Replaying the Revolutionary War with Twenty-Sided Dice

This month I noticed a Kickstarter page for a table-top role-playing game called “Nations & Cannons: The American Crisis,” set during the Revolutionary War.

The crowdfunding campaign by Flagbearer Games is well over its target goal, but there are still a few days to sign up for different rewards.

I confess I’ve found Dungeons and Dragons mystifying ever since I saw another kid at summer camp surreptitiously pirating an entire manual on the office photocopier. In high school some friends played the game, but they invited me along only once (I made some unorthodox suggestion about stealing armor, as I recall).

All that means is that I have no idea what this jargon means:

Nations & Cannons is a complete historical campaign setting for D&D 5e, equipped with a brand new base class, the Firebrand, and six new subclass options for the core classes. It also includes new character creation options for a game where everyone is human. Roles, such as Officer, Scout, and Pioneer, mechanically replace the fantasy races. Heritages, such as Québécois, Colonial, and Haudenosaunee, determine your cultural background and provide an opportunity to showcase all of the different peoples and languages spoken in North America in the 1700s. Last, but certainly not least, Nations & Cannons comes with complete rules for black powder firearms, grenades, and of course, cannons! . . .

Nations & Cannons replaces spells with Gambits—extraordinary acts of ingenuity, guile, or gumption. Gambits function identically to spellcasting so that they are compatible with games that use traditional magic rules for 5e. While there aren't any Wizards, Rangers and Firebrands are casters that use gambits to create dynamic moments in combat, while exploring, or in a social encounter.

But I’m sure there are people happily in the intersection of T.T.R.P.G. and RevWar hobbies.

And the cloth hanging of Henry Pelham’s map of the siege of Boston is very tempting.

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.

“Very silly questions very foolishly answered”

At All Things Georgian, Sarah Murden has shared some amusing extracts (part 1 and part 2) from a 1759 book titled The Gentleman and Lady of Pleasure’s Amusement: In eighty-eight questions, with their answers, on love and gallantry.

Murden likens the book’s format to “agony aunt” letters or, as we in the U.S. of A. call them, advice columns. The extracts cover such topics as unexpected pregnancy, being in love with two sisters, whether to read a spouse’s mail, and what gender the Devil is.

The snarkiness of the queries and replies got me curious enough to look for an online copy of this book to verify its existence. The postings did appear around 1 April, after all.

I failed to find one, reflecting how few copies of The Gentleman and Lady of Pleasure’s Amusement made their way to and stayed in university libraries. (Harvard has a copy that was never digitized by Google Books. Another is at the University of Pennsylvania, donated by Prof. John C. Mendenhall.)

I did find an assessment of the book in The Critical Review, Or, Annals of Literature, edited by Tobias Smollett. The questions and answers were printed along with a couple of equally risqué novellas called The Adventures of Sophia and The History of Frederick and Caroline. The reviewer sniffed:

The first and larger part of this curious performance is, it seems, a hachis [i.e., hash] from the Athenian oracle, consisting of very silly questions very foolishly answered. Of these we shall say nothing further than that our author does by no means seem qualified to reanimate the dead. We might observe, that the Athenian oracle is not only silent and dead, but damned likewise: for that reason, perhaps, it is deprived of rest, and walks—But, a word to the wise, de mortuis nil nisi bonum [don’t speak ill of the dead].

Another magazine, the Monthly Review, said straight out that those questions and answers were “Purloin’d, as the purloiner indeed honestly confesses from two old dull books called the Athenian Oracle and the British Apollo.” The first of those books was in print by 1703, the second by 1726. Together they came in several volumes and promised more than “two thousand answers to curious questions.”

The Monthly Review evidently thought the content of The Gentleman and Lady of Pleasure’s Amusement came out of those earlier books, but my test samples didn’t find any overlap. So it’s possible that the later book was a parody, or hash, of the established genre with a more modern attitude.

The Critical Review’s critical review of the novellas was:

The latter part, which, if we may believe the editor, contains two genuine stories, is a heap of dull absurdities, without invention, humour, or probability. In the first dialogue, a woman of the town relates to her companion, as how she was debauched by the master of a ship, married to a Spaniard who lived at La Vera Cruz not far from Acapulco, shipwrecked upon a desolate island in the South Sea, which proved to be the seat of a powerful empire, ravished by an Indian, promoted to the rank of favourite sultana to the emperor, afterwards wedded to a nobleman of that country, and finally found by accident and brought back to England in a ship commanded by the same man who had deprived her of her virginity.

The second story relates to a young gentleman who met with his own sister as a lady of pleasure, and did not recognize her until they had passed the night together. The sister drowned herself in despair: the brother lost his wits, and the author has none to lose——Judge then if this production is worth three shillings.

This item appeared in the December 1758 issue of the Critical Review. Likewise, the Monthly Review notice was in the November issue. Since The Gentleman and Lady of Pleasure’s Amusement is evidently dated 1759, the printers must either have slipped an advance copy to the magazines or had such success that they quickly issued a second edition.

Colonial Comics “make history come alive in a potent time”

For the School Library Journal website, Johanna Draper Carlson reviewed the second volume of Colonial Comics: New England, focusing on the years 1750 to 1775.

Carlson wrote:

This anthology of 18 historical comic stories aims “to focus on the people and events that tend to get ignored in American history classes.” It’s an admirable goal, and one that succeeds, opening readers’ eyes to lesser-known but involving figures and events.

