“The Measles coming into the Town”

In 2015 the medical journal Emerging Infectious Diseases published David M. Morens’s article “The Past Is Never Dead—Measles Epidemic, Boston, Massachusetts, 1713.”

It quoted extensively from the diary of the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather, and I’ll quote from those extracts.

[18 Oct] …The Measles coming into the Town, it is likely to be a Time of Sickness…

[24 Oct]… [in the past week] my Son Increase fell sick…

[27 Oct] My desirable Daughter Nibby, is now lying very sick of the Measles…

[30 Oct] This day, my Consort, for whom I was in much Distress, lest she should be arrested with the Measles which have proved fatal to Women that were with child, after too diligent an Attendance on her sick Family, was… surprized with her Travail [went into labor]… [and] graciously delivered her, of both a Son and a Daughter… wherein I receive numberless Favors of God. My dear Katy, is now also down with the Measles…

[1 Nov] Lord’s Day. This Day, I baptized my new-born twins… So I called them, ELEAZAR and MARTHA….

[4 Nov] In my poor Family, now, first, my Wife has the Measles appearing on her…

My Daughter Nancy is also full of them…

My Daughter Lizzy, is likewise full of them…

My Daughter Jerusha, droops and seems to have them appearing.

My Servant-maid, lies very full and ill of them.

[5 Nov] My little son Samuel is now full of the Measles….

[7 Nov]… my Consort is in a dangerous Condition, and can gett no rest... Death… is much feared for her… So, I humbled myself before the Lord, for my own Sins... that His wrath may be turned away…

[8 Nov] …this Day we are astonished, at the surprising Symptomes of death upon [my wife]… Oh! The sad Cup, which my Father has appointed me!... God enabled her to Committ herself into the Hands of a great and good Savior; yea, and to cast her Orphans there too…

I pray’d with her many Times, and left nothing undone…

[9 Nov] between three and four in the Afternoon, my dear, dear, dear Friend expired…. [I] cried to Heaven…

[10 Nov] …I am grievously tried, with the threatening Sickness of my discreet, pious, lovely Daughter Katharin.

And a Feavour which gives a violent Shock to the very Life of my dear pretty Jerusha.

[11 Nov] This day, I interr’d the earthly part of my dear consort…

[14 Nov] This Morning… the death of my Maid-servant, whose Measles passed into a malignant Feaver…

Oh! The trial, which I am this Day called unto in… the dying Circumstances of my dear little Jerusha!

The two Newborns, are languishing in the Arms of Death…

[15 Nov] … my little Jerusha. The dear little Creature lies in dying Circumstances. Tho’ I pray and cry to the Lord… Lord she is thine! Thy will be done!...

[18 Nov] …About Midnight, little Eleazar died.

[20 Nov] Little Martha died, about ten a clock, A.M.

I begg’d, I begg’d, that such a bitter Cup, as the Death of that lovely [Jerusha], might pass from me…

[21 Nov] …Betwixt 9 h. and 10 h. at night, my lovely Jerusha Expired. She was 2 years, and about 7 months old. Just before she died, she asked me to pray with her; which I did… and I gave her up unto the Lord. [Just as she died] she said, That she would go to Jesus Christ…

[23 Nov] …My poor Family is now left without any Infant in it, or any under seven Years of Age…

In 1757 Dr. Francis Home of Edinburgh determined that measles was caused by a pathogen. Unfortunately, he did this by using blood from one person with measles to infect others. He then tried to inoculate against the disease using the same technique as with smallpox, but measles doesn’t work the same way.

Not until 1963 did scientists develop an effective measles vaccine. In the first twenty years after the U.S. government tested and licensed that technique, it was estimated to have prevented 52,000,000 cases of the disease in this country. I was among the American children to benefit from the vaccine and never catch measles.

The World Health Organization reported that between 2000 and 2022, measles vaccination averted 57,000,000 deaths worldwide. That’s a huge number of people, about the population of Italy. But through a quirk of our brains, it can be more affecting to read about the series of small deaths, one after another, in Cotton Mather’s house in 1713.

“Recapturing the realities of daily governance”

Creating a Federal Government is an online database developed at Washington University in St. Louis and launched earlier this year.

It seeks to document the U.S. federal government from its creation in 1789 until 1829. That starts with listing all the people documented as hired by the federal government in that period, their jobs, where they worked, and other details.

The project explains itself this way:

What happens to our story of the American founding when we shift the focus from the pursuit of electoral office and toward the actions of appointed officials? Recapturing the realities of daily governance is crucial to our understanding of both the nation’s past and its present. . . .

Day in and day out, the Founding Fathers were consumed with managing the thousands of employees in the federal government. Much as we might now prefer reading their most high-minded writings about the meaning of representative government, once the Founders moved into federal leadership they were far more concerned with day-to-day matters. This does not mean they lost sight of the big picture or pressing national goals. Rather, they understood that their ability to realize their goals for the nation depended on their ability to organize and mobilize the personnel and resources of the federal government.

This task was all the more difficult because they did not possess the organizational tools that we have today. First and foremost, the federal government was highly decentralized. Although each federal agency did possess a central office in the nation’s capital, they had the most limited staff. Nothing reveals this state of affairs more clearly than the fact that so much of the minutiae of managing the federal government appears in the familiar handwriting of people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. As cabinet members and later as Presidents, they devoted much of their time to appointing subordinates and drafting specific instructions to them.

Indeed, those high officials were flooded with requests from people seeking appointments. There was no civil service system to channel that process, simply personal connections and peristence.

Fortunately for those top managers, and for the people trying to document every federal employee, the national government was quite small. And for a brief time under one President, it got smaller:

That President was Thomas Jefferson, and the period was 1801-1803. Jefferson came into office convinced that the federal government had become too large and expensive. He also suspected that many in the federal workforce shared dangerous ideas that put them at risk of violating the commitment to republican government that was at the core of the government’s mission. So Jefferson fired a number of personnel and eliminated a small number of federal offices. The result was to produce a brief reduction in the total number of federal employees. But the combination of the Louisiana Purchase (which expanded the federal domain), international tension, and ongoing domestic challenges led Jefferson to hire new officials and create new offices. As a result, he left office with a federal government larger and more powerful than the one he inherited.

In the period covered by this database, the population of the U.S. of A. grew from a little less than 4 million people to more than 12 million. Both the country and the economy expanded. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the federal government grew as well.

