Hic incipiat

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s Seal, Flag, and Motto Advisory Commission started meeting in July 2021, blowing past its original deadline but gaining approval last year to change those state symbols.

Earlier this year, the commission invited citizens to suggest designs for a new commonwealth seal, flag (no longer necessarily just showing the seal), and motto.

This week it unveiled the results—more than a thousand responses (some repeated), which anyone can thumb through in this download.

The commission sent “23 seals, 48 flags, and 32 mottos” to a second round. (For some reason, those are shared as a PowerPoint file.)

The whole collection includes lots of allusions to Revolutionary history, as we might expect. Some are obvious, like Minuteman figures, messengers on horseback, a pair of lanterns (or just one), lots and lots of pine trees, anachronistic teabags, even a Crispus Attucks.

One person suggested simply returning to the seal carved during the Revolutionary War by Paul Revere, with a figure of a Minuteman. Others combined a Minuteman with an Indian, as on the early colony and later state seals. Several proposed versions of the “Bunker Hill” or “New England” flag with a pine tree canton over the English cross.

Some allusions to the Revolutionary era are more subtle. At least a couple of designs used the nine vertical red and white stripes of the “Sons of Liberty flag.” I don’t think that’s an authentic Revolutionary relic, but I do like the idea of the state acknowledging the political activity of Samuel “Rat-trap” Adams.

Since 2005 Massachusetts’s official state colors are blue, green, and cranberry, and those show up in lots of designs, but many more people used the blue, white, and gold of the current flag. To me the gold looks awfully buff, recalling the “buff and blue” of the British Whigs and thence the Continental Army uniform modeled by Gen. George Washington.

Many of the flag designs include five-pointed stars, like the one on the current seal/flag, but the number of those stars varies widely. Six stars was the most common count. I was baffled by what that number represented. Usually stars refer to the number of things making up an entity, as with the fifty states of the union, and I didn’t think Massachusetts has six of anything.

Then I read that six stars refer to Massachusetts being the sixth state to ratify the Constitution. But that ratification was not, as many submitters believed, when Massachusetts joined the United States. The country had been formed a few years earlier as states signed onto the Articles of Confederation, and Massachusetts was the ninth state to do so.

Of course, the commonwealth has a lot more history than the Revolution. The proposed designs also include lots of Mayflowers, both the ship and the flower. Many nod to the state’s educational, technological, and maritime heritages. At the commission’s urging, lots of designers incorporated animals, plants, or landscapes that have some connection to Massachusetts.

The commission’s top three choices in each category are on this page. I don’t like any of the seals, and I don’t love any of the flags. In the larger group, nothing stood out for me as obviously right either, but I thought some worked better than those selected. (Massachusetts also has an official governor’s flag and an official naval ensign, so there’s room for runners-up.)

I did think a few people came up with the right motto: “Let it begin here.” It’s punchy and understandable, forward-looking enough to evoke innovation. It nods to the state’s false claim to be the real start of the American nation and its more arguable claim to provide the cradle of liberty. It definitely derives from a story of the fight at Lexington.

Unfortunately, that proposed motto didn’t get past the first round. The commission evidently wants something in Latin. (One submitter did translate the words attributed to John Parker into Latin: Hic incipiat.)

A Hero of Lake George

The Battle of Lake George on 8 Sept 1755 probably involved fewer than 3,500 men, a little more on the British side than the French. Each commander reported that his force had faced a much larger foe, however.

Each commander also reported inflicting more casualties than his force suffered, and more casualties than the rival commander reported. In fact, it seems impossible to pinpoint the number of dead and wounded.

Both sides lost leaders, however. On the French side, Baron Dieskau was wounded and captured, and Canadian commandant Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre was killed. The British lost Col. Ephraim Williams and Mohawk ally Hendrick Theyanoguin. Among the provincial officers who died of their wounds was Capt. William Maginnis of New York.

Gen. William Johnson was wounded early in the fighting near Lake George and had to sit out the rest of the battle. Not that he mentioned the last detail in his report to the Crown. Nor did he name Col. Phineas Lyman as the officer who took over and completed that part of the fight. But of course Johnson portrayed the battle as a great victory for Britain.

It probably was a British victory, though limited and costly. Crown forces could now move safely from Fort Lyman to Lake George, and the lakefront was clear enough to build another fort there.

But that clash was an even bigger win for William Johnson, Britain’s liaison to the Iroquois and new provincial general. He was made a baronet, thus Sir William Johnson. Eventually Benjamin West painted Johnson nobly sparing a French officer from attack by a Native warrior, as shown above.

The new baronet returned the king’s favor, renaming the nearby landmarks for the royal family: Lac du Saint-Sacrement became Lake George after George II, Fort Lyman became Fort Edward after one of the king’s grandsons (another slight for Phineas Lyman), and the new fort was dubbed Fort William Henry after the king’s younger son and another grandson. Since the territory remained in British hands, those names prevail.

As the senior (and surviving) British captain in the last part of this battle, Nathaniel Folsom enjoyed some of that glory. He rose within the New Hampshire military establishment, ranked as a colonel within a couple of years. Folsom’s businesses in Exeter prospered.

In 1774 the province chose Nathaniel Folsom as a representative to the First Continental Congress, alongside John Sullivan. His son, Nathaniel, Jr., participated in the first raid on Fort William and Mary that December. Decades later a veteran named Gideon Lamson stated (using military titles the men acquired later):

At nine, Colonel [John] Langdon came to Stoodley’s and acquainted General Folsom and company with the success of the enterprise,—that General Sullivan was then passing up the river with the loaded boats of powder and cannon.

Folsom took charge of one barrel of gunpowder removed from the fort.

Given Nathaniel Folsom’s success in the last war, his support for the Patriot resistance, and his activity in the New Hampshire Provincial Congress, it’s no surprise that that body voted to make him commander of the province’s troops on 21 Apr 1775. The legislators reaffirmed that decision on 23 May.

The problem was that no one had checked with the officer who was actually leading the New Hampshire troops around Boston.

