Back at George Washington High

Last month I wrote about the controversy over murals at George Washington High School in San Francisco.

Those murals, painted by Victor Arnautoff as a New Deal project, depicted the life of George Washington without hagiography. Arnautoff devoted space to the oppression of slavery and the human cost of westward expansion. But showing subservient African-Americans and dead Native Americans raised objections from some students in the 1960s and today.

This spring, the San Francisco Board of Education voted unanimously to budget $600,000 to permanently conceal the murals, most likely with a new coat of paint. People thought that money would cover an environmental study of the plan, the work itself, and anticipated legal battles.

News of the decision attracted attention across the country. The school was opened for public viewing this summer. Many artistic figures joined local preservationists and alumni in opposing the decision. Some fans of the murals started to organize a public vote to keep them. The board president and vice president defended their decision to, in their words, do away with “art that for more than 80 years has traumatized students.” There were few additional voices for removing the murals, however.

This month, the San Francisco school board took a second vote. By the slight margin of 4–3, they decided “to obscure the art with panels or similar materials rather than painting over it.” That would allow the panels to be taken off at some future time. Back in the spring, this remedy was expected to cost much more than the painting, but quite possibly the board had come to anticipate more legal costs.

Or perhaps the first vote was a strategy to test the fervency of the two sides. The Board of Education’s president controls its agenda. The San Francisco Chronicle quoted the current president saying he “always supported obscuring the mural rather than destroying it, although he voted to paint over it in June.” He doesn’t plan to allow a third vote during his term, which ends in December.

The school year will start soon. Given how municipal contracts work, I have no sense of how quickly the project of covering the murals will progress. At some point the board will choose its next president, and in 2020 the city’s voting public will elect a new Board of Education. The referendum on the murals appears to be still up in the air. This whole controversy could rise again—or quietly subside for another few decades.

“The Shool Book of David Kingsley of Rehoboth”

Last month the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton highlighted the work of a boy from Massachusetts by showing pages from a school copybook in its collection.

The library’s blog said:

It was made by a David Kingsley of Rehoboth, Bristol County, Massachusetts between 1797 and 1799. Much of the contents consist of proverbs, precepts, and sets of words copied out doggedly line after line after line after line. David signed every single page, one, two, three, or four times, usually in different places, perhaps at his teacher’s bidding.

Indeed, copying out maxims was the way children learned handwriting that would be useful in business. Signing one’s name was also a good skill, but I think schoolboys did that so often because they had so little property they could claim.

David Kingsley’s name doesn’t appear in the published vital records of Rehoboth. I suspect the reason is because his family were Baptists. His father, also named David (1737-1830), was clerk and deacon of the meeting over in Swansea, as was his father before him.

The David Kingsley who’s the right generation for this copybook died on 31 Dec 1866, and his gravestone says he was aged 83. That would mean he was born in 1783 and thus between fourteen and sixteen when he wrote in that copybook. (Some online sources say he was born in 1782, but I don’t see the authority for that.)

Like his father, that David Kingsley became a long-lived deacon at the Baptist church. He also married three times, in 1804, 1823, and 1833. One of his sons was also a deacon. I can’t find out what profession Kingsley followed.

The library thought the page spread above is the only one in the book that reflects David’s own interests as opposed to his school assignments:

Snaking down the left-hand margin is “David Kingsley made this house.” David’s source of inspiration came from somewhere other than the facing text on the comparisons of measures and a practice word problem. Nor does the copy below it have anything about houses: “Wonce more the year is now begun David Kingsley This Second day of January 1799 the Shool Book of David Kinglsey of Rehoboth February 11 day 1799.” . Perhaps it was supposed to be the home of the “gallant female sailor” the subject of the ballad written on the back of the leaf…

No, it’s definitely David’s own house. He put the start of his name on each door, one letter per triangular section.

Climbing the Walls at George Washington High

America’s conservative media recently went into a tizzy about the San Francisco school board’s decision to spend more than half a million dollars to install a large painting by a Communist artist showing how George Washington kept slaves and encouraged the theft of Native American lands.

No, wait that’s wrong. Right-wing pundits are criticizing the school board’s decision to remove that painting. As are some media voices on the left.

Let’s start again. The school board’s action was driven by the students at George Washington High School, most of whom are young people of color who on their school walls saw their ancestors being oppressed. Those young activists also demanded that the school’s name be changed so as not to perpetuate the honor for Washington.

No, that’s wrong, too. About two-thirds of the school’s students are Asian-American. I’ve seen no evidence of how the full student body feels about this effort. No one has formally proposed to change the school’s name.

I’d better start at the beginning. In 1936 San Francisco built a big new high school with Works Progress Administration money. That federal agency also paid the Russian-born artist Victor Arnautoff to paint thirteen mural panels in the main entrance hall and library. Twelve of those comprised a “Life of Washington.” In photos of the paintings, like the one above by Daniel Kim for the San Francisco Examiner, we can see how Arnautoff had to design around the vents in the walls.

Arnautoff didn’t recreate the usual Colonial Revival public hagiography of Washington. Though he had once fought for the royalist White Russian army, he had become a Communist. Arnautoff therefore chose to include images of Washington ordering around enslaved Africans and encouraging white Americans to migrate west, killing Native Americans in the process.

Arnautoff’s critical approach to the American Revolution produced some ironic details. For instance, his depiction of the Boston Massacre owes a lot to Alonzo Chappell’s painting of British soldiers backed into a defensive triangle by violent colonists—more royalist than rebel.

Decades passed. In 1955 Arnautoff caricatured Vice President Richard Nixon, and the House Un-American Activities Committee summoned him for questioning. Eight years later, he moved to the Soviet Union to live his final years.

Meanwhile, at George Washington High School, students were complaining about the limitations of Arnautoff’s work. Emphasizing Washington’s slaveholding meant portraying blacks only in servile roles. Black Panther activists protested by throwing ink on the paintings and gouging the plaster. As for the pictures of Natives, in 1968 a vice principal told the San Francisco Chronicle, “For years, the by-word has always been ‘I’ll meet you under the dead Indian.’”

