New Books on the Early Supreme Court

Recently the New York Times reported on the upcoming final volume of the Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789-1800. Only thirty years ago, the Supreme Court Historical Society conceived of collecting all the disparate sources on the court's first years. The eighth and last volume has now gone to press.

We think of court records as being very complete, but that tradition was just becoming established in the eighteenth century. Josiah Quincy, Jr., took notes on major Massachusetts court cases in the 1760s as part of his own study and to share with colleagues, not as an official record. There's a nearly complete transcript of the trial of soldiers for the Boston Massacre in 1770, but only because a Loyalist printer saw value in it. No one knows the exact date of the Massachusetts Superior Court's ruling in 1783 that slavery was unconstitutional in the state because that isn't part of the legal filings.

The U.S. Supreme Court started out operating on similar rules, this article says. The justices didn't even ask lawyers to submit written arguments at first; after they made that request, it's unclear whether all attorneys complied, or whether the justices simply didn't save all the filings, because many are still missing. An entrepreneurial lawyer started publishing notes on the early sessions, but got at least one decision completely wrong. And in 1814 the British army burned the U.S. Capitol, which housed the court, and that didn’t do its official records any good.

Some curiosities from the Times article:

Justice David H. Souter, who cited “Suits Against States,” the fifth volume, in opinions on the losing side of two federalism cases, is one of the project’s most enthusiastic boosters.

“It’s not just a collection of documents,” Justice Souter said in an interview this month. “It gives us a broader contextual basis for understanding those early cases.”

When the project got under way in 1977, few would have supposed that some of the court’s earliest cases would gain new relevance. The court began to approach constitutional interpretation with a new interest in the founding generation’s original understanding.

For example, the 11th Amendment, which limits the jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear suits against states, became a hot topic during the 1990s when Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, to Justice Souter’s dismay, dusted it off and invoked it as a bulwark of state sovereignty. The 11th Amendment was adopted to overturn a 1793 Supreme Court decision, and the history project’s fifth volume offers a font of information about that case, Chisholm v. Georgia, and about debates that have not been resolved to this day.

“It never pays to write off an amendment,” Justice Souter said dryly.

So Justice Souter cited the early court’s thinking on lawsuits against states and lost the argument, while Justice Rehnquist, who more often insisted the legal system should follow the founders’ original intent, didn’t use these records, went well beyond the language of the Eleventh Amendment, and won. Hmmmm.

And then there's this tidbit about another book on the court:

While reading letters and diaries, Natalie Wexler, one of the associate editors, became captivated by the relationships among four of the original Supreme Court personalities—Justice James Wilson and his wife, Hannah, whom he married when he was 51 and she was 19; and Justice James Iredell and his wife, also named Hannah.

“I feel I truly know them,” Ms. Wexler wrote in an essay in the Summer 2006 issue of The American Scholar, the magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. “But of course,” she added, “what I know is largely what I’ve made of them. They’ve become ghostly emanations, hovering in some limbo between truth and fiction.”

Ms. Wexler, who also has written a historical novel about the Wilsons and the Iredells, imagines illicit passions that would raise plenty of eyebrows around the court today.

Ms. Wexler’s novel, A More Obedient Wife, is available as a free download through Lulu.com.

Dr. G's Twelfth Night Plumb Cake

On Thanksgiving, I quoted novelist Royall Tyler’s account of that celebration in a genteel Yankee household, written for The Bay Boy, a never-finished revision of his bestselling novel, The Algerine Captive. Writing in the 1820s, Tyler insisted The Bay Boy contained authentic descriptions of life in pre-Revolutionary Boston—but he reserved the right to shift dates and details as his memory or sense of storytelling dictated. I therefore take his descriptions as basically authentic, but a little exaggerated for comic effect and not necessarily confined to colonial times.

The narrator of The Bay Boy is a young doctor in training, and his mentor is apparently based on Dr. Silvester Gardiner, Boston’s top surgeon in the 1750s. By the 1770s Gardiner had retired from daily practice in favor of making money through real estate and importing medicines for other doctors to prescribe.

Like Gardiner, Tyler's character “Dr. G.” is an Anglican and a fervent Loyalist. Before Thanksgiving he tells his trainee, “Eat your pumpkin pudding wherever you please. I hope, however, you will take your Christmas pie with me.” And what a Christmas feast it is!

Here’s the centerpiece of Dr. G’s “supper and ball” on Twelfth Night:

Our attention was undividedly attracted by a large dressed plumb cake on the center of the table, on the ample top of which might be seen the sugar huntsmen and hounds pursuing the stag thro’ groves of box twigs tipped with gold, while the center was covered by a large royal crown with G. R. flaming in gold on its fillet.

That would be “Georgius Rex,” the Latin monogram of King George III.

