Steuben, Walker, and North (and Fairlie)

For the last few days I’ve been discussing statements about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s sexuality made in this comic published by The Nib. I think there’s good evidence for Steuben being gay, but there are also a lot of errors floating around. To whit:

“President George Washington rewarded his prize general with an estate in Valley Forge, the site of perhaps his greatest military victory.”

The source for that misstatement is probably this article by Mark Segal, or one of many like it making a similar error. That article shares a timeline of the baron’s war activity and then says, “Washington rewarded von Steuben with a house at Valley Forge…” That can easily be interpreted as a grant after the war by the first President. But there was no such gift.

Gen. Washington assigned the baron a house within the Valley Forge encampment in 1777-78. That wasn’t a lifelong grant of real estate. It wasn’t a reward for service since, after all, Steuben had just arrived. That house was just where the new general and his staff could live so snow wouldn’t fall on their heads.

Baron de Steuben did receive some grants of real estate after the war in recognition of his service to the new republic. The Continental Congress offered western lands to any officer meeting certain terms, but the baron also got special gifts. His holdings are a bit hard to suss out, not least because he overstated them in his wills. But it looks like his major properties were:

• rented houses in New York City where he lived in the 1780s.
• an estate that New Jersey confiscated from a Loyalist family and granted the baron in 1783 on the condition that he live there, not rent it out. He spent considerable time and money fixing it up, receiving full title in 1788—and a month later he sold it to pay off debts.
• a large amount of land granted by New York in Oneida County. In 1792 that area was even named the town of Steuben.

None of the general’s real estate was in Valley Forge.

Lastly, Valley Forge was the site of an army camp, not a battle and thus not a “military victory.”

“Steuben spent his finals [sic] years with two younger men he had served with in the war: Captain Benjamin Walker and Brigadier General William North. Who later became a US Senator.

“He adopted both as his ‘sons’, but speculation about their relationship remains.”

While this statement acknowledges ambiguity in the historical evidence, it simplifies and skews the facts of Baron de Steuben’s life and of the lives of Walker and North. Steuben did live with those men for a while after the war. He did write in his final will that he wished to “adopt [them] as my Children.” However, those two former aides left the baron’s household to get married in the 1780s, so he didn’t spend his “final years” with them. Here’s the more complex story.

At Valley Forge, Steuben picked up three aides de camp: Benjamin Walker (1753-1818), William North (1755-1836), and James Fairlie (c. 1757-1830). He became very close to them all. In the first will the baron wrote after coming to America, dated 28 May 1781 (P.D.F. download), he bequeathed £1,050 to each of those three men. (He also left half that sum to two Frenchmen who had accompanied him to America, Peter Stephen Duponceau and Capt. Louis de Pontière, and to Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the diplomatic fixer and playwright who helped him connect with American envoys in Paris.) But Steuben’s main heir was a nephew back in Germany, whom he wanted to renounce his baronial title, emigrate to America, and become a republican.

In Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships, William E. Benemann describes a web of shifting relationships among Gen. de Steuben and his military aides: North and Fairlie as a couple before North realizes he likes Walker more and they become intimate, and then Steuben becomes infatuated with both North and Walker, but Walker strings the general along for favors while North is truly affectionate, though more like a son to a father… All this in only two years of those men being in the same military family. And with, frankly, very little textual support for such a level of detail.

But the evidence is clear that Steuben, North, Walker, and Fairlie became very close. Though assignments took them in different directions in the last years of the war, afterward they reunited and lived in the baron’s house on the outskirts of New York City.

That last decade of Steuben’s life is particularly significant to the question of his sexuality because it’s the only period when he wasn’t serving in an army or in a court and thus could live as he chose—or as close to that as circumstances allowed. And what Gen. Steuben wanted to do was spend his time in the company of young men. He used his martial celebrity to sponsor militia units and military academies. For money, he borrowed a lot and sought rewards for his wartime service.

Steuben, then in his fifties, was happy in his bachelor lifestyle. His young friends, however, took more traditional paths in their society. First Walker married a Quaker girl named Molly and set up his own household. Around 1786 Steuben, North, and Fairlie all had their portraits painted by Ralph Earl while he was locked up in debtors’ prison, but later that year Fairlie married and moved to Albany. The next year, with the baron’s help, North married Mary Duane, daughter of the city mayor; they eventually had six children.

Walker, North, and Fairlie all lived for many decades as prominent members of New York’s political class—not leading politicians but lawyers, civil servants, and occasional officeholders. North would be elected to the New York legislature and appointed for a few months to the U.S. Senate. In the early 1800s Walker would serve one term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Walker and North remained close to Baron de Steuben once they married, but more like grown sons looking after a failing father—failing in the financial sense. They tried to cajole the baron into not spending so much and to cajole Congress or state governments into granting him more support. The letters that have been preserved don’t say much about physical intimacy, but there’s clearly fondness on all sides.

Meanwhile, Baron de Steuben found some new young friends.

TOMORROW: The baron’s last years.

[The photo above shows relief portraits of Walker and North on the monument to Steuben in Washington, D.C.]

“The abominable rumor which accused Steuben”

Here’s the continuing discussion about what we know and don’t know about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s sexuality, keyed to statements in a recent comic at The Nib.

“Rumors about Steuben’s ‘tastes’ were common knowledge, and reported in the American press.”

It would be good to see examples of such American newspaper reports. To my knowledge no one has found any. And that’s significant to how “openly” Baron de Steuben lived as a gay man and how much his American neighbors accepted him.

Now it’s conceivable that such articles are lurking in the big newspaper databases with asterisks and allusions making them hard to spot. But no one researching Steuben has cited such a report, and I’ve kept my eyes open for such a finding.

The most open discussion of Steuben’s sexuality in print in the eighteenth century was an article published in Germany in 1796, two years after the baron’s death. Christoph Daniel Ebeling (1741-1817) was a professor in Hamburg and a fan of the American republic. In his Amerikanisches Magazin he wrote an article (“Nachrichten von den Lebensumständen des Baron von Steuben”) which John Macauley Palmer translated as saying:

Just who it was who spread abroad the abominable rumor which accused Steuben of a crime the suspicion of which, at another more exalted court [i.e., Frederick the Great’s] at that time (as formerly among the Greeks), would hardly have aroused such attention, has not become publicly known.

I couldn’t find any American newspaper or magazine mentioning Ebeling’s article in the decades after it was published.

And of course Ebeling did his best to imply the “abominable rumor” was untrue, spread by Steuben’s clerical enemies and eventually rejected by right-thinking people. Which is not exactly the same thing as stating flatly that it was untrue.

“One story claimed that Von Steuben loved to host cocktail nights for his favorite cadets. No clothing allowed.”