TOMORROW: Stark divide.

Anishanslin on The Painter’s Fire in Boston, 23 June

On Wednesday, 23 June, Zara Anishanslin will speak at the Massachusetts Historical Society on her new book, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution.

Zara Anishanslin is a professor at the University of Delaware. Her last book was Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, winner of The Library Company of Philadelphia’s first Biennial Book Prize.

I got to hear Prof. Anishanslin speak about The Painter’s Fire at the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife last month. Previous studies of American-born painters in the Revolutionary world have focused on men like John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, and Ralph Earl—all important artists but also Loyalist in that conflict.

In contrast, Anishanslin looks at three artists who actively supported the new American republic in one way or another: Robert Edge Pine, Prince Demah, and Patience Wright. Pine was a British native, Demah was born enslaved, and Wright was a woman working in wax rather than portraiture, so their lives expand the traditional scope of artists’ studies in other ways as well. Their careers also intersected in interesting ways.

When I first wrote about Prince Demah back in 2006, all that I knew was his first name, that he was enslaved to Christian Barnes in Marlborough, and that she wanted to get him some training as a painter. Research by Paula Bagger and others revealed Demah’s transatlantic career, service in the Continental Army, and more. It’s exciting to see those facts come into the light.

The talk is the society’s Annual Jack Grinold Lecture in American Art and Architecture. It will begin with a reception for in-person attendees at 5:30 P.M. Prof. Anishanslin’s talk (and the online stream) will begin at 6:00. The event is free to society members and online attendees, $10 for others. Register here.

Skinner on “Paul Revere’s Ride” in Boston, 19 July

On Saturday, 19 July, the Paul Revere House will host the launch of Paul Revere’s Ride: An Illustrated History, by Cortney Skinner.

There have been many illustrated editions of Henry W. Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” the artists wrestling to different degrees with its historical inaccuracies.

Skinner took a different path. He’s illustrated Revere’s own account of his ride, our most detailed source on it. And he’s gone to great effort to paint its scenes with as much historical accuracy as possible.

Opposite each painting is a page discussing the historic details, mysteries, and artistic choices Skinner made. Like a good historian, he shares his sources and explains how he decided on visual details, from the household furniture to the angle of the moonlight.

At this event, Skinner will discuss the process of creating Paul Revere’s Ride: An Illustrated History and sign books. It’s scheduled from 1:00 to 3:00 P.M. The book can also be ordered from the Paul Revere House gift shop.

Also at the Paul Revere House that afternoon will be reenactors of Captain Amasa Soper’s Company, a unit that volunteered to defend Boston from attack by sea after the siege of the city ended in March 1776.

“Crying most pitifully all exceeping one”

This is a portrait of Mary Hubbard (1734–1808) painted by John Singleton Copley about 1764 and now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.

According to the institute, Hubbard’s “pose, gown, and background were precisely copied from a British engraving of a noblewoman, yet Copley distinguished the work as his own by capturing the figure’s individual features as well as the surfaces and colors of the luxurious fabrics.”

Mary Greene had married Daniel Hubbard (1736–1796) in 1757. Their mothers were first cousins. What’s more, her widowed father had married his widowed mother in 1744. That was one way mercantile families retained their money.

The Hubbards were Loyalists, particularly invested in importing sugar from the slave-labor plantations in Demarara. Daniel Hubbard signed the merchants’ addresses to the last royal governors, and the family remained in town during the siege. 

On 18 June 1775, Mary Hubbard wrote this description of the the Battle of Bunker Hill to her half-brother, David Greene (1749–1812):

once more at my Pen I can scarcely compose myself enough for any thing nor will you wonder when you know the situation we are in at present

Yesterday another Battle fought Charlestown the Scene of action they began early in the Morning & continued all day fighting. in the afternoon they set fire to the town & it is now wholy laid in ashes we could view this Melancholy sight from the top of our house

one poor Man went on the top of the meeting house to see the Battle was not able to git down again but perished in the flames.

about five in the afternoon they began to send home their wounded here my dear Brother was a Scene of woe indeed to see such numbers as pass’d by must have moved the hardest heart, judge then the fealings of your Sister, some without Noses some with but one Eye Broken legs & arms some limping along scarcely able to reach the Hospital, while others ware brought in Waggons, Chaise, Coaches, Sedans, & beds on mens Shoulders

the poor Women wringing their hands & crying most pitifully all exceeping one who on seeing her Husband in a cart badly wounded vou’d revenge went of but soon return’d compleatly Equip’t with her gun on her Shoulder her Knapsack at her back march’d down the street & left the poor Husband to try how many she could send along to tell he was comeing.

there is a vast Number of our Men killd & wound a great many Oficers two are sent to their long homes amongst the rest one fine looking Man much about your age who stopt against our windows to have his leg which was sliping moved a little he lived till this morning the poor fellow came a shore but yesterday or the day before, Perhaps his Mothers darling & his Fathers Joy cut of in the midst of his days his Sisters two if he had any must weep his untimely fate

hope it will never be my lot to have any of my near connections follow the Army.

Major [John] Pitcarn & Mr. Gore* both dead with many more that I dont know. we cannot yet learn how many of the enemy are kill’d, think it likely Mr. Hubbard who I supose will give you a particular account of the Battle will be able to write you word, to his Letter I refer you.

* have since heard Mr. Gore is a live

I don’t know who “Mr. Gore” is, not seeing such a British officer on the list of wounded. Hubbard wrote as if that man had been in the battle and thus not from the civilian family of Gores I’ve studied. (Samuel Gore was arrested after the battle for cracking a joke about the British deaths.)

The Hubbards didn’t evacuate Boston with the British military. Daniel kept at his business, and in 1792 was one of the founders of the Union Bank. He died on St. Croix during a voyage back from Demarara in 1796.

Mary Hubbard’s letter was first published by the Charlestown historian Richard Frothingham in 1876 and then as transcribed here in the D.A.R.’s American Monthly Magazine in 1894.