That year the high school student body voted 61% to demand additional artwork reflecting “recognition of the great contributions of black people to the sciences and history.” In 1974 the young local artist Dewey Crumpler completed “Multi-Ethnic Heritage: Black, Asian, Native/Latin American,” an explicit response to Arnautoff’s “Life of Washington” nearby.

More decades passed. In 2017 a local preservationist organization proposed seeking landmark status for the high school, in part because of the murals. The school board declined to take that course, also in part because of the murals. Because now more people were criticizing that artwork on the grounds that the pictures created a poor learning environment for African-American and Native American students.

According to the New York Times in April, out of slightly more than 2,000 students at George Washington High School this year, there were 89 African-Americans and 4 Native Americans. Of course, being a small fraction of the student body might well make seeing visual reminders of oppression feel even more oppressive. Not many public high schools feature paintings of dead bodies, whatever political meaning they’re intended to have.

In February, the San Francisco United School District’s Reflection and Action Committee recommended that this summer the department digitally archive the “Life of Washington” and then cover it with white paint. This committee declared that the mural “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” Which of course is the opposite of what Arnautoff intended. But pre-WW2 American racism may have seeped into his depictions unwittingly, and the changing cultural context may have altered how the images come across.

(That committee also stated: “At Oak Park School in Illinois, the[y] covered a historic WPA mural with white paint because it lacked the racial diversity their school has.” In fact, that mural had been moved from another school, and was simply moved again. The George Washington High School murals, in contrast, are frescos permanently infused into the plaster of the walls.)

Various people have disagreed with the committee. Dewey Crumpler, the artist who created the “response” murals, is now a professor at the San Francisco Art Institute; he feels that removing the Arnautoff murals would render his own work in the school “irrelevant.” An English teacher at George Washington High School assigned 49 freshmen to write essays about the frescoes. Four favored removing them. Most felt as one student wrote: “The fresco is a warning and reminder of the fallibility of our hallowed leaders.”

This month the San Francisco Unified School District board voted to accept its committee’s recommendation and find a way to conceal the murals—permanently, according to the board’s vice chair. They budgeted $600,000 for the effort; even a seemingly simple solution like painting over the walls would require a costly environmental impact study and at least a year of planning.

That’s how we’ve reached this deeply ironic moment. A progressive school board is literally talking about whitewashing over George Washington’s faults while leaving his name enshrined on a school building. Media commentators who generally speak up for the historical value of Confederate statues are voicing the same arguments to save a Communist’s New Deal critique of early America.

I’d prefer to see an approach like the one Deerfield used to update its monument to the 1704 raid on the town—adding information rather than subtracting, showing how understandings change, providing a visible reminder of how we value all students today without obliterating how American culture hasn’t always done that.

Schoolmasters with the Initials “J.L.”

As quoted yesterday, in the summer of 1775 London newspapers reported that letters found on the body of Dr. Joseph Warren after the Battle of Bunker Hill implicated some people in Boston as “spies.”

The newspapers disagreed on how many letters the royal authorities had found on Warren’s body—three or six. I don’t believe the text of any letter survives. But those documents prompted the arrest of schoolteachers James Lovell and John Leach on 29 June, twelve days after the battle.

This article from the Essex Institute Historical Collections shows James Lovell writing to friends outside the siege lines throughout May and June. In a 10 May letter, Lovell even told Oliver Wendell about the dangers of sharing sensitive information:

You must however give us no State Matters; for ’tis but “you are the General’s Prisoner,” and whip! away to the Man of War; as is the Case of poor John Peck. I carry’d him Breakfast to the main Guard yesterday, and again this Morning but he was carry’d off last Evening and put on Board Ship. Inquisitorial this!

The royal authorities released John Peck in a prisoner exchange on 6 June. However, the heavy losses at Bunker Hill made the royal authorities far less forgiving.

Lovell was a strong Patriot, known for orating on the memory of the Boston Massacre back in 1771. On 3 May he told Wendell that he was trying to get his wife and children out of Boston, but

I shall tarry if 10 Sieges take place. I have determined it to be a Duty which I owe the Cause & the Friends of it, and am perfectly fearless of the Consequences. An ill Turn, a most violent Diarhea, from being too long in a damp place, has confirm’d Doctr. [Joseph? Silvester?] Gardners advice to me not to go into the Trenches, where my whole Soul lodges nightly. How then can I be more actively serviceable to the Friends who think with me, than by keeping disagreeable post among a Set of Villains who would willingly destroy what those Friends leave behind them.

Lovell was probably writing in a similar vein to Dr. Warren and perhaps indeed sending out information useful to the provincial military. He took elementary precautions. As Sam Forman notes and the E.I.H.C. article shows, Lovell already often signed his letters with just his initials. In addition, he asked Wendell to be sure to seal all their correspondence. But there was no protection for the documents that Dr. Warren chose to carry onto the battlefield.

As for John Leach, he appears to have been dragged into this situation simply because he had the same initials as Lovell. It’s also possible that the letters mentioned teaching school. Boston had three schoolteachers with the initials “J.L.” One, John Lovell of the South Latin School, was a staunch Loyalist. The other two got hauled off to jail.

Then Leach’s specialty as a teacher of navigation became a liability. Lovell taught Latin and Greek—hardly sensitive subjects. But royal officers found “Drawings” in Leach’s home when they arrested him. Those probably included detailed nautical maps and sketches of the harbor.

On 19 July, after three weeks in jail, the schoolteachers and other prisoners were taken into a military court presided over by Maj. Thomas Moncrieffe. According to Leach, the proceeding confirmed how little evidence the authorities had on them:

Till this Time we did not know our Crimes, on what account we were committed, but now we found Mr. Lovell was charged with “being a Spy, and giving intelligence to the Rebels.” And my charge, “being a spy, and suspected of taking plans.” When Capt. [Richard] Symmes appeared, he knew so little of us, that he called me Mr. Lovell; he knew so little of us, that instead of being a just Evidence [i.e., witness], he appeared ashamed and confounded, and went off.

Nevertheless, Leach wasn’t released until 3 October.

In late August, Lovell told a friend “that he expects to be out soon, tryumphant over his Enemies,” and was ready to give up “idlely schooling the children of a pack of Villains” in Boston. Instead, the royal authorities kept him locked up through the end of the siege and then carried him off to Halifax. Eventually he was exchanged.