The ultimate source for this statement is the memoir of Peter Stephen Duponceau, a young Frenchman who accompanied Baron de Steuben to America in 1777 (and actually paid for their passage). Duponceau served unsuccessfully as a staff officer during the war and more happily as a linguist in Pennsylvania after it. Late in life he wrote about Valley Forge:

Once, with the Baron’s permission, his aids invited a number of young officers to dine at our quarters, on condition that none should be admitted that had on a whole pair of breeches. This was of course understood as pars pro toto [the part for the whole]; but torn clothes were an indispensable requisite for admission, and in this the guests were very rare not to fail. The dinner took place; the guests clubbed their rations; and we feasted sumptuously on tough beef steaks and potatoes, with hickory nuts for our dessert. In lieu of wine, we had some kind of spirits, with which we made salamanders; that is to say, after filling our glasses,, we set the liquor on fire, and drank it up, flame and all. Such a set of ragged, and, at the same time, merry fellows, were never before brought together. The Baron loved to speak of that dinner, and of his sans-culottes, as he called us.

The point of this gathering was that those young Continental Army officers were wearing torn uniforms and eating “tough beef steaks” because their pay and supplies were so meager. It was a bonding experience. Notably, Duponceau recalled the idea coming from Steuben’s aides, not the general himself.

Now that gathering might have been titillating for some; certainly we’d interpret an anecdote about young women having to wear torn clothing to a party through the lens of sexuality. But as to the accuracy of the statement from the comic above, if people have to wear torn clothing to a party, then that party is not “No clothing allowed.” And since this happened “once,” it’s not evidence Steuben made a habit of hosting such events—however fondly he remembered that one occasion.

Also, an eighteenth-century midday dinner does not constitute “cocktail nights.”

TOMORROW: The baron in retirement.

A Letter of Recommendation for the Baron de Steuben

Yesterday I started to analyze evidence about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s sexuality. In sum, I think that evidence strongly suggests he was gay, but it’s not nearly as definite as popular articles have recently claimed.

I’m drawing from the draft of an essay I started years ago, somewhat abashed that I’m pulling it off my hard drive in response to a cartoon. Nevertheless, here’s the second installment of replies to claims in that cartoon.

“Franklin knew about Von Steuben’s past, but still decided to write a letter of recommendation to George Washington.”

There’s no evidence Benjamin Franklin knew about the allegations of child-molesting or homosexuality against Steuben in the principality of Hohenzollern-Hechingen. That statement rests on the assumptions that (a) that gossip reached Paris by September 1777, and (b) Franklin heard it. But actual evidence would be some document showing that Franklin knew more facts than he let on.

In fact, the evidence we have suggests Franklin knew less. Here’s the letter that he and his fellow envoy  Silas Deane sent to Gen. George Washington on 4 Sept 1777, recommending Steuben for a role in the Continental Army. The diplomats wrote:

The Gentleman who will have the Honour of waiting upon you with this Letter is the Baron de Steuben, lately a Lieutenant General in the King of Prussia’s Service, whom he attended in all his Campaigns, being his Aide Camp, Quartermaster General, &c. He goes to America with a true Zeal for our Cause, and a View of engaging in it and rendring it all the Service in his Power.

Steuben had never been “a Lieutenant General in the King of Prussia’s Service” or a “Quartermaster General.” He had indeed been an aide de camp to Frederick the Great for a while, but his highest Prussian army rank was captain. He’d been working in the civil government of a small German state since 1764.

I have to add that there’s nothing in Steuben’s European career to suggest he had “a true Zeal” for America or republican government, unlike some other Old World officers offering their services. He had personal reasons, both legal and financial, for sailing thousands of miles from home.

Where did Franklin and Deane get their information about Steuben? They dropped the names of two French high officials: “Mr Le Comte de Vergennes,” the foreign minister and spymaster, and “Mr Le Comte de St Germain,” the minister of war. St. Germain especially admired the Prussian military, and his attempts to reform the French army along those lines ran into such opposition that he resigned later that September.

But most of the American diplomats’ information probably came from Steuben himself. And he was a habitual liar. In John Macauley Palmer’s 1937 biography there’s an index entry for “Steuben…, his fictitous autobiography, 2-5, 53, 85-6, 103-108, 305, 407.” And those pages don’t even include all of his false claims to have become become a lieutenant general in Europe (e.g., 97, 138).

Palmer viewed Steuben as indispensable to American independence, and he didn’t want to believe that his hero lied as he offered his services to the young nation. In fact, when Palmer considered that possibility early in his research, he was ready to set aside the project. He wrote:

My first reaction upon discovering that my hero was a systematic, circumstantial and deliberate liar, was one both of disgust and disappointment. I was disposed to proceed no further with my book. Here was, indeed, a golden opportunity for a debunker or a muckraker, but that sensational role made no appeal to me. 

But eventually Palmer came up with a way to explain the discrepancy between the baron’s actual résumé and what Franklin and Deane wrote about him: Franklin came up with the lie. 

This approach depended on Franklin’s status in American culture and memory. We accept him as a trickster. From his teen-aged essays as “Silence Dogood” to his false supplement for a Boston newspaper printed at Passy and how we remember the oil in his cane, we enjoy stories of Franklin fooling people. We don’t tell such stories about Washington, Adams, or Hamilton, and Jefferson’s duplicity still gets people angry.

In the case of Steuben, Palmer decided that the baron didn’t make any false claims about his career to Franklin (who was supposedly too smart to fall for such lies, anyhow). Instead, Franklin was so smart that he made up those falsehoods himself. He recognized how useful Baron de Steuben would be near the top of the Continental Army. Therefore, he ensured that Gen. Washington and the Continental Congress would treat this newcomer as a man of invaluable experience who deserved top rank by harmlessly—even helpfully—inflating his Prussian credentials.

As for the hapless Silas Deane, Palmer blamed him for falsely claiming to have seen documents to confirm the baron’s credentials—a deception that, unlike Franklin’s, he couldn’t forgive. Palmer didn’t present the simpler possibility that Steuben had fooled Deane. The baron appears to have flashed papers and described their contents at his first meeting with the American envoys, but never handed them over; at the second meeting he said that, alas, he had left those documents behind.

Thus, Palmer rejected the evidence that Baron de Steuben was gay and argued that he was—if only at this crucial moment—honest about his past. Many later authors who accept that Steuben was gay have adopted Palmer’s conclusion that he was also honest. But if there’s one thing we can say for sure about the baron, it’s that he told a lot of lies about himself.

The simplest explanation for the glowing recommendation that Franklin and Deane sent to Gen. Washington is that they actually believed what Steuben had told them about his brilliant career. And the simplest explanation for why Franklin didn’t write anything about the baron being gay is not that he covered up that fact but that the baron didn’t tell him.

TOMORROW: Gen. Steuben in the Continental Army.

What Do We Know about Gen. de Steuben’s Sexuality?

Last month The Nib published Josh Trujillo and Levi Hastings’s comic about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben as a gay man.

I found it inaccurate at several spots. Yet the core message—that Steuben was both important to the Continental Army’s success and sexually attracted to other men—is almost certainly correct. It’s just that a lot of the details, especially those supporting that conclusion, are wildly exaggerated.

Most of the evidence about the Baron de Steuben’s sexuality appears in John Macauley Palmer’s 1937 biography, General von Steuben. Palmer admired Steuben greatly and disliked the idea of the baron being gay, so he tried hard to refute the evidence, leaving logical circles in the ground as he spun. But he did publish the relevant sources in English translation.

