“I am reserved for fortune to frown upon”

In 1736 Bennet Bard (1711–1757) of Burlington, New Jersey, was the sheriff of Hunterdon County.

Bard’s father Peter had been a Huguenot refugee arriving in America in 1706. He held important positions in the colony’s government, including colonel commandant, judge of the supreme court, and member of the governor’s council.

Two years after Peter Bard died in 1734, the council was presented with “sundry Affidavits containing Complaints of the Misbehaviour of Bennet Bard Esq Sherriff of Hunterdon as Also a Letter from some Merchants in Philadelphia to the same Purpose.”

On 23 Sept 1736 the council met to consider those complaints and the sheriff’s response. The official record says:

after hearing Several Petitions and Affidavits Read against the said Sherriff: and several Affidavits on his behalf and Examining diverse Witnesses upon Oath: They are unanimously of Opinion that the said Bennet Bard has been Guilty of divers notorious Barratrys Extortions and other malversations in his Office, and of Cruelly and unjustly Useing and Abusing the Prisoners in his Custody, And that he is not fit to be Continued any longer in that office

Bard remained wealthy, having inherited a mill and lots of real estate. He bought more land. He owned slaves and the labor of indentured servants. His 1743 house appears above, showing off its Flemish checker bond brickwork.

A few years after Bennet Bard stopped being sheriff, his son William was born. According to John McVickar’s A Domestic Narrative of the Life of Samuel Bard, M.D. (1822) and Abraham Ernest Helffenstein’s Pierre Fauconnier and His Descendants (1911), as a young man William fell in love with his cousin Mary Bard, born in 1746. But she didn’t return his affection.

William Bard reportedly moped off into the British army, enlisting in 1761. He was an ensign in the 80th Regiment when he co-signed this affidavit involving someone else’s dispute about rank.

Bard transferred into the 35th Regiment in 1765. He was still an ensign eight years later, which suggests he didn’t have the money and/or ambition to buy a higher rank.

The year after that, Ens. Bard wrote back from his station at Samford Hall in England to another cousin, Dr. Samuel Bard:

My Dear Sam,

You lay me under great obligations for the concern you express at my unhappiness; though, at the same time, it is a little ungenerous to torment me by that ironical speech, with regard to our dear cousin, telling me to live still in hopes of being happy with her.

Believe me, my dear Sam, I have long given that over. Some other person, (perhaps yourself,) is designed for that blessing, whilst I am reserved for fortune to frown upon. For my future ease, I must endeavour to forget her; how far I shall succeed in that, God only knows.

After mustering all my philosophy, I am still as discontented as ever. I am, indeed, very unhappy, and what is worse, believe I shall ever remain so.

Yours affectionately,
W. Bard.

Four years later, Dr. Samuel Bard married their mutual cousin Mary. That can’t have made Ens. William Bard any happier.

TOMORROW: This is supposed to be Bunker Hill week, right?

“To become a Keeper of the Light House on Bald Head”

Commonplace published David E. Paterson’s article “Jefferson’s Mystery Woman Identified.”

It begins:

Historians have long wondered what prompted President Thomas Jefferson’s cryptic sentence in a note dated January 13, 1807, to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin: “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”

Given Jefferson’s opinion explicitly expressed elsewhere that women were best suited to domestic roles, not to boisterous public political forums, and not as actors in the halls and offices of government, scholars of the early republic and popular authors alike, since at least 1920, have tried to reconstruct the specific context in which the president made this comment. For the last twenty years, the consensus explanation has been that Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, unable to find enough qualified men to fill federal government jobs, proposed hiring women for those positions.

However, while Jefferson’s statement may reflect his thoughts on women as office holders in general, my recent research in federal records proves that Jefferson wrote the sentence in reaction to Gallatin’s proposal to appoint a specific woman to a specific job.

As Paterson says, Gallatin’s letter to the President and other pertinent documents don’t survive, so he had to work with other sources. One key bit of news:

The Wilmington (N.C.) Gazette of October 21, 1806, reported that five days earlier, a man named Joseph Swain, hunting deer and wild hogs on Bald Head Island, fired at a noise he heard in the bushes—only to find that he had killed his father-in-law, light-keeper Henry Long.

Paterson’s research also indicates that Gallatin; Timothy Bloodworth, the federal Customs Collector at Wilmington; and twelve local men were all willing to see a woman appointed to the office in question. Only President Jefferson deemed that “the public” wasn’t prepared for that.

Nineteen years later, President John Quincy Adams made the opposite call in regard to the same type of federal office.

For additional reading, here’s Kevin Duffus’s article for Coastal Review on the slain lighthouse keeper, Henry Long. It turns out he was born in the Palatinate in 1743. At the age of ten his family emigrated to Maine, the same region where Christopher Seider’s family first settled. His father, a schoolteacher also named Heinrich Lange, was still there in 1767, according to Jasper Jacob Stahl’s History of Old Broad Bay and Waldoboro.

As a young man, Henry Long moved to North Carolina, which had German-speaking Moravian communities. He became a river pilot, married, and had children. Entering his fifties, Long seems to have wanted a more stable job. In 1794 the Hooper family—who also had roots in the Massachusetts colony—recommended him to the federal government to tend the lighthouse off Cape Fear. And that went well for twelve years.

The Plain Language of the Alien Enemies Act

In 1798 the U.S. Congress, caught up in the possibility of war against France (then under the Directory government), passed a series of controversial laws.

The Naturalization Law made it harder for immigrants to become citizens of the U.S. of A. by increasing the number of years a person had to live in the country before applying. This was repealed in 1802.

The Act Concerning Aliens (distinguished as the Alien Friends Act) empowered the President to jail or deport any non-citizen who he determined was “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” This expired after two years.

The Sedition Act criminalized combining to oppose government measures and criticizing the U.S. government, House, Senate, or President. The John Adams administration deployed this law against Jeffersonian politicians and printers. It expired in 1800.

The Alien and Sedition Acts were strongly opposed at the time. They led to Jeffersonian victories over Federalists. Since then, historians and legal scholars have almost universally treated these laws as a Bad Thing.

The fourth of those laws from 1798 remained on the books, however: the Act Respecting Alien Enemies. It didn’t have an expiration date. Instead, its language limits the circumstances under which a President can invoke it.

The Alien Enemies Act empowers a President to act only

whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government

If “any foreign nation or government” is in a “declared war” with the U.S. of A. or has made a “predatory incursion,” then the federal government can jail and deport that country’s male citizens aged fourteen or older. The U.S. Constitution further vests the power to declare war in Congress, not the executive branch.

Last week the White House illegally invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify deporting hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador even though there’s no declared war against Venezuela nor any invasion by Venezuela.

In place of the law’s actual conditions, the White House claimed that the Tren de Aragua criminal gang and Venezuela amount to something it calls “a hybrid criminal state.” (It didn’t address how in 2023 the Venezuelan government deployed 11,000 soldiers to break up a Tren de Aragua stronghold.) The White House also claims that illegal migration by individuals, in unspecified numbers, is the equivalent of a government-led invasion.

In some ways, the President is an expert on criminal states. He’s a convicted felon, facing additional federal and state charges, adjudicated as liable for sexual assault, and bound by multiple legal settlements for fraud. But that experience in crime doesn’t give this President the legal power to invoke a statute contrary to its provisions.