Stories such as

• “The Devil and Silence Dogood”, by J.L. Bell and Braden Lamb, humorously shows Benjamin Franklin’s early days as a printer’s devil (apprentice) and writer of satire
• “A Lonely Line”, by Sarah Winifred Searle and Carey Pietsch, introduces Molly Ockett, a Native American and Maine legend known for her knowledge of medicine
• “The Newport Riots”, by James Maddox and Rob Dumo, portrays the coming changes and public protest from the scared perspective of crown officials
• “The Grand Illumination”, by Kevin Cooney and Matt Dembicki, illustrates how it’s possible to tweak authority while pretending to honor it in the light of the repeal of the Stamp Act
• “The Stranger’s Corpse”, by J.L. Bell and Jesse Lonergan, tells of the first American casualty during the Boston Massacre
• “The Spunker Club”, by Lora Innes, digresses from politics to look at the mishaps of a group of Harvard medical students trying to option a corpse for their studies
• “Join, or Die!”, by Josh O’Neill and James Comey, sheds light on the first, best-known American political cartoon

bring to life the period and make history come alive in a potent time of pending rebellion. Coincidentally, it’s a particularly timely period in analogy, as debates continue today around whose voice should count in determining the future and politics of the country.

These stories encourage empathy with a variety of viewpoints, as we see and follow lives, whether humorous or tragic. Each story has a text introduction to put them into context and explain any background needed, which aids in comprehension and understanding why the story was selected.

You may have noticed my name a couple of times in there. I scripted two of those stories for some great Massachusetts artists, and contributed research and editorial input on other stories.

Putting Down Rebels

The first ten issues of the Rebels comic book have been collected in a single volume from Dark Horse.

The series was conceived and scripted by Brian Wood on the model of his Northlanders series about Vikings: a variety of stories—different characters, different points of view, different lengths—all drawn one from extended historical conflict.

Most of this volume consists of a story titled “A Well-Regulated Militia,” illustrated by Andrea Mutti; it tracks a soldier from Vermont through the war. Then come much shorter stories following two women, a Native American, a British soldier, and (as seen through the eyes of the hero of “A Well-Regulated Militia”) a black Loyalist; each of those stories has art from a different artist.

I looked at the first issue of Rebels back in August 2015. I hoped the comic’s depiction of Revolutionary events would improve. It didn’t.

In a word, the historical content of this book is godawful. Wood presents such events as the conflict over land grants in Westminster, Vermont; the mission to bring heavy cannon from Lake Champlain to Boston; and the battles of Bunker Hill, Harlem Heights, Saratoga, Cowpens, and more. He mixes real people in with his original characters. But very little is accurate.

The errors aren’t at the level of “The author hasn’t read the latest scholarship” or “He hasn’t read Don Hagist’s guest posting about Pvt. Mathew Kilroy leaving the British army in 1776.” They’re more like “He didn’t bother to check Wikipedia for basic information.” Or if he did, he ignored it.

For example, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys fight at the Battle of Bunker Hill, with Gen. George Washington and Benedict Arnold nearby. Henry Knox heads out to Fort Ticonderoga in the summer of 1775, already a major general. A sergeant, not an officer, commands an artillery company. The Continental Navy flag of late 1775 (the “Grand Union Flag”) flies over a British fort in the Ohio Valley in 1755. Every long firearm is called a “rifle.”

Many errors reveal not just carelessness but basic misunderstandings about the Revolutionary conflict and the society in which it took place. Sometimes those arise from old nationalist assumptions. Thus, we see army regulars getting involved in real-estate disputes in the New England backcountry. The one British soldier we meet in depth is forced to enlist to avoid prison. Sometimes the problems grow out of modern inclusive preferences, not acknowledging how different society was. A woman of color owns a printing press in Boston, operates it entirely on her own, and posts anti-Stamp Act placards years after the Stamp Act has been repealed—which causes the British army to lock her up in Connecticut’s New-Gate Prison. And some errors are just plain errors: U.S. military officers interview people about government pensions instead of distant civil bureaucrats making the decision as they almost always have.

The art is quite good, in a range of realistic styles. Wood often gives the artists free rein for dramatic pages, sometimes wordless. But there are visual anachronisms blazing on every spread. Eighteenth-century British-American men appear with sculpted beards, mustaches, and sideburns. Women wear modern hairstyles and no caps. Civilians often appear in nineteenth-century clothing. Mounted hussars with tall, furry caps charge up Breed’s Hill. An 1802 dining room features furniture, fenestration, and houseplants out of the 1980s.

Even forcing myself to read this collection as stories from another universe, not rooted in Revolutionary history, left me unimpressed. In the first episode the hero and his father shoot at a group of redcoats. One teenager in uniform makes the choice to desert and ends up part of the hero’s family—but we’re just told about that change in a caption. We never see that character make a decision. We never see the family decide to take him in. And we never see major consequences from that arrangement—the character and the potential drama fall away.

A second volume of the Rebels series is slated for next year, following the son of the hero of “A Well-Regulated Militia” through the naval conflicts of the early republic. At this point, I don’t expect much better.

“On the floating zephyrs of heaven”

When we left off the 1859 book Twelve Messages from the Spirit of John Quincy Adams, the spiritual medium Joseph Stiles had just channeled Adams’s meeting in the afterlife with George Washington.