In contrast, for the last four decades the number of federal government civilian employees has hovered around 3 million (as high as 3.19 million in 1990, as low as 2.71 million in 2007). During that time, the national population has grown by more than 100 million people, or 46%.

TOMORROW: Looking in the Creating a Federal Government database for familiar faces.

The Broad Base of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress

The main point I make about the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, convened 250 years ago this month, is that it had more support and participation from the men of Massachusetts than the colony’s chartered legislature.

The provincial census of 1765 listed 186 towns and districts, and more were formed in the following decade. Here’s what I wrote in The Road to Concord about how those towns usually made up the legislature:

Under Massachusetts’s official charter, most towns were invited to send two representatives to each General Court. Very small towns, with fewer than 120 voters, could send only one and did not have to send any. In many places, especially those farthest from Boston, the inhabitants might have trouble convincing a gentleman to leave his farm, or balk at paying that gentleman’s expenses.

Most towns therefore sent a single representative. If a town of moderate size sent no one at all, it was supposed to pay a fine, but that penalty was never levied. As a result, only about two-thirds of the towns participated in a typical General Court before the Revolutionary turmoil.

In contrast, over 180 Massachusetts towns were represented at the first meeting of the Provincial Congress in Salem on October 7, 1774, with only 21 towns listing as having sent no delegate. There was no cap on the number of men who might represent a town in the Provincial Congress, so several towns sent three or more delegates. All told, there were 293 men at the first congress, about twice the legislature’s usual number.

In other words, even though towns had been legally obligated to represent themselves in the General Court, many chose not to. Even though towns had no legal obligation to this new Provincial Congress, many more chose to participate, in defiance of the law, the general, and Parliament. The Provincial Congress was thus a more representative, broader-based body than the preceding legislatures.

Looking back, I’d revise that passage to say that we don’t know how many towns had elected representatives in Salem on 7 October. The newspapers of the time said there were ninety men in all, so the count of towns must have been lower.

However, after the Provincial Congress got down to business in Concord four days later, its official record listed 180 towns. It’s likely that not all elected representatives made it to that start of that session, so that list could have grown a bit over time to that number. Nonetheless, it’s obvious that the congress had a broad popular base and thus, for democrats, more legitimacy.

Where Was the Charlestown Powderhouse?

Before departing from the “Powder Alarm” entirely, I’ll draw on guest blogger Charles Bahne to address a pertinent question: Where was the powderhouse?

That may seem like a silly question since it’s a stone building that has stood atop the same hill since it was built shortly after 1700.

But some of our sources from 1774 refer to that location in different ways:

• William Brattle: “This morning the Select Men of Medford, came and received their Town Stock of Powder, which was in the Arsenal on Quarry-Hill.”
• Boston Gazette: “the powder house on quarry hill in Charleston bounds”
• Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper: “You have heard of the taking ye. Windmill, at Cambridg with the Province Powder.”
• Rev. Ebenezer Parkman: “The Contents Magazine of Powder at Winter Hill had been carryed off.”
• John Adams: “the Provincial Powder from the Magazine at Cambridge”

Charles Bahne wrote in an email:

Legally, the powder house was in Charlestown. But it was closer (both crow-flies distance, and actual roads) to the populated centers of either Medford or Cambridge, or even Menotomy, than it was to Charlestown.

• Powder House Sq. to Medford Sq. = 1.23 miles airline, 1.47 miles by road, according to Google Maps
• Powder House Sq. to Harvard Sq. = 1.90 miles airline, 2.14 miles by road
• Powder House Sq. to Menotomy [Arlington Center] = 2.13 miles airline, 2.17 miles by road
• Powder House Sq. to Charlestown Neck [Sullivan Sq.] = 2.47 miles airline, 2.49 miles by road

Once you got "beyond the Neck", Charlestown got long and skinny. And hardly anyone lived there. . . . While the powder house itself was in the town of Charlestown, the property just across the street was in Medford. The town/city boundaries in that area were adjusted at some point in the 1800s.

I suspect that one reason for choosing that site for a powder house—besides the fact that the old windmill was available—was that the area was unpopulated. If by chance it blew up, there was no one nearby to be killed or injured, no other property that might be destroyed.

But it was conveniently at a crossroads. Broadway was a straight line road between Charlestown Neck and Menotomy, although I suspect that it was a lightly used, poorly maintained thoroughfare, and not a highway. . . . The other crossroad was more important, the road from Medford to Cambridge, present day Harvard St., Warner St., and College Ave.

The picture above is a detail from an 1833 map, before the western arm of Charlestown became Somerville. The arrow points to the powderhouse. The circles show the population centers of Medford, Cambridge, and (at the lower right) Charlestown.

Proximity helps to explain why the man who “for a Number of Years had the Care of [the gunpowder] as to sunning and turning it,” William Gamage, lived in Cambridge. Proximity might explain why the Medford selectmen were the last to remove their town’s powder from the tower in August 1774; it was, after all, quite convenient where it was.

As for Winter Hill, that was fairly nearby and large. But the powderhouse stood atop its own drumlin, called Quarry Hill for decades because locals had taken stone from it, including the stone used to build the tower itself. That spot is now known as Powder House Hill.

How Many People Were at the Old South Tea Meetings?

Last weekend, I served as announcer for the reenactment of the “Meeting of the Body of the People” in Old South Meeting-House.

The most striking moment was hearing noises from outside the building, glancing through the window behind me, and seeing the sidewalk and street absolutely packed with people.

The sight reminded me of all the reports from 1773 of throngs outside that same building, locals straining to hear the developments and lending their bodies to the popular pressure. It was even rather spooky.

The crowd also brought up a historical question that appeared both in the introduction to the event and backstage discussions: How many people were at the tea meetings in Old South in late 1773?

In a letter to Arthur Lee about the whole tea crisis dated 31 Dec 1773, Samuel Adams wrote that on 28 November “the Old South meeting-house [had…] assembled upon this important occasion 5000, some say 6000 men.” And later on 16 December, “the meeting…had consisted by common estimation of at least seven thousand men.”

But of course we recognize Adams as a master of propaganda. Here he was using the technique of crediting lots of other people with saying what he wants to say.