This cake had been ingeniously severed into slices, held together by its top. In one of its compartments it was understood that an almond, commonly called a bean, was concealed and the young lady who was fortunate enough to select that piece was according to the tradition of our English ancestors pretty sure, if a suitable offer was made in due season, to become a bride before the next Christmas holiday.

And now I’m off to take down this year’s wreath.

Podcasting from the Past

As long as I'm on the subject of audio lectures for downloading, I'll highlight three websites featuring audio interviews with some top historical authors. Sometimes these discussions focus on the American Revolution, often other periods and events. But they're always at a high level. Or rather, they always were, since two of these three podcasts are not only about the past, but are now of the past.

Talking History was an initiative by the Organization of American Historians to share history professors' latest work with the public, first as a radio program and then as a podcast. The show lost its funding this past summer, and no new episodes are being produced.

Also fading out last year was the History Channel's podcast called Hardcover History. There seem to have been only four episodes produced, none hitting the Revolution. (The History Channel website offers another little feature called This Day in the American Revolution; folks there interviewed me to write for it months back, and all I got was this Boston 1775 T-shirt.)

The only podcast I've found devoted to Revolutionary America comes from Colonial Williamsburg, and it's still churning out new episodes. The "Past & Present" podcasts offer historical background on life in the 1700s, behind-the-scenes peeks at Williamsburg's living history, and discussions of colonial-era crafts. The webpage also offers links to pertinent articles from the Colonial Williamsburg magazine and website. (Just as the History Channel uses "history.com" as its domain, Colonial Williamsburg claimed "history.org"; let's pause to consider the implication that all history starts in Virginia.)

All these podcasts are also available through iTunes.

Revolutionary Lectures for Downloading

Back in September I mentioned a series of lectures at Old South Meeting-House about radicalism in the American Revolution. Audio and/or video versions of those presentations are available for free (to folks with fast internet connections) through the Forums website of WGBH, Boston's public-TV station:

• Ray Raphael, author of Founding Myths
• Russell Bourne, author of Cradle of Violence
• Dorris Fanelli from the National Park Service on the Liberty Bell site
• Brendan McConville on "Terror, Iconoclasm and the American Revolution"

Since I could attend only one of these events, I'm pleased to have the chance to catch up.

In addition, the WGBH Forums site offers other talks from these Revolutionary War experts:

• Gary Nash, African-Americans in the Continental Army and the Founding Fathers and Slavery
• Simon Schama, African-Americans in the British Army
• Elizabeth Riely, Benjamin Franklin and the Wild Turkey
• Ellen Miles, Gilbert Stuart's George & Martha Washington
• Joyce E. Chaplin, Benjamin Franklin and the Gulf Stream
• Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom
• Philip Dray, Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod
• Panel on American Experience: John & Abigail Adams
• Douglas L. Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and His Books
• D. Brenton Simons, Scam, Scandal, Murder and Mayhem in Colonial Boston
• David McCullough, Biography of a Year: 1776 and Town Meeting
• Colin G. Calloway, American Indians and the French & English War
• Eliga H. Gould, Britain and the Seven Years War
• William M. Fowler Jr., Empires at War
• Marla Miller, The Last Mantua Maker: Women in Boston's Clothing Trades
• Hiller Zobel, Prelude to the Boston Massacre
• Panel on Deborah Sampson, Soldier
• Charles Bahne, Revisiting the Boston Tea Party
  

Pace yourselves.

(Some of the downloads are RealAudio files; the most recent are MP3s.)

Letters, They Got Letters

Ed St. Germain at AmericanRevolution.org has announced the online posting of the complete Complete Letter-Writer: Or, Polite English Secretary, published in London in 1758.

This is one of a number of collections of "Letters on the most common Occasions in Life" published in the century to provide readers with genteel models of correspondence and, by implication, behavior. I can't help but think, though, that part of these books' appeal was how they seemed to offer a peek into other people's business, especially courtships—even if those other people were probably fictional. In any event, they promised help to folks faced with the need to write such awkward missives as:

• "From a Brother at home to his Sister abroad on a Visit, complaining of her not writing"—interesting that in this scenario the sister is abroad and the brother is home feeling neglected; alas, these pages are missing, so all we have online is the sister's very brief apology to her brother and "dear Mamma"
  
• "From a young Woman just gone to Service [i.e., working as a maid], to her Mother at Home"
• "From a young Apprentice to his Father, to let him know how he likes his Place, and goes on"
• "To a young Lady, cautioning her against keeping Company with a Gentleman of a bad Character"
• "From a Tradesman to his Correspondent, requesting the Payment of a Sum of Money"
• "A Young Lady's Answer to a Gentleman's Letter, who professes an Aversion to the tedious Forms of Courtship" and "The Lady's Reply to another Letter from the same Gentleman, wherein he more explicitly avows his Passion"
• "From a young Tradesman to a Lady he has seen in Publick" and "From a Relation of the Lady, in answer to the last"—I thought the second would be a rebuff, but things look good for the young tradesman!
  
