More August Revolutionary Events in Boston

In conjunction with the reenacted encampment of the British army on Boston Common on this upcoming weekend, 15-16 August, two nearby institutions are offering their own Revolution-themed events.

For the entire month of August, the Boston Athenaeum (half a block from the northernmost corner of the Common) is hosting an exhibition of Revolutionary War-era books, manuscripts, and other artifacts from its collections. This display will be free and open to the public during normal opening hours; ask at the desk where to go.

While on the first floor, visitors should also be able to view the Athenaeum’s plaster busts by Jean-Antoine Houdon of Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette, and a cast of Houdon’s life-size sculpture of George Washington.

Also on Beacon Hill, the Museum of African American History offers walking tours on “Black Bostonians of the Revolutionary War Era” every Friday in August from 11:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. Its announcement says:

Come and learn about Revolutionary War era leaders such as Prince Hall and Colonel George Middleton and how they and other early African-American activists in Boston laid the foundation for the Abolition Movement and the early struggles for equal rights.

All tours begin and end in front of the museum.

Educating Dr. Warren’s Orphaned Children

When Dr. Joseph Warren died at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, his estate was burdened with debts. Those finances were also tangled up in the estate of the spectacular bankrupt Nathaniel Wheelwright, which the doctor had agreed to administer.

As I described yesterday, Warren left behind four children and a fiancée named Mercy Scollay. (Ironically, Mercy’s father, selectman John Scollay, had been forced into bankruptcy after Wheelwright’s collapse, and had had to dig himself out of that financial hole.)

Mercy Scollay took on the task of raising the Warren children and arranging for their education. The eldest boy was of particular concern, according to the values of the time: as the son of a gentleman and a martyr, Joseph simply had to go to Harvard—but who would pay the fees for schooling (the Boston schools were closed during the siege), tutoring, and the college itself? Scollay asked lots of people for support. The local Freemasons seem to have been the first to respond to her.

In January 1777, Samuel Adams proposed at the Continental Congress that “the eldest son...might be adopted by the continent, and educated at the public expense.” On 18 May, he sent Scollay this letter, shared online by the Massachusetts Historical Society:

With respect [the M.H.S. transcription has “request”] to the youngest Son and Daughter, I mentiond my strong Desire that they might be continued under your care; and that means might be continued to have the eldest son sent to Dummers School [now the Governor’s Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts]. . . .

While I was in Baltimore, an opportunity presented of making a Proposal, which, if agreed to, would be honorary to my friend and beneficial to his Son. General [Hugh] Mercer having been slain in Battle [at Princeton], or rather Barbarously murdered [not really], a Motion was made in Congress for a Monument to be erected to his Memory, and that his youngest Son should be educated at the Expense of the Continent.

I did not think my self partial in judging that the services and Merit of General Warren considered as a Patriot or as a Soldier were not inferior to those of General Mercer, and therefore added to the Motion that the same Honor should paid to his memory and that one of this Sons should be educated—I proposed the eldest. It was agreed that my Motion should be first entered on the Journal, and a Committee was appointed to consider of both.

Congress soon after adjorned to this Place [back to Philadelphia]. The gentlemen of the Committee are not all of them arrived. I am persuaded it will be agreed to in the Committee, but as the Determination in the House may be uncertain, I think it best that it should not be made known abroad [i.e., publicly], till we see the event.

That sort of regional horse-trading in legislation is not unfamiliar today.

What about the three other children: Elizabeth, Mary, and Richard? Gen. Benedict Arnold wrote to Scollay offering $500 in July 1778 and again in late 1779 in case the Congress didn’t offer additional funds. Mercy Warren of Plymouth (her husband no close relation to the Warrens) was apparently interested in bringing up Elizabeth, but the girl chose not to leave her school in Boston.