The merchant John Andrews wrote similarly about the latter day:

A general muster was assembled, from this and all ye neighbouring towns, to the number of five or six thousand, at 10 o’clock Thursday morning in the Old South Meeting house, where they pass’d a unanimous vote that the Tea should go out of the harbour that afternoon.

But as a rule, I assume Andrews has inflated his numbers by 50–100%.

For example, Andrews wrote that John Ruddock was “the most corpulent man among us, weighing, they say, between 5 and 600 weight.” That would have put the magistrate in the same range as David Lambert, Georgian Britain’s example of corpulency. Justice Ruddock was heavy, but not heavy enough to be able to display himself. He was probably closer to 300 pounds.

Andrews said the cannon now labeled “Adams” and “Hancock” (at the heart of The Road to Concord) must “weigh near seven hundred weight apiece.” The National Park Service has found those guns “weigh about 450 pounds each.”

Finally, we all know that estimating the size of a public crowd, especially at a political event, is notoriously prone to exaggeration. Even today, when we can collect photographic evidence, crowd estimates can be frought with bias, wishfulness, and in some cases simple narcissism.

Using my formula for interpreting John Andrews’s numbers, we should translate his and Adams’s reports of 5,000–7,000 people into about 3,000. That’s still about equal to all the adult white men in Boston.

It’s also far more than the legal capacity of Old South today. But back in 1773 the building’s main floor didn’t have displays in the back, the first gallery had benches instead of individual seats, and the second gallery was open. Most important, people were smaller and had different assumptions about personal space, so they probably crowded together more densely.

Three thousand adults would still probably have been beyond tight—but what if we also count crowds on the streets outside?

Exploring the Boston Slavery Database

Speaking of the city of Boston’s Archaeology Program, its staff took the lead in developing the “Slavery in Boston” exhibit in Faneuil Hall that I discussed back in June.

Its webpages host the online complement of that exhibit.

Those webpages include the Boston Slavery Database, a spreadsheet listing (as of 12 October) “2,357 Black and Indigenous people enslaved in Boston between 1641 and 1783.”

It looks like that listing was compiled mainly by compiling the enslaved people named in “the probate records for Boston proper and Dorchester,” along with research by historians Aabid Allibhai, Jared Ross Hardesty, and Wayne Tucker. The agency acknowledges that it’s incomplete.

Indeed, I ran some test searches for people like Onesimus Mather, Caesar Marion, Surry (Adams), Nero Faneuil, and Sharp Gardner, and didn’t find them.

Printers Pompey and Caesar Fleet appear, but not their father, Peter Fleet. Oliver Wendell appears twice as a slaveholder, but his servant Andrew, documented as testifying about the Boston Massacre, doesn’t show up.

The Boston Globe said one goal of this effort was to inform the public about colonial Bostonians in bondage “beyond the better known names of Phillis Wheatley and Prince Hall.” Ironically, neither of those names appears in the database.

All those missing names show how much larger the institution of slavery was over its fourteen decades in Boston. They also show the limits of one type of historic record. Enslaved people don’t appear in probate records if they died or were freed before their owner died, or if the vagaries of an owner’s estate mean that they weren’t specifically bequeathed or valued. Or if those documents simply disappeared.

The website says: “If you have done research and found evidence of an enslaved Bostonian who is not yet on this list, please email us with your data so that we can add them, with credit.” So this database is like Wikipedia, in that spotting an error or omission also confers some opportunity and responsibility to do something about it. Unfortunately, it’s easier to poke holes than to fix them. But I’ll add figuring out this database to my list of tasks.

“Unable to be at the expense of removing themselves”

On Monday, 1 May 1775 the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, having declared that Loyalists could move into Boston, turned to the bigger question of how to handle families who wanted to move out of the besieged town.

The previous day, the congress had named five members to a committee to consider that issue. After seeing that group’s report in the morning, the body added four more delegates to revise the plan.

In the afternoon, having meanwhile codified the language for commissioning officers in the new army, the congress approved the enlarged committee’s amended report:

IN PROVINCIAL CONGRESS, Watertown, May 1, 1775.

Whereas, the inhabitants of the town of Boston have been detained by general Gage, but at length, by agreement, are permitted to remove, with their effects, into the country, and as it has been represented to this Congress that about five thousand of said inhabitants are indigent, and unable to be at the expense of removing themselves:

Therefore, Resolved, That it be, and it is hereby recommended to all the good people of this colony, and especially to the selectmen, and committee of correspondence most convenient to Boston, that they aid and assist such poor inhabitants of said town (with teams, waggons, &c.,) as shall procure a certificate from the committee of donations, that they are unable to remove themselves;

and it is further recommended to the selectmen of the several towns specified in the schedule annexed, to provide for said inhabitants in the best and most prudent way and manner, until this, or some future congress, shall take further order thereon, and that the said selectmen receive, support and employ their proportion of said inhabitants assigned them in said schedule, and no other; and render their accounts to this, or some future congress, or house of representatives, for allowance, which reasonable accounts shall be paid out of the public treasury:

and it is further recommended, to the committee of donations, to apply said donations for the removal of said inhabitants, and for their support whilst removing; and in case that is insufficient, it is further recommended to said committee of donations, that they make up said deficiency, and lay their accounts before the Congress for allowance, which reasonable expense shall be paid out of the public treasury of the colony:

and it is further Resolved, that the inhabitants of Boston thus removed shall not, in future, be considered as the poor of said town into which they remove; and it is to be understood, that if the number of the poor who shall be removed in consequence hereof, should surpass, or fall short of the number herein calculated, the distribution of them shall be increased or diminished, in proportion according to this regulation: …

There followed a list of towns in Suffolk, Middlesex, Plymouth, Bristol, Berkshire, Hampshire, and Worcester Counties with the number of refugees each was thought capable of supporting, from 4 in Leverett to 129 in Rehoboth.

Essex and Barnstable Counties had no allotment, nor did any seacoast towns elsewhere. Likewise, the towns along or close to the siege lines weren’t on the list, though the congress did ask them to supply teams and wagons for moving people. Presumably the authorities thought those communities were already stretched thin supporting the military and maintaining their coastal defenses.

The Maine counties and the islands were also left off, probably because those would be too hard for refugees to get to.

In all, the congress found space, at least theoretically, for 4,903 poor war refugees. That was nearly a third of Boston’s prewar population.