Washington’s presence leads to another discussion of the evils of slavery. The spirit of Charles Follen, Harvard professor and abolitionist, joins in.

Having brought on Washington, where could the book go next? The next message puts Adams back into conversation with the spirit of Peter Whitney. Who? He was a minister in the Adamses’ home town of Quincy from 1800 to 1843. The two longtime acquaintances have a longer discussion about the spiritual world. A much longer discussion.

Message XI then shows us jubilant freed slaves, Jesus forgiving Judas, and James Monroe—which seems like a bit of an anticlimax.

The spirits divide into four groups. The leaders of the first three groups are, naturally, Josephine, Joan of Arc, and Napoleon. Adams says, “The Commander of the Fourth Division now arrests my attention. He was an intelligence. of invincible will and firmness, yet ever yielding when convinced he was in the wrong”—Thomas Paine!

Adams praises his mother, recalling how they watched the smoke from the burning of Charlestown in 1775. Abigail responds at equal length, describing how America needs good mothers.

Finally we reach the twelfth message. It starts with a look at “The Sphere of Prejudice and Error,” which includes “The Circle of Intolerance,” “The Circle of Bigotry,” and so on. The people who carried out what the book calls the “Massacre of St. Bartholomew” are there, for instance. Reflecting a deep misunderstanding of Islam, Muslims are in “The Circle of Idolatry,” though “the once partially inspired Spirit of the Prophet Mohammed had long since unfolded into the blessed Religion of the Only True God,—the Ever-living Jehovah.” And thus we conquer intolerance and bigotry.

But there’s still more to learn.

Helping Franklin to produce the defecated electricity are Isaac Newton and other scientists. They feed its charge to a circle of Native Americans including Samoset, Osceola, and Pocahontas.

Adams then turns back down to visit George Jeffreys, Lord Chancellor during the “Bloody Assizes” of the 1680s. We read another critique of the Fugitive Slave Act. Adams sees the martyr Jane Grey leading spirits to enlightenment. He describes welcoming “Calhoun, Clay, and Webster” to the afterlife. And after checking off all those boxes the former President offers readers a closing exhortation:

Ye who are travelling the ways of darkness, come forward, and aid us to start this Juggernaut of Truth on its glorious march of victory, until the Demon of Error, and its hideous children, Ignorance, Superstition and Bigotry, are crushed out of existence, beneath the ceaseless rotations of its ponderous wheels!

But that’s still not all! Just as Stiles finished writing Adams’s last message, “another spirit…immediately took possession of his arm.” He wrote out a letter to Adams from another spirit in a different handwriting. This is none other than George Washington again, expressing regret at slavery:

I am aware that the holding of human beings in bondage was incompatible and at war with the mighty cause for which I was so vigorously contending. And gladly would I have rid myself of this incubus to my happiness,—this source of deep mental anxiety. But the strong prejudices of that age were not easily surmounted, and they wound around me a fortress which my better feelings and impulses could not then storm.

After Adams’s brief reply, Stiles wrote out the signatures of “five hundred and forty individuals,” all in different handwritings and some in unintelligible scribbles so we know they must come from ancient cultures. And anyone who can write out five hundred different people’s signatures has got to be trustworthy.

Now it turns out that the notebooks in which Stiles originally wrote all this out survive in the Library of Congress. (To get there, by the way, they passed through the hands of Harry Houdini.) John Benedict Buescher has investigated those documents and shared his findings in this P.D.F. report.

Sadly, Buescher discovered that the text Stiles wrote under the influence of John Quincy Adams’s spirit is quite different from what was published. Material was moved around, shortened, lengthened, and reworded. Hancock, Henry, Warren, Arnold, and others originally made no appearances in Adams’s messages. So I’m sorry to say that the published book is not a reliable account of the afterlife.

Buescher also explored the reception for the book. William Lloyd Garrison, who actually gets a shout-out of praise from Adams’s spirit, responded with less than enthusiasm in The Liberator:

While, with unfeigned respect and good-will to Mr. Stiles…, we feel constrained to pronounce the claim set up for the spiritual origin of this work as preposterous and delusive, we are nevertheless highly gratified with its many excellent and fearless sentiments on the subject of slavery, war, the rights of woman, universal reform, and everlasting progression…

The Spiritual Telegraph, which we might expect to praise these revelations, stated:

We rather regard them as coming from that mid-region of dreams and phantasmagoria which is made up of the exuviae and odds and ends of all celestial, infernal and mundane spheres, agglomerated into mental and visual forms correspondent with the predominant associative spirit-thought and desire, and with the existing mediative susceptibilities.

And The Spiritual Age stated:

In fact, so markedly is the style throughout that of an uncultivated youth, and so different from what we should expect from the “Sage of Quincy,” the “Old Man Eloquent,” that it is difficult to believe he had any hand—or anything more than a hand—in it.

But then the Civil War broke out, and the parts of the book that warned of national division over slavery—particularly the parts said to come from Washington himself—gained new respect. “Had the people of this country been sufficiently enlightened to investigate these messages fairly, they would have seen that there was sufficient evidence that this warning really came from Washington,” wrote Joseph Rodes Buchanan in 1887.

Joseph Stiles went on to a long career as a performing medium. He died in Weymouth in 1897 at the age of sixty-nine.