(The correspondent who sent the text to the magazine was Anita Newcomb McGee, a military doctor in the Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese Wars.)

“When the stakes are as significant as life and liberty”

Earlier this week the president of Yale, Marie McInnis, offered inspiration to the graduating class from a work by much earlier graduate.

Here’s an article from the university:

A Yale-trained art historian, McInnis turned to an artwork from the Yale University Art Gallery collection for answers, focusing on John Trumbull’s celebrated painting “The Battle of Bunker’s Hill.” The canvas marks that moment, 250 years ago in June, when a band of American rebels stood their ground on a hillside in Charlestown, then just north of Boston, against the might of the British military.

In Trumbull’s painting, the scene unfolds beneath acrid plumes of smoke as British forces breach the revolutionaries’ lines. Joseph Warren, an American major general, lies mortally wounded in the arms of a comrade. A redcoat tries to bayonet the fallen general — but British Major John Small has stepped in to stop him.

“In that moment, one man preserves the dignity of a dying foe with an unexpected gesture of compassion amid chaos,” McInnis said. “One man, taming the passions of war, chooses mercy. Chooses to see the man who was his friend, instead of the general of an opposing force.”

In highlighting Small’s intervention, McInnis said, Trumbull invites viewers to recognize a frequently overlooked kind of courage: The ability to show compassion to a bitter adversary.

“Compassion, as I suspect Major Small understood, is not the absence of conviction. It is not weakness,” she said. “And it is certainly not retreat. It is, in fact, an act of radical strength in its rarest form. It is the idea that even in our most consequential disagreements — that even when the stakes are as significant as life and liberty — we must find ways to recognize our common humanity.”

And displaying compassion does not mean avoiding conflict or denying differences, McInnis said.

“In a vibrant, pluralistic society, disagreement is inevitable, indeed welcomed,” she said in her speech, titled “Overcoming divides and embracing our shared humanity.”

“But what I would like to impress on you today is that compassion can coexist with our most deeply held beliefs.”

Here’s the full text of President McInnis’s speech.

Historically, I have to point out that Trumbull constructed his scene to convey just such a message. According to Alexander Garden, Maj. Small himself said that the artist “paid me the compliment of trying to save the life of Warren; but the fact is, that life had fled before I saw his remains.”

Also, Trumbull produced multiple copies of this scene with subtle differences. The image shown above from Yale is one of his preliminary studies. The university also owns a finished, full-color version, as do the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Wadsworth Athenaeum. (Notably, the colors aren’t the same on those two canvases, particularly in the flags Trumbull inserted into the scene.)

Aritfacts Lost, Strayed, or Stolen

The Journal of the American Revolution regularly asks its contributors to share a short answer to an intriguing question—a favorite event or person, a what-if possibility, a little-known example.

Usually I get intrigued, think about possible answers, often type up something to edit down to the requisite length. And then other things land on top of the task pile and I end up never sending in an answer.

But I was able to muster a reply to the latest challenge for contributors: “an artifact from the 1765–1805 era known to have existed well into the nineteenth century, that has since been stolen or gone missing.”

The various answers include one painting and three medals stolen in the second half of the twentieth century, several items of clothing that have probably been tossed out or disintegrated, and an entire financial archive.

Plus, Elias Boudinot’s handwritten memoir (which was, thankfully, transcribed and published before disappearing from archive shelves), two cannon captured at Saratoga and recaptured one war later, and possibly an entire Hessian colonel.

Another example occurs to me now, but I’m not sure it meets the criterion of having “existed well into the nineteenth century.”

On 16 Feb 1836, the printer Peter Edes, son of Benjamin Edes of the Boston Gazette and the Loyall Nine, wrote to his grandson:

It is a little surprising that the names of the tea-party were never made public: my father, I believe, was the only person who had a list of them, and he always kept it locked up in his desk while living. After his death Benj. Austin called upon my mother, and told her there was in his possession when living some very important papers belonging to the Whig party, which he wished not to be publicly known, and asked her to let him have the keys of the desk to examine it, which she delivered to him; he then examined it, and took out several papers, among which it was supposed he took away the list of the names of the tea-party, and they have not been known since.

Benjamin Edes died in 1803, his widow Martha in 1809, and this encounter would have happened between those dates, probably earlier. There were two politically active Benjamin Austins in Boston, father and son; the first died in 1806, the second in 1820.

Did Benjamin Edes really keep such a list, and why? Did Benjamin Austin do away with that document? If so, did he act because of the names that were on it or the names that weren’t on it?

How Did the Sons of Liberty Bowl Gain Its Name?

Yesterday I quoted from a report of an 1873 special meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society where a member displayed the silver bowl that Nathaniel Barber had commissioned from Paul Revere one hundred and five years before.

That year the bowl came back to Boston after decades of being owned by a man in New York.

That same page in the M.H.S. Proceedings went on to say:

The name “Sons of Liberty” is said to have been adopted here from its having been used in a speech in Parliament by our friend Colonel [Isaac] Barré. The fellowship under the name here was formed after the passage of the Stamp Act, and was first called in a Boston paper “The Union Club.” It was composed mostly of mechanics, and held secret meetings, at which the risings and other measures were planned. The principal committee met in the counting-room of Chase & Speakman’s distillery, in Hanover Square.

That report didn’t link the “Fifteen Associates” named on the bowl to the “Union Club” or “Sons of Liberty,” except in the general way that they were all on the same side of the pre-Revolutionary political divide.

Three years later, the Catalogue of the Loan Collection of Revolutionary Relics: Exhibited at the Old South Church described the same bowl this way:

Silver Bowl. For some years previous to the Revolution a number of gentlemen known as the ”Sons of Liberty” used to meet and discuss the questions of the day. In 1768, the Colonial Assembly of Massachusetts Bay voted to raise a Committee of Correspondence with her Sister Colonies on their grievances. The British Ministry demanded the repeal of this act. The Assembly voted “not to rescind,” and in commemoration of this vote the Sons of Liberty had this massive Punch Bowl made.