Lovell never did go back to teaching school. Instead, he became a delegate to the Continental Congress, where he managed the correspondence with America’s diplomats—this time using a code.

“Masters Leach and Lovell were brought to prison”

On 29 June 1775, John Leach, a mariner in Boston’s North End, began to keep a journal. He started it out of anger because he had just been arrested by the British military authorities and he wanted to document what was happening to him.

Leach wrote:

Memorandums, began Thursday, June 29th, 1775.—At 3 this afternoon, a few steps from my House, I was seized upon by Major [Edward] Cane, of the Regulars, accompanied by one [Joshua] Loring, who is lately made a Sheriff: they obliged mo to return to my House, where Major Cane demanded my Keys of my Desks, and search’d all my Drawings, Writings, &c, and told me I had a great deal to answer for.

I replyed, it was very well, I stood ready at a minute’s warning to answer any accusation; I had a drawn Hanger, I could have took hold of in a moment, and cut them both down. I had both Courage and inclination to do it, tho’ they had each their swords by their sides, but I suddenly reflected, that I could not escape, as the whole Town was a prison. God wonderfully restrained me, as I should have lost my Life, either by them, or some of their Companions.

They then conducted me from my House to the Stone Gaol, and after being lodged there 20 minutes, the said Cane and Loring brought in Master James Lovell, after searching his Papers, Letters, &c. as they had done mine.

Cane carried my drawings to show Gen. [Thomas] Gage, next day, and returned them.

Leach’s diary was printed in the New England Historical and Genealogical Record in 1864.

Already in the Boston jail since 19 June was eighteen-year-old Peter Edes, son of the radical printer Benjamin Edes. The elder Edes had slipped out of town just before the war began and set up a press in Watertown.

Peter was also keeping a diary, and on 29 June he wrote:

Masters Leach and Lovell were brought to prison and put into the same room with me and my companions.

Peter Edes’s diary, which shares text with John Leach’s, was published in 1901.

Leach and Lovell both received the title “Master” because they kept schools. Leach taught navigation and other skills privately in the North End. Lovell was actually the usher, or assistant teacher, to his father, Master John Lovell, at the South Latin School, but the town valued him enough to pay him far more than any other usher. Lovell had also delivered the first official town oration in memory of the Boston Massacre back in April 1771.

The imprisonment of Lovell and Leach is one more thread of the story of Bunker Hill. And not just because the officer who arrested them was being promoted to major in the 43rd Regiment only because Maj. Roger Spendlove had died in that battle. (Spendlove had survived wounds at Québec, Martinique, and Havana, but not Charlestown.)

Lovell and Leach were locked up after the battle because the British commanders thought one of them was a spy.

TOMORROW: Incriminating letters.

Rev. Jonathan Boucher: “I did know Mr. Washington well”

The Washington Papers Project just shared Kathryn Gehred’s profile of the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, a Virginia and Maryland minister who had the unenviable job of tutoring Jack Custis in the early 1770s.

“I never did in my Life know a Youth so exceedingly indolent, or so surprizingly voluptuous: one wd suppose Nature had intended Him for some Asiatic Prince,” Boucher wrote to the teenager’s stepfather, a Virginia planter named George Washington.

Boucher supported the royal government in the political arguments of the early 1770s, at one point carrying pistols to his pulpit to defend himself.

He reported seeing Washington for the last time on a ferry as the Virginian headed to the Second Continental Congress in 1775, where he would accept the position of commander-in-chief of a rebel army.

Years later, in his memoirs, Boucher described Washington this way:

I did know Mr. Washington well; and tho’ occasions may call forth traits of character that never would have been discovered in the more sequestered scenes of life, I cannot conceive how he could, otherwise than through the interested representations of party, have ever been spoken of as a great man.

He is shy, silent, stern, slow and cautious, but has no quickness of parts, extraordinary penetration, nor an elevated style of thinking. In his moral character he is regular, temperate, strictly just and honest (excepting that as a Virginian, he has lately found out that there is no moral turpitude in not paying what he confesses he owes to a British creditor) and, as I always thought, religious: having heretofore been pretty constant, and even exemplary, in his attendance on public worship in the Church of England. But he seems to have nothing generous or affectionate in his nature.

In 1876 Boucher’s grandson published this and other extracts of his memoir in the London magazine Notes and Queries. Americans, in the midst of the Colonial Revival, disliked that description of the first President. But half a century later, an American press published Boucher’s memoir in full.

A Break-in at James Lovell’s House

On 29 Nov 1784, the American Herald newspaper of Boston carried this crime report from the previous week:

The House of the Hon. JAMES LOVELL, Esq; was, on Tuesday night last [23 November], broke open, and an iron Chest, containing some valuable papers, and a little cash stolen.

And, the next Friday, three villains, viz. William Scott, Thomas Archbald and Nero Funnel, Negro, were apprehended, and the money being found upon them, they were committed to goal.

Lovell was an important man in Boston. Before the war he was an usher, or assistant teacher, under his father at the South Latin School, but then after the Battle of Bunker Hill the military authorities locked him up and then took him to Canada. That suffering provided the credentials for Massachusetts to elect Lovell to the Continental Congress in 1778. He was a delegate until 1782, at some points basically running American foreign policy because no one else was so interested.

In 1784 Lovell became collector of Continental taxes in Massachusetts. Thus, the “valuable papers” he had in a trunk in his home could have been quite valuable indeed.

The 1 December Massachusetts Centinel provided additional information that “part of the papers were recovered, tho’ a large amount are supposed to have been burnt.”

That newspaper also had this report about a related crime:

On Monday a quantity of dry goods were found concealed in a barrel near Mr. Calf’s tan yard; upon examination it appears that they were stolen from Mr. [John] Fullerton’s shop, by a negro fellow called Nero Funnel, one of the villains that stole Mr. Lovell’s chest.

The three suspects were kept in jail until the court session began in February.

TOMORROW: In court.

“To be sold by Wholesale and Retail, By James Jackson”

As I research Mary Jackson and her family, I must say it would be a lot easier if they weren’t named Jackson. And if they hadn’t kept choosing first names like James, William, and Mary. But of course they weren’t the only family in eighteenth-century New England who set traps for researchers that way.