Many of the original European documents were probably destroyed in World War 2, along with others that might have been helpful. It’s therefore unlikely that we’ll find new evidence from Steuben’s lifetime. But we can do a better job than Palmer of interpreting those documents and spotting the most likely conclusions.

This comic instead overstates the evidence in various ways. It doesn’t cite sources but appears to have been based on articles written for American newspapers, magazines, and websites over the past twenty-five years since Randy Shilts’s Conduct Unbecoming focused attention on Steuben as a gay man.

I’ll go through the statements I think are exaggerated.

“Steuben lived openly as a homosexual before the term was even invented.”

It’s true that the word “homosexual” was coined in 1868. More important (as Trujillo and Hastings later acknowledge), people’s understanding of sexuality and expectations of how gay men behave were different in the Baron de Steuben’s lifetime and in our own. So what does it mean to say he “lived openly as a homosexual”?

Gen. de Steuben was a lifelong bachelor. He didn’t marry a woman while having affairs with men, as it was and is said of his monarch Frederick the Great of Prussia, Frederick’s brother Prince Henry, and Lord George Germain in Britain. The baron’s title was too new, his estate too small, to make a direct heir necessary. In that respect, Steuben was more like Horace Walpole or Charles Paxton.

But neither is there any evidence of Gen. de Steuben claiming a longtime partner or expressing sexual interest in males. When he set up a household with a young man late in life, he presented that man as his secretary.

Some of Gen. de Steuben’s letters express affection for other men more plainly than 20th-century male correspondents did, but there are similar letters between eighteenth-century men who had active heterosexual lives. Even in the baron’s circle, there’s a lot of joshing about young ladies, whether sincere or not.

So the comic’s statement that Steuben “lived openly as a homosexual” is highly questionable at best.

“Steuben was expelled from Germany on charges of sodomy.”

There was of course no political entity called “Germany” in Steuben’s lifetime. He was born in Prussia, but in the late 1760s and early 1770s he was a powerful government minister in the small principality of Hohenzollern-Hechingen. And then suddenly he wasn’t.

The baron met with American envoys Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin in Paris in the summer of 1777, but they couldn’t promise him a rank and good pay in the Continental Army. He instead sought a position in Baden. An official from that small country wrote to the prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen on 13 Aug 1777:

It has come to me from different sources that M. de Steuben is accused of having taken familiarities with young boys which the laws forbid and punish severely. I have even been informed that that is the reason why M. de Steuben was obliged to leave Hechingen and that the clergy of your country intend to prosecute him by law as soon as he may establish himself anywhere.

That’s the principal contemporaneous evidence for Gen. de Steuben’s homosexuality. We might even say the baron wasn’t accused of “sodomy” but of molesting children (in the original French, “d’avoir pris avec de jeunes garçons des familiaritiés, que les Loix defendent & punissent sévérément”). Again, the period’s understanding of sexual behavior is significant: the Prussian court appears to have revived the classical Greek admiration of adolescent boys as a noble way of expressing homosexual desire.

About five days after this letter was drafted, Steuben was back in Paris, over 300 miles away. Now he was quite interested in the Americans’ offer. By 4 September the baron had signed on to their cause, on 10 September he left Paris for Marseilles, and on 26 September he sailed for America, never to return.

All that said, no one has found evidence that Baron de Steuben faced formal “charges of sodomy” or that he was officially “expelled” from any country. Palmer even argued that the real problem in Hohenzollern-Hechingen was a budget crunch, and that the accusations of sexual misconduct were trumped up by Steuben’s court enemies—though he offered no evidence for such enmity. But the most likely explanation is that Baron de Steuben left his post and then Europe under a cloud because of those accusations of sexual misconduct, thus removing himself in a bid to keep the scandal as quiet as possible.

So again, The Nib’s comic takes the incomplete, somewhat murky evidence from Steuben’s lifetime and offers readers a definite statement reflecting modern expectations.

TOMORROW: What Franklin, Washington, and others knew.

Reading about Rick Beyer’s Rivals unto Death

Rivals Unto Death: Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr is a retelling of the political rivalry that led to the most famous fatal duel in U.S. history. It comes from Rick Beyer, an author and filmmaker from Lexington.

Rick’s behind the “First Shot” film, the “In Their Own Words” pageant, the annual Lexington tea burning, and more to come. I invited him to answer a few questions about his new book.

What was the genesis of Rivals Unto Death? How did you come to write it?

I have Lin Manuel Miranda to thank for that! With the musical Hamilton getting hotter and hotter, the editor who shepherded my first book into print invited me to write about the rivalry. The idea was to squeeze the whole story into a compact and accessible volume. I’ve long been fascinated by this tale, and I jumped at the chance. The publisher had a hurry-up deadline, but I had an ace up my sleeve. A dozen years ago I researched the duel for a History Channel documentary I was supposed to produce. At the last minute Richard Dreyfuss decided he wanted to produce that show, and for some strange reason they went with him instead of me! That research stood me in good stead for this project.

What were the biggest surprises for you as you researched and wrote the book?

To start with, Burr saved Hamilton from capture during the Revolution, and may well have saved his life later on when he extricated Hamilton from what was shaping up as a duel with future President James Monroe. You won’t find that in most history books—or the musical! And there are many more fascinating and little known connections. The two men switched back and forth from allies to adversaries multiple times…so tracing their relationship makes for a fascinating journey.

I was also surprised by the degree to which I revised my opinion of Aaron Burr. He’s not quite the cardboard cutout villain history has portrayed. He was a war hero, a feminist, an abolitionist, a supporter of immigrant rights (far more so than immigrant Alexander Hamilton), a patron of the arts, a loving husband and father, and a brilliant innovator in political campaigning. All and all a fascinating character.

The bulk of Rivals Unto Death is about the tangled legal, commercial, and political world of New York in the early republic. How did you get a handle on that topic?

Important as it was, NYC was tiny by modern standards. When Burr and Hamilton started practicing law there in 1783, there only about two dozen lawyers in the entire city. Today you can find that many in a Wall Street Starbucks! A great source on the crowded cockpit that was early 19th-century New York is the Pulitzer Prize-winning history Gotham by ‎Mike Wallace‎ and Edwin G. Burrows.

One of the things that history tends to paper over is the passion and partisanship of the time. The founders weren’t marble statues; they were flesh and blood men who were often at each other’s throats. So many events and controversies of the late 18th and early 19th centuries seem remarkably familiar today. Street protests ending in violence, hysterical predictions about presidential candidates, accusations of vote fraud, anger over immigration and deficits—it was all there in the time of Hamilton and Burr, and it forms the context for their rivalry. A great source of insights on that score is the website founders.archives.gov, a searchable archive with more than 175,000 pieces of correspondence and other writings from the first five presidents and Alexander Hamilton. Thank you, National Archives!

How did you structure your narrative for readers?