That description thus presented the fifteen men listed on the bowl as “the ‘Sons of Liberty.’” Not just Sons of Liberty, but the Sons of Liberty.

In 1881 The Memorial History of Boston included Edward G. Porter’s chapter on “The Beginning of the Revolution.” That weighty history mashed together the “party of Boston mechanics” who organized the first anti-Stamp Act protest in 1765 (as named by the Rev. William Gordon) with “the Sons of Liberty” who used the silver punch bowl in 1768. In fact, they were two separate groups; not one name appears on both lists.

Other authors followed suit, soon calling it “the Sons of Liberty bowl.” And after the bowl came on the market in 1949, as described by Museum of Fine Arts curator Ethan Lasser, Arts Digest referred to it as “Paul Revere’s celebrated Sons of Liberty Punch Bowl, thought by some to rank third among American historical treasures, after the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” [The phrase “by some” is doing a lot of work there.]

The current webpage for the artifact is titled “Sons of Liberty Bowl” and refers to “the Liberty Bowl.” The bowl does indeed have the words “Liberty” and “Librties,” and a picture of a Liberty Cap, inscribed on it. But the phrase “Sons of Liberty” was attached over a century later.

I agree that the fifteen men named on the bowl were Sons of Liberty as Boston used that term in the late 1760s. Nathaniel Barber and Daniel Malcom were particularly active in resisting royal officials. But they weren’t the only, the first, or the leading Sons of Liberty in town.

And this isn’t the only surviving punch bowl associated with Sons of Liberty in Boston, either. The Massachusetts Historical Society has a porcelain bowl owned by Benjamin Edes, one of the group Gordon credited for those anti-Stamp Act protests.

“This BOWL commemorative of Events prior to the American Revolution”

In August 1768 a Boston Gazette item, quoted back here, announced that Nathaniel Barber had commissioned a large silver bowl “for the Use of the Gentlemen belonging to the Insurance Office kept by” him. These weren’t his clerks, it appears, but his investors.

That group in turn invited “a Number of Gentlemen of Distinction in the Town” to drink toasts with them. The bowl’s engraving celebrated the 92 members of the Massachusetts General Court who refused to rescind the Circular Letter of 1768.

That newspaper item didn’t name the artisan who created the silver bowl: Paul Revere. Nobody then knew he’d become more famous than Barber or any of the other men whose names he engraved on the vessel.

Several of those gentlemen participated in the Boston Sons of Liberty’s dinner in Dorchester in August 1769. To be sure, there were nearly 300 other men there, too, including Revere and most members of the “Loyall Nine.”

At some point in the middle of the nineteenth century new words were engraved around the bowl below Revere’s original words and pictures:

This BOWL commemorative of Events prior to the American Revolution, was purchased of the Associates whose names are inscribed upon its surface, by Wm. MACKAY, one of their number, from whom upon the demise of the latter, in Feby 1832, it became the property of Wm. MACKAY, his Grandson in direct line, a Resident of the City of New York.

The Associates were Citizens of Boston.

Then someone added to the flat bottom of the bowl:

* at whose death in 1873, it
passed into the hands of his
Brother ROBT. C. MACKAY of
Boston

And finally, even later:

and ROBERT C. MACKAY on Mar. 11, 1902
transferred it to MARIAN LINCOLN PERRY
of Providence, Rhode Island
a great great grand-daughter of
JOHN MARSTON
one of the fifteen associates

The term “Associates” also appears in the Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings reported on a special meeting on 16 Dec 1873, when the Rev. George E. Ellis displayed that bowl for other attendees. Thay report referred to “the Fifteen Associates, belonging to Boston, for whom the bowl was made.”

It appears the M.H.S.P. article picked up the word “Associates” from the later carving around the bowl, while the engraving on the bottom may have taken the phrase “the fifteen associates” from the M.H.S.P. article.

In any event, nowhere on the bowl did the phrase “Sons of Liberty” appear, and the original newspaper report from 1768 didn’t use that term.

TOMORROW: Crossing the streams.

“The ideals of American life still in force today”

The Museum of Fine Arts just shared an essay by Ethan Lasser, the the John Moors Cabot Chair for the Art of the Americas, about the silver punch bowl made by Paul Revere and engraved with several merchants’ names.

Lasser wrote:

What does the year 1949, in the aftermath of World War II, when America was entering a decade of prosperity, have to do with a silver punch bowl from the 18th century? This is the year Revere’s piece entered MFA’s collection. It’s a remarkable story: the bowl descended through the family of William Mackay, one of the Sons of Liberty it celebrates. In 1902 ownership shifted, and the bowl fell into the hands of Marian Lincoln Perry, great-great-granddaughter of John Marston, another one of the Sons of Liberty.

After Mrs. Perry’s death in 1935, the enterprising New York art dealer Israel Sack set out to place the bowl in an institution. He received offers from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but felt strongly that “the bowl should belong to the city that gave it birth” and offered it to the MFA. “It was made in Boston for men of Boston and by a famous silversmith of Boston,” he said. “It belongs in Boston.”

Edwin J. Hipkiss, then the MFA’s curator of Decorative Arts, was quick to act. He realized the bowl spoke of the past—but also of his own time, when the United States had endured a more recent fight for freedom in World War II. In Hipkiss’s words, the piece “expresses the hopes and achievements of dauntless Americans of 180 years ago and commemorates the ideals of American life still in force today.”

Prominent Bostonians rallied to help Hipkiss raise funds to acquire the bowl for the Museum. “Acting independently for the Museum of Fine Arts,” they initiated the Revere Sons of Liberty Bowl Fund. Their rousing, all-caps fundraising letter is still in our curatorial files: “THE BOWL IS A SYMBOL OF OUR FREEDOM because it commemorates the very first unified stand for liberty in the country.” . . .

Leafing through our files, I came upon the Boston Public School Superintendent’s Circular #103, dated November 30, 1948. “To the principals of Schools and districts,” the letter begins:

The School committee invites the school children of Boston to make a voluntary contribution … to keep permanently in our city this priceless relic made in Boston by a famous silversmith of Boston in tribute to sterling patriots of Boston.