A 20 Dec 1779 letter from Samuel Adams relays this news from Dr. John Warren, the children’s uncle:

the eldest son was, as early as it could be done, put under the care and tuition of the Rev. Mr. [Phillips] Payson, of Chelsea; a gentleman whose qualifications for the instructing of youth, I need not mention to you. The lad still remains with him.

The eldest daughter...is with the doctor; and he assures me, that no gentleman’s daughter in this town has more of the advantage of schools than she has at his expense. She learns music, dancing, writing and arithmetic, and the best needle-work that is taught here. The doctor, I dare say, takes good care of her morals.

The two younger children, a boy of about seven years, and a girl somewhat older, are in the family of John Scollay, Esq., under the particular care of his daughter

In 1780, Congress took up the issue of the other three children, noting that “it appears no adequate provision can be made out of his [the late father’s] private fortune.” The national government decided that Massachusetts should step up with its own money, but agreed to provide half of a major-general’s pay until the youngest child came of age. The back pay came to $7,000, historian Jared Sparks later calculated. Of course, inflation was eating away the value of that money.

What return did the nation get on its payments for the boys’ education? Not much, alas. The young Joseph Warren graduated from Harvard in the class of 1786, served as a militia officer at the Castle, and died at age 22. His little brother Richard went into business and died at 21. Elizabeth married Gen. Arnold Welles and died without having children. Mary married twice, and is the only child of Dr. Joseph Warren to have left heirs.

The major local legacy of Dr. Joseph Warren came through his younger brother, also a physician. Dr. John Warren helped to found Harvard Medical School. His son Dr. John Collins Warren helped to establish the New England Journal of Medicine and the Massachusetts General Hospital, and performed the first surgery under ether anesthesia.

Looking for Dr. Warren’s Children on Wikipedia

Boston 1775 has hit the big time! Last Friday I received a missive on what Wikipedia was saying about Dr. Joseph Warren’s children. I followed it up, and discovered that as of yesterday the first citation in the Warren article was to this Boston 1775 post. And who says you can’t trust Wikipedia?

Unfortunately, you can’t always trust Wikipedia. That same entry went on to say:

At the time of Warren’s death [during the Battle of Bunker Hill], his children—Joseph Warren, H. C. Warren, Richard Warren, Elizabeth Warren, Mary Warren—were staying with Abigail Adams at the John Quincy Adams birthplace in Braintree, Massachusetts. A cairn now marks the spot where his oldest daughter observed the battle from afar after word of her father’s death. The Warren children were then financially supported by Benedict Arnold who later succeeded in obtaining support for them from the Continental Congress until they were of age.

To start with, Dr. Warren and his wife, who died in 1773, had only four children: Elizabeth, Joseph, Mary, and Richard, in order of birth. In 1775 their ages ranged from about nine years old to about three, according to this later letter from Samuel Adams. Rhoda Truax’s biography of the family says their nicknames were Betsey, Jose, Polly, and Dick.

There’s no citation on Wikipedia for the statement that those kids were with Abigail Adams during the Battle of Bunker Hill (which is what my correspondent was asking about, quite skeptically). Adams described the time of that battle in a letter, and her son John Quincy later recalled it in more letters, as I quoted back here. Neither mentioned the Warrens. Since one of John Quincy’s recollections went on to praise Dr. Warren (who had treated his injured finger), he would surely have mentioned being with the Warren children while their father was being killed—if indeed he had been.

Also, contrary to the Wikipedia explanation, no one knew that Warren was killed in that battle until it was over. It’s possible that one of Warren’s daughters later visited that hill in Braintree and looked toward the site of the Charlestown battle, but that’s not what Wikipedia describes (as of now—maybe I’ll fix it in the coming week).

So what happened to Warren’s four children in 1775? The doctor’s most recent biographer, John Cary, supposes that they were “left in the care of Mercy Scollay in Boston when Warren had been forced to flee town” in April. Scollay was a daughter of selectman John Scollay; she and the doctor had just become engaged, or perhaps engaged to be engaged. Citing a letter from Scollay to John Hancock dated 21 May 1776 (which I haven’t seen), Cary continues: “Shortly before his death, Warren asked her to care for his children if anything should happen to him.”