The executive branch then further demonstrated its lawlessness by ignoring a judicial order to stop flying people out of the country until the legal issues can be decided.

The Nicolás Maduro regime in Venezuela shows the danger of allowing a coup plotter—in this case, Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez after 1992—to take political office. Coup plotters by definition don’t respect elections and the rule of law. Venezuela is now only nominally republican, actually authoritarian (as is El Salvador). But Venezuela isn’t in declared war against or invading the U.S. of A., as the Alien Enemies Act stipulates. It’s not the only criminal state in this story.

The Record of a Pennsylvania Dutch Midwife

Pennsylvania Heritage shares an interesting article by Patrick J. Donmoyer of Kutztown University on the “Hebamme Büchlein” or work record of the midwife Rosina Heydrich (1737–1828).

Heydrich was part of the Schwenkfelder community, a religious sect that immigrated from Lower Silesia to the Perkiomen Valley of Pennsylvania in the decade before she was born. That area is now part of Montgomery County. Her parents’ marriage had been the occasion for those immigrants to choose a minister and establish a meeting.

Heydrich began her notebook by copying out more than a hundred herbal remedies. Donmoyer writes, “Some remedies are notably ritual in nature, describing the use of healing objects or procedures enacted in a particular manner or at certain times.”

On 1 Aug 1770, Heydrich recorded her first delivery in the book. That was also her only delivery that year, so perhaps she was still in training, or busy with her own family. In 1771 Heydrich attended at two births, and the next years at three, and during the war years she appears to have become her community’s principal midwife.

Over the next 84 pages, and the next 49 years, Heydrich and her assistant (who Donmoyer suggests was a daughter) set down the basic details of more then 1,700 more births. That’s more babies than in the similar journal that Martha Ballard kept in Maine, but Heydrich didn’t also mention local events.

It’s clear Heydrich and her assistant maintained this record for their own use, not as a public record. “Passages freely combine German and Latin script, fraktur calligraphy, and Latin printing in varying degrees on a single page and even sometimes in a single inscription.” That made the document a challenging read.

Heydrich’s manuscript was held for decades by the Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center in Pennsburg. Under a grant from state agencies, specialists have transcribed, translated, and digitized the pages, and the notebook is now available for anyone to read through the P.O.W.E.R. Library.

Music to Enjoy over the Holidays

Here are some links to music with colonial connections to enjoy at home over the upcoming holidays.

During last year’s stay-at-home holiday, the Middlesex County Volunteers Fifes and Drums recorded a version of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” on a multitude of fifes to a multitude of cameras, expertly arranged together.

Also from last year, the original cast of Hamilton reunited on video to perform some modern Christmas songs together. Top-notch singing. 

In an older vein, the Sons of Liberty (shown above) are three Smith brothers from Virginia who, at least until they went off to separate colleges, played period music at historic sites and reenactments. They, too, recorded a video at the end of last year; the eighteenth-century music starts at about 4:30. Here’s a half-hour concert commemorating the Battle of Cowpens.

Finally, the Museum of the American Revolution is hosting a live concert of period music that people can enjoy in their homes.

Tuesday, 28 December, 6:00 to 7:30 P.M.
A Hessian Holiday Concert
Museum of the American Revolution

The museum says:

Join us for this live concert and discussion exploring the surprising German influence on early American music performed by ensemble members of Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra Tempesta di Mare, hosted by Museum Curator of Exhibitions Matthew Skic with illustrated comments from Ulrike Shapiro, Executive Director at Tempesta di Mare. . . .

At the Battle of Trenton on Dec. 26, 1776, Washington’s army defeated a force of Hessian troops, German soldiers who fought alongside the British in America. Included among the 900 captured Hessians was a group of oboists (or “hautboists”), the favorite entertainment of Colonel Johann Rall, who was mortally wounded at Trenton. Accompanied by regimental drummers, these 10 oboists marched into Philadelphia as prisoners of war following the battle.

Less than a year later, the Continental Congress hired these musicians to provide entertainment for the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1777. John Adams wrote that the festivities included “fine music from the band of Hessians taken at Trenton.”

Some of these Hessian musicians returned to Hesse-Cassel following the end of the Revolutionary War, but some of them stayed. One of them, Philipp Pfeil, moved to Philadelphia and became “Philip Phile, music master,” later composing the march we know today as the ceremonial march of the Vice President of the United States.

The concert will include both German music and early American patriotic songs, performed by five members of Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra Tempesta di Mare.

Online access to this concert costs $15, $10 for museum members. Purchase tickets here.

Asians in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts

South Indians were enslaved in North America well before the two Continental Army soldiers I discussed yesterday.

The 9 June 1757 Boston News-Letter included this advertisement:

Ran-away from his Master, Ebenezer Webster, of Bradford in the County of Essex, a black Slave, Native of the East-Indies, named James; speaks good English, about 21 Years of Age, wears long bushy Hair, of middling Stature, has a Scar on the left side of his Forehead which enters under his Hair: Had on a light Oznabrigs Coat, a brown homespun Jacket, with brass Buttons, black plush Breeches, a pair of new Pumps, a new Felt Hat, and a white Linnen Shirt.—He formerly belong’d to Mr. Elijah Collins of Boston.

Whoever has taken up the said Servant, or may take him up, and convey him to his said Master, or to Mr. Benjamin Harrod, of Boston, shall have THREE DOLLARS Reward, and all necessary Charges paid.—

All Masters of Vessels and others are hereby caution’d not to conceal or carry off the said Slave, as they would avoid the Penalty of the Law.

Dated, June 7th. 1757.

The same ad ran in both the News-Letter and the Boston Gazette for three more weeks. (I found a pointer to this ad at Ned Hector’s website.)

The China Trade brought another set of Asians to New England—people from China and surrounding countries. The New England Historical Society blog picked up on research by documentary filmmaker Qian Huang about a Chinese youth who died in Boston harbor in 1798.

John Boit (1774-1829) was part of America’s mercantile exploration of the Pacific starting in his own teens. In 1794 he took command of the sloop Union out of Newport, arriving in Canton in late 1795.

While in China, Boit took on a teen-aged boy whom he called “Chow” and his family remembered also as “Libei”—most likely named Zhou Libei. The young captain referred to Chow as “My faithful servant.”

Boit continued sailing the Union west, across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope into the Atlantic. The sloop arrived back in Boston in July 1796, the first single-masted ship known to have circumnavigated the globe.

Capt. Boit and his “faithful servant” continued to sail for another couple of years, visiting Mauritius before returning to North America. In late 1798 Boit agreed to take the schooner Mac to Cape Verde.

In September, while the Mac was still in Boston harbor and Boston was in the middle of a yellow fever epidemic, Chow fell from the ship’s mast and died. His death was listed in town records on 12 September under the name “Chow Mandarin.” The expensive, well preserved gravestone that Capt. Boit purchased for Chow stands in the Central Burying-Ground and reads:

Here lies Interr’d the Body
of CHOW MANDERIEN
a Native of China
Aged 19 years whose death
was occasioned on the 11th Sepr.
1798 by a fall from the Mast head
of the Ship Mac of Boston
This Stone is erected to his Memory
by his affectionate Master
JOHN BOIT Junr.

Studying America’s Earliest Jewish Communities

The Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center at the New England Historic Genealogical Society is offering an online course on “Freedoms and Challenges: America’s Earliest Jewish Communities, 1650–1840” starting on 2 March.