When was collection day? December 7, 1948, the seventh anniversary of Pearl Harbor—a day of infamy brightened by this symbol of freedom. Thousands of school children participated in the effort and, a few weeks later, in the opening weeks of 1949, the Sons of Liberty Bowl was acquired and made its debut at the Museum.

It struck me how this telling looks back repeatedly to World War II but doesn’t mention the Cold War with the Soviet Union that the U.S. of A. had just entered. Americans were eager to point to the values of liberty, faith, and the like, in contrast to oppressive, godless Communism. Recruiting schoolchildren to give money for “A SYMBOL OF OUR FREEDOM” and “in tribute to sterling patriots” fits right into that moment.

The Short Military Career of Lt. Col. Thomas Williams, Jr.

The Journal of the American Revolution just published Tim Abbott’s article about Lt. Col. Thomas Williams, Jr. (1746–1776), of Stockbridge.

Williams left behind an engraved powder horn, now in the collection of the Stockbridge Library Museum and Archives. It shows Boston landmarks.

(This is different from the Dr. Thomas Williams powder horn recorded by Rufus Alexander Grider in 1888 and now lost.)

The siege lines around Boston contained some professional horn carvers selling their work to men who wanted souvenirs of military service. I suspect the Williams horn is one like that. As an officer and as a lawyer in civilian life, he probably didn’t have the time or inclination to do his own carving.

As Abbott’s article recounts, Williams was one of two minute company captains who responded to the Lexington Alarm from Stockbridge. The other company included a score of men from the town’s Native community and thus gets more attention.

As the troops besieging Boston organized themselves into an army enlisted through the end of the year rather than an emergency militia force, Williams became part of Col. John Paterson’s regiment. In September he volunteered for Col. Benedict Arnold’s expedition through Maine to Québec.

However, Williams was in the rear guard led by Lt. Col. Roger Enos (1729–1808), who in late October decided to turn back. That was controversial. Enos was tried and acquitted in a court-martial. He was probably lucky to go through that procedure before the army at Cambridge received “Colonel Arnolds evidence,” as Gen. George Washington reported.

Williams left Paterson’s regiment at the end of 1775, but on 9 Jan 1776 he became lieutenant colonel of a new regiment under Col. Elisha Porter to be sent up to Québec along Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence River. This time Williams made it to the outskirts of the city, but smallpox was weakening the Continental forces.

Those Americans were trying to inoculate and fight the war at the same time. Abbott writes:

The timing for the deliberate exposure of Porter’s Regiment to smallpox could not have been worse. The inoculation process required effective quarantine for three to four weeks, during which the men were both weak and contagious. Even for those under treatment, severe cases could still develop and mortality rates under the best conditions still ran 1 to 2 percent. Porter’s men had no more than three days in hospital after they were inoculated before the siege was dramatically lifted by the arrival of a British fleet on May 6 and the American forces were soon driven back upriver in full retreat. Not only were they exposed to physical stress while they developed smallpox symptoms, but they became a significant vector for the spread of the disease to others in its more deadly form.

The American commander, Gen. John Thomas, died on 2 June. Lt. Col. Williams led his men back to Crown Point, New York, before falling ill. He didn’t make it home to Stockbridge.

Williams doesn’t appear to have left behind his own diary or letters—his powder horn might have been his only personal record of military service, and it probably wasn’t his own creation. Abbott has therefore done the work of reconstructing his career by weaving together official records and other officers’ accounts.

A Print of a “Patriotick Barber”

On 14 Feb 1775, 250 years ago today, Robert Sayer and John Bennett published a satirical print, probably created by Philip Dawe, titled “The Patriotick Barber of New York.”

As I discussed back here, that was one of several images Sayer, Bennett, and probably Dawe produced for British customers interested in American affairs.

The artist appears to have taken inspiration from news stories printed in British newspapers. In this case, the article appeared in the 7 January Kentish Gazette, the 13 January Edinburgh Advertiser, and perhaps elsewhere.

As quoted by R. T. H. Haley in The Boston Port Bill as Pictured by a Contemporary London Cartoonist, it said:

The following card, copies of which were circulated at New York, is too singular not to merit insertion:

“A Card,
“New York, Oct. 3rd.

“The thanks of the worthy sons of liberty in solemn Congress assembled, were this night voted and unanimously allowed to be justly due to Mr. Jacob Vredenburgh, Barber, for his firm spirited and patriotic conduct, in refusing to complete an operation, vulgarly called Shaving, which he had begun on the face of Captain John Crozer, Commander of the Empress of Russia, one of his Majesty’s [troop] transports, now lying in the river, but most fortunately and providentially was informed of the identity of the gentleman’s person, when he had about half finished the job.

“It is most devoutly to be wished that all Gentlemen of the Razor will follow this wise, prudent, interesting and praiseworthy example, so steadily, that every person who pays due allegiance to his Majesty, and wishes Peace, Happiness, and Unanimity to the Colonies, may have his beard grow as long as ever was King Nebuchadnezzar’s.”

The picture showed the barber, well wigged but ugly and sneering, pushing the handsome but half-shaved captain out of his chair. “Orders of Government” poke from the captain’s pocket while another man tries to hand him a letter marked “To Capt. Crozer.”

The print carried the subtitle “The Captain in the Suds,” and underneath it was the verse:

Then Patriot grand, maintain thy Stand,
And whilst thou sav’st Americ’s Land,
Preserve the Golden Rule;

Forbid the Captains there to roam,
Half shave them first, then send ’em home,
Objects of ridicule.

On the barbershop wall are engraved portraits of the Earls of Camden and Chatham, British politicians who spoke up for the colonies’ cause, plus Chatham’s recent speech. Beside them hangs the Continental Congress’s Articles of Association, a boycott that hadn’t actually been announced when this incident took place.