As I reported before, James and Mary Jackson had their second son baptized James at King’s Chapel on 8 May 1735. Boys named Jackson were admitted to the South Latin School in 1740 and 1742. Unfortunately, those school records don’t include full names. It’s possible that those boys were William and/or James Jackson, who would have been aged nine and seven respectively. If so, like most boys who started at a Boston grammar school in the 1700s, they never graduated, probably shifting to a writing school for better education in business skills.

This is just a guess based on their later paths, but I suspect William spent his adolescence helping Mama at the Brazen Head while James clerked for another import merchant. I’m even ready to guess that businessman was William Rand (1716-1758), who sold cloth and other dry goods “in Cornhill, The Corner Shop on the North side of the Townhouse,” per the 24 June 1751 Boston Evening-Post. In other words, very close to the Brazen Head.

This shopkeeper William Rand is often mixed with Dr. William Rand (1689-1759), who was an apothecary and a town tax collector. To confound matters further, that doctor had a namesake nephew, who in this period was a Harvard student and medical trainee and later was a counterfeiter. But I digress.

James Jackson came of age in May 1756. Already the town’s ministers were reading a notice that he intended to marry Sarah Rand—possibly the baby sister of shopkeeper William Rand, born in Charlestown in 1729. On 27 May, the couple wed at King’s Chapel. (The record there gives Sarah’s first name as Mary, just to add to the genealogical muddle. But that’s clearly an error, judging by the intention of marriage and later records of the couple.)

James Jackson thus married at an unusually young age, perhaps to a woman six years older. However, there’s no indication Sarah Rand was pregnant when they married, as many New England brides were. Instead, he seems to have been mature for his years.

James and Sarah Jackson had their own little baby James baptized at King’s Chapel on 26 June 1757, with his mother Mary standing as one of the sponsors. Five years later, on 10 Mar 1762, their son William was baptized in the same church; grandmother Mary and uncle William Jackson were sponsors.

On 26 Feb 1759 the Boston Evening-Post ran this advertisement:

Just Imported from LONDON, in the Brigantine Hannah, John Ayers Master, and to be sold by Wholesale and Retail,
By James Jackson,
At his Shop opposite Ebenezer Storer, Esq; and Son’s Warehouse in Union-street, BOSTON, very reasonable for ready Money,

A Great Variety of European and India GOODS, consisting of such a Number of Articles as would be tedious to the Reader. Likewise, a fine Assortment of Cutlery Ware, English Shoe Soles, Writing Paper, Looking Glasses, Raisins, Currants, Starch and Spices.

A similar ad followed in the Boston Post-Boy. Young Jackson had opened his own shop in the North End and was importing from Britain and beyond.

In March, the Boston town meeting elected James Jackson as one of twelve Clerks of the Market, alongside such peers as the silversmith Nathaniel Hurd. That was an entry-level elected position which the community usually gave to a young man seen as reliable and on his way up.

TOMORROW: Taking a chance with the Jackson brothers.

Anna Green Winslow’s Cold Christmas Eve

On 24 Dec 1771 twelve-year-old Anna Green Winslow sat down to write a letter to her mother in Halifax. Anna was living with an aunt in Boston for the better educational opportunities. Of course that meant private lessons, not the town schools, since she was a girl.

Anna started this letter with the winter weather:

to-day is by far the coldest we have had since I have been in New England. (N.B. All run that are abroad.)

Which I think means that anyone who had gone outside hurried through their errands in order to get back inside as fast as possible.

Last sabbath being rainy I went to & from meeting in Mr. Soley’s chaise. I dined at unkle Winslow’s, the walking being so bad I rode there & back to meeting. Every drop that fell froze, so that from yesterday morning to this time the appearance has been similar to the discription I sent you last winter.

The walking is so slippery & the air so cold, that aunt [Sarah Deming] chuses to have me for her scoller these two days. And as tomorrow will be a holiday, so the pope and his associates have ordained, my aunt thinks not to trouble Mrs Smith with me this week.

“Mrs Smith” was Elizabeth Murray Campbell Smith, who was teaching Anna embroidery and other needle crafts. The Smiths were Anglican, so they celebrated Christmas. So between that holiday and the weather, Aunt Deming decided to keep the young “scoller” at home so she wouldn’t slip and fall on the ice.

Anna and her aunt attended the Old South Meeting-House, and like a good descendant of the early Puritans, she viewed the 25 December holiday as a fallacy of “the pope and his associates.” Still, she got to stay home from schooling.

Online Collections of Engravings and Samplers

Here are a couple of online databases of visual interest.

The Anderson House library of the Society of the Cincinnati in Washington, D.C., has created an online collection of engravings and prints from and relating to the Revolutionary War. The website explains its contents:

Works of art on paper featuring engravings of Revolutionary War battle scenes, allegorical and commemorative prints, and portraits of original members of the Society of the Cincinnati. A significant collection of satirical prints includes caricatures of major figures on all sides during the Revolutionary War and political cartoons of relevant events of the longer Revolutionary era from the Seven Years' War through the War of 1812.

Highlights include: an extremely rare wartime mezzotint of George Washington by Charles Willson Peale; a pair of rebus letters skewering the Carlisle Peace commission; and images of leaders such as George III, John Wilkes, the marquis de Lafayette, and Louis XVI.

The website format lets viewers magnify the images to study details.

Turning from warfare to the domestic sphere, the Sampler Consortium unveiled the Sampler Archive, an online searchable database of American schoolgirl samplers and related embroideries. The archive begins with material from the Winterthur Museum, the D.A.R. Museum, and the Rhode Island Historical Society. Images from a dozen other collections and recent events will follow.

The samplers are catalogued with detailed information on their physical characteristics, history of the maker and her family, and provenance. The collection can be browsed according to the contributor, type of object, maker's age, place, and date.

As an example, the sampler shown above bears the name of "Nancy Tucker aged 8 1791." Curators at the D.A.R. Museum think it may have been made in Essex County, Massachusetts. Below an alphabet it bears the motto:

This Work In Hand my Friend may hav
When I am Dead And in My Grave

Which may have been meant well but rather reminds me of the dire warnings against theft that schoolboys used to write in their schoolbooks.