• "From a Gentleman who died at Constantinople, to a Friend in England; giving him an Account of the Manner of his Death"—quite a feat, that.
• A plethora of love letters
• Model letters from such authors as Alexander Pope, John Locke, and George Farquhar

The book's table of contents lists page numbers, but the online edition doesn't use pagination. Instead, if you're looking for a particular letter, note the part of the book where it appears and how far along in that part, then scroll down in the corresponding webpage.

The site indicates this resource comes to the world through the generosity of Tina Buchanan. And, of course, Ed St. Germain.

(Today's illustration, courtesy of the Library of Congress, is Thomas Jefferson's letter to Benjamin Banneker, trying to brush aside his racist remarks about African-Americans in Notes on the State of Virginia. An awkward situation for which no letter-writing manual offered a solution.)

Boston's Expanding Borders

For the next few days, I've decided, Boston 1775 will highlight some free online resources that relate to Revolutionary New England.

Over at the City Record and Boston News-Letter, Charles Swift has generously uploaded a detailed scan of an 1894 map of Boston showing the borders of the central part of the city at that time, and the borders of the peninsula when the first English settlers arrived.

The Boston of 1775 looked much more like the smaller shape. At high tide, there was only a narrow neck of land connecting the town to the rest of Massachusetts, which made it very easy for the British to defend. At low tide, there were broad mudflats across the Back Bay, just as difficult to cross. Dock Square near Faneuil Hall really did have a dock next to it.

Starting in the decades after the Revolution and accelerating in the early 1800s, Bostonians expanded their usable dry acreage with landfills. Today the locations of most colonial wharfs—such as the Griffin's Wharf, site of the Tea Party—lie many meters inland. (Rowe's Wharf and Long Wharf retain their old names, though.) Atlantic Avenue appears to run over what used to be a series of sunken barriers protecting the innermost harbor. The Mill Pond where Benjamin Franklin learned to swim has been completely filled in.

One geographical feature retains its basic seventeenth-century borders, however: Boston Common. Originally set aside as grazing land, it has become a new sort of protected public resource.

New Year's Wishes from the Newspaper Lad

Printer Isaiah Thomas was a pack rat or, as historians gratefully call this type of person, a dedicated archivist. He collected many of the pieces that came out of his press over the years, from the first broadside he ever set in type (at, he said, the age of seven—it was to the tune of "Our Polly Is a Sad Slut"—mp3 here) to issues of his Massachusetts Spy newspaper. Eventually Thomas made a permanent home for his collection by founding the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester.

One item from Thomas’s print shop, probably created by his inky apprentices, is a handbill dated “Boston, January 1, 1771.” which goes like this:

The LAD who carries
The MASSACHUSETTS SPY,
Wishes all his kind Customers
A Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!
And presents the following:

May grateful omens now appear,
To Make the New a happy Year,
And bless th’ ensuing days:
May future peace in every mind,
Like odours wafted by the wind,
Its sweetest incense raise.

May GEORGE in his extensive reign,
Subdue the pride of haughty SPAIN,
Submissive to his feet.
Thy princely smiles our ills appease,
Then grant that harmony and peace
The dawning year may greet.

Kind Sirs! your gen’rous bounty show,
Few shillings on your Lad bestow,
Which will reward his pains,
Who piercing Winter’s cold endures,
And to your hands the SPY secures,
And still his task maintains.

It was a tradition for boys who worked for newspapers to compose and print such verses each New Year. Historians don't know whether they sang these lines, sold the handbills, or both. In any event, the tradition was—like the Pope Night processions, Christmas Anticks, and other forms of tips—a way for the boys to earn a few coins for themselves at the end of the year.

Two notable things strike me about this handbill. First, it mentions Christmas as well as New Year's; most surviving examples from Boston don't. Thomas and his shop would help to promote Christmas in New England in the years after the war, publishing songs and books tied to that holiday, which earlier generations of New Englanders had disdained. So this might be an early sign of Thomas's interest in Christmas.

Second, this song is almost aggressively patriotic, praising George III and threatening enemies like "haughty Spain" (a lesser rival than haughty France or haughty Holland, but easier to rhyme). That political sentiment didn't mean that Thomas was a friend of the royal government. In fact, he was one of the most radical of Boston's printers, and his subscribers mostly shared his convictions. But the Whigs of 1771 and even of 1775 saw themselves as British patriots, fighting alongside the king against corrupt politicians who were undermining constitutional liberties.

Senses and Sensibilities in History Writing

One small trend in recent history-writing is to focus on people’s sensory experiences. (I suppose writing whole books on “place” got old.) I first encountered this at a Massachusetts Historical Society seminar a few years ago which eventually fed into Richard C. Rath’s How Early America Sounded. That paper was about various yelling, ranting, and singing Quakers, before that religious movement settled down and became associated with quiet contemplation instead. Rath’s book also covers church bells, language barriers, and the importance of “earshot” in a culture with no electronic communication system.