The course description says:

American Jewish history begins over 100 years before the United States was founded, and the experiences of the earliest Jews lay out the foundational themes of America itself. In this four-part course we will explore the writings, architecture, ideas, and daily lives of American’s earliest Jewish individuals and communities—lives that were vigorous, variegated, and experimental.

Issues they faced still concern us today: desires of individuals vs. communities; the relationships of different communities to one another; how experiences differ by generation, geography, and gender; and the overall strategies, choices, and responses we make in creating and securing our identities in a nation that does not fully define them for us.

The teacher is Ellen Smith, Professor Emerita at Brandeis University. In September 2020 she retired as Director of the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program, having taught in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and the Heller School for Social Management. Trained as a professional historian and a museum curator, Smith has produced over three dozen books, articles, and exhibitions on American Jewish history. She is the co-author and editor, with Jonathan D. Sarna, of The Jews of Boston and was the chief consultant to the Emmy award-winning WGBH television show of the same name. Prof. Smith is a past Curator of the American Jewish Historical Society, and was the Chief Curator in the planning stage of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.

There are four classes scheduled, all at 4:00 to 5:30 P.M. on Tuesdays:

• 2 March: Accidents and Opportunities
• 9 March: Promise or Peril?
• 16 March: American and Jewish Revolutions
• 23 March: Beyond the Northeast

Participants will continue to have access to course materials until 30 June. The cost for this class is $85. People can register here.

The photo above shows the gravestone of Judah Monis. Its first part reads:

Here lies buried the remains of RABBI
JUDAH MONIS, MA, late HEBREW
instructer at HARVARD College in
Cambridge in which office he continued 40
years. He was by Birth and Religion a Jew but
embrac’d the Christian faith & was publickly
baptiz’d at Cambridge, AD 1722 and
departed this life April 25, 1764 Aged
81 years 2 months and 21 days.

After that are quotations from five Bible verses, three from the Hebrew Bible and two from the New Testament.

Monis was the most prominent man of Jewish ancestry in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, especially since there was practically no competition. Unlike Newport, Rhode Island, colonial Boston didn’t have enough Jewish people to form a community.

Monis was born in Italy in a family that had converted to Christianity under pressure, but he studied at Jewish academies there and in the Netherlands. He arrived in New York in 1715. Five years later, Monis came to Harvard College, earning an M.A. degree by writing a Hebrew grammar. The college asked him to teach Hebrew but required that he adopt Congregationalism. Monis’s conversion was controversial for both Jews and Christians in America, and he never became a professor, only an instructor connected to the college. Nonetheless, he was respected as the expert on his topic for decades. In his final years Monis lived with relatives in Northboro, where he was buried.

When John Piemont Set Up Shop in Danvers

At the website of the Danvers Archival Center, part of the town’s public library, Richard B. Trask shared his essay “Discovering Paul Revere in the Dried Prunes Box,” also published decades ago in Family Heritage.

It involves the engraved billhead shown here.

It was the summer of 1969, and I was working for the local Historical Commission as a summer cataloguer and researcher, trying to put into order the thousands of town records. Most of the loose, individual town papers were enclosed in nailed wooden boxes as a result of a W.P.A. project in the 1930s when the records were roughly sorted into various departmental categories. The boxes had originally been used in food relief during the depression and were clearly, and to my eyes humorously, marked, “Dried Prunes–For Relief–Not to be Sold.” Unfortunately, the boxes were not good for storing manuscripts, and many of them had become nesting areas for all sorts of vermin. . . .

Among these handwritten slips of paper, I noticed a very handsome item containing a fine engraving of the shoulders and head of a turbaned and mustachioed man with banners about him proclaiming, “John Piemont. Turk’s Head, Danvers.” The item was a trade bill of John Piemont’s eighteenth-century Turk’s Head Tavern, which was located on the old post road near what is now the junction of Pine and Sylvan Streets in Danvers.

Subsequent to discovering the identity of the trade bill’s printer, I learned from Dr. Richard P. Zollo, who wrote an interesting study on the life of John Piemont titled, “Patriot in Exile,” that Piemont was a Frenchman who settled in Boston in about 1759 and took up the trade of peruke [wig] maker. While residing in Boston, Piemont apparently became enmeshed in the patriot cause. He was a member of St. Andrew’s Lodge of Masons and was actively involved in the events leading up to the Boston Massacre of 1770. In 1773, partly as a result of losing Tory patronage at his wig shop, Piemont moved to Danvers and took on the management of a tavern.

To be exact, apprentices from the shop Piemont shared with another barber and wigmaker were involved in the first violence on King Street on the evening of 5 Mar 1770. One of those teens, Edward Garrick, criticized a passing army officer, and Pvt. Hugh White called the boy over and clonked him on the head.

There’s also a complaint from Pvt. John Timmins about Piemont and some other barbers clonking him on the head, as I quoted way back here. I still can’t make sense of this unmotivated attack, especially since Piemont’s business catered to royal officials and army officers. He even employed a moonlighting private, Pvt. Patrick Dines. I suspect Timmins came up with the complaint after the Massacre when he knew his superiors were eager for complaints about the locals whose names had come up in that dispute.

As Trask writes, Piemont later left Boston and opened a tavern in Danvers. When the war broke out in 1775, some locals “called him a Tory,” and the local committee of correspondence had to vouch for him. But back to the essay.

Months later, while browsing in a local book store I was looking through a book titled Paul Revere’s Engravings by Clarence S. Brigham. A plate in the chapter on trade cards caught my eye. A bill from Joshua Brackett’s “O. Cromwell’s Head” tavern on School Street in Boston, was reproduced. The design, format and size of this Revere engraving was almost identical to the Piemont bill that I had found.

I quickly looked in the index for “Piemont” and was referred to page 175, which stated that Paul Revere’s day book included many charges for engraving advertising cards and bill heads, but that no specimen remains of many of them. In June 1774 Revere made two hundred prints for a charge of 8 shillings to Mr. John Piemont.

Check out Trask’s essay to see the clue that confirmed his suspicion that Paul Revere had engraved this image for the former barber from Boston.

Charles Bourgate’s Massacre

Today, 5 March, is the Sestercentennial anniversary of the Boston Massacre. I’ve written a lot about the Massacre over the years, including this post from 2007 about how the trouble started and how easily people could have avoided it.

So today I’m sharing a rarely recounted perspective on the event from a teen-aged servant named Charles Bourgate. He was reportedly born at Bordeaux, France, but also identified as “a Jersey boy.”

This was the French boy’s testimony at the trial on 12 Dec 1770 of his master, Customs official Edward Manwaring, along with Manwaring’s friend John Munro and lower-level Customs employees Hammond Green and Thomas Greenwood.

All four of those men were charged with participating in the murders on King Street, with muskets actually shot out an upper window of the Customs house, as shown above from the print by Paul Revere.