This is a murder mystery in which there is no doubt about who pulled the trigger, but the why is endlessly fascinating. The book opens one week before the duel, at New York’s Fraunces Tavern, where Hamilton and Burr sat side by side at a convivial July 4th dinner. No one else there knew that they already set in motion their duel, and they gave no hint of it that night. How could they share an enjoyable evening when they were dead set on shooting it out? What in the world was going on? That’s what I wanted to explore, and the book goes back to the time of the revolution in a search for clues.

I structured the book as a countdown to the duel. The chapters literally count down from ten to one, and at the beginning of each chapter I note how much time is left until the duel. Burr and Hamilton are on a slow-motion collision course, and as the years tick down, the causes of their ultimate confrontation become clear.

You write that the roots of the rivalry between Hamilton and Burr lay in the two men’s relationships to George Washington. Tell us more about those relationships and how they steered the men.

Hamilton and Burr were each offered a chance to serve on Washington’s staff during the Revolution, Burr when he was twenty, Hamilton when he was twenty-two. Burr lasted ten days and left with a bitter taste in his mouth, harboring a lifelong enmity toward Washington. Hamilton stayed four years, becoming Washington’s most important aide and his lifelong protégé. Over the years, this fundamental divide over Washington shaped their politics and soured their relationship.

Burr challenged Hamilton to their duel after reading a reference to “a still more despicable opinion which General Hamilton had expressed.” Do you have any suspicions about what that opinion was?

Gore Vidal posited that Hamilton accused Burr of having an incestuous relationship with his daughter, but I think that is just a novelist’s invention. Hamilton had written privately to people about his fear that Burr might be secretly scheming to create a new country out of New England and New York, largely for the sake of his own personal aggrandizement. I suspect his “more despicable opinion” involved some variation on that theme. As an immigrant who had adopted America as his own nation, Hamilton was unalterably opposed to breaking apart the nation he had worked so hard to create. “I view the suggestion of such a project with horror,” he once wrote. It seems like just the kind of thing he would expound on at a political dinner not knowing it would eventually bring about about his own demise.

Thanks, Rick! If you have your own questions about Hamilton and Burr, you can ask Rick at these upcoming appearances:

• Thursday, 23 February, 7:00 P.M. at Brookline Booksmith
• Sunday, 26 February, 2:00 P.M., at Lexington Depot for the Lexington Historical Society
• Wednesday, 15 March, 7:00 P.M., at Beverly Historical Society
• Thursday, 6 April, 7:00 P.M. at Porter Square Books

Getting the Job Done

Signers of the Declaration of Independence not born in the thirteen colonies (out of 56):

• Button Gwinnett
• Francis Lewis
• Robert Morris (shown here)
• James Smith
• George Taylor
• Matthew Thornton
• James Wilson
• Rev. John Witherspoon

Signers of the Articles of Confederation not born in the thirteen colonies (out of 48):

• William Duer
• Francis Lewis
• James Lovell
• Robert Morris
• Daniel Roberdeau
• Edward Telfair
• Rev. John Witherspoon

Framers of the Constitution not born in the thirteen colonies (out of 55):

• Pierce Butler
• William R. Davie
• Thomas Fitzsimons
• Alexander Hamilton
• James McHenry
• Robert Morris
• William Paterson
• James Wilson

Members of the first federal Congress not born in the thirteen colonies (out of 95):

• Aedanus Burke
• Pierce Butler
• Thomas Fitzsimons
• James Jackson
• Samuel Johnston
• John Laurance
• Robert Morris
• William Paterson
• Thomas Tudor Tucker

“Building Old Cambridge” in Harvard Square, 7 Feb.

On Tuesday, 7 February, the Cambridge Historical Society will present the authors of Building Old Cambridge: Architecture and Development, Susan E. Maycock and Charles M. Sullivan, speaking at the Harvard Coop.

This book is published by the Cambridge Historical Commission and the M.I.T. Press, which says:

Building Old Cambridge explores the oldest section of Cambridge, which was founded as the capital of Massachusetts Bay in 1630 and chosen as the site of Harvard College in 1636. When the new villages of Cambridgeport and East Cambridge appeared in the early 19th century, the original settlement around Harvard Square became known as Old Cambridge. While the university and its often-wealthy students influenced the development of Harvard Square, Old Cambridge became a national center of the printing industry and supported vital communities of African Americans and Irish immigrants.

Successive waves of newcomers – including the West Indian planters who built summer estates in the 1750s, the suburbanites who appeared in the 1850s, and the annually renewed flood of professors and students that have always enriched community life – have contributed to the layering of architectural styles that is evident in all corners of the neighborhood.

Maycock and Sullivan are stalwarts at the Cambridge Historical Commission, as Survey Director and Executive Director, respectively. No one knows more about the city’s architecture and development than they do. This book has been twenty years in the making and clocks in at 944 pages.

Last month the Cambridge Chronicle asked Maycock and Sullivan about their most surprising discovery:

Some of the communities we discovered that we hadn’t been aware of. One was a village called Lewisville. It was an African-American community off Garden Street that was founded by freed slaves in the late 18th, early 19th Century. They developed a little cemetery, the Lewis Tomb. We had no idea.

How did you discover Lewisville existed?

We were looking at a map of Cambridge in the 1870s and we noticed this note that said “Tomb” near Walker Street. We thought, ‘This is really strange. Who would have a tomb on their property?’ So we pulled that thread a little bit and did some title research and kept pulling the thread and come up with this whole story about this African-American settlement that dispersed before the Civil War, where many members went to Africa in the African immigration movement. But it really disappeared in the 1880s.

Is there anything left, any tombstones?

There’s nothing left. We’ve been in the backyard of the house. The area was redeveloped in the 1870s. Apparently, in the Chronicle, it was reported the remains were dug up and put in Cambridge Cemetery in unmarked graves and the land was subdivided and new houses were built. So none of the houses survived. 

One of the families forming the nucleus of that community were Tony and Cuba Vassall and their children, once enslaved on the John Vassall estate through the year that Gen. George Washington used that mansion as his headquarters.

This Building Old Cambridge event will start at 7:00 P.M. on the 3rd floor of the Coop’s Massachusetts Avenue building.

Washington and the “Mahometan” World

A centerpiece of the Museum of the American Revolution opening in Philadelphia this April is Gen. George Washington’s second headquarters tent, purchased and used during the Revolutionary War.

The museum staff spoke of the challenges of conserving and displaying the tent in this C-SPAN video. It was erected in its new home this month, as covered in the New York Times. Interesting details about its history and construction can be found in this online article.

However, one of the most thought-provoking details about Washington’s tent appears at the end of this article by Cherie Hicks in the Altoona Mirror:

A circular stamp is on the inside of the tent made of linen, which was coming out of Egypt, a predominantly Muslim country by the mid-18th century.

“It appears to be a Quranic verse in Arabic script,” [museum director Scott] Stephenson said. “Somebody knew Arabic to craft that. It’s a very enigmatic stamp and another good reminder that there wasn’t just one type of experience of slavery in Colonial America.”

The rest of that article talks about another artifact, also to be displayed at the new museum, testifying to the presence of Muslims in America before the United States. Almost all of those people were enslaved, captured in western Africa.