I think another early example of sensory history is Elaine Forman Crane’s article “‘I Have Suffer’d Much Today’: The Defining Force of Pain in Early America,” published in Through a Glass Darkly. With few painkillers and no anesthetics, how did colonial Americans get through the day, especially a day with surgery scheduled? Since pain is subjective, baffling doctors even today, it’s very hard to compare one person’s experience to another’s. We must, as Crane does, fall back on thinking mostly about how people of the time thought of pain, particularly in how men and women were supposed to react differently to it.

The most general sensori-historical approach I’ve seen is Peter Charles Hoffer’s Sensory Worlds in Early America. While Rath focuses mostly on the seventeenth century, Hoffer discusses such events as the Boston Massacre, so I had to give it a shot. And I was underwhelmed.

Guess what? People sensed the Boston Massacre. They experienced the cold of the air. They felt the impact of sticks and snowballs. They heard the bang of guns. They saw the blood and bodies lying on the ground. Yes, people all over King Street were sensing things. (Except ropemaker Samuel Gray, who, having had part of his skull shot off, didn’t sense Pvt. Matthew Kilroy bayoneting his brain—if in fact that happened as some Bostonians claimed to have seen.)

So much physical detail might have been exciting for a historian who had previously focused on intellectual and abstract issues. Hoffer is a leading legal historian, and our legal system might in some ways be an attempt to get above how things feel to individual people to more general principles and rules. But I, having come to Revolutionary history through narrative writing in general and fiction writing in particular, never lost sight of the power of sensory detail.

When I saw pictures of Boston’s Pope Night, therefore, it didn’t take a lot of imagination to conclude that the celebration was meant to be loud. “To judge by the number of horns [Swiss artist Pierre Eugène] Du Simitière drew [in 1767], the evening must have been ear-splitting,” I wrote in an essay for The Worlds of Children. An ear-splitting event, but not an earth-shaking realization.

In the 30 Nov 2006 London Review of Books, Yale professor John Demos questions Hoffer’s approach to historical events on another ground:

One can discern, in each case, a sensory element; but its significance is more a matter of context than of cause. At the very least, one would need a way of measuring the sensory against the political, the material, the ideational and so on, in order to make the case.

There is, finally, a conceptual difficulty lurking beneath the surface of Hoffer’s entire project. The ‘report of the senses’ can never by itself achieve motive power, whether in the lives of individual persons, or in the histories of groups. That comes only through further steps of processing: steps that involve both cognitive assessment and (for lack of a better term) emotional charging. . . . It is, above all, emotional energy that drives specific human actions—the energy of fear, joy, anger, surprise and a handful of other ‘primary affects’ (in various compounds and combinations). Hoffer gives barely a nod towards this crucial aspect.

Demos’s point seems even more important when we consider the findings from neurology that emotion is key to memory. We remember not what we sense, but what we sense and feel emotionally about.

The Truth of Washington's Vision

Earlier this week I zipped by Valley Forge National Historical Park, so it seems like a good moment to discuss a most curious text about Gen. George Washington at that camp that appears on a lot of websites.

The text called "Washington's Vision" describes an angelic figure coming to the general in his tent at Valley Forge and giving him a prophecy about the future of the U.S. of A. Here's a sample:

Presently I heard a voice saying, "Son of the Republic, look and learn," while at the same time my visitor extended her arm eastwardly, I now beheld a heavy white vapor at some distance rising fold upon fold. This gradually dissipated, and I looked upon a stranger scene. Before me lay spread out in one vast plain all the countries of the world—Europe, Asia, Africa and America. I saw rolling and tossing between Europe and America the billows of the Atlantic, and between Asia and America lay the Pacific.

"Son of the Republic," said the same mysterious voice as before, "look and learn." At that moment I beheld a dark, shadowy being, like an angel, standing or rather floating in mid-air, between Europe and America. Dipping water out of the ocean in the hollow of each hand, he sprinkled some upon America with his right hand, while with his left hand he cast some on Europe. Immediately a cloud raised from these countries, and joined in mid-ocean. For a while it remained stationary, and then moved slowly westward, until it enveloped America in its murky folds. Sharp flashes of lightning gleamed through it at intervals, and I heard the smothered groans and cries of the American people.

A second time the angel dipped water from the ocean, and sprinkled it out as before. The dark cloud was then drawn back to the ocean, in whose heaving billows in sank from view. A third time I heard the mysterious voice saying, "Son of the Republic, look and learn," I cast my eyes upon America and beheld villages and towns and cities springing up one after another until the whole land from the Atlantic to the Pacific was dotted with them. . . .