Other families came out by their own means and went to places left off the congress’s list. I discussed Abigail Adams’s July struggle to host George Trott’s family on her farm in Braintree back here. In this article Katie Turner Getty reports that Concord eventually housed “as many as 130 Bostonians” though its initial allotment of poor refugees was 66.

COMING UP: The agreement breaks down.

“Both fell into the Water”

This week I found myself discussing significant details that Boston newspapers left out of their reports:

• what captain nearly lost his ship on Cape Cod.
• which gentleman owned a poetry-writing girl named Phillis.

Presumably if Bostonians really wanted to know the missing information, they could ask around the town of 16,000 people and find out.

Here’s another example from the same month. The same 1 Oct 1767 Boston News-Letter report on the storm that beached Capt. Richard Coffin’s ship also included this detail:

A Gentleman and his Lady who had just landed on one of the Wharves from a Boat that had been below, was by the extreme Darkness of the Night, led to the edge of the Wharf and both fell into the Water, and would probably have been drowned, had not some of the Company immediately assisted and got them out.

What unlucky couple was that? What was their story?

Fortunately, I have some people I can ask. Here’s John Rowe’s diary from 24 September:

We had A Very Severy Storm it Blew as hard as I ever heard it, Accompanied with Thunder Lighting & very heavy Rain.

Mr Walter & Wife had Like to have been drownd at pecks Wharf

And 27 September:

After Noon I went to Church

Mr Walter Read prayers & preachd from the 103d. Psalm & the 19th Verse, The Lord hath prepard his Throne in the Heavens and his Kingdom Reigneth.

Over all, this was A very Pathetick & Good Discourse & very Applicable to Mr Walters Late Misfortune—in which Wee All Rejoyce for Gods Remarkable Deliverance of him & Wife—

William Walter was the rector at Trinity Church. So it wasn’t just any gentleman who fell off the wharf; it was one of the town’s handful of Anglican clergymen.

And his wife? Just shy of a year before that storm, the Rev. Mr. Walter had married Lydia Lynde. Her early-1760s portrait by John Singleton Copley appears above.

That sent me to the diary of Lydia Walter’s father, Massachusetts chief justice Benjamin Lynde (the second chief justice of that name). His entry for 23 September says:

A fine morning, but a great storm by night. My daughter Walter with her husband by wind carryed off the wharfe into the water, where she sank, and in most hazardous state, but got out, and thro’ God’s great goodness not hurt, tho’ then within 2 months of her time.

So the lady who fell off the wharf was seven months pregnant!

And here’s the happy ending from Lynde’s diary of 13 November:

My daughter Walter (notwithstanding her fall into the water), safely delivered of a son, baptized the 16th, Lynde; [Recompense Wadsworth?] Stimpson and wife Godfather and mother, Sheriff [Stephen] Greenleaf ye. other.

The Walter family left Boston in the evacuation of 1776, but William and Lydia Walter came back after the war when he was named rector of Christ Church.

Young Lynde Walter married in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, in 1791, then again in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1798. Eventually he returned to Boston, where he died in 1844 at age seventy-six. His namesake son was the first editor of the Boston Evening Transcript.

But all that was possible only because people had helped fish his grandmother out of Boston harbor on a stormy night in September 1767.

Call for Papers on “Empire and Its Discontent”

On 1–2 Dec 2023, the Massachusetts Historical Society and the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society will host a conference in Boston on the theme “Empire and Its Discontent, 1763-1773.” This conference is part of a series of scholarly meetings designed to ”re-examine the origins, course, and consequences of the American Revolution.”

This year sees the 260th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years’ War and the Sestercentennial of the Boston Tea Party—two milestone events in workings of the British Empire.

The program committee is now inviting historians and scholars working in connected fields on questions of empire, revolution, and independence between 1763 and 1773 to submit papers for this conference. Possible topics include:

• Imperial rivalries and shifting power within North America
• The structures of empire within the metropole and on the peripheries
• Policy and practice in the 18th century
• The political, diplomatic, and military challenges of governing a diverse and far flung polity
• Global trade networks within and outside the empire and their influence on imperial policy and colonial practice
• The shifting nature of boundaries, borders, authority, and sovereignty and their role in the local and global geopolitics of the era
• The imperial origins of the outbreak of sustained unrest in British America after 1763 and the impact of that unrest on settler, native, and enslaved populations
• The Tea Party and its immediate aftermath

Applicants should submit a title and a 250-word proposal along with a c.v. by 1 May via this Interfolio link. All scholars invited to participate will be contacted by 30 May, and there will be travel subsidies and hotel accommodations available. Papers should be no longer than 20 double-spaced pages. Presenters must submit their papers by 1 November, a month before the conference, to be pre-circulated to registrants. There will be an edited volume of papers in their final form.

More information will appear on the American Philosophical Society’s website, and questions may be addressed to Adrianna Link, Head of Scholarly Programs there.

Remaking the Georgian Landscape

Britain’s North American colonies contained some very wealthy men, such as the New York land proprietors or the leading planters of Virginia.

But those men were nowhere near as rich as the landowning aristocrats in Britain. What counted for a mansion in North America would have been an average country manor across the ocean, where the richest lords were building giant palaces.

Furthermore, as Nicola Cornick wrote at the Word Wenches, some wealthy men even remade the landscape around their homes just for aesthetic reasons:

If we look at the Georgian and Regency period, there did seem to be a penchant for noblemen sweeping aside old villages in order to improve the look of their country estates. At Wimpole Hall, the 2nd Earl of Harwicke commissioned Capability Brown to redesign his parkland to improve the views from the mansion in 1767. Sadly this involved sweeping aside various small villages! . . .

In 1780, Joseph Damer, Lord Milton, decided that the market town of Middleton, adjacent to his home at Milton Abbey, was spoiling his rural peace and quiet. He commissioned an architect called William Chambers plus the ubiquitous Capability Brown to design a new village, Milton Abbas [shown above], in a wooded valley away from the Abbey.

Most of the townspeople were relocated there and Middleton was demolished and the site landscaped. Thirty six identical thatched cottages were built with the intention of each housing 2 families. Each house was fronted with a lawn and planted with a horse chestnut tree. No doubt Lord Milton felt he was being very generous and perhaps plenty of people were grateful for a new house. To us these days, however, does it feel like generosity or breathtaking arrogance?

American scholars often write about how much effort George Washington or Thomas Jefferson put in (and forced from others) to make their homes just the way they wanted. But no project in the colonies or early America reached that Old World level of grandiosity.