Washington acknowledged the possibility of Islamic laborers at Mount Vernon, at least jocularly, when he wrote to former aide Tench Tilghman in 1784 about hiring new skilled workmen:

I am a good deal in want of a House Joiner & Bricklayer, (who really understand their profession) & you would do me a favor by purchasing one of each, for me. I would not confine you to Palatines [Germans]. If they are good workmen, they may be of Assia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mahometans, Jews, or Christian of any Sect—or they may be Athiests—I woud however prefer middle aged, to young men. and those who have good countenances & good characters on ship board, to others who have neither of these to recommend them—altho, after all, the proof of the pudding must be in the eating. I do not limit you to a price, but will pay the purchase money on demand

According the Mount Vernon’s scholars, the people living and working at that slave-labor plantation probably already included some Muslims, judging by such names on the records as Fatimer and Nila. And Washington appears to have understood that, even on the west side of the Atlantic, he was touched by the people and products of of the Islamic world.

Lt. Machin and the Cape Cod Canal

On Saturday I’m going to Sandwich to speak to the Cape Cod Sons of the American Revolution about The Road to Concord. So I decided to look for something interesting about Revolutionary Sandwich.

That led me back to one of my favorite characters from the siege of Boston: Thomas Machin. As I’ve written, Machin came to the town in 1774 as a private in His Majesty’s 23rd Regiment of Foot.

Machin left town on the night of 26 July 1775, “when sentry on the fire boat in the river near the neck.” He took his fellow regular’s musket while he slept, got into a canoe, and headed for the American lines.

In Cambridge, Machin was debriefed by Gen. George Washington himself. He then helped John Trumbull sketch the British fortifications; when he defected, two British officers wrote in their diaries that he knew something about that topic. Machin then probably worked in quartermaster Thomas Mifflin’s department. In January 1776, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Continental Artillery—one of the American army’s few engineers.

After the siege, Washington ordered Machin to stay in the Boston area to help fortify the harbor against any new British attack. But in May the Massachusetts legislature got a new idea:

It is represented to this Court that a navigable canal may without much difficulty be cut through the isthmus which separates Buzzards Bay and Barnstable Bay, whereby the Hazardous Navigation round Cape Cod, both on account of the shoals and enemy, may be prevented, and a safe communication between this colony and the southern colonies be so far secured

The notion of a canal through Cape Cod had been around for decades. With the Royal Navy lurking out in the Atlantic, this seemed like an excellent time to push it through.

People understood that Machin had experience digging canals. According to family tradition set down in the mid-1800s, he had worked for the British canal engineer James Brindley. Indeed, Brindley was active in the part of central England where Machin reportedly hailed from. However, that family tradition is suspect, creating a fictional past for the man instead of identifying him as a deserter.

Whatever his background, Lt. Machin went to work surveying the canal route and making other plans. But on 10 June 1776, Gen. Washington wrote to James Bowdoin, senior member of the Massachusetts Council:

I am hopeful that you applied to General [Artemas] Ward, and have received all the Assistance that Mr Machin could give in determining upon the practacability of cutting a Canal, between Barnstable & Buzzards Bay ’ere this, as the great demand we have for Engineer’s in this Department [i.e., New York], Canada, &ca, has obliged me to order Mr Machin hither to assist in that branch of business.

Just as the canal construction might be starting that summer, the engineer was called back to the army.

TOMORROW: Can this project be saved?

“It would mortify Mr. Adams and please Mr. Washington”

The Philadelphia Dancing Assembly planned to honor George Washington’s birthday with a ball on 22 Feb 1798, but then elections were scheduled on that Thursday. So the group postponed their event for a day.

Meanwhile, President John Adams had declined his invitation. On 23 February, the Aurora General Advertiser published that response with some editorial commentary about Adams’s “impolite & arrogant terms.” Its printer, Benjamin Franklin Bache, wrote sarcastically that he did not expect “that the president of the U. States would so far forget the dignity of his station as to mingle with shop keepers.”

Adams had privately written that one problem with such birthday balls was “those Things give offence to the plain People of our Country, upon whose Friendship I have always depended. They are practised by the Elegant and the rich for their own Ends, which are not always the best.” So each side was accusing the other of being elitist.

The dispute also had a personal dimension. Eliza Custis Law, Martha Washington’s eldest granddaughter, was in Philadelphia that month, urging all gentlemen to attend the birthday ball. The Federalists would normally have been happy to do so, but now that seemed disloyal to President Adams. Meanwhile, their Jeffersonian rivals were for once all about having a big party for Washington.

On the evening after the ball, the Swiss-born businessman Albert Gallatin (shown here) wrote to his wife about the situation:

Do you want to know the fashionable news of the day? The President of the United States has written, in answer to the managers of the ball in honor of G. Washington’s birthday, that he took the earliest opportunity of informing them that he declined going.

The court is in a prodigious uproar about that important event. The ministers and their wives do not know how to act upon the occasion; the friends of the old court say it is dreadful, a monstrous insult to the late President; the officers and office-seekers try to apologize for Mr. Adams by insisting that he feels conscientious scruples against going to places of that description, but it is proven against him that he used to go when Vice-President.

How they will finally settle it I do not know; but to come to my own share of the business. A most powerful battery was opened against me to induce me to go to the said ball; it would be remarked; it would look well; it would show that we democrats, and I specially, felt no reluctance in showing my respect to the person of Mr. Washington, but that our objections to levees and to birthday balls applied only to its being a Presidential, anti-republican establishment, and that we were only afraid of its being made a precedent; and then it would mortify Mr. Adams and please Mr. Washington.

All those arguments will appear very weak to you when on paper, but they were urged by a fine lady, by Mrs. Law, and when supported by her handsome black eyes they appeared very formidable. Yet I resisted and came off conqueror, although I was, as a reward, to lead her in the room, to dance with her, &c.; all which, by the by, were additional reasons for my staying at home. Our club have given me great credit for my firmness, and we have agreed that two or three of us who are accustomed to go to these places, [John] Langdon, [Richard] Brent, &c., will go this time to please the Law family.

Gallatin was pleased to have won the respect of his Jeffersonian colleagues, but he seems to have been equally eager to gain credit from his wife for resisting Law’s “handsome black eyes.”

The young, first-term Massachusetts Congressman Harrison Gray Otis explained the Federalist side of the controversy to his wife:

The Birth night ball of last evening was I am told respectably attended, tho by no means equal in splendour & numbers to the last. . . . The President did not attend, & his refusal has given considerable offence, even to some of the federal party.

To be sure his apology was rather formal, but I think he acted rightly upon principle. As President, he ought to know of no distinction among private citizens, whatever may be their merit or virtue; & having never received from the Philadelphians, the slightest mark of attention, he was in my mind quite excusable for declining to be the pageant, to do honor to another.

Many families who usually increase the flutter of the beau monde were absent. The Morrisites of course. The Binghams who have lately lost a relation, & the Chews on account of a Mrs. Pemberton who died last Sunday; I am told too that the whole house was very damp and believe I have not lost much.