Here, courtesy of Teach US History, is an engraving from about 1825 of Warren leaving to go to his final battle. [ADDENDUM: The engraving appears in an 1846 issue of The Columbian Magazine, so it might be twenty years older than I thought.] He’s not letting emotion overcome him, to say the least. A baby—arguably a three-year-old—looks on. The caption for this engraving called the woman his wife, so we know misinformation didn’t start with Wikipedia.

TOMORROW: The education of Dr. Warren’s children becomes a national issue.

Assessing T. J. Randolph as a Source

I’ve been quoting and analyzing two statements about Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the relationship between them. Both documents—letters from biographer Henry S. Randall and from Jefferson granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge—relied on oral statements from the President’s oldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph (shown at left). How well does that information stand up to scrutiny? Not well. In fact, I don’t think we can avoid the following conclusions.

1. Thomas Jefferson Randolph was not a reliable source on the question of Sally Hemings’s children.

Randolph told Randall and Coolidge several things about why his grandfather couldn’t have been the father of any of the Hemings children, and who secretly was the father of them all. But those statements are contradicted by:

• documentary evidence: Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson were not separated for fifteen months before the birth of any child.
• architectural evidence: Monticello had no bedroom close enough for Randolph to hear Jefferson’s breathing at night.
• biological evidence: Patrilineal descendants of the youngest Hemings child, Eston, don’t share the same Y chromosome as patrilineal relatives of the Carr brothers, Peter and Samuel.
• chronological evidence: Randall understood that “At the periods when these Carr [i.e., Hemings] children were born, he, Col. Randolph, had charge of Monticello.” Randolph, born in 1792, was three years old when Hemings had her first immediately documented child, and still only sixteen when she had her last.
  
• each other: Different people recorded hearing Randolph identify two different Carrs as having had a long-term, exclusive sexual relationship with Sally Hemings and fathering all of her children.

It’s possible to come up with explanations for some of those contradictions. For example, Randolph might have consistently named Samuel Carr as the father, but years later Randall wrongly remembered hearing the name of Peter Carr instead. It’s also possible that Randolph gave out some accurate information, but stretched the truth to seem more authoritative or to make his explanations cover a longer time. But those suppositions all come back the point above: we can’t rely on the statements that ultimately come from T. J. Randolph.

Most of those statements’ contradictions were apparent when the Randall and Coolidge letters were first published in full. Nevertheless, until Annette Gordon-Reed published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, most Jefferson biographers took Randolph’s statements about the Hemings children as the most authoritative on the subject.

2. There’s no reliable evidence pointing to Peter or Samuel Carr as father of Sally Hemings’s children.

Only two people appear to have ever mentioned the Carrs as having any contact with Hemings at all: Henry S. Randall and Ellen Randolph Coolidge. And they got their information from Randolph—contradictory and unreliable information. Knowing that, we must conclude that either Peter or Samuel Carr is no more likely to have fathered the Hemings children than any other white man living within seven miles of Monticello. They just happened to be the householders related to Jefferson who lived closest.

In fact, the Carrs are less likely to have fathered the Hemings children than other candidates because:

• Eugene Foster’s genetic study showed that the Carr Y chromosome doesn’t match the Hemings Y chromosome. (The Jefferson Y chromosome does match.)
• No one in the Hemings family and no one in the vicinity of Monticello except for Randolph told people that either Carr was the father. (Madison Hemings and some neighbors said that Thomas Jefferson was the father; others denied that, but didn’t record alternative names.)

Of course, given the paucity of evidence two hundred years later, and the difficulty of proving any paternity without D.N.A. from parents and child, it’s still possible to imagine ways that one of the Carrs could have had some children with Sally Hemings. For example, she could have had children with multiple men, but so secretly that no one at Monticello remarked on that possibility, and the only genetic test available happens to apply only to a child fathered by a Jefferson instead of a Carr. That’s possible. But it’s a less likely explanation than what’s already on the table: Madison Hemings’s recollection, supported by other statements from the time.

