn’t appear to have ever lived in his Annapolis house for an extended period. Instead he stayed on his slave-labor plantation in what is now Gambril. He also never married, and thus never raised children in the house.

In 1926 St. John’s College bought the building to use as a museum, but ran into financial straits during the Depression. The Hammond-Harwood House Association formed in 1938 to maintain the site as an independent museum of architecture and the decorative arts.

Among the artifacts in the museum’s collection is this doll from a Baltimore family.

The museum’s webpage explains:

She is a Queen Anne style doll and dates to about 1785. She may have been made in England, starting as a block of wood and slowly taking shape as a carver turned the block on a lathe. It is easy to see why six-year-old Ann Proctor would have been attached to her, perhaps so attached that she insisted her doll be included in this portrait of her:

That’s a Charles Willson Peale painting from 1789. The museum notes that the doll is actually smaller than Peale painted it, so as not to distract from Anne (and her parrot). But clearly the doll had a lot of meaning for the Proctors.

“A painting so great, and so strange”

Laura Cummings’s review of the Derby Museum in England for the Guardian is the sort of review that makes me want to look up plane and train schedules:

There is a painting so great, and so strange, in the city of Derby as to be worth the visit to the gallery alone. It shows a group of spectators gathered in deep darkness round a clockwork model of the solar system. Their faces are illuminated only by an invisible source: the hidden lamp that stands in for the sun. . . .

Joseph Wright’s A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery (1766) has pride of place in Derby Museum and Art Gallery, as it should. During his life and long after his death, Wright (1734-97) was chiefly known for two things: having his name infrangibly bound to the Midlands town of his birth, and being Britain’s best painter of candlelight. . . .

Today’s museum feels uniquely intimate. Here is [Richard] Arkwright, and then a painting of his cotton mill, where the 12-hour shifts ran right through the night; and then a clock designed by John Whitehurst to record the running time of machines alongside standard time, on two dials; and then Wright’s portrait of Whitehurst.

Here too is the 120,000-year-old hippo found in a Derby suburb; the Roman dice discovered beneath the ring road; the pigeon King of Rome, which broke all speed records racing 1,001 miles back home from Italy in 1913. And all of this appears alongside French revolutionary shoes, Cycladic figures, samurai armour, Egyptian mummies and dinosaurs that children can touch.

All this place needs, as the gallery prepares to show 400 of Wright’s lithe and animate drawings in 2024, alongside his painted masterpieces, is a massive dose of money (come on, plutocrats) to lift its premises and presentation up to the standards of its Enlightenment stars. Then Derby Museum and Art Gallery can be what it ought to be, a miniature rival to the British Museum, without all the stealing.

“Oft where the crouded stage invites, The laughing Muses join”

Christopher Anstey (1724–1805, shown here by William Hoare ignoring his daughter and her dolly) was the son of a Cambridgeshire minister who showed a great talent for Latin poetry at school and university.

The market for Latin poetry being small, Anstey was lucky enough to inherit considerable estates. He married and had a large family. In the 1760s he started to spend time in Bath, at first for his mood and then because he liked it.

In 1766, Anstey published The New Bath Guide: or Memoirs of the B–n–r–d Family in a Series of Poetical Epistles, a long satirical poem that became hugely popular.

Ten years later, having moved to Bath, Anstey wrote An Election Ball, in Poetical Letters from Mr. Inkle at Bath to his Wife at Gloucester. He dedicated that satire to John Riggs-Miller, host of a literary salon at Batheaston.

Anstey was a regular at the Riggs-Millers’ every-other-Thursday parties, including one on 3 Dec 1778. That was a little more than two weeks after Catharine Macaulay married Dr. William Graham in Leicester, a development that people in greater Bath were already gossiping about.

The poem that Christopher Anstey threw into the Riggs-Millers’ Roman vase for judgment that day was an ode titled “Winter’s Amusement.” That might have seemed a mere comment on the season. But as the lines were read aloud, the audience detected a more serious message: people should avoid passion and folly in love, especially as they grow older.

Ye beauteous nymphs, and jovial swains,
Who, deck’d with youthful bloom,
To gay assemblage meet to grace
Philander’s cheerful dome,

Mark how the wintry clouds hang o’er
Yon frowning mountain’s brow;
Mark how the rude winds warp the stream,
And rock the leafless bough.

The painted meads, and flow’ry lawns,
Their wonted pride give o’er;
The feather’d flocks in silence mourn;
Their notes are heard no more.

Save where beneath the lonely shed,
Or desolated thorn,
The red-breast heaves his ruffled plumes,
And tunes his pipe forlorn.