The Afterlife of John Quincy Adams

There’s a pretty fierce competition for the strangest Revolution-related book that I’ve encountered this year, but one very strong competitor is Twelve Messages from the Spirit of John Quincy Adams, through Joseph D. Stiles, Medium, to Josiah Brigham, prepared for the press by Allen Putnam and published in Boston in 1859, eleven years after Adams’s death.

At the beginning of the book Brigham attested:

The messages contained in this book, coming from the immortal spirit of John Quincy Adams, were written out in manuscripts, at various times, at my house in Quincy, Mass., and at the house of my son-in-law, C. F. Baxter, Boston, during the last four years, through the hand of Joseph D. Stiles, medium, when in an entranced state, and who, at the time of writing them, was unconscious of what was being written.

The whole was written in an almost perfect fac-simile of that peculiar, tremulous handwriting of Mr. Adams in the last years of his earthly life,—a handwriting which probably no man living could, in his natural state of mind, so perfectly imitate, and which is wholly unlike the usual handwriting of the medium.

The writing of these messages in manuscript was commenced in August, 1854, and closed in March, 1857. The medium (in trance] commenced copying and revising them for publication about the first of April following, and finished in June, 1858, making some additions and some omissions.

So what did the spirit of John Quincy Adams have to say? The book explains that he has discovered a “Celestial Telegraph” which works as “a thin line of clarified electricity” extending from a “Spiritual Circle” and lets him visit Earth through various mediums. (Media?)

Other figures from the American Revolution show up in the book, rather like the Florentines whom Dante meets in Hell. None other than John Hancock welcomes Adams to the afterlife. John and Abigail Adams are pleased to see him as well but don’t say anything particularly parental at first—they must have moved beyond earthly concerns.

Then two more spirits appear “in full military costumes, similar to those worn by the soldiers during the Revolutionary War”—none of those white robes. One comes forward and turns out to be…Lafayette! Adams was President when Lafayette made his return tour of America in the 1820s, after all.

Adams gets to meet Christopher Columbus and “Americus Vespucius,” which leads to a long discussion of scientific discoveries, such as spiritualism. For example, “The so-called Salem Witchcraft” turns out to have been “the attempt of spirits to manifest their presences to earth’s children.” Too bad about the people who were hanged and crushed to death.

Back to Revolutionary celebrities: John André, “dressed, not in a flowing robe, but in a British uniform”! Joseph Warren! Patrick Henry! Benedict Arnold!

Benedict Arnold? “Desiring to eradicate, as far as possible, the sins of his mortal career, and to become a useful member of Celestial Society, he earnestly sought the instruction of Higher Minds, and other means necessary to insure happiness and a perfect unfoldmept of his spiritual faculties.” So this book offers hope for everyone.

And the sight of a repentant Arnold leads swiftly to a condemnation of “the Fugitive-Slave Bill” and what it says to people seeking freedom:

No! Massachusetts cannot give
The boon thy soul doth fondly crave;
The poor and panting fugitive
Must on her soil Remain a slave!

Her Bunker Hill, where patriot blood
In freedom’s cause was freely spent,
Cannot a shelter give to thee
Beneath its tow’ring monument!

There’s a lot of anti-slavery rhetoric in this book, and a lot of poetry, too. Which makes perfect sense, since John Quincy Adams did devote a lot of time to both activities.

After some mild adventures, Adams and Lafayette ascend higher, thus reaching the same sphere as “William Penn, Shakspeare, Mary Washington, Augustine Washington, Martha Washington, Hannah More, Felicia Hemans, Jane Grey, Josephine, Elizabeth Frye, John Howard, Peter Whitney.” Followed by “Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, William Henry Harrison, Benjamin Harrison, Israel Putnam.”

Then Napoleon, the Duke D’Enghein, Joan of Arc, Peter Melanchthon, William Ellery Channing, Confucius, François de Fenelon, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Elias, and, high above the others, Christ. Followed by Mary and Joseph.

But whom haven’t we heard from yet? Finally in the ninth message George Washington appears to speak to Adams—though their conversation gets interrupted by Martin Luther, of all people. Adams rhapsodizes about Washington:

Can any one doubt but that spirits from the immortal world sustained him through all the disheartening trials and almost unendurable sufferings of Valley Forge,—cheered his heart, and those of his desponding soldiers when they were so heroically laboring to release their dear native land from the clutches of a tyrannical potentate and his myrmidons?

Myrmidons including, you know, André.

TOMORROW: But wait, there’s more! We’re only up to Message IX.

Tom Feelings and Revolutionary Black History

I had the honor of meeting the artist Tom Feelings shortly before his death in 2003 when I drove him to a writers’ conference in New Hampshire.

Feelings was then speaking about his monumental book of drawings depicting the transatlantic slave trade, The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo. He had earlier illustrated such award-winning children’s books as To Be a Slave by Julius Lester and Moja Means One by Muriel Feelings.

Feelings’s career as an illustrator spanned nearly half a century. On returning from service in the Air Force in 1958, he created a comic strip for the New York Age, a Harlem weekly. At a time when mainstream American culture ignored almost all of African and African-American history, Tommy Traveler: In the World of Negro History put those stories in front of young black readers.

In 1991 Black Butterfly Books collected several series of Feelings’s strip, had them colored and relettered, and published them in picture-book form. The new title was Tommy Traveler in the World of Black History. That volume is now out of print, but some libraries still have copies.