“Unfolding Histories” at the Cape Ann Museum

The Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester is hosting its first major archival exhibition, showcasing notable documents from its collection and those of seven other local institutions.

“Unfolding Histories: Cape Ann before 1900” is organized around ten themes: Native American history, education, religion, African-American history, literary imagination, charity and welfare, women’s history, temperance, warfare, and transportation. The museum says:

Organized thematically, Unfolding Histories lets the documents tell the stories of Cape Ann, thereby highlighting often neglected experiences and perspectives. This archival record richly depicts the political and social structures of our nation before its founding, through its early years and on up to 1900, and provides windows into the working and cultural life of a place that would become a haven for artists and writers.

The Boston Globe reported, “The show consists of some 80 items: letters, books, maps (one of them executed by no less than Samuel de Champlain), official documents, photographs, diaries, Native American artifacts, even stereopticon cards.”

The Cape Ann Museum’s Twitter feed has been sharing items from the exhibit under the hashtag #unfoldinghistories. Highlights from the Revolutionary era include:

• this note about the outbreak of war inserted into Gloucester’s town records.
• a love letter from 1776.
• a handwritten certificate of emancipation in 1777 (shown above).
• taxation to support a Continental soldier in 1782.
• records of payment for housing a black mother and child in 1783 (the same year the Massachusetts courts made slavery unenforceable).

The exhibit was curated by Gloucester resident Molly O’Hagan Hardy, who is also director for Digital and Book History Initiatives at the American Antiquarian Society. The other organizations lending documents for the exhibit are the Annisquam Historical Society, Essex Historical Society and Shipbuilding Museum, Essex Town Hall, Gloucester City Hall, Gloucester Lyceum & Sawyer Free Library, Manchester Historical Museum, Sargent House Museum, and Sandy Bay Historical Society.

“Unfolding Histories” will be on display until 9 September.

Clues to Young George’s Education

A couple of months back, the Oxford University Press blog ran an extract from Kevin J. Hayes’s George Washington: A Life in Books discussing the first President’s school days and early reading.

Here’s an extract from that extract:

Further evidence shows that at one point in his education Washington did attend school with other boys. Friend and fellow patriot George Mason mentioned to him a man named David Piper, whom he described as “my Neighbour and Your old School-fellow.” Like Washington, Piper would turn to surveying once he left school, becoming surveyor of roads for Fairfax County. He was also something of a bad boy. Piper was repeatedly brought to court on various civil and criminal matters. Together Washington and Piper could have attended school at the Lower Church of Washington Parish, Westmoreland County, where Mattox Creek enters the Potomac River, but there is no saying for sure. The story of Washington’s education is shrouded in mystery.

His school exercises indicate what he studied inside the classroom and out. They show him mastering many different subjects, learning what he would need to make his way through colonial Virginia whether that way took him down a deer track or up Duke of Gloucester Street. Some of the exercises are dated, revealing that this set of school papers as a whole ranges from 1743 to 1748, that is, from the year Washington turned eleven to the year he turned sixteen. Other evidence demonstrates that he continued his studies beyond the latest exercises in the manuscript collection. Altogether the exercises and the books Washington read during his school days reveal his early literary interests, his fascination with mathematics, and the genesis of his career as a surveyor.

Washington became curious about poetry in his youth, as two manuscript poems that survive with the school exercises reveal. When he first read these poems, he transcribed them to create personal copies he could reread whenever he wished. His copies reveal Washington’s ambition to excel in penmanship, and their texts shed light on his state of mind at the end of adolescence.

I’m not convinced about that last interpretation. A big part of a gentleman’s education in the eighteenth century was learning elegant handwriting, and boys learned that by copying models provided or written out by their teachers. These poems, which appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1734 and 1743, might therefore have been handwriting exercises, with their content mattering less than their form.

Certainly young George set down those two poems in a handsome hand. In the same copybook he wrote out twenty-one pages of legal forms, instructions “To Keep Ink from Freezing or Moulding,” and the famous “Rules…of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation.”

“My hair rose on end, and seemed to lift my hat from my head”

Since this is Hallowe’en, I’ll relay a story from the newspaper publisher and politician Benjamin Russell (1761-1845), who grew up in Boston before the Revolutionary War.

The printer Joseph T. Buckingham set down and published Russell’s story “as near as can be recollected”:

It was a part of my duty as an assistant in the domestic affairs of the family, to have the care of the cow. One evening, after it was quite dark, I was driving the cow to her pasturage,—the common. Passing by the burial-ground, adjoining the Stone Chapel, I saw several lights that appeared to be springing from the earth, among the graves and immediately sinking again to the ground, or expiring. To my young imagination, these lights could be nothing but ghosts. I left the cow to find her way to the common, or wherever else she pleased, and ran home at my utmost speed.

Having told my father the cause of my fright, as well as I was able, while in such a state of terror and agitation, he took me by the hand and led me directly to the spot, where the supposed ghosts were still leaping and playing their pranks near the surface of the ground. My hair rose on end, and seemed to lift my hat from my head. My flesh was chilled through to my very bones. I trembled so that I could scarcely walk. Still my father continued rapidly marching towards the spot that inspired me with so much terror.

When lo! there was a sexton, up to his shoulders in a grave, throwing out, as he proceeded in digging, bones and fragments of rotten coffins. The phosphorus in the decaying wood, blended with the peculiar state of the atmosphere, presented the appearance that had completely unstrung my nerves, and terrified me beyond description.

I was never afterwards troubled with the fear of ghosts.

So nothing to worry about, kids! Just the sexton digging up old bones and glow-in-the-dark coffins to make room for new bodies.

And since I’ll speak at Old North Church tomorrow about Revolutionary Boston’s schools, here is Buckingham on Russell’s education:

When quite a child Russell was noted for a remarkably retentive memory and more than ordinary facility in learning the tasks prescribed by his teacher. He was placed at the public school taught by Master [James] Carter, whose aptness in teaching and mildness of discipline were somewhat celebrated. Nothing was then taught in the common schools of Boston but the simplest elements of education. The tasks, that Russell had to perform, embraced nothing but easy lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

No science, history, geography, or other subjects.