3. We have to ask what Thomas Jefferson Randolph might have been hiding.

Normally historians treat people’s statements and recollections as reflecting how they honestly see their world—unless there’s evidence to the contrary. Then we have to consider whether they were mistaken, or shading the truth, or deliberately lying. For example, Henry S. Randall was probably sincere when he wrote:

It so happened when I was afterwards examining an old account book of the Jeffersons I came pop on the original entry of this slaves birth: and I was then able from well known circumstances to prove the fifteen months separation—but those circumstances have faded from my memory.

Still, Randall was mistaken. Possibly influenced by Randolph’s assurance that there was a fifteen-month gap, he overlooked one of Jefferson’s trips to Monticello nine months before Sally Hemings gave birth.

Similarly, we can consider that Randolph was sincerely mistaken about that same fifteen-month gap. But it’s harder to find a simple explanation of why he thought he could hear his grandfather breathing at night, or why he’d tell Randall about his Carr cousins wailing over what they’d done to his grandfather’s reputation and not tell his sister. And then there’s the fact that he wanted to keep his statements from being subjected to public scrutiny.

So without concluding that Randolph definitely was stretching the truth or lying, we should consider that possibility. What would that imply about the whole situation?

What would have motivated Randolph to lie? He said that shortly before his mother died he’d promised her that he would “defend the character” of Thomas Jefferson. Randolph was clearly trying to shape how Randall and subsequent historians wrote about his grandfather. He offered an explanation of the Hemings children alternative to the one discussed most in the press until then: that they were Jefferson’s children.

Perhaps Randolph believed in that explanation, but thought it needed more evidence behind it and tried to fill in some holes. And perhaps he was trying to conceal facts that he feared would reflect badly on his grandfather, his family, and/or himself. In the latter case, what might he have been trying to hide?

Though Randolph defended his grandfather’s character, he wasn’t so careful about his Carr cousins’ reputations, or the Hemings sisters’. He said that there was a lot of sex between white men (“Irish workmen,” “dissipated young men in the neighborhood”) and black women at Monticello. Randolph said his grandfather “was extremely indulgent” toward some young male relatives, and “the idea of watching them for faults or vices probably never occurred to him.” That’s a long way from the eighteenth-century ideal of a patriarch in control of his household (not that many patriarchs truly were). So if Randolph was trying to deny or conceal something, his statements would be evidence of something even more embarrassing than that.

T. J. Randolph Talks Freely to His Sister

On 24 Oct 1858, Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge (1796-1876, shown courtesy of Monticello) wrote a letter to her husband about Sally Hemings’s children, and other children born at Monticello who clearly had both European and African ancestry. Most of her information came from her older brother, Thomas Jefferson Randolph.

Coolidge wrote, “I have been talking freely with my brother Jefferson on the subject of the ‘yellow children’.” She wanted to summarize that conversation so that her husband could pass on most—but not all—of the information to a “Mr. Bulfinch.” This was probably a relative of Coolidge’s Boston-born husband; his mother was a Bulfinch.

Coolidge wrote about various white men having sex with the women her grandfather held captive: “Irish workmen,” “dissipated young men in the neighborhood.” However, she said Sally Hemings had only one sex partner:

One woman known to Mr. J. Q. Adams and others as “dusky Sally” was pretty notoriously the mistress of a married man, a near relation of Mr. Jefferson’s, and there can be small question that her children were his. They were all fair and all set free at my grandfather’s death, or had been suffered to absent themselves permanently before he died. The mother, Sally Hemmings, had accompanied Mr. Jefferson’s younger daughter to Paris and was lady’s maid to both sisters. . . .