I quoted some of this text as throwaway material on my other blog. Since then, I've dug deeper and learned more about its origin.

The earliest publication of "Washington's Vision" that I've found was in the 24 June 1861 Philadelphia Inquirer. That December, it was published in the Pittsfield Gazette, and the following April in the New Hampshire Sentinel. In 1864, "Washington's Vision" was published as a pamphlet, now available for online viewing courtesy of Indiana University. It's possible that the original publication was an even earlier 1861 pamphlet that the Inquirer quoted from.

The author of the article/pamphlet, Wesley Bradshaw, describes hearing of Washington's experience through a veteran of Valley Forge named Anthony Sherman. In Prominent American Ghosts, Susy Smith claimed, "Sherman told the story to several people," and, "A Mormon periodical carried the account in 1856," though she doesn't identify that periodical. However, the 1861 text has Sherman saying something quite different: that on 4 July 1859 he told Bradshaw a tale "which no one alive knows of except myself." (I suppose Smith, also author of Confessions of a Psychic and E.S.P. for the Millions, may have had special sources for her information. But I doubt it.)

The 1864 edition of "Washington's Vision" comes with a cover blurb from Edward Everett, the important and sadly forgotten Massachusetts politician and orator. (I wonder if he ever actually saw the pamphlet.) The same publication contains poetry and a story about 99-year-old Jane Seymour knitting stockings for Washington's army, then much later for the Union army during the Civil War. It's patriotic propaganda through and through, as shown by the cover line "The First Union Story Ever Written."

Are there any reliable facts in "Washington's Vision"? A man named Anthony Sherman did serve in the Continental Army. He applied for and received a pension in the 1830s. However, his pension application said he wasn't at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78; he was with Gen. Benedict Arnold's army instead. Furthermore, Anthony Sherman is not listed among Revolutionary veterans receiving a pension in 1840, meaning he had died by that year—well over a decade before he supposedly spoke to Wesley Bradshaw in Philadelphia.

Wesley Bradshaw didn't exist, either. That was a pseudonym used by Charles W. (for Wesley) Alexander, the publisher of "Washington's Vision". John Adcock at Yesterday's Papers says that Alexander, using his "Wesley Bradshaw" identity, had already contributed to a series of illustrated pamphlets that

purported to be true stories of murderers and female fiends, full of torture, murder and melerdrama, usually beginning on page 19, so a 64 page work was not all it was advertised to be.

(Note that Washington's Vision gets rolling on page 11.) Thus, if we believe the story Alexander tells in "Washington's Vision," he heard of an angelic prophecy crucial to the nation, and chose to publish it under the same pseudonym he used for exploitative potboilers.

In fact, a big part of Alexander's work was responding to recent public events with patriotic thrillers and legends. During and after the Civil War he wrote and published several novels such as Pauline of the Potomac; Or, General McClellan's Spy; its sequel Maud of the Mississippi, General Grant's Daring Spy; and the immortal The Angel of the Battlefield: A Tale of the Rebellion. In 1876, just in time for the Centennial celebration, Alexander came out with The History and Legends of the Old Liberty Bell in Independence Hall in Philadelphia. "Washington's Vision" is part of that fictional output, not a historic link to Valley Forge.

Nonetheless, "Washington's Vision" has been reprinted many times since 1861, including in the Grand Army of the Republic's newspaper, the National Tribune, in 1880, and its successor Stars and Stripes in 1950. And now it's on the internet, so it will never die.

[Thanks to M. T. Anderson and Nicole for the Susy Smith reference, and for getting me interested in this remarkable publication.]

Horatio Gates &c. on History Channel, 30 Dec

Tomorrow the History Channel is scheduled to air a program on Gen. Horatio Gates, commander of the Continental forces at Saratoga. The program will probably feature comments by A Student of History, John Maass. After that comes a program on Gen. Nathanael Greene, who also followed Gates as commander of the Continental Army in the southern theater.

Ralph Earl: "intemperate" artist

I found what I want for my birthday! This delightful Ralph Earl painting from about 1783 of two brothers is being offered by the Hirschl & Adler Gallery. I'm not sure Earl set out to show the boys half-hugging, half-roughhousing, but there's a real sense of a fraternal relationship here.

Earl (1751-1801) was born in Worcester, and first tried to establish himself as an artist in New Haven. He met Henry Pelham, John Singleton Copley's younger half-brother, and went to Boston in March 1775 to see Copley's works, the best in the colonies. (Copley himself had left for Europe by that time, never to return.)

Later that spring, Earl sketched the landscape around Lexington and Concord for the famous Amos Doolittle prints of the battle there. However, Earl himself favored the Crown, perhaps because its supporters offered better business prospects for a portraitist. (He did paint Continental Congress delegate Roger Sherman, though.)