“Colonial Boston’s Public Schools” at Old North, 1 Nov.

On Wednesday, 1 November, I’ll speak at the Old North Church on “Classes and Forms: The Landscape of Colonial Boston’s Public Schools.”

This talk is part of the Old North Foundation’s Speaker Series focusing on the ordinary people of Boston. The event description explains:

Colonial Boston took pride in its free public schools, which educated young Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and thousands of other boys before the Revolution. But a close look at those five grammar and writing schools reveals that they provided only limited opportunities for middling-sort boys, not to mention no place for girls or non-white boys. Colonial Boston’s schools thus reflected and reinforced the town’s social and economic divisions. The creation of a new nation spurred major reforms in 1789, eventually leading toward today’s public education.

This talk is based on research I’ve presented at different scholarly conferences, most of which will appear in an upcoming volume from the Dublin Seminar on New England Folklife.

I started to look into Boston’s public schools to understand how the town’s pre-Revolutionary children spent their days. That effort soon forced me to give up a lot of assumptions I’d had about those schools, such as what they taught—they didn’t cover reading and writing, history, geography, science, or other standard modern topics.

Likewise, I had to discard idea about who went to those schools—only about half of the eligible white boys. And about how long those scholars lasted—two-thirds of more of the seven-year-olds entering the South Latin School taught by John Lovell (shown above) dropped out before finishing.

Thus, while Boston can pride itself on having the oldest public school system in the U.S. of A., legally open from the start to (white male) students from all classes, that pre-Revolutionary system didn’t provide equal opportunity as we might think. In 1789 the town had its first major debate on school reform since adding writing schools to the grammar or Latin school—reform explicitly driven by new republican ideas.

This talk is scheduled to start at 6:00 P.M. Register for the program here; the price is a “pay what you will” donation to the Old North Foundation.

“Very fit for a Saturday morning’s declamation”

Yesterday we left William Wirt at about age thirteen in 1785 or so, chafing at an unjust accusation and physical punishment by his school’s usher, or assistant master. Wirt was living with the master of his school, the Rev. James Hunt, and from his books had already developed literary ambitions.

Our youth was an author, be it remembered. and that is not a race to take an injury, much less an affront, calmly. The quill, too, was a fair weapon against an usher, and by way of vent to his indignation at this and other continued outrages, but with no view to what so seriously fell out from it in furtherance of his revenge, he indited some time afterward an ethical essay on Anger.

In this, after due exhibition of its unhappy effects, which, it may be, would have enlightened Seneca, though he has himself professed to treat the same subject, he reviewed those relations and functions of life most exposed to the assaults of this Fury. A parent with an undutiful son, said our moralist, must often be very angry;—a master with his servant, an inn-keeper with his guests;—but it is an usher that must the oftenest be vexed by this bad passion, and, right or wrong, find himself in a terrible rage; and so he went on, in a manner very edifying, and very descriptive of the case, character and manner of the expounder of Cicero.

Well pleased with his work, our author found a most admiring reader in an elder boy, who, charmed with the mischief as much as the wit of the occasion, pronounced it a most excellent performance, and very fit for a Saturday morning’s declamation. In vain did our wit object strenuously the dangers of this mode of publication. The essay was “got by heart,” and declaimed in the presence of the school and of the usher himself, who, enraged at the satire, demanded the writer, otherwise threatening the declaimer with the rod.

His magnanimity was not proof against this, and he betrayed the incognito of our author, who happened the same evening to be in his garret when master usher, the obnoxious satire in hand, came into the apartment below to lay his complaint before his principal. Mr. Hunt’s house was one of those one-story rustic mansions yet to be seen in Maryland, where the floor of the attic, without the intervention of ceiling, forms the roof of the apartment below, so that the culprit could easily be the hearer, and even the partial spectator, of the inquisition held on his case.

“Let us see this offensive libel,” said the preceptor, and awful were the first silent moments of its perusal, which were broken, first by a suppressed titter, and finally, to the mighty relief of the listener, by a loud burst of laughter. “Pooh! pooh! Mr. ——, this is but the sally of a lively boy, and best say no more about it; besides that, in foro conscientia, we can hardly find him guilty of the ‘publication.’”

This was a victory; and when Mr. Hunt left the room, the conqueror, tempted to sing his “Io triumphe” [a Roman cheer of victory] in some song allusive to the country of the discomfited party, who was a foreigner, was put to flight by the latter's rushing furiously into the attic, and snatching from under his pillow some hickories, the fasces of his office, and inflicting some smart strokes on the flying satirist, who did not stay, like Voltaire, to write a receipt for them. The usher left the school in dudgeon not long afterward… 

The literature that Wirt recalled from Hunt’s library included the classical historian Josephus, poet Alexander Pope, essayist Joseph Addison, and Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1762), which seems to have been quite progressive in its time.

From “a carpenter in the employ of Mr. Hunt” young Wirt borrowed less formal literature: the play Guy, the Earl of Warwick and probably some of Tobias Smollett’s novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle.

[The image above comes from an 1857 elocution textbook. It shows the correct stance and gesture for an orator making an “indignant appeal.”]

William Wirt’s Schooldays

William Wirt (1772-1834) was an author, biographer of Patrick Henry, lawyer, and U.S. Attorney General for nearly twelve years.

Shortly before dying, Peter H. Cruse (1795-1832) wrote a biographical sketch of Wirt that was published in a volume of early newspaper essays. It included the following anecdote from Wirt’s schooldays.

At the age of eleven, Wirt had started to study with the Rev. James Hunt (1731-1793) in Montgomery County, Maryland. By reading the minister’s books, the young scholar discovered literature—and literary ambitions.

The discovery that [Alexander] Pope began to compose at twelve years of age, begat in our student the same sort of emulation as the like example in [Abraham] Cowley did in Pope. He reproached himself for his backwardness when he was now already thirteen.

The first attempt was a little discouraging. It was in verse, and he was embarrassed as usual by the awkward alternative of sacrificing the rhythm to the thought, or (which is the usual preference in such cases,) the thought to the rhythm. He came to the disappointing conclusion that he was no poet, but indemnified himself by more lucky efforts in prose, one of which falling into the hands of Mr. Hunt, he expressed his favourable surprise, and exhorted the adventurer to persevere, who thus encouraged became a confirmed reader and author.