Charles testified:

I am an apprentice to Mr. Edward Manwarring. On the evening of the 5th March last, I was at Mr. [John] Hudson’s in Back-street, at the North-end, where my master then lodged, Mr. Hudson and his wife [Elizabeth] were at home;…

According to the boy’s earlier deposition for town magistrates, Manwaring and Munro had gone to the Customs house to “drink a glass of wine” about half an hour before he heard an alarm.

when the bells rung I ran into King street, and to the door of the Custom-house which was on a jarr partly open, and a young man one Green, he with one eye, (pointing to Hammond Green) opened the door and pulled me in; two or three gentlemen came down stairs, and one of them a tall man, pulled me up stairs, and said to me, you must fire, the tall man gave me a gun, and said to me “if you don’t fire I’ll kill you”—

In his deposition, Charles said, “I saw my Master and Mr. Munroe come down stairs, and go into a room; when four or five men went up stairs, pulling and halling me after them.” So not exactly the same detail, but the same result.

I went up stairs and stood by a front window in the chamber, and the tall man loaded two guns with two balls each, and I fired them both; as soon as I had fired one gun, he, the tall man, said again to me, “if you don’t fire I will kill you.” He had a cane with a sword in it in his hand, and compelled me to fire both the guns.

After I had fired these two guns, Mr. Manwarring fired one gun also out of the same window. The tall man loaded the three guns, and I see him put the balls in each of them and heard them go down. The two guns I fired, I pointed up the street and in the air. When my master Mr. Manwarring pointed his gun out of the window I was in the room, but went out and was on the stairs before his gun went off, I heard it, but did not see it.

As soon as I had fired, the tail man took me down stairs, and said he would give me money if I would not tell: I replied, I did not want any money, but if I was called before the Justices, I would tell the truth.

There were a great many people in the house, and a number of people round me in the chamber where I fired, I can’t tell the precise number, but there were more than ten, Mr. Munro and Hammond Green were in the house below stairs, Mr. Manwarring was in the chamber when all the three guns were loaded and fired, there was the space of a minute and an half between the second gun I fired, and the third which my Master fired. There was a candle in the chamber, but I cannot tell whether there were one or two windows in it. When I came up into the chamber, there were two guns in it, I fired twice out of the same gun, but I cannot tell whether Mr. Manwarring fired the same gun I did.

At the time I and my master fired, the street below was full of people, and the mob were throwing sticks, snow-balls, &c. It was pretty dark, but I don’t know but there might be a little moon. I can’t tell whether the guns my master and I fired, were fired before or after the firing by the soldiers.

When I went from Mr. Hudson’s to the Custom-house, I passed through the lane that leads from the Market to the Custom-house, (Royal-exchange-lane) and I did not see the Sentry-box or any soldiers near the Custom house; there were many people round there in the street.

Immediately after I went down stairs, I went out of the house and saw a great number of people throwing snow-balls and sticks, but I saw no soldiers. I returned to Mr. Hudson’s house, Mr. Hudson and his wife were then at home, and no other person in the house.

Earlier Charles had declared, “I ran home as fast as I could, and set up all night in my master’s kitchen.”

At the trial, attorneys asked the French boy again “where he was when be heard the report of his master’s gun?” He said “he was quite down stairs,” thus not able to declare positively that Manwaring had shot at the crowd but certainly implying he had.

Asked whether William Molineux had asked him about his story, Charles said “he was in the goaler’s house with Mrs. Otis the prison-keeper’s wife, Mr. Wallis, deputy sheriff, and Mr. Molineux, and that the latter told him to tell the truth.”

Of course, none of this was the truth. Except, probably, that Hammond Green had only one eye.

TOMORROW: The morning after a Massacre.

The Life and Death of Christopher Seider

The younger boy hit by “Swan shot” from Ebenezer Richardson’s musket on 22 Feb 1770 was named Christopher Seider (although that last name also showed up as Snider and in other forms).

Christopher’s story starts with an effort to settle Maine. Around 1740, Massachusetts land speculators recruited German-speaking immigrants to live in the area around Broad Bay now called Waldoboro. At first this community was very small, but immigrant-laden ships arrived in Boston harbor beginning in November 1751.

The 25 Sept 1752 Boston Evening-Post reported:

a ship arrived from Holland with about 300 Germans, men, women and children, some of whom are going to settle at Germantown [in Braintree] and the others in the Eastern parts of the Province [i.e., Maine]. . . . a number of very likely Men and Women, Boys and Girls, from Twelve to twenty-five years old, will be disposed of for some Years according to their Ages and the different Sums they owe for their Passage.

In other words, some of the younger immigrants were to be indentured servants.

On that ship, the St. Andrew, came Heinrich Seiter, a farmer from Langensteinbach, and his family. Their home country was ruled by Charles Frederick, Margrave of Baden-Durlach. He was among the more enlightened of Europe’s noble despots, but Seiter was “very poor” and sought better opportunities. In that family, it appears, was a young man named Georg Frederich Seiter, born in 1727.

Around the same time, a woman named Christine Salome Hartwick, born about 1723, arrived with several of her relatives. That family’s name showed up in New England records as Hardwick, Hartig, and other forms.

Heinrich Seiter settled in the Waldoboro area. George Seiter may have lived with him for a while or gone directly to Braintree, where locals were trying to develop a little manufacturing center. Some of the new Germans were said to be glassmakers, and Joseph Palmer and Richard Cranch were building a glass factory.

We know that Georg Frederich Seiter married Christine Salome (soon Sarah) Hartwick on 20 Mar 1753 at Germantown. They had three children in Braintree:

• Christina Elizabeth, born 26 Dec 1754.
• Sophia, born 29 June 1756.
• Christopher, baptized 18 Mar 1759.

By then the family name was written as “Sider.” If Christopher was baptized a week or two after birth, like his sisters, then he was born in early March 1759.

In 1755, the glass factory was struck by lightning and burned. Palmer and Cranch tried to keep the venture going, but in 1760 they gave up and mortgaged the land to Thomas Flucker. Some of the German workers went to Maine, some to a new town soon called Ashburnham—and George and Sarah Seider moved their family to Boston, where their daughter Mary was baptized at King’s Chapel on 10 June 1761.

The Seiders lived in a little house at the bottom of Boston Common on Frog Lane, later gentrified to Boylston Street. On the other side of the street was the giant elm that in 1765 the Sons of Liberty dubbed “Liberty Tree.”

As the 1760s came to a close, Christopher was no longer living with his family, however. He was in the household of the very wealthy widow Grizzell Apthorp, working as a servant. Apthorp was a pillar of the King’s Chapel congregation, which was probably how she came to know the Seiders.

There’s evidence that Christopher also attended a school of some sort. In the 1840s a woman named “Mrs. Preston” told a writer that she had gone to school with him, probably a reading school when they were younger. The Boston News-Letter reported that Christopher “was going from School” on 22 Feb 1770.

It’s quite clear that Christopher Seider was a reader. The Boston Evening-Post reported that he carried “several heroic pieces” or broadsides “in his pocket, particularly Wolfe’s Summit of human glory.” A broadside titled Major-General James Wolfe, who reach’d the summit of human glory, September 13th, 1759 is now on display at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The 17" by 24" sheet describes the taking of Québec in 1759, illustrated with a large colored woodcut of the general.

On the morning of 22 February, Christopher was among the boys outside Ebenezer Richardson’s house. It’s not clear how much he participated in the young mob’s attack on that house. Prosecutor Robert Treat Paine took notes that a witness named Jonathan Kenny said, “Syder threw nothing stood looking,” and “I was by Syder 5. minutes. Saw him throw nothing.” But Charles Atkins testified, “Syder was stooping to take up a Stone as I thought.”