I have written thus far thinking you might chuse to communicate my letter to Mr. Bulfinch. Now I will tell you in confidence what Jefferson told me under the like condition. Mr. [Vaul W.] Southall and himself young men together, heard Mr. Peter Carr say with a laugh, that “the old gentleman had to bear the blame of his and Sam’s (Col. Carr) misdeeds.”

There is a general impression that the four children of Sally Hemmings were all the children of Col. Carr, the most notorious good-natured Turk that ever was master of a black seraglio kept at other men’s expense. His deeds are as well known as his name.

This echoes what Jefferson biographer Henry S. Randall recalled hearing from T. J. Randolph in the same decade—except the details don’t match.

As Annette Gordon-Reed pointed out, Randall heard Randolph tell a dramatic story of the Carr brothers bursting into tears of remorse when he confronted them about the Hemings rumors. Yet Randolph told his sister that Peter Carr spoke about the topic “with a laugh,” and didn’t mention their cousins showing any regret.

In 1868 Randall came away believing that “Sally Henings was the mistress of Peter,” and that Samuel Carr was “particularly open” about having another woman—Betty Hemings—as his mistress. Ten years earlier, Coolidge understood that “the four children of Sally Hemmings were all the children of” Samuel Carr.

The two stories don’t leave room for thinking that there were overlapping rumors. (In other words, something like: “Did you hear Peter’s going out with Sally?” “No! I heard that last week she went out with Samuel.” “Really? I had no idea.”) Rather, in both cases people believed that Randolph had stated that basically everyone at Monticello knew about those relationships: “their connexion with the Carrs was perfectly notorious at Monticello”; “a general [i.e., widely shared] impression”; “most notorious good-natured Turk.” Furthermore, everyone was clear that all of Sally Hemings’s children were the product of a long-term relationship with one man.

One thing was consistent both times people recalled Randolph’s information: He asked them to keep quiet about the name of the man having children with Sally Hemings. They could speak in general terms about white men having sex with their grandfather’s captives, even about “a near relation of Mr. Jefferson’s” coupled with Hemings. But they shouldn’t name either Peter or Samuel Carr. Which, of course, meant that the Randolph family’s Carr cousins would have no chance to respond before the generations who had known Thomas Jefferson personally had died out.

TOMORROW: Assessing Thomas Jefferson Randolph as a witness.

“Into the Woods” at Historic Deerfield

One highlight of this spring’s Dublin Seminar on “New England and the Caribbean” was a visit to the Flynt Center of Early American Life’s new exhibit of furniture, called “Into the Woods.”

What was the Caribbean connection? The West Indies and Central America were where New England furniture makers got the mahogany and other hardwoods they used to create their most expensive pieces. (At the same time lots of New England oak was being shipped to the tropics in the form of barrel staves, to hold molasses, rum, and sugar.)

The exhibit uses dozens of examples from Historic Deerfield’s permanent collection of colonial and early American antiques. Curator of Furniture Joshua Lane displayed pieces in “exploded view” to offer an inside look. Thus, we can see the drawers for a highboy separate from the frame that held them, or the tools that rendered a graceful chair from a block of wood.

Other parts of the exhibit show furniture-makers developing new methods and trying to keep up with fashions (such as Asian motifs on “japanned” pieces). The technique that awed me was a way to give light wood inlays the appearance of a shadow on one side, and thus the illusion of depth. The joiner cut a veneer of light wood, singed half of it lengthwise, and then cut wedges from the area where the singed and unsinged portions met. I don’t think I did a great job of explaining that; you’ll have to go see.

Back in December 2006 I mentioned how I’d be delighted if anyone wanted to make me a present of a particular Ralph Earl portrait of two brothers (now no longer visible online). I’d be almost as grateful at receiving this exhibit’s two semi-circular chests of drawers with compartments that swing out on hinges at the sides. In fact, even one of those pieces would be lovely.