Tommy is a young black boy who’s read all of his local library’s books on black history. The librarian sends him across town to Doctor Gray, who has an extensive library. Tommy starts reading, and “with his active imagination he quickly slides into another world,” ending up alongside various historical figures. Two stories in the Tommy Traveler collection take place during the American Revolution.

The strip began by taking Tommy to New York in 1776 for an eight-page story set at the Fraunces Tavern. In the mid-1900s there was a widespread belief that its proprietor, Samuel Fraunces, was of African descent. That was evidently based on his nickname, “Black Sam”; his birth in the Caribbean; and his work as a caterer. But at a time when black men were labeled “Negro” in legal documents, there’s no corroboration that Fraunces was black, and his portrait shows a pale man.

The story starts with Tommy meeting the tavern-keeper’s daughter, Phoebe. Again, there’s no evidence Samuel Fraunces had a daughter of that name. She first appeared in a story in the January 1876 Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, inspired by a tale that Benson J. Lossing had told sixteen years earlier. Thus, in depicting Samuel and Phoebe Fraunces as part of African-American history, Feelings was retelling a myth, but one that many earlier authors had already presented as true.

In Feelings’s version, Tommy sees that Phoebe has fallen in love with a soldier named Tom Hickey, a deserter from the British Army to the Continentals. Gen. George Washington is also staying at Fraunces’s inn (as in Lossing, but not in historical sources). Hickey gives Phoebe a poisoned pear to feed to the general, but—warned by Tommy—she knocks it out of the general’s hand just before he eats it. (Lossing wrote that the poison was in a dish of peas.) Hickey goes to the gallows, as his real-life equivalent did in 1776.

Later in this collection, Tommy travels to 1770 for a fourteen-page story. Working on a ship called the Romney, he meets Crispus Attucks. This black man turns out to be a political leader on the streets of Boston, calling meetings and announcing such things as: “Otis is right. Stand up and fight for your rights!” The crowd roars back, “Lead us and we’ll follow!”

Again, Feelings’s depiction reflects how the few African-American history books published at that time portrayed Attucks. They showed him as a leader of the crowd—which he was on the night of 5 Mar 1770, according to other men’s testimony, but which he probably wasn’t when it came to political organization. The comic strip doesn’t mention Attucks’s Native American heritage. Indeed, the character speaks of being “sold into slavery when I was just a young boy.”

Attucks’s protests against Crown taxes lead to a fight against mitred grenadiers. Captain Preston orders a soldier named Montgomery to capture “that tall, dark fellow” as the crowd’s leader. Instead, the soldiers fire their guns, killing Attucks and other men. Tommy identifies his friend by name to Lt. Gov. Hutchinson, adding, “His beliefs won’t ever die. Someday we will have our independence, someday…”

Other stories in this volume profile Aesop, Joe Louis, Frederick Douglass, and Emmet Till (killed only three or four years earlier). In the eighteenth-century tales, the clothing and hair styles (especially women’s) are a hodgepodge of past fashions rather than appropriate for the 1770s. The stories are dreadfully didactic. As for the art, Feelings was talented but not yet practiced. All in all, Tommy Traveller is interesting as a period piece—a snapshot from early in the modern civil-rights era of how African-Americans were making their rightful claim to have been part of western civilization all along.

About a decade after Tommy Traveler ran its course, Feelings returned to the story of Crispus Attucks in the comic book Golden Legacy. Bertram Fitzgerald developed that series, he stated, to “implant pride and self-esteem in Negro youth while dispelling myths in others.” The third issue is titled “Crispus Attucks and the Minutemen.” (Other issues cover Toussaint L’Ouverture, Benjamin Banneker, and figures from other historical eras.) Reprints are still available. I haven’t seen the Attucks issue, but I assume it reflects the same understanding of the Boston Massacre as in Tommy Traveler.

In depicting African-American history, Feelings’s masterpiece remains The Middle Passage.

Wheatley and Attucks “Against All Odds” Advertisements

On his Black Quotidian website, Matt Delmont shares material from African-American newspapers—the news stories, opinion pieces, and advertisements that black Americans in larger cities were reading in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Earlier this week the site featured a comics-style advertisement for Black and White Ointment and Skin Soap from the 17 Sept 1938 Pittsburgh Courier. That ad featured the Boston poet Phillis Wheatley—shown as a little girl coming of a slave ship at left.

Another ad in the same “Against All Odds” campaign highlighted Crispus Attucks, shot and killed at the Boston Massacre. It looks like twelve such pages might have been combined to create the Against All Odds booklet one could buy with three Black and White Beauty Creations labels and 25¢. I haven’t found any trace of that booklet today.

I can pick holes in the history that both ads relate. Wheatley didn’t meet King George III or, as far as the contemporaneous evidence tells us, Gen. George Washington. (But she did meet the Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the colonies, and Washington did invite her to visit him at Cambridge.)

Likewise, no witness spoke of Attucks making a “speech” that incited opposition to the British troops on 5 Mar 1770, though he was at the front of the crowd that confronted the soldiers on King Street.

Still, these ads are valuable evidence of how the memory of Wheatley and Attucks was preserved and shaped in popular culture—not just in schoolbooks and formal histories but also in commercial communications. At a time when mainstream America was openly hostile to citizens of African ancestry, they upheld the memory of “the terrible ‘Middle Passage’” and of blacks’ role in the nation’s origin.