Christopher must have been toward the front of the crowd when Richardson pulled his trigger because his torso was hit by eleven lead pellets. In addition, said the Boston Evening-Post, “The right hand of the boy was cruelly torn, whence it seems to have been across his breast.” Christopher fell and was carried into a nearby house.

The Evening-Post reported, “all the surgeons, within call, were assembled and speedily determined the wounds mortal.” Among the doctors we know examined the boy were the radical Dr. Thomas Young, the apothecary Dr. John Loring, and Dr. Joseph Warren, who afterward conducted an autopsy.

In addition, there were “clergyman who prayed with” Christopher. The newspaper praised “the firmness of mind he showed when he first saw his parents, and while he underwent the great distress of bodily pain, and with which he met the king of terrors.”

Christopher Seider died “about nine o’clock that evening.” Some reckonings say he was the first person killed in the American Revolution. He was probably just a few days short of his eleventh birthday.

TOMORROW: The older boy.

America’s First Vampire Investigators

The Connecticut Courant article I quoted yesterday named three men in addition to Isaac Johnson, the paterfamilias so distraught by tuberculosis in his family that he had two of his children’s bodies dug up in 1784.

One was the man who wrote the article for the newspaper, attesting to what he saw. Moses Holmes (1727-1811?) was an important figure in Willington, Connecticut. He deeded to the town some of the land that became the common. Holmes held multiple public offices and had represented the town in the Connecticut state legislature starting in 1776.

Holmes mentioned two doctors who examined the remains of the corpses: “Doctors Grant and West.” I set out to identify those men and found them on the list of men who founded the Connecticut Medical Society in 1792.

One impetus for chartering such medical organizations was to differentiate their members from “quacks” (though, given the state of eighteenth-century medicine, I’m not sure quacks were necessarily worse for patients than establishment doctors). Holmes’s letter likewise complained about a “Quack Doctor.”

The first of the two doctors at the exhumation was Miner (or Minor) Grant (1756-1828) of Willington. He appears to have been more of an apothecary than a surgeon, and is remembered for the shops he ran. The one in Willington, built in 1797, is now a private residence near the center of the town. Another he built for his son in Stafford in 1802 has been moved to Old Sturbridge Village—which means that outdoor museum can say it owns a building constructed for one of America’s first vampire investigators.

The other doctor was Jeremiah West (1753-1806, gravestone shown above) of Tolland, the larger town to the west of Willington. West graduated from Yale College in 1777, served as a Continental Army surgeon during the Revolutionary War, might have taken a little more training in Boston, and settled in Tolland shortly before the exhumations.

J. R. Cole’s 1888 History of Tolland County quoted an unidentified source saying:

In stature, Dr. West was full six feet, with a large and well proportioned frame. He became exceedingly corpulent during the latter part of his life, and is represented as being unusually large and heavy. Tradition says that he weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds, and that his step as he walked seemed to shake the ground. In social life he was cheerful, humorous and pleasant.

All three of these men—Holmes, Grant, and West—were politically active. In fact, they would all serve in the Connecticut house in 1786, a couple of years after the exhumation. Dr. West later participated in the Connecticut ratifying convention for the U.S. Constitution.

Thus, when Dr. Miner Grant and Dr. Jeremiah West came to witness the exhumation of the Johnson children, and Moses Holmes added his own observations about their graves and reported all that to the Courant in New Haven, that was the Willington authorities assembling to make a strong statement about the idea of vampirism. They didn’t like it. They wanted to stamp out that false belief before it spread.

But we know that didn’t work. There are scores of reports of similar exhumations from New England in the nineteenth century, with a bit of archeological evidence as well. At the S.H.E.A.R. panel I attended last summer, Michael Bell theorized that the persistence of that practice despite legal and print hostility means it was periodically reinvigorated with new believers from Europe. But we can trace the roots of the belief in America back to right after the Revolutionary War.

TOMORROW: Vampire vocabulary.

A Double Exhumation in 1784 Connecticut

On 22 June 1784, the Connecticut Courant ran an article which has become highly significant for hunters of vampires and vampire lore. It read:

WHEREAS of late years there has been advanced for a certainty, by a certain Quack Doctor, a foreigner, that a certain cure may be had for a consumption, where any of the same family had before that time died with the same disease; directing to have the bodies of such as had died to be dug up, and further said that out of the breast or vitals might be found a sprout or vine fresh and growing, which, together with the remains of the vitals being consumed in the fire, would be an effectual cure to the same family:----

And such direction so far gained credit, that in one instance, the experiment was thoroughly made in Willington, on the first day of June instant, two bodies were dug up which belonged to the family of Mr. Isaac Johnson of that place, they both died with the consumption, one had been buried one year and eleven months, the other one year, a third of the same family then sick---

on full examination of the then small remains by two doctors then present, viz. Doctors Grant and West, not the least discovery could be made; and to prevent misrepresentations of the facts, I being an eye witness, that under the coffin was sundry small sprouts about one inch in length then fresh, but most likely was the produce of sorrel feeds which fell under the coffin when put in the earth.

And that the bodies of the dead may rest quiet in their graves without such interruption, I think the public ought to be aware of being led away by such an imposture.

MOSES HOLMES.
June 1784.

The Connecticut Courant had mentioned vampires back in 1765, as described here. Sometime around then, printer Thomas Green brought on little George Goodwin (1757-1844) as an apprentice, and by 1784 Goodwin was co-publisher of the paper. However, Green and his first partner, Ebenezer Watson, had died, and there’s no indication that anyone in the print shop remembered the earlier article. It’s significant that this item did not include the word “vampyre,” though the belief in the value of digging up, examining, and burning a body was the same.

Moses Holmes’s report was reprinted in the Pennsylvania Packet and Salem Gazette on 29 June, and possibly in other American newspapers. It’s the earliest evidence that any New Englanders seriously entertained a belief in vampires of the sort described by European authors earlier in the century—as dead people who sapped the lives of those close to them from within their graves.

In the expanded edition of Food for the Dead, Michael Bell described finding records of Isaac Johnson of Willington, Connecticut. This man was born in Windham in 1735, married in Willington in 1756, and died in Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1808. His gravestone appears above, courtesy of Find a Grave.

Isaac and his wife Elizabeth had two children die within the specified period: Amos (1760-1782) and Elizabeth (1764-1783). There may have been other children sick at the time; this genealogy page for Isaac doesn’t include all the names that appear in Willington baptismal records published in the New England Historic and Genealogical Register in 1913.

Amos Johnson was the right age to have fought in the Revolutionary War. Unfortunately, there were multiple men of that name in Connecticut records, so I can’t connect him with any particular company.

Bell reported that he couldn’t find the Johnson children’s graves in Willington. He did, however, find that on the 1790 U.S. census the household included two white males over age sixteen, no white males under sixteen, two white females, no slaves, and seventeen “other free persons”—far more than any other home in the town. That’s unusual, but what it means is unclear.

This newspaper article also offers evidence for Brian Carroll’s thesis that the vampirism belief was brought to America by Hessian military surgeons. As The Travels of three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh account shows, belief in such vampires was established in Hesse by 1734. Hessian prisoners of war were housed in Tolland, next to Willington, during the war. Was the unnamed “Quack Doctor, a foreigner,” mentioned in the article one of those Germans?

TOMORROW: The other doctors on the scene.