Here’s the New York Times article about the “Into the Woods” exhibit. It will remain in the Flynt Center at Historic Deerfield until 2013, but don’t put off seeing it. If you visit before 17 August, you can also check out Edward Maeder’s exhibition of what the well-dressed colonial American gentleman wore: wigs, banyans, and fabrics that today would grace only the finest sofas. And through December there’s a display of powder horns from the 1700s.

T. J. Randolph Keeps a Secret

Henry S. Randall’s 1 June 1868 letter to James Parton makes clear that Thomas Jefferson Randolph really, really wanted the biographer to accept that Peter Carr was the father of all of Sally Hemings’s children, and that his grandfather Thomas Jefferson wasn’t the father of any.

It’s also clear from the letter that Randolph really didn’t want Randall to share any of his statements about Peter Carr with the world. Randall explained the circumstances to Parton, who was also planning to write about Jefferson:

Do you ask why I did not state, or at least hint the above facts in my Life of Jefferson? I wanted to do so, but Colonel Randolph, in this solitary case alone prohibited me from using at my discretion the information he had furnished me with. When I rather pressed him on the point he said, pointing to the family graveyard, “You are not bound to prove a negation. If I should allow you to take Peter Carr’s corpse into Court and plead guilty over it to shelter Mr. Jefferson, I should not dare again to walk by his grave; he would rise and spurn me.”

I am exceedingly glad Col. Randolph did overrule me in this particular. I should have made a shameful mistake. If I had unnecessarily defended him (and it was purely unnecessary to offer any defense) at the expense of a dear nephew—and a nobleman—hating a single folly.

Randolph insisted that he wanted to protect the Carr family reputation. Of course, he was even more eager to protect the Jefferson family reputation; that’s why he told all that stuff to Randall in the first place. How did asking the author to keep it secret serve Randolph’s primary purpose? If a serious biographer had published evidence about Peter Carr fathering the Hemings children, complete with an eyewitness account of a tearful confession, that could have laid the fifty-year-old issue to rest.

Unless, that is, the Carrs were to object with public statements of their own. When Randolph spoke to Randall in the 1850s, there were four Carr men still alive who could have offered their own testimony or evidence about Peter and Samuel Carr’s visits to Monticello and the Hemings sisters—or lack thereof:

• Samuel Carr himself. The former colonel and legislator didn’t die until 1855. Would he have liked knowing that his cousin had told a writer, “Samuel’s proceedings were particularly open”?
• Peter’s son Dabney (1802-1854), who served as customs collector at the port of Baltimore and U.S. minister to Turkey.
• Samuel’s son James Lawrence (1813-1874/5), a lawyer in western Virginia.
• Samuel’s son George Watson (1822-1899), an army colonel.

All these men had enough standing in society to challenge Randolph’s statements—if he’d made them publicly. But he made them only in private conversations with a sympathetic author, and then convinced that author to keep them secret. He thus accomplished what he wanted—to keep the Hemings rumors out of Randall’s book—without risking a bigger blowup.

The recipient of Randall’s 1868 letter, James Parton (shown above, courtesy of the Freedom from Religion Foundation), finished his own book about Jefferson in 1874. At that time Randolph and at least one of the four Carrs listed above was still alive, but a newspaper interview with Madison Hemings had brought the story of his mother back into the public eye. Parton therefore addressed the question. He even acknowledged:

There is even a respectable Madison Henings, now living in Ohio, who supposes that Thomas Jefferson was his father. Mr. Henings has been misinformed.

Because obviously a letter from a sympathetic biographer remembering ten-year-old conversations with a man clearly out to restore his grandfather’s reputation was more reliable than what Hemings had heard from his own mother while growing up at Monticello. Similarly, the way that biographer had spelled Hemings’s last name was obviously more authoritative than how the man spelled it himself.