In the top and bottom of the picture are wig boxes with the names of local Whigs: “Alexander McDugell,” John Lamb, Isaac Sears, and so on. One says, “Welle Franklin.” Was that the royal governor of New Jersey?

Perhaps the most striking detail of this print is that I can’t find any mention of the incident in the American press, nor of the men involved. The event appears to have been recorded only in the British newspaper reports, and those would have been long forgotten if not for this picture.

But because the print was so dramatic, 200 years after publication it inspired Ashley Vernon and Greta Hartwig to create a one-act opera, The Barber of New York.

TOMORROW: More about the barber.

A Copley Portrait and the Story Behind It

Last month the Pook & Pook art auction house in Pennsylvania sold two paintings of a little girl named Priscilla Greenleaf (and her dog).

One, attributed to Joseph Badger and dated about 1750, went for $20,000, or double the top range of its estimate. 

The other, an early work by John Singleton Copley, sold for $500,000, or more than six times the initial estimate. That’s what appears in this thumbnail.

The Copley portrait, which Pook & Pook dated to about 1757, was posthumous. That’s because Priscilla had probably died in 1750, soon after Badger painted her.

John Greenleaf, the children’s father, was an apothecary. As D. Brenton Simons wrote in Witches, Rakes, and Rogues, when Greenleaf’s eleven-month-old son died in January of that year, soon after the deaths of his daughters, he suspected poison.

Greenleaf accused a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl he enslaved, Phillis Hammond, of giving the baby arsenic. Arrested and under pressure, she confessed to killing John, Jr., and Elizabeth. The family believed she killed Priscilla as well. The newspapers published little about the case, not even the Greenleaf name.

Phillis Hammond pled guilty to murdering baby John that spring. She was sentenced to death. The Boston Evening Post reported, “Her Mother died with Excess of Grief.” Phillis was hanged on 16 May 1751. The Rev. Dr. Mather Byles preached at the execution. Some printer issued a broadside with a crude woodcut and verse titled “The bitter Effects of Sin,” the source for Phillis’s surname.

The Greenleafs had Badger’s portraits of Priscilla and Elizabeth to remember their daughters. (The latter is now in the collection of Colonial Williamsburg.) But evidently they wanted an image of their murdered son, and for the pictures to match.

John Singleton Copley was still a teenager himself when the Greenleafs commissioned him to paint all three of their lost children. The pictures of Elizabeth and John are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The museum website says of the boy’s outfit: “Copley’s source for John’s exotic cap and pose was a print after Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of Lord Bury as a child.” Likewise, though his picture of Priscilla followed Badger in posing the little girl with a dog, he may have used a European print as a better model.

“Lost Bunker Hill Cyclorama,” 29 Jan.

On Wednesday, 29 January, the National Parks of Boston and Boston Public Library will present a free online presentation about “Boston’s Lost Bunker Hill Cyclorama.”

The event description says:

The Battle of Bunker Hill is one of the most mythologized moments in American history, and the events of June 17, 1775, have inspired artists for more than two centuries.

The most monumental work of art dedicated to the battle was “The Battle of Bunker Hill Cyclorama.” In an era before IMAX blockbusters, audiences in the 1800s visited cycloramas; 360-degree paintings displayed within enormous circular structures. When “The Battle of Bunker Hill Cyclorama” was unveiled in Boston 1888, it was considered the most accurate depiction of the battle yet seen, yet a few short years later was discarded.

This program explores the history and legacy of the greatest work of art ever lost in Boston.

This event is scheduled to start at 6:00 P.M. To attend, people must register through Zoom.

Folks can also explore the National Parks of Boston’s webpage on the cyclorama, which offered a “Diorama of the Boston Tea Party” as an appetizer. Only a few two-dimensional traces of the installation survive.

In addition, Jake Sconyers’s HUB History podcast explored the earlier cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg in this episode.

The Latest Stamp Act

The United States Postal Service just announced some of its plans for new stamps in 2025.

Among the subjects are “Battlefields of the American Revolution,” as shown above:

Marking the 250th anniversary of the start of the Revolutionary War, this pane of 15 stamps invites us to witness and remember five turning points in the fight for American independence. Watercolor paintings depicting scenes of five battles appear alongside photographs of sites involved in each battle. Derry Noyes, an art director for USPS, designed the stamps with art by Greg Harlin and photographs by Jon Bilous, Richard Lewis, Tom Morris, Gregory J. Parker and Kevin Stewart.

I like the juxtaposing of history painting and travel photography. And it’s interesting to see how Harlin tackled the challenge of his artwork needing to work by halves.

But which battles are commemorated?

• Lexington and Concord (1775).
• Bunker Hill (1775).
• Trenton (1776).
• Saratoga (1777).
• Yorktown (1781).

That’s an even more limited presentation of the Revolutionary War than usual. Of course, featuring only American victories and moral victories cuts down the list of possible battles considerably. But this series suggests that only one fight mattered during the last five years of the war and in any state south-southeast of New Jersey. 

Christopher Machell and Crackenthorpe Hall

This post is about the life of British army officer and disabled artist Christopher Machell, mostly because I can’t resist the chance to type the phrase “Lancelot Machell of Crackenthorpe Hall.”

That was the name of the officer’s grandfather. The Machell family seat was that big manor house in Crackenthorpe (shown here), a village in the western English county of Westmorland (now Cumbria).

The Machells had owned that property since the late Middle Ages, rebuilding and remodeling it multiple times in the 1600s.

Lancelot Machell and his wife Deborah had fourteen children between 1708 and 1726, ten of them girls. Of the four boys, three died while still very young.

That left Richard Machell, born in 1713, as the heir to Crackenthorpe. He married Mary Gibson in 1732, and they soon started to have children. But Richard followed an unusual path for a landed gentleman: he joined the church and in 1739 became rector of St. Peter’s Church in Great Asby.

The elder Lancelot Machell and his wife Deborah both died in 1767. While retaining his ecclesiastical post, the Rev. Richard Machell moved into Crackenthorpe Hall with his family. The following year, he joined in an agreement to divide Crackenthorpe common among seventeen proprietors, coming away with 238 of its 526 acres.