Decades of Change in Studying Slavery

In 1989, or a third of a century ago, David Hackett Fischer published Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America.

That book described four important migrations from Britain to its North American colonies, starting with the Puritans of East Anglia populating New England.

After issuing Paul Revere’s Ride in 1994 and Washington’s Crossing in 2004, among other books, Fischer returned to the cultural beat in 2005 with Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas.

That book’s card page (publishing jargon for the page listing an author’s other works) identified it as the third volume in a series that began with Albion’s Seed, a series called “America: A Cultural History.”

The second of the four listed volumes was to be American Plantations: African and European Folkways in the New World. That came out this year with a new title, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals.

LitHub just extracted a historiographical portion of African Founders in a web article is titled “How Empirical Databases Have Changed Our Understanding of Early American Slavery,” which stresses “New Tools of Truth-Seeking.”

In fact, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database launched on C.D. in 1999 and has been on the web at SlaveVoyages.org since 2008. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall published her Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy on disk in 2000, and that’s also online now. These databases are well known to scholars in the field.

Fischer doesn’t make the claim that those resources are new, though they may well have arrived since he started work on this book. Rather, he wrote about them to give credit where it’s due and show readers the changes in the field. For instance:

Some American historians have long believed that many or even most slaves who came to the mainland colonies in North America had been “seasoned” in the Caribbean, or born and raised there, or were “Atlantic Creoles” who had been raised there and in other Atlantic places. There was some truth in these beliefs, during early years of the slave trade to North America.

But overall, [the Intra-American Slave Trade Database produced by Gregory] O’Malley found them to be very much mistaken. In his database of slaves shipped from the West Indies to North America, 92 percent were “new negroes” from Africa, who were quickly transshipped through West Indian ports to mainland colonies. Only about 8 percent were “seasoned” or “Creole” West Indian slaves.

Unfortunately, because the article is based on the book text, it doesn’t include links to the databases it discusses. But it does offer some pointers for people researching American slavery on their own. And I added some of those links here.

Maps to Explore from Your Desk

The Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library is offering an “Unrest in Boston 1765–1776” collection of digital images from its collection for educators in grades 3 through 8.

The maps to explore are:

• William Price’s 1769 update of John Bonner’s 1722 map of the town, showing just the Shawmut peninsula. (I have a print of this on my wall.)
• Lt. Richard Williams’s map of wartime Boston, the provincial siege lines, and the inner harbor.
• London publishers Robert Sayer and John Bennett’s “Seat of War, in New England” map of eastern Massachusetts, featuring a little train of figures escorting Gen. George Washington toward Boston.
• Boston native Isaac de Costa’s map of eastern Massachusetts showing locations from the Battle of Lexington and Concord, including provincial cannon in the countryside.

These maps come with geographic inquiries, supporting documents, and questions for class discussions.

I noted that the overview starts, “Colonial Boston was a flourishing city of 20,000 by the 1760s.” In fact, the 1765 census found 15,520 people in Boston. The surrounding towns, now incorporated into the city, added more people to the area, as did the short-term population of sailors and (at times) soldiers. But this essay makes clear that it counts those soldiers as separate from the town inhabitants.

That census figure is significant not just because of accuracy but also because it hadn’t changed much in decades. Boston was stuck at about 16,000 people while Philadelphia and New York grew larger. What once was Britain’s biggest and busiest port in North America became number three. A frustrating stagnation might have been one reason Bostonians were so easily worked up about imperial taxes in the 1760s.

Before leaving the Leventhal Center, I want to highlight another digitized item from the same decade: This map of the travels of the Qianlong Emperor of China in the fall of 1778.

As an object, this diagram of the imperial route unfolds into an image nearly twenty feet long. (It’s appropriate, therefore, that the interactive feature demands a screen of a certain size before it will show you anything.) The digital presentation comes with helpful explanations by Prof. Anne-Sophie Pratte.

Knowing Your Enemy by Name

The two pieces of testimony I quoted over the last two days have something in common besides how they both described violence between locals and soldiers near the ropewalks in central Boston.

In both cases the person describing the 3 Mar 1770 fight, putting all the blame on those nasty people on the other side, could also name one of those opponents.

Archibald McNeal wasn’t just menaced by unknown grenadiers, identifiable only by the wings on their uniforms. Rather, he referred to “One of the grenadiers, named Dixson.”

Pvt. John Rodgers didn’t say he was attacked by three anonymous Bostonians. He fingered one of them as Joseph Shed, whom we can identify as a carpenter.

That pattern reflects the extensive ties between soldiers and civilians that Serena Zabin explores in The Boston Massacre: A Family History. Since late 1768 soldiers had been living in Boston, a town of only 16,000 people. People saw each other on the streets, in taverns, in churches. In some cases soldiers worked part-time alongside locals. Their wives boarded with local homeowners. More than a few redcoats wooed or married Boston women.

As a result, some civilians knew some soldiers as individuals, and vice versa. They may not have liked each other, but their relationships went deeper than simply redcoat and local.

Another example of this phenomenon that Zabin highlights is the case of James Bailey, a sailor who was at the 3 March ropewalk confrontation and at the Massacre two days later.

At the ropewalk, Bailey was a bit of a provocateur, asking young McNeal why he didn’t answer the grenadiers’ taunts. (And then, not having a weapon to counter the soldiers’ bludgeons either, Bailey shut up.) But he could also be friendly to a soldier.

On King Street, Bailey testified, he spotted Pvt. Hugh White standing guard outside the Customs office and being badgered by angry boys. [Rightly so, I’d say, but that’s another story.] “I went up to him because I knew him, and to see what was the matter,” the sailor said—i.e., what was all this ruckus about?

When I first went up to him, I said, what is the matter? He said he did not know. The boys were throwing pieces of ice at him, and after I went to him, they threw no more; I stood with him five or six minutes.

Bailey was actually “standing along with the Sentry, on the Custom-house steps,” in effect shielding White from attack. During that time, the sailor recalled, “He said very little to me, only that he was afraid, if the boys did not disperse, there would be something very soon, he did not mention what.”

Pvt. White, in turn, looked out for Bailey. When more soldiers arrived from the main guard, one of them was Pvt. John Carroll. Bailey recognized him from the ropewalk a couple of days before, and it’s quite possible Carroll recognized him. Bailey stated:

When the soldiers came down, Carrol came up to me and clapt his bayonet to my breast, and White said do not hurt him. . . .