Abigail Adams declared that by leaking her husband’s note the Jeffersonians had “defeated their own plans. as soon as it was known, it went through the city like an Electrical shock—and the Ball was meager enough, so much so, that tho it was by subscription I have heard but 15 Ladies were present.”

TOMORROW: What Jefferson himself thought of this all.

Fall Lectures at Fort Plain, New York

This spring I enjoyed the American Revolution in the Mohawk Valley conference organized by the Fort Plain Museum in Fort Plain, New York. I was pleasantly surprised to see the turnout—not only are lots of folks in that region proud of its Revolutionary history and eager to learn more, but some came a long distance to hear us.

The museum has just announced its fall lecture series on upcoming Thursdays.

13 October
“War on the Middleline: The Founding of a Community in the Kayaderosseras Patent in the Midst of the American Revolution”
James E. Richmond will focus on the Revolutionary War in Saratoga County and the surrounding area beyond the 1777 Battles at Saratoga. The talk will feature the impact of the war on average citizens as told “in their own words” in such documents as the records of the committees of correspondence, private journals, and pension applications. Richmond’s talk will culminate with the story of the British raid on Middleline Road in Ballston in October 1780.

20 October
“Sir William Johnson and the Evolution of the Mohawk Valley Fur Trade”
Michael Perazzini, the Senior Interpreter at Johnson Hall State Historic Site, will discuss the evolution of the fur trade in upstate New York as well as the changes implemented by Superintendent of Indian Affairs Sir William Johnson. He will display and discuss several artifacts involved in this business. In addition to his work at Johnson Hall, Michael is also a member of Claus’ Rangers, a living history group dedicated to the perspective of the Loyalists.

27 October
“350 Years of Firearms”
As part of this wide-ranging presentation, John Phillips will display 20th-century replicas of the pistols used in the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. The originals are now the property of the JP Morgan Chase Bank.

3 November
“Forgotten Pioneers: African Americans in the Mohawk Valley”
Main speaker Wayne Lenig is a Research Associate in archaeology at the New York State Museum and formerly an adjunct professor in Anthropology at Fulton-Montgomery Community College. He has worked as a curator at various museums in the region. In addition, Charles Lenig will discuss and demonstrate “West African Drumming in Colonial America.”

Each event starts 7:00 P.M. at the museum, 389 Canal Street in Fort Plain. Admission is free, but donations are appreciated.

The Issue of Naturalization Laws, and What Really Mattered

Steven Pincus’s new book The Heart of the Declaration raises the question of how British imperial policy on migration into North America after 1763 pushed thirteen of the empire’s colonies toward independence. I hadn’t seen much about that issue, so I did some background reading.

There’s no question that population policy was one of the grievances against the king that the Continental Congress listed in its Declaration of Independence in 1776:

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

The phrase “obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners” refers to an instruction that the London government sent to all the royal governors over King George III’s signature on 29 Nov 1773:

Whereas We have thought fit by our Orders in our Privy Council to disallow certain Laws passed in Some of our Colonies & Plantations in America for conferring the Priviledges of Naturalization on persons being aliens, and for divorcing persons who have been legally joined together in Holy Marriage: And whereas Acts have been passed in other of our said Colonies to enable Persons who are our Liege Subjects by Birth or Naturalization to hold and inherit Lands Tenements and real Estates [which] had been originally granted to or purchased by Aliens antecedent to Naturalization; It is our expressed will and Pleasure that you do not upon any pretence whatsoever give your assent to any Bill or Bills that may have been or shall hereafter be passed by the Council and Assembly of the Province under your Government for the naturalization of Aliens, nor for the divorce of persons joined together in Holy marriage, nor for establishing a Title in any Person to Lands, Tenements & real estates in our said Province originally granted to, or purchased by Aliens antecedent to Naturalization.

G. R.

(This same instruction limited the colonies’ power to pass new divorce laws, as you can see, but that didn’t make it into the Declaration.)

Most people settling in the British colonies came from other parts of the British Empire. Another big chunk came, against their will, from Africa. Europeans affected by naturalization laws were a small portion, but colonies and landowners promoting new settlements wanted to offer them the possibility of full citizenship.

Many of the American colonies passed their own naturalization laws to give non-British settlers rights in their new communities once they were rich enough—rights to own land, vote in local elections, and so on. From the central government’s perspective, those laws were also a back door into having the privileges of a British subject under the empire’s trade laws.

Parliament wanted its Plantation Act of 1740 to be the basis for how people from outside the British Empire became subjects of the king. And by 1773 the ministers in London were wary on principle of any colonial laws that appeared to challenge the authority of Parliament’s sovereignty throughout the Empire.

How big a deal was the dispute over naturalization laws in New England? Hardly at all. Colonial New Englanders were never exactly welcoming to newcomers who weren’t Congregationalist and English, even those from within the empire. Massachusetts passed its naturalization law in 1731; it accepted all of eleven French and German men in the next year and a half, and then only four more arrivals between 1741 and 1767 under the imperial law. Connecticut’s first naturalization law came in 1773, covering a Spaniard named Don Gabriel Sistera. New Hampshire never passed such a law at all.

So that leaves Rhode Island. That colony, founded to be more open than its neighbors, was more active in naturalizing newcomers for much of its history. In 1762 its high court also ruled that the Plantation Act didn’t apply there, a direct challenge to Parliament’s authority. However, Rhode Island did so in order to exclude a couple of Jewish merchants from full rights. Thus, that colony challenged Britain’s control over naturalization to make immigration less appealing, not more.

Naturalization laws were probably a bigger deal in colonies southwest of New England, which had a more welcoming history. But of course that’s not where the Revolutionary War started. Furthermore, I think we can see the real issue behind this dispute over migration by looking at the other verbiage of the 1773 royal instruction and the Declaration’s complaint about it:

• “Acts have been passed in other of our said Colonies to enable Persons who are our Liege Subjects by Birth or Naturalization to hold and inherit Lands Tenements and real Estates [which] had been originally granted to or purchased by Aliens antecedent to Naturalization”
• “raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands”

The crux of this dispute was lands. The Proclamation of 1763 restricted colonial settlement to the west. The imperial government wanted to reward its Native American allies for their loyalty and to avoid disputes between them and European settlers. But colonists, especially wealthy men who invested in western claims, wanted to maximize settlement there.

As I’ve said before, that restriction wasn’t a big deal in New England since those colonies were already blocked from expanding west. But for a growing colony like Pennsylvania, or an investor with lots of land claims like George Washington, it was a big deal.

I’m interested in seeing how it was that “throughout the 1760s and 1770s the British government tries desperately to stop immigration into North America,” as Pincus says. The Declaration does indeed claim that the royal government “endeavored to prevent the population of these states,” but it looks like a lot of that endeavor was simply not passing laws which certain powerful Americans wanted “to encourage [foreigners’] migration hither.” Not trying to accelerate the movement of people isn’t the same as trying to stop it.

The Issue of Immigration—Running the Numbers

Yesterday I quoted from the Course of Human Events blog’s posting about The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government, a new analysis of the forces behind the Revolution by Yale history professor Steven Pincus.