By 1777, local newspapers were denouncing Earl as a traitor, and he had to sneak into British-occupied Newport for safety. From 1778 to 1785 he worked in London, studying with Benjamin West. Then he returned to the U.S. of A., probably expecting to be the big fish in the small pond. Unfortunately, business wasn't always up to his expectations, and he did some of his best work while imprisoned in New York for debt. Earl died at age fifty of, one critic said, "intemperance." See more about him in this biography from the Worcester Art Museum.

Here's a self-portrait, also for sale. And a page of links to Earl's work in museums around the country.

(And don't worry—I promise I'll act surprised.)

Nothing Material

Recently I wrote an entry about Patrick M’Robert’s tour of the northern British colonies in North America in 1774-75. I omitted how his account actually starts:

We met with nothing material on our passage; only a little girl of about nine years of age fell over board and was lost.

Christmas Anticks? Bah, Humbug!

The appearance of "Anticks," or mummers, in Revolutionary Boston, as described in yesterday's post, was not enjoyed by all.

On 20 Dec 1793, the Massachusetts Mercury published a letter, actually dated the following day, to the "INSPECTOR of the POLICE," a recent addition to the lineup of town officials. (That timing confirms that the Anticks made their appearances at Christmas, a detail Samuel Breck did not recall in the passage I quoted yesterday.)

The time will soon arise on which the ANTICKS are wont to assemble. The disadvantages, interruptions and injuries which the inhabitants sustain from these gangs, are too many for enumeration, a few only must suffice.

When different clubs of them meet in the street, noise and fighting immediately commences. Their demands for entrance in houses, are insolent and clamorous; and should the peaceful citizen (not choosing to have the tranquillity of his family interrupted) persevere in refusing them admittance, his windows are broke, or the latches and knockers wrenched from his door as the penalty; Or should they gain admittance, the delicate ear is oftentimes offended, children affrighted, or catch the phrases of their senseless ribaldry.

As you wish no doubt to purge the town of every evil or inconvenience, I conceive this to be one of no small magnitude...

And a Merry Christmas to you, too, sir.

Christmas Anticks in Post-War Boston

Here's a seasonal memory from Samuel Breck, born in Boston to a well-to-do merchant during the Revolutionary War; Recollections of Samuel Breck was published posthumously in Philadelphia in 1877.

I forget on what holiday it was that the Anticks, another exploded remnant of colonial manners, used to perambulate the town. They have ceased to do it now, but I remember them as late as 1782.

They were a set of the lowest blackguards, who, disguised in filthy clothes and ofttimes with masked faces, went from house to house in large companies, and, bon gré, mal gré, obtruding themselves everywhere, particularly into the rooms that were occupied by parties of ladies and gentlemen, would demand themselves with great insolence. I have seen them at my father’s, when his assembled friends were at cards, take possession of a table, seat themselves on rich furniture and proceed to handle the cards, to the great annoyance of the company.

The only way to get rid of them was to give them money, and listen patiently to a foolish dialogue between two or more of them. One of them would cry out, "Ladies and gentlemen sitting by the fire, put your hands in your pockets and give us our desire." When this was done and they had received some money, a kind of acting took place. One fellow was knocked down, and lay sprawling on the carpet, while another bellowed out,

"See, there he lies, But ere he dies
A doctor must be had."

He calls for a doctor, who soon appears, and enacts the part so well that the wounded man revives.

In this way they continue for half an hour; and it happened not unfrequently that the house would be filled by another gang when these had departed. There was no refusing admittance. Custom had licensed these vagabonds to enter even by force any place they chose.

Folks who know about English folklore have no doubt recognized these "Anticks" as traditional Christmas mummers.

Such misrule was one of the reasons the Puritan founders of Massachusetts were so down on Christmas (along with the little matter of the date not being mentioned in the Bible). By the time of Breck's childhood, however, such disapproval no longer prevented young men from enjoying this form of begging and theater.

I haven't found any mentions of Anticks in Boston before the Revolutionary War, so I suspect the tradition took hold in those years, that it wasn't a relic of colonial times but actually a new import from Britain. That was probably partly due to the shake-up of society that the war brought about, and partly to the end of Pope Night as a holiday when young Bostonians could dress up, cavort, and demand coins from the upper class.

Boston Government Regulates Food

Over at the City Record and Boston News-Letter, Charles Swift writes:

State Representative Peter Koutoujian’s proposal to ban trans fats from Massachusetts restaurants has met with predictable howls of outrage from those insisting that the government has no right to tell them what to eat. I find this outpouring of libertarianism amusing because history shows that one of the primary functions of Boston's government was, in fact, the regulation of the food supply to ensure consumers received what they paid for and that the food they bought was healthy.