Montgomery…was the very next person to me, close to me. When White told him not to hurt me, he took his hand and pushed me right behind him.

Bailey was one of the witnesses who said Pvt. Edward Montgomery fired the first shot after being hit, though he disagreed with other witnesses on what happened just before that. Bailey had such a close-up view of the shooting because Pvt. White perceived him as friendly.

Assessing the Revolution’s Effect on Slavery in New England

Even though most New Englanders went into the Revolution and Revolutionary War with no thought of changing chattel slavery, the ideology of liberty and natural rights produced new thinking.

In the ten years before the war we can see hints of the system breaking down. The number of enslaved people in Massachusetts stopped growing with the overall population. Advertisements in newspapers offered to give away small children; as horrific as that sounds, it indicates the economics of slaveholding looked poor. The first anti-slavery pamphlets in decades appeared shortly before the war.

The departure of wealthy Loyalists, first from their rural homes and then from Boston in 1776, left some enslaved people at liberty. It also cut the number of local elite voices defending their investment in human property since the new wealthy arising during the war didn’t have such a history of slaveholding.

In New York and the southern states, the British were able to organize companies of black troops and support personnel from slaves who had freed themselves. But they couldn’t do that in Boston or Newport. Instead, it was the Continental Army that formed two Rhode Island regiments made up largely of black and Native men.

Even more important, from the start of the war, New England regiments enlisted black men alongside whites. The Rhode Islanders were eventually dispersed among other regiments that way as well. For a sizable number of enslaved New England men, serving in the Continental Army was a path to freedom, not serving the British army.

In 1777 the settlers who came to Vermont from New England decided that there would be no slavery in their new independent state. In 1783 the Massachusetts high court decided that state’s new constitution rendered slavery unenforceable. New Hampshire quickly followed. Connecticut and Rhode Island enacted gradual emancipation laws—very gradual—in 1784.

To be sure, those forms of abolition didn’t produce fair outcomes. Some former slaveholders used the law to justify not supporting older people who had worked for them without pay for years. People remained legally enslaved in southern New England until the eve of the Civil War. The region’s economy remained bound up with slave societies to the south.

Nonetheless, in this significant part of the new U.S. of A., the Revolution had strongly contributed to slavery’s end. So can we say that was a major effect of the Revolution?

I decided to look at the numbers. In 1765 the provincial census counted about 5,200 black people in Massachusetts, including Maine. The breakaway government found about the same number in 1776. The first U.S. census of 1790 counted 5,369 non-white citizens. A significant fraction of those people were already free before the Revolution, but that’s the maximum number of people in Massachusetts freed by the state court. The corresponding number for the state of New Hampshire was 630.

Meanwhile, in the 1780s and ’90s the port of Charleston, South Carolina, imported about 2,000 enslaved Africans each year, on top of children born into slavery. Thus, every three years the new American republic absorbed more people into life as slaves than the total freed by the northern New England abolitions. As positive as the effects of the Revolution were in some states, the strong overall trend of the new nation was toward enslaving more people, even before the cotton economy took over.

“He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms”

When I first read about the idea that Americans rebelled because they worried about the British government moving to end chattel slavery, advanced in books by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen and Gerald Horne, I didn’t see how that fit the pattern of where the resistance broke out. Nor on where the ensuing Revolution had the greatest effect on slavery.

If the anxiety of slaveholders was a major driver in the onset of the Revolution, why did the worst early confrontations happen in New England, which had the smallest percentage of people enslaved?

Why did that obstreperous Massachusetts assembly vote twice in the decade before the war to end all imports of human property from Africa? Why did the legislature entertain petitions from enslaved men, reportedly encouraged by its clerk Samuel Adams? Why did those states move to end or limit slavery during and soon after the war?

Conversely, if slaveholders had become so anxious as to defy the government in London, why did Jamaica and the other Caribbean islands, which depended completely on chattel slavery, remain firmly loyal to Britain? Why was the British military able to reconquer Georgia and the capital of South Carolina, two of the three newly independent states with the largest fractions of their populations enslaved?

Those questions apply to the hypothesis that slaveholders were aroused by the Somerset decision of 1772, as the Blumrosens and Horne argued. And there’s already very little contemporaneous evidence to suggest that white colonists viewed that legal decision as portending any change for America.

On the other hand, if we look at the hypothesis that the slaveholders’ anxiety arose not from the Somerset case but from the Dunmore and Phillipsburg Proclamations, as Sylvia Frey, Woody Holton, and others have written, the pattern of resistance makes more sense.

In that view, the early resistance to new taxes, the shift of power in New England in late 1774, and the outbreak of war in 1775 were driven by a lot of other factors—not only economics and constitutional beliefs but everything from post-Puritan suspicion about the threat of an Anglican bishop over America to unspoken resentment over more vigorous Customs enforcement.

Chattel slavery wasn’t necessarily a big factor for American Whigs in that period, except in how Whig philosophy deemed people without traditional British rights as little more than ”slaves,” and the presence of some actual slaves in town might have made that threat feel more real. (Then again, the master class in a slave society is remarkably capable of not seeing themselves as having anything in common with the people they enslave.)

Once fighting began, however, British commanders looked for every resource they could. In late 1775 the Earl of Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, promised freedom to people enslaved by Patriots. His offer had power in only one colony, but Virginia wasn’t just any colony—it had the largest total population by far, and over 40% of those people were enslaved.

Dunmore’s campaign was shut down rather quickly, but not before, according to Holton, it pushed Virginians, and perhaps southern Patriots generally, toward independence in 1776. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson blamed King George III for perpetuating the slave trade and then wrote:

he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Southern delegates who wanted to maintain chattel slavery and avoid ridicule for total hypocrisy edited that down to seven words: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” The document moved quickly on to complaining about the Crown’s Native American allies. No one used the word “slave,” but everyone knew “domestic insurrections” meant slave revolts.

The war ground on. Gen. Henry Clinton renewed Dunmore’s policy in the Phillipsburg Proclamation of 1779 and extended it across all the rebellious colonies. But it had different effects in different regions.

By that point, New England, which already had the least to fear of slave uprisings, was also largely free from the British military. The Phillipsburg Proclamation meant about as little there as the Somerset decision.