The Adventures of the Two Boston Cannon?

The last book I’ll highlight in this stretch of postings is no longer available in stores but can be read online—not that I recommend that.

In 1894 Rhode Island native Hezekiah Butterworth published The Patriot Schoolmaster; or, The Adventures of the Two Boston Cannon, the “Adams” and “Hancock”: A Tale of the Minute Men and the Sons of Liberty. The book included a few illustrations by H. Winthrop Peirce of Andover.

The Patriot Schoolmaster is historical fiction for young readers, and not very good at that. As the extended subtitle might suggest, Butterworth tried to cram every tradition of Revolutionary Boston into the book, and the result is a mishmash of events that never coheres into a plot.

On top of that, Butterworth kept breaking off from what little story there is to fill us in on the history, or future, of his characters, sometimes quoting long passages from his source material. One begins to suspect he was being paid by the word and never reread what he’d written.

The young hero, Allie Fayreweather, starts out as “about twelve years old,” but he seems younger, or stupid. The date of the opening action is “Saturday, September 27, 1768.” The novel lasts until Continental troops march into Boston, or six and a half years later. And Allie never seems to get older or smarter.

Most other characters are types reflecting the age when the book was written. It starts with Samuel Adams’s enslaved maid Surry speaking in broad dialect, and she remains a major character. Later Phillis Wheatley appears, better spoken but deferential and totally starstruck by Gen. Washington. The villain is a pompous, violent Tory named Dr. Oliver. Curiously, the title character plays a minor role. Instead, Samuel Adams is the anchor of the action, with his dog Queue and fictional young Allie trotting after him.

You might wonder why I mention The Patriot Schoolmaster at all. This book shows how the story of “the Two Boston Cannon, the ‘Adams’ and the ‘Hancock’” was a standard part of Boston’s Revolutionary narrative in 1894. To be sure, the novel gets nearly every detail of that narrative wrong. But for New England children of the turn of the last century, the legend of those cannon was as familiar as Paul Revere’s ride is to us now. Yet by the time of the Bicentennial, when I was growing up, that story was unknown.

My new book, The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War, aims to change that. But with sources more reliable than The Patriot Schoolmaster. I’ll be speaking about that history at the Massachusetts Historical Society on Thursday.

Marek Bennett Makes Sense of Money

These panels are from a short comic by the New Hampshire artist and educator Marek Bennett, looking at the dollars that the town of Henniker had to spend on a covered bridge late in the Revolutionary War.

Bennett mines the records of his town and others nearby and adapts their stories into comics form. As another example you can read online, he adapted Elisha Haynes’s application for a Revolutionary War pension. The comic captures that sort of document as well as anything I’ve read: the go-here-go-there nature of military service, the aged veteran deciding to seek public assistance, the meager property he had left (perhaps after giving some away to relatives).

Bennett’s Live Free and Draw website offers several more historical comics, most based on events in the 1800s.

This spring I enjoyed Bennett‘s new book The Civil War Diary of Freeman Colby, adapted in the same visual style as in the panels above. You can sample pages here on that site and order the book from here.

As with George O’Connor’s Journey into Mohawk Country (discussed back here), the words on the page adhere very closely to the source material. The images fill out, comment on, or even (as in this page) undercut those words.

Colby’s document is mainly a record of Union Army camp and hospital life. When he finally got into battle, he apparently became too busy to keep journaling in such detail. And Bennett sticks to the source, not adding extra battles for the sake of drama.

As for that visual style, Bennett doesn’t always draw stick figures. But when he does, they’re emotive and easy to tell apart. (In Freeman Colby, all the Massachusetts men in Colby’s company have square heads to distinguish them from his New Hampshire chums.) That style makes Freeman Colby good teaching material since every kid can draw a story like that, and indeed Bennett offers school workshops.

As if that’s not talent enough, Bennett is also a musician, performing Civil War folk music in the Hardtacks.

Hannah Adams, Comic Book Heroine

The Massachusetts historian and author Hannah Adams (1755-1831) made an appearance in Wonder Woman, #28, published in 1946. She was the focus of a backup feature called “The Wonder Women of History,” and here it is.

Furthermore, it looks like the same story features a cameo by an (unrecognizable and anachronistically dressed) Dr. John Jeffries. His balloon trip across the English Channel might deserve a comics treatment of its own.

Two New Pre-Revolutionary Comics to Choose Between

Tea Party: An American Story is a webcomic from Sam Machado, Cynthia “Theamat” Sousa, and Amanda Sousa Machado, signing themselves as TAS.

It’s one of the most scrupulous fictional depictions of pre-Revolutionary Boston that I’ve seen. As a measure of the level of detail, in episode 6 the Samuel Adams household includes Surry, Job, and Queue. Episode 2 shows Benjamin Burdick tending bar at the Green Dragon Tavern (or, as he advertised it, the Freemason’s Arms).

As a result, there’s not much action in the story. So far it’s shown the Boston Whigs talking seriously about the political issues of the day, largely in the terms of the time. The court party hasn’t shown up yet, limiting the conflict to the frictions internal to those activists and their families. But eventually we’ll move from the judicial salaries issue to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s letters to the tea.

On the other end of the comics spectrum, Dark Horse has issued the first issue of The Order of the Forge, written by Victor Gischler and illustrated by Tazio Bettin. The company’s summary:

Before he fathered a nation, young George Washington forged his legend in blood! Imbued with the mystical powers of America’s original inhabitants, George—along with his friends Ben Franklin and Paul Revere—must stop an evil governor who wishes to rule an empire!