Yet shall the sun’s reviving ray
Recall the genial spring;
The painted meads resume their pride;
The feather’d flocks shall sing.

But not to you shall e’er return
The pride of gaudy years;
When pining Age with icy hand,
His hoary mantle rears.

When once, alas! his churlish blast
Shall your bright spring subdue,
I know not what reviving sun
Can e’er that spring renew.

Then seize the glorious golden days
That fill your cups with joy!
Bid every gay and social scene
Your blissful hours employ.

Oft where the crouded stage invites,
The laughing Muses join;
Or woo them while they sport around
Eugenia’s laurel’d shrine.

Oft seek the haunts where health and joy
To sportive numbers move;
Or plaintive strains breathe soft desire,
And wake the soul to love.

Yet ah! where-e’er you bend your way,
Let fair Discretion steer:
From Folly’s vain delusive charms,
And Passion’s wild career.

So when the wintry hours shall come,
When youth and pleasure fly,
Safe shall you ward th’ impending storm,
And Time’s rude blast defy.

Perpetual charms, unfading spring,
In sweet reflection find;
While innocence and virtue bring
A sun-shine to the mind!

(I’m following the title and text printed in The Scots Magazine in January 1779 rather than in the 1808 collection of Anstey’s work.)

The judges at the salon chose Anstey’s ode as that day’s best offering. Lady Miller asked him to read it again. Instead, he pulled another poem out of his pocket.

TOMORROW: The epode.

Black Reviews White’s Revolutionary Things

H-Early-America has just shared Jennifer M. Black’s review of Ashli White’s new book, Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

White looks at “the material culture that shaped French, American, and Haitian political contests between 1770 and 1810,” covering “diverse objects such as military clothing, maps, ceramics, wax figures, and politically charged accessories.”

Black writes:

Part 1 examines everyday items that became politically charged due to who procured them, where, how, and why. . . .

Part 2 examines clothing and accessories to show how revolutionary individuals understood, demonstrated, and interpreted their own political alignments and those of others. . . .

Part 3 turns to visual culture, especially maps, prints, and wax figures, to understand how contemporaries shared news about the ongoing revolutions.

The review sums up:

In her focus on the objects’ production, distribution, use, and context, White departs from typical material culture histories of this period, which tend to focus on how certain objects conveyed status or represented cultural and intellectual themes for contemporaries. In this way, White provides a fresh and interesting discussion of these highly politicized objects. But the approach may be somewhat frustrating for material culture scholars accustomed to close readings of particular objects’ attributes and symbolism—there are few of these, and mostly toward the end of the book. . . .

Still, this book makes several important contributions to the extant literature. White’s transnational and comparative focus allows her to isolate racial difference as a factor that shaped individual experience and, for example, affected contemporaries’ reactions to revolutionary violence. . . . Moreover, White’s transnational focus allows her to trace objects that moved across the Atlantic and circulated among varied revolutionaries. Thus, the book is as much a history of material culture in the military as it is about politics and revolutions.

Some of the most knowledgable and diligent researchers into Revolutionary-era material culture I know are reenactors since they literally use the objects of the time or the closest replicas they can make or obtain. It sounds like this book might be useful for exploring the cultural context of those goods and how that changed with events.

“Nothing less than a global conspiracy against liberty”

More from David Armitage, this time from a History Today round-up of historians discussing conspiracy theories that had real-world results:

Starting during the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765 and gathering steam in the following decade, white settler rebels dusted off 17th-century slogans to decry popery and, above all, ‘slavery’ in the evil designs of Westminster and even – in the most perfervid imaginings of Thomas Jefferson – George III himself.

After armed resistance broke out in British America, the Continental Congress issued a series of documents laying out nothing less than a global conspiracy against liberty directed first against the American colonies, then spreading to Ireland, the British Caribbean and South Asia. In response, many Britons believed a parallel conspiracy: that excitable descendants of Puritans and Roundheads were hellbent on independence from the British Crown and Parliament.

The collision of conspiracy theories inflamed and propelled divisions on both sides of the Atlantic, to form what the great early American historian Bernard Bailyn called ‘the ideological origins of the American Revolution’. The colonists’ fears may have been overblown and their invocation of ‘slavery’ hypocritical; meanwhile, metropolitan Britons’ prophesies became self-fulfilling in July 1776. Yet both showed that not every conspiracy theory is necessarily a con: to be actionable it just has to be credible.

The other authors in this column discuss the “Popish Plot,” the “Papal Octopus,” and a pair of mysterious deaths in the time of Tiberius.