One of these juvenile essays was engendered by a school incident, and was a piece of revenge, more legitimate than schoolboy invention is apt to inflict when sharpened by wrongs real or imaginary. There was an usher [i.e., assistant master] at the school, and this usher, who was more learned and methodical than even-tempered, was one morning delayed in the customary routine by the absence of his principal scholar, who was young Wirt himself. In his impatience he went often to the door, and espying some boys clinging like a knot of bees to a cherry-tree not far off, he concluded that the expected absentee was of the number, and nursed his wrath accordingly.

The truth was, that the servant of a neighbour with whom Wirt was boarded at the time, had gone that morning to mill, and the indispensable breakfast had been delayed by his late return. This apology, however, was urged in vain on the usher, who charged in corroboration the plunder of the cherry-tree; and though this was as stoutly as truly rejoined to be the act of an English school hard by, the recitation of master Wirt proceeded under very threatening prognostics of storm.

The lesson was in Cicero, and at every hesitation of the reciter, the eloquent volume, brandished by the yet chafing tutor, descended within an inch of his head, without quailing his facetiousness however, for he said archly, “take care, or you’ll kill me.” We have heard better timed jests since from the dexterous orator, for the next slip brought a blow in good earnest, which being as forcible as if Logic herself, with her “closed fist,” had dealt it, felled our hero to the ground.

“I’ll pay you for this, if I live,” said the fallen champion, as he rose from the field.

“Pay me, will you?” said the usher, quite furious; “you will never live to do that.”

“Yes, I will,” said the boy.

TOMORROW: Billy Wirt’s revenge.

Franklin’s Autobiography in Franklin’s Hand

Today I’m scheduled to travel from Boston to Philadelphia, much as young Benjamin Franklin did almost three centuries ago.

The manuscript in which Franklin recounted his early life for his children can be viewed in digital form thanks to the library of the University of Pennsylvania. (The manuscript itself belongs to the Huntington Library in California.)

Here’s Franklin describing the extent of his formal schooling:

My elder Brothers were all put Apprentices to different Trades. I was put to the Grammar School at Eight Years of Age, my Father intending to devote me, as the Tithe of his Sons, to the Service of the Church. My early Readiness in learning to read (which must have been very early, as I do not remember when I could not read), and the Opinion of all his Friends that I should certainly make a good Scholar, encourag’d him in this Purpose of his. My Uncle Benjamin too approv’d of it, and propos’d to give me all his Shorthand Volumes of Sermons, I suppose as a stock to set up with, if I would learn his Character.

I continu’d however at the Grammar School not quite one Year, tho’ in that time I had risen gradually from the Middle of the Class of that Year to be the Head of it, and farther was remov’d into the next Class above it, in order to go with that into the third at the End of the Year. But my Father in the mean time, from a view of the Expence of a College Education which, having so large a Family, he could not well afford, and the mean Living many so educated were afterwards able to obtain, Reasons that be gave to his Friends in my Hearing, altered his first Intention, took me from the Grammar School, and sent me to a School for Writing and Arithmetic kept by a then famous Man, Mr. Geo. Brownell, very successful in his Profession generally, and that by mild encouraging Methods. Under him I acquired fair Writing pretty soon, but I failed in the Arithmetic, & made no Progress in it.

At Ten Years old I was taken home to assist my Father in his Business, which was that of a Tallow Chandler and Sope-boiler; a Business he was not bred to, but had assumed on his Arrival in New England & on finding his Dying Trade would not maintain his Family, being in little Request. Accordingly I was employed in cutting Wick for the Candles, filling the Dipping Mold, & the Molds for cast Candles, attending the Shop, going of Errands, &c.

The manuscript shows Franklin’s little edits, such as changing his time at Boston’s Latin School from “only one Year” to “not quite one Year” and adding the description of Brownell’s “mild encouraging Methods” of teaching.

The Massachusetts Militia, and Its Exceptional Men

Next week I’ll be one of the presenters at a teachers’ workshop organized by Minute Man National Historical Park. My topic will be the Massachusetts militia system and that institution’s role in The Road to Concord.

Preparing for that session, I’ve been reviewing the Massachusetts militia laws. In January 1776 the General Court approved an update of the main law, which dated to the reign of William and Mary.

The new law defined the people required to participate in the militia’s seasonal military training this way [my formatting for clarity]:

That that Part of the Militia of this Colony, commonly called the Training-Band, shall be constituted of all the able-bodied Male Persons therein, from sixteen Years old to fifty, excepting

• Members of the American Congress,
• Members of the Council, and of the House of Representatives for the Time being,
• the Secretary of the Colony, all Civil Officers that have been, or shall be appointed by the General Court or either Branch of it,
• Officers and Students of Harvard-College,
• Ministers of the Gospel, Elders and Deacons of Churches, Church-Wardens,
• Grammar School-Masters,
• Masters of Arts,
• the Denomination of Christians called Quakers,
• Select Men for the Time being,
• those who have by Commission under any Government or Congress, or by Election in Pursuance of the Vote of any Congress of the Continent, or of this, or any other Colony, held the Post of a Subaltern, or higher Officer,
• Persons while actually employed as Masters of Vessels of more than thirty Tons Burthen, other than Fishing Vessels, and Vessels coasting this Colony, and to and from this Colony to the other New-England Governments,
• Constables, and Deputy Sheriffs,
• Negroes, Indians and Mulatoes,

and shall be under the Command of such Officers as shall be chosen, impowered and commissionated over them, as is by this Act provided;

and the Select-Men, or the major Part of them of each town, shall be, and hereby are impowered by Writing under their Hands, to excuse from Time to Time such Physicians, Surgeons, Ferrymen and Millers in their respective Towns, from common and ordinary Trainings, as they shall judge it necessary to excuse:

In effect, this law excused gentlemen at the top of society (Harvard men, office-holders, and ministers) from training while also barring men from the bottom (non-whites). Some workplaces were deemed so important that their employees could also be excused: transatlantic ships, ferries, mills.