The southern states had become the focus of Clinton’s strategy, and that was also where Patriot and neutral planters saw the most to lose from their human property escaping or rebelling. It makes sense for the biggest backlash against the British to arise there.

As for Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean, they had never rebelled, so Clinton’s proclamation meant nothing to those planters. The ocean blocked enslaved islanders from seeking freedom behind army lines. The same ocean also made those islands dependent on remaining part of the transatlantic trading system; despite some protests against the Stamp Act in 1765, the Caribbean planters were never in a position to rebel.

(These thoughts were prompted by Twitter conversation with Woody Holton in early September. He looked at the percentage of enslaved in different colonies. I’ve added the factor of when those places saw the most fighting.)

Gen. Gates’s Articles of Convention

As I said yesterday, on 23 Oct 1777 John Gill’s Continental Journal printed the “ARTICLES of CONVENTION between Lieutenant-General [Horatio] GATES and Major-General [John] BURGOYNE.”

Gates must have hurried that document to Boston, not simply because the Battle of Satatoga was big news but also because the state of Massachusetts had to prepare for the arrival of thousands of prisoners of war.

The full text of the surrender terms is here. I’ll quote the most important passages, those involving substance rather than details of implementation, as they appeared in the Continental Journal.

ARTICLE I. The troops under Lieutenant-General Burgoyne, are to march out of their camp with the honors of war and the artillery of the intrenchments, to the verge of the river where the old fort stood, where the arms and artillery are to be left; the arms to be piled by word of command from their own officers.

Art. II. A free passage to be granted to the army under Lieutenant-General Burgoyne to Great Britain, on condition of not serving again in North America during the present contest, and the port of Boston is assigned for the entry of transports to receive the troops, whenever General [William] Howe shall so order. . . .

Art. IV. The army under Lieutenant-General Burgoyne, to march to Massachusetts-Bay by the easiest, most expeditious and convenient route; and to be quartered in, near, or as convenient as possible to Boston, that the march of the troops may not be delayed when transports arrive to receive them.

Art. V. The troops to be supplyed on their march, and during their being in quarters, with provisions by General Gates’s orders, at the same rate of rations as the troops of his own army, and if possible, the officers horses and cattle are to be supplyed with forage at the usual rates.

Art. VI. All officers to retain their carriages, batt-horses and other cattle, and no baggage to be molested or searched, Lieutenant General Burgoyne giving his honor that there are no public stores secreted therein.—Major-General Gates will of course take the necessary measures for the due performance of this article; should any carriages be wanted during the march for the transportation of officer’s baggage, they are if possible to be supplyed by the country at the usual rates. . . .

Art. IX. All Canadians and persons belonging to the Canadian establishment, consisting of sailors, batteaumen, artificers, drivers, independent companies and many other followers of the army, who come under no particular description, are to be permitted to return there . . .

Gates was a veteran of the British army. He and Burgoyne had enlisted as young officers at the same time, and he had served under Burgoyne earlier in their careers.

The American general knew what supplies and housing a large army, including families, would need. He was also sensitive to the honor of British officers; one of the thirteen articles guaranteed those gentlemen the privilege of walking around greater Boston wearing their arms. 

About 5,900 Crown troops surrendered at Saratoga. On 8 November they started to arrive in Cambridge, which in 1776 had an official population of 1,586.

“The idea of a place called Nova Scotia”

One of the most thought-provoking historical articles I’ve read recently is Alexandra L. Montgomery’s essay for the Journal of the History of Ideas blog, “Imagining Nova Scotia: The Limits of an Eighteenth-Century Imperial Fantasy.”

Montgomery, a Nova Scotian herself, writes that the visions of people far from the province have often overlaid actual life there.

Particularly during the decades on either side of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the then-colony became a near obsession among British colonial administrators on both sides of the Atlantic. Generations of men poured over questionable maps, spinning out schemes meant to exploit the region’s rich fisheries, timber stores, and geographically advantageous location along the major ship routes between Europe, the British mainland colonies, and New France. And yet,…while proposals for the region were unending, facts were in short supply.

Indeed, even the idea of a place called Nova Scotia was, for much of the early modern period, unmoored from any objective reality.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Earl of Halifax wanted to mold Nova Scotia into a “model colony,” with lots of British government money and oversight and a new capital named, naturally, Halifax. The French and Indian War made British Canada safer to settle but harder to pay for.

While the new leadership of the province and Board of Trade supported Halifax’s broad vision, they balked at its cost and chose to outsource the next phase of Nova Scotia’s transformation to private individuals and land companies. It was in this post-war context that some of colonial America’s most notable names became involved in the colony to their north. The Board of Trade’s open call for respectable land investors to take up and settle Nova Scotian land attracted no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin, and another company from Philadelphia hired a fresh-faced and not-yet-“mad” Anthony Wayne to survey their potential Nova Scotian lands.

But that fuse fizzled instead of booming, and by the time the more populous British colonies to the south were coming together to resist Parliament’s new taxes, American Whigs saw Nova Scotia as what a colony shouldn’t be.

In his 1767/1768 Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, John Dickinson pitted the colonies that would eventually break away from the empire against the somewhat newer areas of British control, among which he included Nova Scotia. He rejected the attempts to settle Nova Scotia as damaging to the population levels of the older colonies, not to mention a colossal waste of money.

That attitude colored the American Revolutionaries’ thoughts on whether to treat Nova Scotia as a potential ally, Montgomery writes.

The last image her article left me with was Nova Scotia at the end of the war, firmly within the British Empire and now the Loyalists’ first place of refuge. “Shelburne, Nova Scotia,…transformed from a boom town of as many as 14,000 people in 1783 to a near ghost town with over 300 empty houses just a few years later.”

“I could almost wish that an inoculating Hospital was opened, in every Town”

In the Washington Post, Prof. Andrew Wehrman wrote about Massachusetts and Boston’s official response to the threat of smallpox in the summer of 1776:

Abigail Adams…learned of the Continental Army’s failed invasion of Canada. Smallpox had broken out among the soldiers, dooming the campaign. Returning soldiers threatened to bring the disease back with them. Exasperated, John wrote to Abigail: “The Small Pox! The Small Pox! What shall we do with it?” He answered his own question by remarking, “I could almost wish that an inoculating Hospital was opened, in every Town in New England.”