The sell line is supposedly in young Washington’s words: “I cannot tell a lie. I f**king hate zombies.” That’s him with his little hatchet on Juan Ferreyra’s cover.

Rebels Writer in Bellingham, 11 Apr.

On Saturday, 11 April, Friendly Neighborhood Comics in Bellingham will host a signing by Brian Wood, writer and co-creator of the new comic book series Rebels, set during the Revolutionary War.

Wood has written many types of comics, including the franchises X-Men, Conan the Barbarian, and Star Wars and such originals as DMZ. The antecedent for this magazine is Northlanders, in which he told stories of Vikings from different periods in European history. Rebels will likewise be a series of adventures, not necessarily connected, about the Revolutionary War.

The store sent me an “ashcan” preview of twelve pages from the first issue. The draftsmanship by Andrea Mutti and coloring by Jordie Bellaire are top-notch. Unfortunately, Mutti didn’t draw late-eighteenth-century faces and clothing. There are great gobs of facial hair on the men, and no stays or caps on the women.

Likewise, the historical grounding for the story is shaky. Wood is a Vermont native, so it’s natural for him to launch the series with a story from that part of America. But that story doesn’t come close to reflecting what actually happened. In a Previews interview, Wood said:

One phrase I came across early in my research is “America’s first militia,” which refers to the Green Mountain Boys, a pivotal group early in the war for independence. I think that’s a great hook, a way to tie history to current events, a way to look at both the present and the past. So much of current political maneuvering is justified by this history.

If we narrow the meaning of “militia” to how it appears in today’s American politics, for a self-selected group of men running around the woods with guns and questionable legal papers because they feel disempowered by the society around them, then yes, the Green Mountain Boys could be the “first militia.” But if we use that term historically, then we should say that America had militias from the start of British settlement. They were an institution in colonial society, established by law, officially answering to governors and functioning as arms of the community.

The story in Rebels, #1, starts with the hero’s heavily bearded father making him shoot at British regulars in the Vermont woods in 1768. That didn’t happen. It couldn’t have happened because the Crown didn’t use its army to deal with the long, vexing dispute between its New York and New Hampshire colonies over the land west of the Connecticut River.

The scene then shifts to the confrontation at the courthouse in Westminter, Vermont, on 13 Mar 1775. That was a real scene of conflict between New York-appointed authorities and settlers who held grants from New Hampshire. The parish was politically split east and west. Men who opposed the New York government took over the courthouse. The sheriff and a judge read the Riot Act and then formed a posse from the population on their side to clear the building. The resulting violence killed two men inside the courthouse.

For centuries Vermonters have tried to tie that fracas in Westminster to the war that burst out in Massachusetts the next month. That’s tenuous but arguable. Contrary to how the Rebels comic depicts the scene, however, there were no redcoat troops involved. Nor was the Continental Congress discussing “separation from the Crown” in March 1775. Nor was Albany yet the capital of New York.

I’m hoping that future issues of Rebels are better grounded in Revolutionary history and material culture. There really is great narrative potential in the events of the War for Independence, stories that can be both accurate and fresh for comics readers.

Just One More History Comic

Adventure Comics, #296, from May 1962 featured a story titled “Benjamin Franklin’s Super-Reporter.” It was drawn by Al Plastino, and some fans think the script was by Bill Finger, best known for co-creating Batman.

The story, according to someone who’s actually read it:

When Jonathan, Clark, and Martha Kent see their picture in an American newspaper from Revolutionary War days with a headline that they perished during a party, Superboy takes all three of them back in time to what turns out to be a parallel universe in which they have an adventure with Ben Franklin and other heroes of the Revolution, and are presumed wrongly to have died during a fire at the Boston Tea Party.

You remember the fire at the Boston Tea Party, right? And how at the time that event occurred, Benjamin Franklin wasn’t in London watching his career implode?

The back of this comic book offered another Revolutionary diversion.

That is less than one penny per soldier! The thing is, these plastic soldiers were all small and thin, practically two-dimensional.

Revolutionary War Comic Coming in 2015

Last month the Nerdist website announced that in April 2015 Dark Horse Comics will launch the comic book Rebels, which “will explore the lives of soldiers, ordinary colonists, and the extraordinary men and women that lived and died during the Revolutionary War era.”

The series was conceived by scripter Brian Wood, and the art will come primarily from the Italian illustrator Andrea Mutti and American-Irish colorist Jordie Bellaire.

Wood created the series Northlanders, about Vikings, which Vertigo published from 2007 to 2012. The Nerdist says:

Wood has proven that he is no stranger to taking a piece of history, modern or ancient, and putting it under the microscope. When it came to tackling a new piece of historical fiction, it was a no-brainer that he wanted to shine a light on the American Revolution. “I’ve had the idea for AGES to write an Ethan Allen story,” Wood explained, “and I made a couple attempts at a screenplay trying to tell a very epic, visceral Ridley Scott type of story about the guy. I couldn’t quite figure it out but its been in the back of my head all this time.”

But Allen won’t be the main character for the whole series. Wood will follow the model of his Northlanders, which told a series of separate stories about different Vikings over the centuries. The scale of Rebels will be smaller, with all the tales set during America’s Revolutionary fight, but there will once again be a variety of characters and conflicts.