That left the vast majority of white men in the colony in the training band: small farmers, as well as craftsmen. The previous militia law included men between the ages of fifty-one and sixty; this one assumed fiftysomethings didn’t need more training. However, a later clause of the same law stated that white men aged fifty to sixty-five were on the “Alarm List” to be called up in a military emergency—“Provided, That no Persons above sixty Years of Age, nor such Millers and Ferrymen,…shall be compelled to march out of the Town wherein they have their usual Place of Abode.”

Men who had ever been commissioned as military officers didn’t have to show up for drills; presumably, they already knew the drill. And perhaps legislators felt that it would be awkward for such men to stand in the ranks and receive orders from militia officers with less experience.

Not being required to attend training didn’t exclude men from turning out with the militia in an emergency. We know such men of African descent as Prince Estabrook, David Lamson, and Caesar Ferrit marched with the provincial militia companies on 19 Apr 1775. In an actual battle, I suspect, neighbors were happy for all the support they could get. But it’s also possible that by the 1770s towns were ignoring the part of the provincial law that excluded non-whites from training.

Looking at Ben’s Revolution

This spring brought us a new book from Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Bunker Hill and Valiant Ambition, and Wendell Minor, jacket designer for John Adams and 1776. Unlike those books, Ben’s Revolution is written for young readers.

In its format, Ben’s Revolution is a rarity among recent children’s books, almost a unicorn. It’s a “picture storybook.” At sixty-four pages it’s twice the length of a typical picture book today (through a lot of picture books used to be that length). That means the publisher invested in about twice as many illustrations, and paid twice the printing and paper costs. The book’s word count is similarly supersized, far above the 500 words aspiring picture-book authors are told to limit themselves to.

Penguin was no doubt willing to go beyond the normal parameters of a modern picture book because of the names involved: Philbrick, a bestselling author; Minor, a highly respected artist; and the Revolutionary War, a staple of American school curricula. In fact, that probably wasn’t a difficult calculation at all. But picture-book authors without such a track record shouldn’t take Ben’s Revolution as a model.

In content, Philbrick built this book around the experiences of Benjamin Russell, subject of several Boston 1775 postings. Young Ben starts the book as a schoolboy in Boston, serves time as an off-the-books clerk for a provincial military company in the first months of the war, and finishes as an apprentice to printer Isaiah Thomas. Russell actually witnessed some of the fighting on 19 April and 17 June 1775, and those stories provide the backbone of the book.

Philbrick also uses two anecdotes of unnamed boys from this time, casting Ben Russell as the protagonist. He becomes one of the boys who demanded that Gen. Frederick Haldimand preserve their coasting run down School Street. He’s the boy who hears Col. Percy’s musicians playing “Yankee Doodle” and tells the earl that he’ll dance to that tune by sundown. In addition, the book gives us a look at such events as the Tea Party, the shots on Lexington common, and the British evacuation of Boston without straining to put Ben on the scene.

All those moments are handsomely painted by Minor, who in addition to designing iconic jackets has also illustrated many children’s books, specializing in Americana and nature. A few years back Minor illustrated a biography of Henry Knox which I found beautiful but riddled with errors. This time my only big quibble about the art is that Minor depicts Ben and his young friends with the haircuts of today’s boys—a fairly common approach to portraying the period, whenever an artist works. As I’ve noted, the fashion for boys in the 1770s was suspiciously close to a mullet.

The nature of Ben Russell’s actions, and of how he and others through Philbrick and Minor chose to tell his story, means there are no female characters in the story. Even Ben’s mother is mentioned only from afar. And there are very few females visible in the art. Likewise, Russell didn’t say anything about the black or Native soldiers in the provincial camp, and I spotted only two darker faces in the pictures’ backgrounds, one in the redoubt on Breed’s Hill.

I should note that Nat Philbrick and I have shared conversations and manuscripts about Revolutionary Boston for a while. Ben’s Revolution therefore reflects the argument I made in The Road to Concord that Gen. Thomas Gage triggered the war by sending troops “on a secret mission to seize the cannon that the patriots had hidden in Concord.” I now have hopes that the next generation of Americans will grow up with that story instead of the assumption that the British were hunting John Hancock and Samuel Adams.

Noel on Exercise for Scholars, 22 Feb.

On Wednesday, 22 February, Rebecca Noel will speak on the topic “Beware the Chair: The Medieval Roots of School Exercise…and Your Standing Desk” at the historical society in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

So what should we be worried about?

This talk explores the sometimes alarming, sometimes hilarious history of the idea that the scholarly life makes people sick. It’s a problem that came to afflict more people as education expanded during the Enlightenment and became nearly universal in the 1800s. Whether the culprit was lack of movement, seated posture, blood rushing to the head, tuberculosis, or digestive woes, physicians have fretted over the health of scholars since at least Plato’s day. Tracing this idea from Europe to the United States, from scholars to children, and from boys’ to girls’ education, the presentation shows how durable the fear has remained—and how relevant it is to the more sedentary world in which we now live.

Noel is Associate Professor of History at Plymouth State University. She is working on a book titled Save Our Scholars: The Mandate for Health in Early American Education. Rebecca and I overlapped at college, but she was already studying American history and I wasn’t, so I didn’t meet her until several years ago at a Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife. This posting was inspired by the paper she presented then.

The program in Plymouth starts at 7:00 P.M. It is free and open to the public, and there will be refreshments to work off.

And now here are some remarks from Josiah Quincy (1772-1864) about his days at an academy in Andover starting at age six, in the middle of the Revolutionary War:

The truth was, I was an incorrigible lover of sports of every kind. My heart was in ball and marbles. I needed and loved perpetual activity of the body, and with these dispositions I was compelled to sit with four other boys on the same hard bench, daily, four hours in the morning and four in the afternoon, and study lessons which I could not understand. Severe as was my fate, the elasticity of my mind cast off all recollection of it as soon as school hours were over, and I do not recollect, or believe, that I ever made any complaint to my mother or any one else. . . .

One recollection of my boyhood is characteristic of the spirit of the times. The boys had established it as a principle that every hoop and sled should have thirteen marks as evidence of the political character of the owner,—if which were wanting, the articles became fair prize, and were condemned and forfeited without judge, jury or decree of admiralty.