Colonial Records of King’s Chapel to Be Published

On Thursday, 5 December, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and King’s Chapel will celebrate the publication of The Colonial Records of King’s Chapel, 1686-1776, two volumes edited by James Bell and James Mooney.

King’s Chapel was the first Church of England parish in New England. The Rev. Robert Ratcliffe arrived in Boston on 15 May 1686 to lead the parish, and the first chapel building opened three years later. Most royal governors sent from London worshipped there.

Of course, the Puritan leaders of Boston were suspicious—of the Anglican establishment, rituals, and such innovations as New England’s first church organ in 1714. But as the town’s population grew and became a little more diverse, Congregationalist leaders had to accept not only King’s Chapel but also Christ Church (now better known as Old North) and Trinity Church.

In 1699 the congregation formed a vestry to represent the congregation and advise the church minister and wardens. After 1733, however, only people who owned pews could vote on church matters. That kept the society in the hands of some of Boston’s wealthiest families.

In the late 1740s those voting members of King’s Chapel decided to replace their wooden building with a larger stone structure. The first step was to make a deal with the town to build a new South Latin School so the chapel could take the land the old schoolhouse stood on. The Latin School thus moved across School Street from its original location, which is on the Freedom Trail.

Then came the construction of the new chapel following a plan of the Newport architect Peter Harrison. The builders actually constructed the present stone chapel around the old wooden walls, then dismantled the lumber and removed it through the windows. The wood was shipped up to Nova Scotia to be assembled into a new church. The whole process took five years, an investment reflecting the wealth of the congregation.

The Revolution caused major disruptions to King’s Chapel. Its last Anglican minister, the Rev. Henry Caner, embarked for Halifax in March 1776, carrying the communion silver, linen, and church records. The congregants who remained had to merge with Trinity Church while the members of Old South Meeting-House, which had been damaged by British dragoons, took over the stone building. For a while the church was called the Stone Chapel because mentioning the king was politically unpalatable.

Some Chapel members who had stayed in Boston tracked down Caner down in Britain by 1784 and asked him to return the church silver. He responded that, since the state of Massachusetts had confiscated his property, he felt no obligation to return anything to Boston. The church finally got the registers back from Caner’s heirs in 1805.

The Colonial Records of King’s Chapel, 1686-1776 is based on those records, including the church’s vestry minutes and lists of baptisms, marriages, and funerals. That information will interest not just church historians but genealogists and people studying other aspects of Boston’s history. Even as King’s Chapel was the wealthiest Anglican church in colonial Boston, it served many people without wealth and connections, including enslaved and free Africans, soldiers, and Irish and French arrivals seeking more familiar forms of worship.

This celebration will take place from 5:30 to 7:30 P.M. in the King’s Chapel Parish House at 64 Beacon Street. At 6:00 editors Bell and Mooney will speak about the publication process. There will be refreshments and books available for sale and signing. The public is invited.

Farinelli on “The Palatine Wreck,” 3 May

On Friday, 3 May, the New England Historic and Genealogical Society will host a noontime lecture by Jill Farinelli on the topic “The Palatine Wreck: The Legend of the New England Ghost Ship.”

The event description says:

Two days after Christmas in 1738, a British merchant ship traveling from the Netherlands to Pennsylvania grounded in a blizzard on the northern tip of Block Island, 12 miles off the Rhode Island coast.

The ship carried emigrants from the Palatinate and neighboring territories in what is now southwest Germany. The 105 passengers on board—sick, frozen, and starving—were all that remained of 340 men, women, and children, who left their homeland the previous spring to move to America. They now found themselves castaways, on the verge of death, and at the mercy of a community of strangers whose language they did not speak.

From this incident sprang one of New England’s most chilling maritime mysteries. Shortly after the wreck, stories began circulating that the passengers had been mistreated by the ship’s crew and by some of the islanders. The stories persisted, transforming over time as stories do, and in less than a hundred years, two terrifying versions of the event were in circulation.

Farinelli is a local writer and editor. The Palatine Wreck, published by the University Press of New England, was her first work of historical nonfiction.

This talk will begin at noon on Friday at 99-101 Newbury Street in Boston. It is free and open to the public.

Richard Fry’s Greatest Scheme

Before going on with The Saga of the Brazen Head, I’ll zip through what happened with Richard Fry.

Under his contract for the paper mill with Samuel Waldo and Thomas Westbrook, Fry had to pay £64 a year. But making paper on the Maine frontier didn’t bring in huge profits, and the whole province was in a cash crunch. Fry managed to send his landlords fifty reams of paper in place of specie, but that wasn’t £64 in cash, was it?

Waldo and Westbrook sued Fry and won a judgment of £70. They had the sheriffs in Maine seize the paper-making equipment. And they had Fry clapped into the Boston jail as a debtor around the start of 1737. In response, Fry claimed that Waldo and Westbrook had taken that action only after they had tried to buy him out and he refused.

Waldo recruited another man to continue the paper manufactory as an employee. Then he turned on Westbrook, forcing him out of the partnership. Calling himself “hereditary lord of Broad Bay,” Waldo recruited more settlers in Europe.

Among the people who came to America at Waldo’s invitation were the German ancestors of Christopher Seider. However, whenever Britain went to war with France, which happened in 1744 and again in 1757, the Maine frontier became a risky place to live and the settlements emptied out. Waldo died in 1759. Some of his holdings descended to his daughter Hannah and then to her daughter Lucy, wife of Henry Knox.

Meanwhile, back in the Boston jail, Richard Fry produced a steady stream of petitions complaining about his Maine landlords, the sheriff and undersheriff who’d taken his stuff, and the jailer who’d locked him up.

On 22 May 1739 Fry placed yet another advertisement in the New-England Weekly Journal:

This is to inform the Publick, that there is now in the Press, and will be laid before the Great and General Court, a Paper Scheme, drawn for the Good and Benefit of every individual Member of the whole Province; and what will much please his Royal Majesty; for the Glory of our King is in the Happiness of his Subjects: And every Merchant in Great Britain that trades to New-England, will find their Account by it; and there is no Man that has the least Shadow or Foundation of Common Reason, but must allow the said Scheme to be reasonable and just:

I have laid all my Schemes to be proved by the Mathematicks, and all Mankind well knows, Figures will not lye; and notwithstanding the dismal Idea of the Year Forty One, I don’t doubt the least seeing of it a Year of Jubile, and in a few Years to have the Ballance of Trade in Favor of this Province from all Parts of the Trading World; for it’s plain to a Demonstration, by the just Schemes of Peter the Great, the late Czar of Muscovy, in the Run of a few Years, arrived to such a vast Pitch of Glory, whose Empire now makes as grand an Appearance as any Empire on the Earth, which Empire for Improvement, is no ways to be compared with this Royal Majesty’s Dominions in America.

I humbly beg Leave to subscribe myself,
A true and hearty Lover of New-England,
Richard Fry.

Boston Goal, May 1739.

What was he on about now? Fry was issuing A Scheme for a Paper Currency to solve the specie crisis and promote the local economy. Backing up the new printed money, he wrote, would be the output of “Twenty Mills” built around Boston harbor. When Fry had first announced his scheme the previous August, even calling a meeting of investors at the Green Dragon Tavern, he had only seventeen mills in mind.