The minister’s first son Hugh had died after a day. His oldest surviving son and heir was another Lancelot Machell, born in 1741. Among the younger children was Christopher, born in 1746. He needed a profession, and at age twenty-two he became an ensign in His Majesty’s 15th Regiment.

I discussed what I could find of Christopher’s military career yesterday. He was a lieutenant as of 1771, a captain in 1775, and deployed to America in 1776. Later sources say he was wounded in the “Battle of New York” and lost his left arm, but he remained on the regimental roll until 1789, when he retired with the rank of major.

Christopher Machell married Ann Scott in late 1783. According to Irish Watercolours and Drawings by Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, Maj. Machell was in Ireland in the mid-1780s, painting landscapes “in monochrome or grisaille” with “no interest in figures.” His pictures of the land around Dublin, County Antrim, and County Down are in the National Gallery of Ireland.

The Rev. Mr. Machell died in February 1786. Lancelot Machell became the owner of Crackenthorpe Hall and that big estate. But not for long. In August, he advertised the manor and its attendant properties for sale. An agent for the Earl of Lonsdale bought everything for £12,000.

Family tradition would say Lancelot “lost a bet to Lord Lonsdale of nearby Lowther Castle and put the estate up for sale to pay for it.” The first Earl of Lonsdale does have some crazy stories attached his name (keeping his late mistress’s body in her bed until the smell became so bad he had it put in a glass-topped coffin, fighting a duel with a guard captain because he didn’t like being told to stay away from a London riot), but gambling doesn’t loom large.

Maj. Christopher Machell reportedly objected to this sale and asked his brother to sell him Crackenthorpe Hall and a bit of land around it. (There was no way he could have matched the earl’s price for all the property.) But it was too late. Lancelot moved onto property he inherited from his mother and died in April 1788, leaving most of his remaining wealth to Christopher.

Maj. Machell settled his family in Beverley, in the county of Yorkshire. (In other words, he moved clear across England, but across the narrowest part of England.) As I wrote yesterday, Machell gained the rank of lieutenant colonel as an inspector of militia in 1807, so his descendants remembered him as “Colonel Machell.” An article in the 1886 Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society quoted one of his sons recalling him this way:

He was highly endowed with mental and personal qualities of no slight pretension, an admirable draughtsman, a good musician, a skilful botanist, and possessing a wonderful amount of varied and accurate information. In person he was above the ordinary standard being 6 foot 2 inches in height, and built in fair proportion, so that his strength and activity were very great, and even up to the time of his death he never was bowed down by decrepitude, nor did his sight fail him.

The Historical Account of the Herbarium of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society describes a painting of “the gallant colonel seated, and resting his arm upon a volume of his ‘Hortus Siccus’,” or plant list. A biography of his grandson, explorer Thomas Machell, by Jenny Balfour-Paul describes the colonel’s “armless sleeve pinned up” in this portrait. He died in 1827 at the age of eighty.

Christopher and Ann Machell had five sons who reached adulthood. Three joined the British army, and a fourth was a banker. The fifth tried the Royal Navy but then followed his grandfather’s path, became a minister, and produced the family’s only male heirs.

One of that man’s younger children, James Octavius Machell, proved to be a very successful racehorse breeder. So successful that he made enough money to buy back Crackenthorpe Hall from the latest Earl of Lonsdale in 1877. He added another wing to the manor, called the “Victorian Wing” but shaped along Georgian lines to blend with the rest.

If you’re Anglophilic enough to have enjoyed this trip through one line of British landed gentry, you may be interested to know that that wing of Crackenthope Hall is available for rentals and occasions.

Christopher Machell: Not Wounded at Bunker Hill

Earlier this month I saw a Bluesky posting about a disabled artist named Christopher Machell, who had lost an arm at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Perhaps because the name was unfamiliar to me, I assumed that was an enlisted man. I sought more information since sources on the experiences of British privates are hard to come by.

I soon realized that Machell was an officer, not a private. The Annual Report of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society for 1907 stated:

Christopher Machell was born in 1747. He was Lt.-Colonel in the 15th Regiment of Foot, and served with the British Forces under General [Thomas] Gage in the American War of Independence. the 17th June, 1775, he was present at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, and in that fiercely contested and sanguinary engagement the gallant Colonel lost an arm.

The source of this information was Machell’s grandson. Unfortunately, he was wrong on several counts.

First, the 15th Regiment wasn’t in Boston in 1775.

Second, Machell wasn’t a lieutenant-colonel during the war. British Army Lists show that he was a lieutenant when the fighting began and promoted to captain on 9 Oct 1775.

In the 1775 Army List, Machell was the least senior captain in the regiment. In 1783 he was the most senior captain because all of the others had been promoted, died, or retired.

According to Robert John Jones’s History of the 15th (East Yorkshire) Regiment, Machell received a promotion to major in June 1783 and retired at that rank in 1789.

So how did Machell come by the rank of lieutenant colonel? Because in 1807 he was on the War Office’s list of “Persons appointed INSPECTING FIELD OFFICERS of Yeomanry and Volunteer Corps in GREAT BRITAIN, with the Rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Army while so employed.” In other words, he was an army veteran called in to inspect militia units. I don’t know whether there was any actual work in that appointment or it was just a courtesy.

What about that wound? According to Burke’s Landed Gentry, Capt. Machell “lost his arm in the battle of New York.” The 15th Regiment was indeed part of the Crown’s New York campaign in 1776, fighting in the Battles of Brooklyn, White Plains, and Fort Washington.

When Machell was wounded is unclear. He wasn’t listed among the casualties in Gen. Sir William Howe’s 27 August report, and the British army and press were much better at reporting wounded officers than wounded privates. It’s conceivable Machell was wounded not in any of the big memorable battles but in the ongoing skirmishing around New York.