In his book Parton quoted the parts of Randall’s letter about a fifteen-month separation and Randolph sleeping within earshot of his grandfather’s bedroom. He left out the passages that named Peter Carr and instead wrote: “The father of those children was a near relation of the Jeffersons, who need not be named.” (It’s interesting that Parton mentioned the Carrs’ father Dabney several times, and quoted a couple of letters Jefferson had sent to Peter Carr, including one that advised: “Question with boldness even the existence of a God.” Which takes us back to Freedom from Religion, I suppose.)

As a historical source, there are only two troubling details about Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s statement that Sally Hemings was Peter Carr’s mistress:

• In 1858 Randolph told his sister a different story.
• We now know that neither story was accurate.

COMING UP: What Jeff told Ellen.

T. J. Randolph Throws the Carrs Under a Bus

I’ve been quoting from the 1868 letter in which Thomas Jefferson biographer Henry S. Randall recalled his conversations with the President’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph about the family’s captive maid Sally Hemings. Those conversations probably started in the early 1850s and had to have finished before 1858, when Randall published his book.

The biggest part of the letter involved Randolph pointing to a first cousin, once removed, as the father of Hemings’s children. Writing in 1868, Randall recalled the statements this way:

Mr. Jefferson had two nephews, Peter Carr [1770-1815] and Samuel Carr [1771-1855] whom he brought up in his house. There were the sons of Mr. Jefferson’s sister [Martha] and her husband Dabney Carr that young and brilliant orator, described by [William] Wirt, who shone so conspicuously in the dawn of the Revolution, but died in 17[73]. Pete was peculiarly gifted and amiable. Of Samuel I know less. But he became a man of repute and sat in the State Senate of Virginia.

Col. [Thomas Jefferson] Randolph informed me that Sally Henings was the mistress of Peter, and her sister Betsey the mistress of Samuel—and from these connections sprang the progeny which resembled Mr. Jefferson. Both the Henings girls were light colored and decidedly goodlooking. The Colonel said their connexion with the Carrs was perfectly notorious at Monticello, and scarcely disguised by the latter—never disavowed by them. Samuel’s proceedings were particularly open. . . .

Colonel Randolph said that a visitor at Monticello dropped a newspaper from his pocket or accidentally left it. After he was gone, he (Colonel R.) opened the paper and found some very insulting remarks about Mr. Jefferson’s Mulatto Children. The Col. said he felt provoked. Peter and Sam Carr were lying not far off under a shade tree. He took the paper and put it in Peters hands, pointing out the article. Peter read it, tears coursing down his cheeks, and then handed it to Sam. Sam also shed tears. Peter exclaimed, “arnt you and I a couple of pretty fellows to bring this disgrace on poor old uncle who has always fed us! We ought to be —— by ——!”

I could give fifty more facts were there time, and were there any need of it, to show Mr. Jefferson’s innocence of this and all similar offenses against propriety. . . . Mr. Jefferson was deeply attached to the Carrs—especially to Peter. He was extremely indulgent to them and the idea of watching them for faults or vices probably never occurred to him.

Monticello’s webpage about the Carr family says that Peter and Samuel Carr were born in 1770 and 1771, respectively. By 27 Feb 1793, according to a letter from their cousin Martha, Peter had moved out of his mother’s house and Samuel was looking for an estate as well. According to The Carr Family Records, a spotty genealogy published in 1894, Peter and Samuel Carr lived on adjoining estates called Carr’s Retreat and Dunlora. As near as I can tell through Google Maps, they were about six or seven miles from Monticello.

In April 1799 Jefferson told his sister that both cousins had just had children: “Peter Carr had a son and Sam a daughter.” Peter declined to enter public life, though his family reportedly thought he should. Samuel eventually served brief terms in both houses of the Virginia legislature and was a colonel of the state militia during the War of 1812. According to Andrew Burstein’s Jefferson’s Secret, Samuel also helped T. J. Randolph manage his unreliable father’s finances.