Indeed, at the end of every month before the Revolution, Boston’s selectmen set the weight and price of loaves of bread sold in town, based on the price of flour. The annual big town meeting in March elected town officials called Purchasers of Grain and Surveyors of Wheat, among others. The Boston Public Library’s archive of town papers from this period includes an “Account of Bread taken from the Bakers, by the Clerks of the Market [yet another elected position], the year past,” dated 27 Feb 1768.

And of course those loaves contained no more than a trace of trans fats.

A Tour Through Part of the North Provinces

This morning I’m sharing a bit of travel literature: Patrick M’Robert’s A Tour Through Part of the North Provinces of America: Being, a Series of Letters Wrote on the Spot, in the Years 1774, & 1775, published in Edinburgh in 1776.

M’Robert planned to write a book on Britain’s North American colonies for prospective emigrants, but had the bad timing to arrive just before the Revolutionary War broke out. He had hoped to visit Boston in mid-1774, but with the port closed he went to Halifax instead. By the time M’Robert wrote his last letter, he had to acknowledge the war:

You may also be surprised that I say nothing of the unhappy contest now subsisting between this and the mother country: This I leave to politicians; but am afraid both parties will repent when too late their having launched so inconsiderately into it. When it will end, God only knows, I fear the ruin of one, if not of both countries.

Still, M’Robert does offer some useful advice for travelers, such as how to get service at a New England tavern:

They have been great adventurers in trade, and generally successful; they are very inquisitive, want to know every circumstance relating to any stranger that comes amongst them, so that a traveller lately in that country had been so pestered with their idle queries, that, as soon as he entered a tavern, he used to begin and tell them, he was such a one, telling his name, travelling to Boston, born in North Britain, aged about thirty, unmarried, prayed them not to trouble him with more questions but to get him something to eat: this generally had the desired effect.

And at the back of the book is this mileage chart for traveling by land to Boston from the city of New York, showing the distance between each town or stop and the next:

King’s-bridge — 15 miles
East Chester — 6
N. Rochell — 4
Rye — 5
Horse-neck — 6
Standford — 7
Norwalk — 10
Fairfield — 12
Stratford — 8
Milford — 4
New Haven — 10
Wallingford — 13
Durham — 7
M. [Middle]Town — 6
Weathers-field — 11
Hartford — 3
Windsor — 8
Enfield — 8
Springfield — 10
Kingston — 15
Western — 9
Brookfield — 6
Spencer — 8
Leicester — 6
Worcester — 6
Shrewsbury — 5
Marlborough — 10
Sudbury — 11
Water-town — 10
Boston — 10

Today I drive the reverse route, and beyond, so new postings might be spotty for the next week or so.

Virginia Congressman Violates Oath of Office

Rep. Virgil Goode, Republican of Virginia, has sent a letter to hundreds of his constituents criticizing another elected Representative for planning to be sworn into office with the scripture of his religious faith. Goode wrote:

I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way. The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran. . . .

The Ten Commandments and "In God We Trust" are on the wall in my office. A Muslim student came by the office and asked why I did not have anything on my wall about the Koran. My response was clear, "As long as I have the honor of representing the citizens of the 5th District of Virginia in the United States House of Representatives, The Koran is not going to be on the wall of my office."

Goode's attempt to raise the immigration issue is impertinent; the Representative whom he criticized had ancestors living in America before the U.S. of A. was founded.

In response to criticism of that letter, Goode then issued an even more blatantly unconstitutional statement:

The voters of each Congressional district select the representative that they choose to represent them, and perhaps voters in all districts will now ask prospective candidates whether they will use the Bible, the Koran, or anything else.

When Virgil Goode entered Congress, he took the following oath of office, the current form for the Vice President, Representatives, and Senators:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

Such a promise is mandated by the third paragraph of Article VI of the U.S. Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Thus, the very same constitutional article that requires oaths or affirmations also states that there should never be a religious test for a public officeholder in the U.S. of A.—yet Goode is advocating just such a test.

Goode clearly has chosen not to "support and defend the Constitution," nor "bear true faith and allegiance to the same." Instead, he has chosen to ignore and demean one of the Constitution's clear requirements. While criticizing how another elected Representative might take his oath, Virgil Goode broke his own.

To compound the sad irony, Goode represents the part of Virginia that includes Charlottesville and Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home. Jefferson was of course highly proud of drafting Virginia's statute for religious freedom.

Rediscovering Oscar Marion?

A posting at A Student of History, by John Maass, alerted me to a recent ceremony in Washington, D.C., respecting Oscar Marion, enslaved servant of Revolutionary War general Francis Marion (1732-1795).

As the Washington Post reported, many nineteenth-century images of Gen. Marion include a black servant in the background. The best known of these is "General Marion Inviting a British Officer to Share His Meal," now hanging on the Senate's side of the U.S. Capitol. The black man is never identified in those paintings, but genealogist Tina Jones recovered the knowledge that Marion was served throughout the war by an enslaved man named Oscar.