The 15th Regiment remained in North America through 1778, when it was moved to the Caribbean. In 1781 the French captured the 15th on St. Eustatius, setting them free the next year. The brief profiles of Machell don’t say anything about him being a prisoner or war, hinting he may not have been with the regiment then.

All that raises the question of why, if Capt. Machell actually lost an arm in the first three years of the war, he remained on the regiment’s roll through the end. Jones’s History of the 15th may contain an answer, but I don’t have access to the whole book.

TOMORROW: Arguing over Crackenthorpe.

Checking Out the Cherubs at Old North Church

Old North Illuminated has announced that its project to conserve cherubs painted high on its interior walls in the 1700s is going faster than expected.

Each cherub, originally painted by John Gibbs, has proved to have a different facial shape and expression. The craftspeople expect to reveal all sixteen of the faces.

People can learn more in this GBH News interview with lead conservator Gianfranco Pocobene.

Visitors to the Old North Church can enjoy a closer view of the paintings by purchasing slots on a “Cheeky Cherub” tour. The church’s interpreters will lead that group up to the balcony (meaning there are stairs to climb) and discuss how these figures fit into the church’s original design scheme.

The “Cheeky Cherub” tour is available at different times and on different days. It costs $10 and includes regular admission to the church sanctuary. Tours are booked through this website.

Finally, there’s a live online event about the cherubs next week.

Wednesday, 11 December, 7 to 8 P.M.
Uncovering Our Angels: Paint Restoration at Old North Church

Gianfranco Pocobene, the lead conservator of the historic paint restoration project at Old North, will discuss the techniques, tools, and technology that have allowed his team to penetrate layers of white overpaint to reveal the beautiful artwork hidden underneath. He will share photos of the newly revealed angels, discuss theories as to how the angels were painted in the 1700s and why they were painted over, and answer your questions about the project.

Born in Italy and raised in Canada, Gianfranco Pocobene has spent decades working in art conservation for prestigious institutions like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Harvard Art Museums. Some of his most significant projects include the restoration of the John LaFarge murals at Trinity Church, Boston, the Women’s Gallery mural at Vilna Shul, Beacon Hill, Puvis de Chavannes’ Philosophy mural at the Boston Public Library, and Benjamin Constant’s mural at the Ames-Webster Mansion, Boston.

Register for that talk through this webpage.

More Light from the Portrait of Francis Williams

Earlier in the month I reported on Fara Dabhoiwala’s work on the portrait of Francis Williams based on two news articles.

I’ve now read Prof. Dabhoiwala’s own article in the London Review of Books, and he has even more to say.

About the painter:

The only oil painter known to have been active in Jamaica during these years was an Anglo-American artist called William Williams, who was then in his early thirties. This Williams, the son of an ordinary mariner, had been born in Bristol in 1727. He’d always loved to draw. Sent to sea as a youth, he abandoned his crew in Virginia and spent a few years knocking around the West Indies and Central America, sometimes living among Indians, learning their language and trying his luck as a painter for the local colonists.

Eventually, around 1747, he ended up in Philadelphia, where he worked for a theatre, painting sets and backdrops, and in a boatyard, painting ships, as well as doing sign-painting and lettering, teaching music, writing poetry and composing what is now regarded as the first American novel.

Though he was entirely self-taught, he also made landscapes and portraits; he collected engravings; he used a camera obscura as a drawing aid; he studied the lives of the great artists and wanted to be one himself. He was the earliest teacher of the young Benjamin West, who…in the 1770s commemorated his old mentor by including his likeness in one of his monumental historical canvases.

William Williams kept a list of every painting he ever made. The original doesn’t survive, but in the 19th century someone jotted down a summary of it. In the spring of 1760, Williams travelled from Philadelphia to Jamaica to offer his services as an artist. His list recorded that during his months in Jamaica, he painted 54 pictures. None of these has ever been found. I am confident that the portrait of Francis Williams is one of them.

There is in fact a scientific test that could prove this, because it has recently been discovered that William Williams prepared his canvases with a distinctive and very unusual triple layer of underpainting. I’m pressing the V&A [Victoria & Albert Museum] to undertake this new test as soon as possible.

Dabhoiwala also posits that the painting depicts not only the page in Newton’s Principia showing how to calculate the path of a comet but Halley’s comet itself. I’m not entirely convinced by this because the visual clues aren’t distinct. Then again, neither are comets a lot of the time. And the painter was definitely charting something in that portion of the canvas:

We can see that on the infrared scans of the picture. When William Williams made his first pencilled marks on this canvas, to plot the composition, he carefully ruled a series of lines to show where that white object in the sky should go – and to mark its relation to the constellations he was told to paint below. His sitter made sure of that, as he made sure of every other carefully placed detail in his portrait.

The portrait of Francis Williams is the only painting ever made of Halley’s comet in 1759, on its momentous first predicted return. 

“The Spies in Henry Barnes’s House” at Hingham, 17 Nov.

Yesterday I wrote about Ens. Henry DeBerniere, the young mapmaking army officer.

He turned up at Henry and Christian Barnes’s house in Marlborough on 1 Mar 1775, along with Capt. William Brown.

Those two officers were “The Spies in Henry Barnes’s House” that I’ll speak about on the afternoon of Sunday, 17 November, in the Hingham Historical Society’s Revisiting The American Revolution series.

Dr. Samuel Curtis will also show up in my talk, just as he showed up at the Barnes house that night, trying to ferret out information on DeBerniere and Brown. So he was spying, too.

I may even bring in Gib Speakman and Prince Demah because of their ties to the Barnes family, even though I can’t link them to events of that night.

Why, you might ask, am I delivering this talk in Hingham rather than in Marlborough, where all the action happened?

Because another player in that night’s drama was Chrisy Arbuthnot, an orphaned ten-year-old niece living with the Barneses. She had come to them from Hingham.

In addition, Prince Demah’s portraits of Henry and Christian Barnes are now among the treasures of the Hingham Historical Society.

Like other talks in this series, this presentation will be accessible in person and online, as part of the whole series or on its town. Admission (which isn’t cheap) helps to fund the society.