(Shown above is Paul Revere’s 1774 version of “The Mitred Minuet,” copied from a British original. On either side of the Atlantic, this cartoon expressed wariness about the British government countenancing Catholicism as the established religion in Québec. In Boston, there was paranoia not just about Catholic bishops but Anglican ones as well.)

Obelisks Being Repaired

The National Park Service is preparing for the Sestercentennial, which means sites with Revolutionary roots are being spruced up.

The agency maintains a list of “deferred maintenance” projects with a total cost that’s now more than $22 billion.

The 250th anniversary of the Revolution, and the crowds that’s expected to bring to those parks, has sent some money toward those maintenance projects. That’s a Good Thing.

There is an immediate downside, however: In the next couple of years that work might affect access to or views of some sites.

At Minute Man National Historical Park, for instance, the obelisk erected at the site of Concord’s North Bridge in 1863 and the nearby Minute Man Statue were recently conserved, shrouding them briefly.

A larger and longer project has started at the Bunker Hill Monument. Restoring the upper exterior of that stone tower means putting up lots of scaffolding, which will surround the monument and affect the views from its windows.

For safety, the area immediately around the tower and lodge are fenced off, though both buildings are still open to the public. I believe one of the small cannon traced in The Road to Concord is still on display in the lodge.

That work is scheduled to be done by the end of this year, keeping the tower in good shape for its spotlight in 2025.

Folks eager to see a towering Revolutionary obelisk this summer and fall might instead take a trip to the Saratoga Monument in Victory, New York. It will be open on weekends from 12 August to 15 October.

The Saratoga Monument is 155 feet tall, with 188 steps, compared to the Bunker Hill Monument’s 221 feet and 294 steps. However, it also offers more decoration to look at, including statues of Continental leaders Horatio Gates, Philip Schuyler, and Daniel Morgan on three of its four sides.

Behind Watson and the Shark

The National Gallery of Art recently shared Alysha Page’s article about an unusual figure in John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark.

Copley actually made three versions of this picture for merchant Brook Watson, the oldest now in the National Gallery. A second copy, also from 1778, is in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. A smaller version painted in 1782 is in the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Page’s essay focuses on one figure, writing: “The Black man stands upright at the top of the pyramid-like composition of this busy harbor scene.” I think the apex of the pyramid is clearly the right hand of the white sailor beside that man, about to thrust a lance down toward the shark. At the very least that white sailor’s head is at the same level as the black man’s.

It seems significant that the black sailor in the boat is positioned behind all the white men. Though he loosely holds the rope tossed to Watson, we don’t see him throwing out that life line. Instead, other sailors are frozen in dramatic action: spearing the shark, leaning down toward the water to grasp Watson.

All that said, the mere presence of a black sailor among Watson’s rescuers is clearly significant. As Page points out, Copley’s sketch for the scene showed that man as white, so he made a conscious effort to change that detail.

Among Copley’s other canvases is a study of a black man’s face, usually assumed to be the model for this figure in Watson and the Shark. I think the study is much more individualized and expressive than the figure in Watson and the Shark. But it was so rare for paintings to show black men among white men that the final figure doesn’t have to be most lively, or at the apex of the people shown, to be meaningful.

“Bawdy Bodies” Online from Yale

In 2015–16, the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale hosted an exhibition of eighteenth-century British prints called “Bawdy Bodies: Satires of Unruly Women,” co-curated by Dr. Hope Saska and Dr. Cynthia Roman.

That display has now been turned into an online exhibit, available here.

The introductory page says:

The works on display focus in particular on images that ridicule the highly accomplished and creative women who dared to transgress or test the boundaries of propriety that circumscribed their gender.

While late eighteenth-century commentators often celebrated the florescence of graphic caricature and satire that openly lampooned political figures—including the royal family—many of the satires exhibited here expressed trenchantly conservative views concerning social roles and manners. Loath to celebrate new-found intellectual, social, and political freedoms and empowerment for women, graphic satirists instead harshly ridiculed female liberties and accomplishments to the delight of largely male audiences.

Among the examples is Thomas Rowlandson’s satire “Breaking up of the Blue Stocking Club,” shown above. Though that phrase initially meant all the people who came to Lady Elizabeth Montagu’s salons, male or female, by the late 1700s it was gendered and pejorative.

I didn’t see material on Catharine Macaulay, but this exhibit provides context for the prints satirizing her intellectual output, personal life, and distinct appearance.