Specifically, I discussed how Pincus’s book links the imperial debate of the 1760s and 1770s with the issues of economic stimulus and governmental austerity today, wondering how well the analogy works. Given the limitations on what the central British government did and could do in the eighteenth century, what sort of stimulus could Parliament cut back on?

Pincus’s answer relates to an even hotter hot-button issue of our day, immigration. Once again, from the Course of Human Events blog:

The British government had heavily subsidized immigration to North America. The colony of Georgia was even set up specifically so that Parliament could subsidize immigration of tens of thousands of people—including Scottish Highlanders, Italians, Germans, and the poor of England—to come to America. As Pincus explains, “All of that comes to a grinding halt in 1763, and throughout the 1760s and 1770s the British government tries desperately to stop immigration into North America.” The patriots argued that immigrants provided skills and were good consumers, which would drive the economy. Those against immigration argued that these individuals were polluting culture and providing competition that took jobs away from other people. “That strikes me as an interesting parallel to today’s debates”, says Pincus.

Here I have questions about what the American colonists perceived about immigration policy in the pre-Revolutionary period. Because they were actually seeing a growing influx of arrivals from Britain and northern Europe.

In Voyagers to the West (1986), Bernard Bailyn wrote:

…migration figures to mainland British North America before 1760—far greater than those to any other area of European colonization—pale next to the figures for the decade and a half that followed.

People flooded into North American between 1760 and 1775, first of all from the British Isles. Between the end of warfare and the disruption of the Empire in 1775, over 55,000 Protestant Irish emigrated to America; approximately 40,000 Scots, and over 30,000 Englishmen—a total of at least 125,000 from the British Isles alone. . . . But the British and Irish contributions together constituted only half the whole number of immigrants. In the same years at least 12,000 German-speaking immigrants entered the port of Philadelphia…

Other scholars have reached different conclusions about the numbers of immigrants, but they seem to agree on the upward trend. Carl L. Bankston III has written:

Northern Irish migration peaked between the 1750’s and the early 1770’s, with an estimated 14,200 people from northern Ireland reaching America from 1750 to 1759, 21,200 from 1760 to 1769, and 13,200 in the half-decade leading up to the American Revolution. Most of the Scots migration took place from 1760 to 1775, when about 25,000 new arrivals came to the colonies.

In “Migrations to the Thirteen British North American Colonies, 1700-1775” (Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Spring 1992), Aaron Fogleman estimated the number of Europeans coming into the thirteen North American colonies that broke away as:

• 1740s: 51,500.
• 1750s: 70,900.
• 1760s: 75,500.
• 1770s: 49,700 in the first five years, thus on pace for 99,400 for the whole decade until the war intervened.

Though these scholars’ estimates differ on the number of arrivals from Europe, they all agree that immigration to the North American colonies was up significantly during the 1760s and early 1770s. That’s the same period when Pincus says the imperial government’s support for such movement “comes to a grinding halt.”

So whatever the government in London was doing in those decades to “stop immigration into North America,” it wasn’t working. Maybe it kept the numbers down from where they would have been. But the colonists could see more people arrive from Europe every decade.

TOMORROW: Looking at the naturalization laws.

Political Science in Fever-Stricken Philadelphia

H-Net just ran Jan Golinski’s review of Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic by Thomas A. Apel.

As Golinski explains, no one in 1790s Philadelphia understood the cause of the epidemic that emptied the new national capital, but that didn’t stop two schools of thought from forming:

Broadly speaking, the “localist” side of the dispute traced the disease’s origins to bad air in the affected area, due to the presence of corrupt or putrefying matter or to a change in what they called the “atmospheric constitution.” Against them were ranged the “contagionists,” who believed the disease had originated elsewhere, brought by migrants—such as the refugees who fled to Philadelphia from the revolution in Haiti—and subsequently communicated from one individual to another.

From a modern perspective, one might be inclined to dismiss the whole debate as founded on ignorance and mistaken assumptions. Nobody at the time had any knowledge of the virus that causes yellow fever, and nor did anyone recognize the role of the female Aedes aegypti mosquito in transmitting it from person to person. We now know that the disease is not directly infectious, though it is so through the medium of the insect vector; it is not caused by putrefying organic matter, but stagnant water does provide an environment in which the mosquito can easily breed. Both localists and contagionists could therefore muster facts to support their case, but neither side could decisively disprove the other’s claims.

Like many medical controversies in the eighteenth century, therefore, we don’t really want to take either side. It would be so much easier if any of the debating doctors of the period just washed his hands.

In his final chapter, Apel examines the political dimension of the controversy. He rightly declines to map the two sides directly onto the political divisions of the time. On the other hand, he suggests that the fierceness of the dispute did reflect the political factionalism of the 1790s. This was the era when the Enlightenment public sphere fissured into contending groups, and when conspiracy theories abounded on both sides of the Atlantic. Participants in the yellow fever debates frequently alleged their opponents were lying or conspiring against the public interest.

[Dr. Benjamin] Rush, in particular, exhibited a high degree of paranoia, likening himself to the early Christian martyrs persecuted under the Roman Empire. Simultaneously, he insisted that his opinions were the undeniable outcome of reason and truth. Apel reminds his readers that twentieth-century critics of the Enlightenment identified this combination of paranoia, conspiracy theories, and dogmatic insistence on one’s own rationality as symptomatic of the last phase of the movement.

The epidemic occurred at the same time as the French Revolution, after all, and the harsh British reaction to its radicalness.

Lowell Lecture Series on Archeology in Boston

The Lowell Lecture Series organized by the Paul Revere House and hosted by Old South Meeting House is under way. This year”s theme is archeology, and these talks are still coming up.

Tuesday, 13 September, 6:30-7:30 P.M.
Dig Boston: How, When, and Why Archaeology Happens in the Hub
While Boston’s history began many thousands of years ago, archeological investigations are a relatively recent development. City Archaeologist Joseph M. Bagley discusses the ins and outs of conducting an archaeological dig in Boston through the lens of recent excavations at Old North Church, the Seaport Shipwreck, and Malcolm X’s house.

Tuesday, 20 September, 6:30-7:30 P.M.
Knee Deep in Paul Revere’s Privy: Archaeology at the Paul Revere House Lot
Archaeological investigations conducted by The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. at the Paul Revere House site from 2011-2013 resulted in the recovery of nearly 10,000 artifacts and a range of landscape and infrastructural features, including drains, cisterns, privies, and sewer pipes. PAL Senior Archaeologist Kristen Heitert will show how many of the artifacts speak of the former residents themselves, such as “Home Rule” tobacco pipes possibly smoked by newly arrived Irish immigrants; and the skull of a small terrier, perhaps a pet or a practical ratter.

Tuesday, 27 September, 6:30-7:30 P.M.
From Hills to Islands: Ancient Adaptations to the Inundation of Boston
Some 6,000 years ago, Boston was well inland from the ocean, but as rising sea levels poured in tidal waters around the hills east of Boston, ancient Native Americans lost no time adapting to and enjoying the change. While Martin Dudek, Senior Project Manager of Commonwealth Heritage Group, will focus on the Native American sites on Spectacle Island, he will also include a brief overview of other exciting archaeological sites worked on for the Big Dig.