The Inaugural Issue of Action Presidents!

The first issue of the new Action Presidents! comic debuts today on ComiXology, and it naturally tackles the towering figure of the first President, George Washington.

This comic book comes from Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, the team behind Action Philosophers! and (a series I like even more) The Comic Book History of Comics. The Action Philosophers! series dissected the lives and ideas of famous thinkers in comic-book form, the tropes of superhero action often satirizing the subject matter. In contrast, some of the Action Presidents!, including Washington, really were quite active men.

Van Lente structures the story around Washington’s quest for self-control, at first for himself and then for the Continental Army and ultimately for the young U.S. of A. Washington undoubtedly had great ambitions, and he struggled to maintain the calm that his culture demanded of gentlemen.

As you see, Dunlavey’s approach to the art owes a lot to the satiric approach of the 1960s “underground” comics and Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History books. His undisciplined American soldiers, for example, look much like a certain trio of mid-20th-century movie comedians. Because Action Presidents! is being published first in digital form, we see Dunlavey’s art in color, not just black and white as in the previous series.

Naturally, a 20-page comic has to skip a lot of Washington’s life. Among the major aspects left behind was his support for a new Constitution in the late 1780s. Readers would never know from these pages that he chaired the Constitutional Convention, providing its product with far more legitimacy than if he had stayed home. Instead, the comic emphasizes Washington’s wish that someone else could lead the country and let him stay home at Mount Vernon—not that he ever suggested any other man take the job of first President.

The lower panel above shows one repeated lapse of the comic: facial hair on eighteenth-century American men. This is a common mistake among cartoonists trying to produce a variety of male faces in yore; at least Dunlavey’s style means no reader can take those portrayals as realistic.

The comic starts with Washington’s birth in Virginia’s slave-owning aristocracy, noting how upper-class his family was; it could have said more about how precarious his own perch in that upper class was after his father’s death. We see some of Washington’s challenges in the French and Indian War, though not what a grasping young man he was until he married Martha Custis. Overall, however, it does a good job of highlighting the tensions between Washington, the ideal gentleman he wanted to be, and the paragon that American culture has often portrayed him as.

The Action Presidents! narrative of the Revolutionary War is the standard popular American account: New York to Trenton, Valley Forge and the Fabian strategy, the French alliance and Yorktown. That of course leaves out a lot of events, including the Boston campaign, the loss of the nation’s capital in 1777, the long warfare outside New York, and the campaigns Washington oversaw from afar in the north and south. But again, Van Lente and Dunlavey have only twenty pages, and they still have to get to the Presidency.

In that Presidency, the comic focuses rather narrowly on Alexander Hamilton’s fiscal policy, the Whiskey Rebellion, and Washington’s personal response to that unrest. Again, many other aspects of the first administration go unexplored. But that series of episodes raises interesting questions about President Washington and how he interpreted his job. It fits well into the overall theme of this short and, to be sure, active biography.

“King George’s Stamp Act Tea”

This funny-pages version of the Boston Tea Party appeared in newspapers in 1904 and is reproduced in Peter Maresca’s new book Society Is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of The American Comic Strip 1895-1915.

It starts with King George giving his Stamp Act to Lord North, which prompts Boston housewives to break their teacups at Liberty Tree. And at the end the American eagle is born. Okay, that’s a historical hodgepodge, but at least the graphics are striking.

Maresca’s Sunday Press Books collects and reprints early comics at their original size, even larger than today’s newspapers (and much larger than today’s newspaper comics). In these early decades, editors and artists were still working out what to do with the form, so they were trying all sorts of things that look crazy to us today. The Atlantic offered some more previews of this collection.

Founding Boys, Before It Disappears

Founding Boys was a webcomic that ran from December 2010 to June 2012. It’s a mashup of Revolutionary American history, Japanese manga, British boarding-school stories, and the musical 1776.

Here, for instance, is a discussion between John Adams, who’s the allegorical school’s overly intense scholar, and Benjamin Franklin, who appears to be the grumpy teacher secretly in sympathy with the rebellious students.

Founding Boys ends abruptly as George Washington, the school’s big silent jock, steps over a spill of Delaware milk. But it’s still an impressive run considering the pseudonymous cartoonist was a high-school student all that time. A student who also won a national award for best high-school newspaper comic strip. And people say kids don’t care about history anymore.

William Cunningham Enters Stage Left

Boston 1775 isn’t the only website discussing William Cunningham this week. Lora Innes has introduced him into her historical romance comic, The Dreamer. One of the heroes of that story is Connecticut hero Nathan Hale, and his real encounter with Cunningham didn’t end well for him.

Fans responded to the debunking of Cunningham’s “Dying Confesssion” this way:

• Caera: “Please don’t tell me he got off after all the crap he put everyone though, to say nothing of our dearest Nathan!”
• Susan: “Wait he wasn’t hanged? WHY DID THE INTERNET LIE TO ME!!!!!!!!!!”
• David: “I smell a conspiracy here. SOMETHING kept the British authorities from doing the right thing and removing Cunningham from his position.”

And people say that modern audiences can’t get passionate about a story from the Revolutionary era.

There are now two paperback volumes of The Dreamer published, as well as several digital short stories at the comic’s webstore. And since it began as a webcomic, you can start reading the story from the beginning for free.