One might question the value of economic advice from a man who had gone bankrupt in England and was in jail for debt. But those circumstances didn’t daunt Fry. We can read his proposal, plus a couple of the petitions he wrote in the same years, in this book. Other documents from him are in the Clements Library.

Fry’s scheme wasn’t the only attempt to address the province’s specie shortage. In 1740, Boston businessmen set up the Massachusetts Land Bank, which issued private paper currency based on land holdings. The royal government and its supporters, led by Thomas Hutchinson, worked to stifle that enterprise, and in 1741 Parliament outlawed it. Some historians have traced the enmity between Hutchinson and Samuel Adams, whose father was a Land Bank investor, to that controversy.

Fry of course saw nothing wrong with paper currency (and one suspects he hoped to win the contract to supply the paper). But he no doubt preferred his own approach to issuing it. And as long as the provincial authorities opposed the Land Bank, he was ready to take advantage of that. In December 1740 Fry pointed out to Gov. Jonathan Belcher and his Council that his jailer was dealing in Land Bank currency. (A sample shown above.)

Richard Fry died in 1745, his finances still a mess. He left a wife and at least one child.

“The great Seal should on one side have…”

As discussed yesterday, in the summer of 1776 a committee of Continental Congress heavyweights—Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—asked the Swiss-born artist and historical collector Pierre Eugène du Simitière to design a seal for the new United States of America.

Of course, each of those gentlemen also gave the artist a helpful, and contradictory, suggestion of what the seal should look like. And Du Simitière had his own ideas.

Jefferson reported the result of that committee discussion to the Congress on 20 August:

The great Seal should on one side have the arms of the United States of America which arms should be as follows. The Shield has six Quarters, parti one, coupe two. The 1st. Or, a Rose enammelled gules and argent for England: the 2d Argent, a Thistle proper, for Scotland: the 3d. Verd, a Harp Or, for Ireland: the 4th. Azure a Flower de Luce Or for France: the 5th. Or the Imperial Eagle Sable for Germany: and the 6th. Or the Belgic Lion Gules for Holland, pointing out the Countries from which the States have been peopled.

The Shield within a Border Gules entwind of thirteen Scutcheons Argent linked together by a Chain Or, each charged with initial Letters Sable as follows: 1st. NH. 2d M.B. 3d RI. 4th C. 5th NY. 6th NJ. 7th P. 8th DC. 9 M. 10th V. 11th NC. 12th. SC. 13 G. for each of the thirteen independent States of America.

Supporters, dexter the Goddess Liberty in a corselet of Armour alluding to the present Times [i.e., the ongoing war], holding in her right Hand the Spear and Cap and with her left supporting the Shield of the States; sinister, the Goddess Justice bearing a Sword in her right hand, and in her left a Balance.

Crest. The Eye of Providence in a radiant Triangle whose Glory extends over the Shield and beyond the Figures.

Motto e pluribus unum.

Legend round the whole Atchievement. Seal of the United States of America mdcclxxvi.

On the other side of the said Great Seal should be the following Device. Pharoah sitting in an open Chariot a Crown on his head and a Sword in his hand passing through the divided Waters of the Red Sea in Pursuit of the Israelites: Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Cloud, expressive of the divine Presence and Comman[d] beaming on Moses who stands on the Shore and extending his hand over the Sea causes it to overwhe[lm] Pharoah.

Motto Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.

The shields showing the countries where most European-Americans had come from was Du Simitière’s idea. He was, after all, an immigrant—though not from any of the nations represented. Du Simitière had originally pictured an American rifleman standing opposite Liberty, but Justice made a better pairing.

The Biblical scene on the reverse side was Franklin’s suggestion, with the addition of the “Pillar of Fire” from Jefferson. The motto “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God” also came from Franklin, though it had an older history (which I’ll discuss at some point). Jefferson liked that saying so much he added it to a seal for Virginia that he commissioned from Du Simitière in this same summer. None of Adams’s ideas made it to the final proposal.

The committee presented this proposal to the Congress. With the British army about to attack New York City, the delegates tabled that symbolic matter till later. And they didn’t return to the question of a national seal until four years later, when Franklin and Adams were in Europe and Jefferson was in Virginia. And then the Congress tossed out their 1776 report and started over.

The U.S. of A. had to get along without a seal for another couple of years as more committees discussed the question. Finally in 1782 the Congress’s secretary, Charles Thomson, got sick of waiting and drew one himself. Only two elements from the 1776 proposals survived to the final seal: the “Eye of Providence in a radiant Triangle” and the motto “E pluribus unum.” There’s no positive evidence about who came up with either.

Thomson adopted the latest committee’s suggestion of a heraldic eagle but chose the bald or “American Eagle” because that species was American, he later explained to James Madison. The idea of an eagle definitely didn’t come from John Adams, whatever the 1776 musical depicts.

TOMORROW: And how did the turkey and the dove come in?

[The picture above shows a nineteenth-century recreation of the seal that Du Simitière described, courtesy of Mental Floss; no drawings from 1776 survive.]

A Turkey of a Great Seal

In the musical 1776, the characters of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson debate which bird would be the best symbol for the new United States: turkey, eagle, or dove.

I saw the movie version of that show during the Bicentennial. My class even performed that scene’s song, “The Egg,” as a chorus. But now I know it was all bunk.

The Continental Congress did assign those three members to design an official seal for the new union on 4 July 1776, the same day it sent a certain Declaration they had drafted to the printer. However, those guys didn’t come up with any ideas involving birds.

As Adams explained the process in a 14 August letter to Abigail, the three politicians consulted with the Swiss artist Pierre Eugène du Simitière on the seal design. That put Du Simitière in the role of the professional graphic designer trying to please three clients who all fancy their own ideas, haven’t decided priorities among themselves, and have to go back to their bosses for final approval anyway.

Every man had a different concept, Adams wrote. Du Simitière:

For the Seal he proposes. The Arms of the several Nations from whence America has been peopled, as English, Scotch, Irish, Dutch, German &c. each in a Shield. On one side of them Liberty, with her Pileus, on the other a Rifler, in his Uniform, with his Rifled Gun in one Hand, and his Tomahauk, in the other. This Dress and these Troops with this Kind of Armour, being peculiar to America…

Franklin:

Moses lifting up his Wand, and dividing the Red Sea, and Pharaoh, in his Chariot overwhelmed with the Waters.—This Motto. Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.

Jefferson:

The Children of Israel in the Wilderness, led by a Cloud by day, and a Pillar of Fire by night, and on the other Side Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon Chiefs, from whom We claim the Honour of being descended and whose Political Principles and Form of Government We have assumed.

Adams:

I proposed the Choice of Hercules, as engraved by Gribeline in some Editions of Lord Shaftsburys Works. The Hero resting on his Clubb. Virtue pointing to her rugged Mountain, on one Hand, and perswading him to ascend. Sloth, glancing at her flowery Paths of Pleasure, wantonly reclining on the Ground, displaying the Charms both of her Eloquence and Person, to seduce him into Vice.

That meant Simon Gribelin’s engraving of “Hercules at the Crossroad,” shown above, based on a painting by Paolo de Matteis. Adams had the self-awareness to add, “But this is too complicated a Group for a Seal or Medal, and it is not original.”

TOMORROW: The result of that committee process.

In Captivity with Gen. Charles Lee

Gen. Charles Lee was captured in New Jersey on 13 Dec 1776.