All these lectures are free, and Old South has plenty of seating.

(The photograph above comes from a 2013 Boston Globe article about a dig behind the Old North Church.)

Jared Ross Hardesty Lecture and Seminar, 14-15 Sept.

On Wednesday, 14 September, Old North Church will host a lecture by Jared Ross Hardesty, author of the new book Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston. Hardesty is an Assistant Professor of History at Western Washington University and blogs through the African American Intellectual History Society website.

Old North’s announcement for this talk says:

Hardesty takes us inside the lives and worlds of enslaved Bostonians in the 18th century. In doing so, this lecture will reconstruct an 18th-century Atlantic world of unfreedom that stretched from Europe to Africa to America. Boston’s slaves lived in this place that was characterized by many different forms of dependence and oppression, including Indian slavery, indentured servitude, and apprenticeship. In this hierarchical and inherently unfree world, enslaved Bostonians were more concerned with their everyday treatment and honor than with emancipation, as they pushed for autonomy, protected their families and communities, and demanded a place in society.

By reassessing the lives of Boston’s slave population as part of a social order structured by ties of dependence, Hardesty not only demonstrates how African slaves were able to decode their new homeland and shape the terms of their enslavement, but also tells the story of how marginalized peoples engrained themselves in the very fabric of colonial American society.

The book is of particular interest to Old North as Hardesty describes the black congregation of Old North, both free and enslaved, in some detail. Hardesty also describes the role of slave owners, including Old North’s chocolatier, Captain Newark Jackson, the namesake for Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop.

Prof. Hardesty is scheduled to speak at 6:30 P.M. in Old North. There will be a book signing and reception afterwards. The event is open to the public, but attendees are asked to register and consider a donation to the church.

Scholars and educators who attend Hardesty’s talk on Wednesday are also invited to participate in a “small, intensive seminar” he’ll lead on Thursday, 15 September, from 1:00 to 5:00 P.M. at the Royall House & Slave Quarters in Medford. The “New Perspectives on Slavery in New England” seminar is free, but participants must register.

Visiting Moll Pitcher, the Fortune-Teller of Lynn

To visit the fortune-teller Mary “Moll” Pitcher, chroniclers of Lynn wrote, people looked for the house of Dr. Henry Burchstead. He was the [grand]son of a physician from Silesia, and he built a large house on what is now Essex Street.

More notably, Burchstead set up two large whale bones in the form of a “gothic arch” as his front gate. Alonzo Lewis, followed by other authors, said that visitors to Lynn embarrassed to have people know they were consulting Pitcher would instead ask for directions to “the bones of the great whale.”

There’s one problem with those directions, however. According to a genealogy published in the Massachusetts Magazine in 1910, Dr. Henry Burchstead died in 1755, five years before Moll Pitcher married and decades before Lewis and those other chroniclers lived. [CORRECTION: The Dr. Burchsted who died in 1755 was succeeded by his son, another Dr. Henry Burchsted, who lived to 1807. The younger man set up the whalebone gate.] James R. Newhall’s 1897 expansion of Lewis’s history of Lynn said other doctors took over that house: Dr. Peter G. Robbins in 1805 and Dr. Richard Hazeltine in 1817. But it’s not clear who lived there from 1755 to 1805, covering the bulk of Moll Pitcher’s career. In any case, people looked for the whale bones.

Lewis described “the humble dwelling of Molly Pitcher, which stood on what was then a lonely road, near the foot of High Rock.” A less flattering, secondhand description of Pitcher published in the 12 July 1879 Boston Traveller and reprinted in the 15 July New York Times said the house was

a black two-story hovel, which stood in a large field, familiarly called in those days the Pitcher field. There was a well-beaten pathway running from the old rickety gate up to the single door. Before the door, was placed an irregular block of stone, and even that, to the superstitious, had its terrors. . . .

The field where the cottage stood has been filled with nice dwellings, and there is not a sign left of the mysterious dwelling-place…except the remodeled hovel which stands in the rear. It has been materially changed and would scarcely be recognized.

In the March 1899 Essex Antiquarian, Sidney Perley published a picture of the Pitcher house “as it formerly appeared.” It looks like it had one story and an attic, four windows in front, and a small extension on the left side. That picture shows a standard Georgian center door while the 1879 article stated the “single door…stood to the extreme left of the house and opened into a small entry-way, which, in turn, opened into a rather larger room, where Moll received her visitors. There were two small rooms adjoining this large one, where were used for various purposes.” Those two reports seem incompatible.

Perley included three other relics of Mary Pitcher: her signature from some 1770 document, a black bonnet she was known to wear, and a table.

The Essex Institute, owner of this table, is now part of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. I wonder if Moll Pitcher’s table is still in its inventory, and if it gets brought out during Salem’s witch tourism season.

TOMORROW: The exposé.

The Privilege of Printing Parliamentary Debates

Every so often I’ve mentioned how in the 1760s the British press was wary of reporting the exact language of Parliament’s debates.

There’s no official record of the debate over the Stamp Act, for instance, or the debate to repeal it. Instead, we have to rely on private letters and memoirs, which often disagree. (Of course, official records can also disagree with letters and memoirs, and with what legislators actually said.)

In 1767 the bookseller John Almon offered a Political Register which reported on the Earl of Camden’s speech against the Declaratory Act the year before. But Almon protected himself by referring only to how “L— C——” spoke to the “B—— p———” on the issue of taxing the “A——— c——.” And he never published a second volume because of government pressure.

This portrait of London alderman Richard Oliver is another document of that debate over open government. As the website of Britain’s ArtFund explains:

In 1771 a messenger of the House arrested [John] Miller, the printer of the London Evening Post, for a breach of privilege for publishing Parliamentary debates. Richard Oliver, an Alderman of Billingsgate Ward and MP for the City[,] was a magistrate on the case together with Brass Crosby, the Lord Mayor, and Alderman John Wilkes.

The Court released Miller[,] but Crosby and Oliver were ordered to attend the House of Commons, where their actions were declared a breach of privilege. Both were committed to the Tower of London in March and not released until the end of the Parliamentary session in May.

While in the Tower both Crosby and Oliver had their portraits painted by Robert Edge Pine, a portrait and history painter who was a supporter of Wilkes and a man of strong radical sympathies. In consequence of Crosby and Oliver’s stand against the House, no attempt has since been made to prevent publication of parliamentary speeches.

The transcripts that Miller printed came from Almon. Around that same time, the government also prosecuted those two men for reprinting the Letters of Junius, winning convictions but losing the political battle. In 1774, Almon established the Parliamentary Register as a regular publication, and soon the British public felt entitled to know what Members of Parliament were saying.

This fight for press freedom was closely tied to the debate over Britain’s policy toward America. Almon supported American autonomy. Oliver was one of the few M.P.’s to vote against the Boston Port Bill in 1774 (as well as a distant cousin of Massachusetts lieutenant governor Thomas Oliver). The artist Pine, who briefly tutored Prince Demah, and the printer Miller both moved to America around the end of the war.