While John Adams and 55 other men in Philadelphia debated the final wording of the Declaration of Independence, on July 3, 1776, the people of Boston declared their independence from smallpox. Fearing further outbreaks, the Massachusetts legislature voted to once again shut down the entire city for a general inoculation.

The people of Boston cheered the news. Ezekiel Price, a local businessman and court official, declared on July 4: “Liberty given for to inoculate for the small-pox; many begin upon it this afternoon.”

Abigail Adams took her four children to her uncle’s house to inoculate with the families of her two sisters. Guardhouses were built to warn anyone entering the city of the presence of smallpox and to prevent anyone from leaving the city during the general inoculation without a certificate from a doctor.

On July 18, 1776, Col. Thomas Crafts read the Declaration of Independence for the first time to the people of Boston from the balcony of the State House. Abigail Adams joined the “multitude into King Street to hear the proclamation.” The assembled crowd was composed of recently inoculated Bostonians and those with previous immunity who had stayed behind to take care of the rest. . . .

Boston’s “freedom summer” ended on Sept. 18, 1776, when the city ordered the guardhouses closed and the city to reopen for business. Although statistics were not immediately published, 20 years later, Thomas Pemberton, a businessman and member of the newly founded Massachusetts Historical Society, compiled the numbers. In the summer of 1776, Boston saw 29 deaths from 304 cases of natural smallpox. By contrast, only 28 deaths were reported with 4,988 Bostonians inoculated. Ninety percent of Boston’s nonimmune population was inoculated, saving hundreds of lives.

The implications for how our population should respond today are obvious. Some choose to reject them.

“A Well Regulated Militia” at Fort Ticonderoga

Fort Ticonderoga has just opened an exhibit titled “A Well Regulated Militia: Citizen, Soldier, and State.”

The museum’s description says:

The militia, one of the most important institutions of American life for centuries, is today almost totally absent from American life. Throughout colonial and early national America, the militia formed the largest and often only means of defense. Regular military forces did not appear regularly until British regulars arrived during the French and Indian War, and even after the creation of the Continental and late[r] US Army, militia forces greatly outnumbered them.

For much of American history, the militia was thought to be more useful and more virtuous. Formed of the people themselves the militia represented the power of citizens that underlay the creation of the American Republic. Obligatory participation in the militia provided citizens with a means of defense and a critical role in the institutions of the state.

At its peak, the militia may have comprised as much as 10% of the US population, compared to well under 1% of the population serving in the National Guard today (the descendant of the militia).

This new exhibit explores this often misunderstood institution from its formation in the colonial period through its decline in the early 19th century. Despite being central to debates over the Constitution and American identity, the militia never truly represented all of “the people” and had a mixed record in military campaigns throughout our history.

Learning about the development of the American militia allows us to go beyond battles and campaigns and reflect on what our nation values, the obligations and benefits of citizenship, and who participates in American society.

From the photographs on the exhibit webpage, it seems to include a lot of nineteenth-century militia uniforms. As handsome as those are, I think it’s crucial to recognize that the essence of the Revolutionary-era militia was that it did not require uniforms.

Officers and companies that drew from the upper class, such as the Company of Cadets in Boston, could afford special matched outfits, and they certainly provided a more showy and military experience at drills and parades. But the strength of the militia was how it drew on nearly every able man in society, meaning mostly farmers and artisans. They were expected to come dressed as they were.

Militia service also had a social function. As I discuss in The Road to Concord, the local company was a community institution and potentially a ladder of class mobility. In nineteenth-century cities, militia companies became increasingly like social clubs, with less connection to either military preparation or government control.

By the late 1800s, for example, the organizational descendant of the Company of Cadets was known for its fundraising theatricals, and those theatricals were known for their cross-dressing men. (See Anne Alison Barnet’s Extravaganza King.) Even by the standards of nineteenth-century militia uniforms, that was showy.

“Equal Suffrage in the Senate”

When people discuss the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College, the conversation often leads on to the U.S. Senate.

After all, one way the Electoral College distorts our votes derives from how each state has two U.S. Senators and the electors were originally a shadow version of the entire Congress, both House and Senate. The result is disproportionately large representation in the Electoral College for voters who live in small-population states.

Of course, small-population states have even more disproportionate power in the Senate, which has approval power over major Presidential appointments, judges, and (with a two-thirds supermajority) treaties.

Equal representation for each state in the Senate was part of the compromise at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that convinced small states to give up their even more disproportionate power under the Articles of Confederation. It was a product of that historic moment.

Historians can point out that in 1790 the most populous state, Virginia, contained 748,000 people, or 631,000 as calculated by counting enslaved people as only three-fifths of a person, while Delaware had 59,000 or 55,000 people. The largest state was thus only about twelve times bigger than the smallest. Despite small states having disproportionate sway, Virginia, home of four of the first five Presidents, still managed to exercise a lot of political power.

In contrast, today the most populous state, California, is more than 67 times larger than the least populous, Wyoming. Despite being only 1.5% the size of California, Wyoming has 5.5% of the larger state’s weight in the Electoral College and 100% of its weight in the Senate.

Our incoming Senate is split down the middle in terms of political party, with fifty Republicans on one side and fifty Democrats and independents caucusing on the other. Yet the Democratic side represents 41 million more of us people—equivalent to the entire population of Argentina. 

I think there’s an argument to be made that we citizens are served by having some of our national representation determined by state boundaries. Because of differing laws, each state’s population does end up being an interest group in itself. But as to whether the Dakotas (combined population 1.7 million) should have twice the Senate power as Illinois (population 12.6 million), that’s hard to justify except on the basis of inertia.

Since the Constitution requires three-fourths of the states to approve amendments, it would be hard to change the Electoral College by re-amending Amendment 12. (That’s why the National Popular Vote Compact appears to be the most promising way to reform the system, asking state legislatures to make the decision and stick to it.)

Changing the makeup of the Senate, however, would be even harder—well nigh impossible. That’s because of a usually overlooked clause at the end of Article V of the Constitution:

…no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

Changing the design of the U.S. Senate would thus not only require a supermajority of states, as with an amendment, but complete unanimity. This is the only surviving exception to the amendment process. (The other was forbidding any attempt to limit the slave trade until 1807.)

It would probably be easier for the very large states to split into smaller ones, each having two Senate seats.

(The picture above, courtesy of Wired, is a British map of North America from 1741. Europeans still thought California was an island.)