On 28 Jan 1777 he wrote from British-occupied New York to Robert Morris in Philadelphia:

I am extremely obliged to you for your kindness and attention—the money for the bill I am told I shall get to-day—I have nothing to request at present but that you will write to Mr. Nourse to take care of what belongs to me—and if that my servant Guiseppe is well enough you will send him and desire him to bring the Dogs with him as I am much in want of their Company—God bless you My respects to Mrs. Morris

“Guiseppe” was Giuseppe Minghini, an Italian whom Lee had hired as a personal servant while he was traveling in Europe. The general was asking Minghini to join him in captivity—and to bring the dogs as well.

It might not be surprising that Minghini didn’t immediately set out. Lee was still in New York on 4 April, and he renewed his instructions directly to the Italian:

If your health permits I desire you will without a moments delay set out for this place—your establishment & fortune depend on your compliance—bring with you as many summer cloaths as you can silk stockings, linnen wastecoats and breeches tights, boots and a new hat—some books likewise particularly Ainsworth’s [Latin] Dictionary & the six french books, l’histoire politique—if any of the Dogs are with you bring them. Mr. Rob Morris will furnish you with the necessary money. Addio—come immediately

Minghini brought one dog to keep Lee company until the trio was finally released on 21 Apr 1778. By then the general had also picked up a mistress whom Elias Boudinot called “a miserable dirty hussy…(a British Sergeants Wife).”

One might think that Minghini brought the general’s his favorite pet, Mr. Spado, but that dog wasn’t available.

TOMORROW: What happened to Spado?

The Last Years of Baron de Steuben

When we left the retired general Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, usually then known as Baron de Steuben, his first postwar housemates had left him as well.

Those were three of his former military aides: Benjamin Walker, James Fairlie, and William North. In the mid-1780s they all got married and set up their own households. That left the baron at loose ends in New York, living beyond his means.

Steuben enjoyed the company of young men—but not all young men. Sometime during the 1780s two nephews visited Steuben from Prussia. The baron quickly came to dislike them, especially because they expected him to provide their fare and living expenses (after all, he had written letters boasting of his success in America). They went home.

In the late 1780s the baron showered gifts on his butler, who North thought was a “worthless rascal” being dressed up as a “beau.” For a while in 1791 Steuben lived at Walker’s house.

In the spring of 1792, however, the baron set up a household at 32 Broadway and collected a new pair of companions. The first was John W. Mulligan (1774-1862), son of New York tailor and wartime spy Hercules Mulligan. A recent Columbia graduate, Mulligan started to study the law in the office of Alexander Hamilton but then took the job of Baron de Steuben’s secretary.

The next arrival was Charles Adams (1770-1800), son of John and Abigail Adams, another aspiring attorney. In April 1792, Adams told his mother about Steuben: “He is the best man in the world I sincerely beleive.” In a letter dated 8 Oct 1792, Charles Adams described how the baron had invited him to move in:

The Baron returned from Steuben [his town in upstate New York] last week and I had intended to procure lodgings at some private boarding house, but when I mentioned to him my intention, he took me kindly by the hand “My dear Adams said he When your sister went from New York I invited you to come to my house, at least till you could find more convenient and pleasant Lodgings; I then had not the pleasure of a long acquaintance with you, but I was pleased that in our little society we could be of mutual advantage to each other, and that our improvements in the French language and in other branches of literature would render my table the seat of improvement and pleasure.

[“]I have since you have been here formed a very great and sincere friendship for you. You must now allow me the right of friendship; Indeed you must not leave me. What is it? Is there any thing you do not like? Is any thing inconvenient? I wish I could give you a better apartment, but the house will not aford it.[”]

I told him there was not a desire I could form but what was accomplished in his house; but that I did not think it proper that I should any longer take advantage of a kindness I had not a right to expect.

[“]And will you not then allow me to be any longer your friend and patron? You must not make such objections. It is not from any favor I can ever expect from your father. I am not rich, nor am I poor: and thank God I have enough to live well and comfortably upon; your being here does not make any difference in my expences. I love you, and will never consent that our little society should be broken, untill you give me more sufficient reasons for it.[”]

To this affectionate and fatherly address, I could only reply that I would do any thing he wished and would not leave him if he was opposed to my doing so. My dear Mamma there is something in this man that is more than mortal.

On 31 Jan 1793 Adams wrote to his father:

The Baron returned [from Philadelphia] on teusday his visit has been of service to him He said to me upon sitting down to supper that evening “I thank God my dear Charles that I am not a Great man and that I am once more permitted to set down at my little round table with Mulligan and yourself enjoy more real satisfaction than the pomp of this world can afford.” 

However, that situation was financially unsustainable. Steuben decided to move to his country estate, where life was cheaper. He headed out there in May 1793 and again in the spring of 1794. Vice President Adams understood the baron intended “there to reside for the Remainder of his Days.” Mulligan moved with him, still in the role of secretary.

On 12 Feb 1794, before leaving the city, Baron de Steuben made his third and final will (P.D.F. download). He had decided to “exclude my relations in Europe”—those nephews. Instead, he would “adopt my Friends and former Aid Des Camps Benjamin Walker and William North as my Children and make them sole devisees of all my Estates therein.” So they shared a financial inheritance which they probably would have had to sort out anyway.

Steuben left swords and other specific bequests to North and Walker. He left Mulligan “the whole of my library Maps and Charts and the sum of Two Thousand five hundred Dollars to complete it.” He assigned a year’s wages and clothes to his servants. Charles Adams, who was staying in the city to study for the bar, was a witness to the will. Another was Charles Williamson (1758-1808), a former British army officer who emigrated to America to promote land investments and the interests of the British Empire.

On 22 September, Charles Adams wrote to his mother:

On the fourteenth of October I shall set out for Albany The earnest solicitations of the Baron have drawn a promise from me to spend a few days with him at his solitude after I have passed my Counsellors examination. I have always lamented that you have so little acquaintance with this excellent man I never have know a more noble character and his affection for me calls forth every sentiment of gratitude which can exist in my breast.

In November Adams’s father happily reported that Charles was “at Steuben after an Examination at Albany and an honourable Admission to the Rank of Counciller at Law.” But out on the baron’s estate, things were going poorly.

Early in the morning of 26 November, the general suffered a stroke. A biographer who relied on Mulligan’s memories wrote that a servant came to fetch him from another building:

Mulligan at once ran through the snow to his room, and found him in agony. Steuben appeared to have suffered much, and could only articulate a few words, “Do n’t be alarmed, my son,” which were his last.

This account didn’t mention Charles Adams, but he must have been in the area because he wrote to his father (in a letter that no longer exists) that Steuben had suffered a “Palsy.” William North hurried over from his home in Duanesburg, and a doctor arrived.

But Steuben never regained consciousness. He died on 28 Nov 1794. Mulligan and North picked out his burial place “an eighth of a mile north of the house, on a hill in the midst of a wood.” Ten years later the baron’s remains were moved to the present gravesite.

Charles Adams married in 1795 but died only five years later, having drunk himself to death. John W. Mulligan around the same time wed a woman from Kentucky; they had nine children. He lived until 1862, thus witnessing the end of the Revolutionary War and the start of the Civil War.

[The statuary shown above, labeled “Military Instruction,” consists of an ancient warrior displaying a sword perilously close to a nearly naked young man. It’s part of the monument to Steuben in Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C. The baron would have loved it.]