The Post quotes Jones as saying of Oscar Marion, "He is not just some obscure figure in the background. This person had a name. He had a life and a separate contribution." Which is true, but it's very hard to tell what his individual life and thoughts were since (a) he was trapped within the American slavery system, and (b) our sources seem to be all generated by his master's family. Presiding over the recent ceremony, George W. Bush praised Oscar Marion's "devoted and selfless consecration to the service of our country," but of course the man didn't have a free choice. He was "selfless" first because American law assigned his self to another man.

John Blake White (1781-1859) created the painting at the Senate in the 1820s, after Francis Marion's death. The artist said he had met the general when he was a boy, and painted the man's face from memory. But White made no such claim of accuracy about the other men in the painting. There thus seems to be no evidence that White tried to paint the individual Oscar Marion, or met the enslaved man at the same time he met the general.

Instead, I think the painting shows little more than a symbol of a helpful enslaved servant. The black man's features aren't distinctive, and even his pose reflects the notion of servitude: kneeling to prepare food for the white men who stand above him. The individual whom Gen. Marion called Oscar is still probably faceless.

Similarly, a black servant stands in the background of a couple of paintings of George Washington: John Trumbull's 1780 portrait and Edward Savage's 1796 picture of the Washington family. In recent years people have rushed to identify those figures as William Lee, the enslaved bodyservant who accompanied the Washington throughout the Revolutionary War.

Both Trumbull and Savage painted from life. Trumbull probably encountered Lee many times when he served as an aide at the general's headquarters in Cambridge, so he could have indeed painted the individual Lee. But the face in Trumbull's painting looks like a caricature. As for Savage, when he described his painting, he didn't even mention the black man in the background, just as he didn't mention the table at the center. I think we might be wishful to interpret these paintings as containing portraits of individual black men.

(We have more evidence about Will Lee as an individual and his relationship to George Washington; see the Boston 1775 posting on Margaret Thomas.)

Farewell Ceremony

Last week we saw an elaborate ceremony for a departing military administrator, so it seems appropriate to recall how Gen. George Washington bid farewell to his officer corps at the end of the Revolutionary War.

This description of the event at the Fraunces Tavern in New York comes from the memoir of Col. Benjamin Tallmadge, Washington's deputy for intelligence:

The time now drew near when the Commander-in-Chief intended to leave this part of the country for his beloved retreat at Mount Vernon. On Tuesday, the 4th of December, it was made known to the officers then in New York, that Gen. Washington intended to commence his journey on that day. At 12 o’clock the officers repaired to Francis' Tavern, in Pearl Street, where Gen. Washington had appointed to meet them, and to take his final leave of them.

We had been assembled but a few moments, when His Excellency entered the room. His emotion, too strong to be concealed, seemed to be reciprocated by every officer present. After partaking of a slight refreshment, in almost breathless silence, the General filled his glass with wine, and turning to the officers, he said, “With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.”

After the officers had taken a glass of wine, Gen. Washington said: “I cannot come to each of you, but shall feel obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand.”

Gen. [Henry] Knox being nearest to him, turned to the Commander in Chief, who, suffused with tears, was incapable of utterance, but grasped his hand; when they embraced each other in silence. In the same affectionate manner, every officer in the room marched up to, kissed, and parted with his General-in-Chief.

Such a scene of sorrow and weeping I had never before witnessed, and hope I may never be called upon to witness again. It was indeed too affecting to be of long continuance—for tears of deep sensibility filled every eye—and the heart seemed so full, that it was ready to burst from its wonted abode. Not a word was uttered to break the solemn silence that prevailed, or to interrupt the tenderness of the interesting scene. The simple thought that we were then about to part from the man who had conducted us through a long and bloody war, and under whose conduct the glory and independence of our country had been achieved, and that we should see his face no more in this world, seemed to me utterly insupportable.

But the time of separation had come, and waving his hand to his grieving children around him, he left the room, and passing through a corps of light infantry who were paraded to receive him, he walked silently on to Whitehall, where a barge was waiting. We all followed in mournful silence to the wharf, where a prodigious crowd had assembled to witness the departure of the man who, under God, had been the great agent of establishing the glory and independence of these United States. As soon as he was seated, the barge put off into the river, and when he was out in the stream, our great and beloved General waived his hat, and bid us a silent adieu.

We paid him the same compliment, and then returned to the same hotel whence Gen. Washington had so recently departed.

Of course, Washington came back to the national scene, first to chair the Constitutional Convention of 1787, then as President from 1789 to 1797, and finally as commander-in-chief during the “quasi-war” scare of 1798. But one of his greatest services to the U.S. of A. was to establish a tradition of bidding farewell to public posts when voluntary retirement from a position of unequaled power in a society was practically unknown.

A Note of Note

And a friendly welcome to everyone who's visiting for the first time because Boston 1775 became one of Blogger's "Blogs of Note" today!