Joan Donovan on Political Memes at Old South, 29 June

On Thursday, 29 June, Revolutionary Spaces’ Old South Meeting House will host a conversation with Dr. Joan Donovan on “Benjamin Franklin, Rattlesnakes, and Pepe the Frog.”

This discussion will look at memes in American politics from the Founding Era to today. The event description says:

Memes—images that spread quickly through large groups—are a central part of internet culture. Not only have they have been instrumental in the rise of social media, they also have had a major influence on American political discourse.

According to leading media expert Dr. Joan Donovan, memes mirror the behavior of flags and broadsides of the American Revolution, including Benjamin Franklin’s ubiquitous Join or Die engraving and the iconic Gadsden Flag.

I’m intrigued because I’ve written about the quasi-scientific roots of American snakes as political symbols and spoken about Stamp Act protests as memes in the age of weekly newspapers.

Dr. Donovan is a public scholar specializing in media manipulation, political movements, critical internet studies, and online extremism. She is the Research Director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and directs the Technology and Social Change project, exploring how media manipulation helps to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. Donovan is the co-author of Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America with tech journalist Emily Dreyfuss and cultural ethnographer Brian Friedberg.

Donovan will be in conversation with Matthew Wilding, Director of Interpretation & Education at Revolutionary Spaces and curator of the upcoming exhibit “Impassioned Destruction: Politics, Vandalism & The Boston Tea Party” at the Old State House.

This event will start at 7:00 P.M., with doors opening thirty minutes earlier. There will be light snacks and refreshments. Register in advance for free.

“Nothing but poor dead dogs!”

This week the B.B.C.’s History Today magazine published an article by Stephanie Howard-Smith titled “The War on Dogs,” apparently boiled down from her 2018 article in the Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Howard-Smith writes:

Late in the summer of 1760, London was gripped by reports of mad dogs attacking people in the streets. On 26 August the Common Council of the City of London met and the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Chitty, issued a proclamation declaring that for the next two months, any dogs in the streets of the city should be killed and buried in mass graves. Similar orders followed in the surrounding areas.

Monetary rewards were offered to the officials initially tasked with the culling, but the cull inevitably descended into mob violence. Even pets were caught up in the bloodshed. The cullers clubbed pointers standing on their doorsteps and drowned greyhounds going for walks. A dog leaving the city on a lead was reportedly bludgeoned in the street.

The dog-loving writer and antiquarian Horace Walpole described the carnage he saw during the first week of the cull in a letter to a friend:

The streets are the very picture of the murder of the innocents – One drives over nothing but poor dead dogs! The dear, good-natured, honest, sensible creatures! Christ! How can anybody hurt them?

This sort of dog cull was not particularly unusual in itself – Edinburgh saw a cull of street dogs in 1738. Rather, it was notable because it was met with such vocal opposition.

An artist produced a satirical print of the cull depicting Thomas Chitty as King Herod and the cullers as violence-hungry thugs. Londoners began writing letters to newspapers criticising the Common Council’s order. Many were concerned that the brutality meted out to dogs might awaken latent savagery that could be transposed onto humans.

That satirical print can be viewed here, courtesy of the British Museum. Other figures in the cartoon included John Fielding and William Hogarth. The latter’s dog Trump, shown above in 1745, has his own Wikipedia page.

Constituting Comics

Constitution Illustrated by R. Sikoryak is a unique edition of the document that frames the government of the U.S. of A.

Each clause of that Constitution is, as the title says, illustrated. And in color yet.

The School Library Journal’s Good Comics for Kids website said:

This book is educational in more ways than one. Beyond the legal chronicle, each page is drawn to resemble a different comic strip or character. Sikoryak is an amazing mimic of art styles, so everyone from the Peanuts gang to the cast of G.I. Joe appears herein. An index lists his influences, crediting the original artists, listing the characters, and stating roughly when they originally appeared. This is a pocket-sized history of popular comics.

Sikoryak did an amazing job choosing the comics to emulate. Diverse characters drawn in the style of Raina Telgemeier stand in for “we the people”. Dennis the Menace appears on the page about age limits, Uncle Scrooge for taxes, Sgt. Rock for raising an army, and Beetle Bailey for the militia. Calvin and Hobbes view a field of arguing snowmen while, of course, Wonder Woman explains women’s suffrage.

Sikoryak is now working on a similar edition of the Declaration of Independence, and a mini black-and-white sampler (what the comics industry might once have called an “ashcan comic”) is available for sale.

The complete Declaration Illustrated volume is scheduled for publication in 2024. With some irony, the publisher of both volumes is Drawn & Quarterly, based in Canada.