It’s clear from this letter that Randolph wanted Randall to understand that Peter Carr was the father of all of Sally Hemings’s children, and that almost everyone at Monticello knew that: “from these connections sprang the progeny which resembled Mr. Jefferson. . . their connexion with the Carrs was perfectly notorious at Monticello, and scarcely disguised.” Randolph offered no opening for thinking that any other man was having sex with Hemings and could thus have fathered any of her children.

Peter Carr couldn’t have impregnated Sally Hemings in France, however. And according to the gossip-seeking journalist James Callender, she was pregnant when she came back from Paris with Jefferson. (Hemings’s son Madison would also state that his mother had been pregnant at that time.) Thus, Randolph’s statement about Peter Carr couldn’t refute Callender’s first and biggest accusation against the President; it could only address the gossip that spread as the Hemings children grew up at Monticello through 1826. Perhaps Randolph was confident that the slave-labor plantation’s account books contained no record of Hemings giving birth in 1790; after all, he inherited those documents from his grandfather.

TOMORROW: The other thing Thomas Jefferson Randolph wanted.

(The miniature portrait of Jefferson above, from Monticello, is by John Trumbull.)

T. J. Randolph and His Grandfather’s Breathing

Yesterday I quoted a passage from an 1868 letter from Henry S. Randall, a biographer of Thomas Jefferson, to a younger writer, passing on what the President’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph had told him about the enslaved worker Sally Hemings. Here’s another tidbit:

He said Mr. Jefferson never locked the door of his room by day: and that he (Col. R.) slept within sound of his breathing at night.

Thus, by evoking the authority of someone who had lived alongside Jefferson in Monticello, Randolph was offering evidence that the President couldn’t have slept with Hemings. From that same letter we know that Randolph had taken it upon himself to “defend the character of [his] grandfather,” and was speaking to a sympathetic author who believed and passed on his remarks. But was he speaking accurately?

Last year Bloomberg posted an interview by Manuela Hoelterhoff of Alan Pell Crawford on his new book, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson. It included this exchange:

Hoelterhoff: When you studied the ground plan [of Monticello], you noticed a secret passage to the slave quarters.

Crawford: During the childbearing years of Sally Hemings—the chambermaid with whom he probably had this long-term sexual relationship—he moved her to a room beneath the house itself and then at some point installed a staircase that would lead to his private chambers at Monticello.

I included the floor plan of the house in part to refute a claim made by his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, that he would have known anything that went on inside Jefferson’s bedroom, because he slept within the sound of his snoring. I show there’s no such bedroom that would be within the sound of anything that went on inside Jefferson’s bedchambers.

Crawford uses the word “snoring” to give Randolph the benefit of the doubt—perhaps the “breathing” Randolph claimed to have heard at night was on the loud side. But it seems that Randolph’s bedroom still couldn’t have been close enough. So that’s the second claim which Randall recalled hearing from Randolph that we now know to be false.

In the overall interview, I was struck by Crawford’s tone of sympathy for the elder Jefferson’s situation, living off the labor of hundreds of other people yet still unable to live within his means.

TOMORROW: Thomas Jefferson Randolph points his finger.

T. J. Randolph and the Missing Fifteen Months

Earlier in the week I offered a link to Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, online courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society. That notebook and other careful accounts from Jefferson’s slave-labor plantations were in the custody of the President’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph (1792-1875, shown here courtesy of Monticello) from 1826 until 1848, and then changed hands as the M.H.S.’s finding aid describes.

Randolph cited those documents when he tried to refute the rumors that had circulated since at least 1802 that his grandfather had had children with his enslaved maid Sally Hemings. That attempted refutation comes to us through Henry S. Randall (1811-1876), who wrote a three-volume biography of the President published in 1858. On 1 June 1868, Randall told another biographer several stories he’d heard from Randolph concerning Hemings and her children. The Frontline website offers a transcript of that letter.

The part that relates to Jefferson’s papers says:

Mr. Jefferson’s oldest daughter, Mrs. Gov. [i.e., Martha Jefferson] Randolph, took the Dusky Sally stories much to heart. But she never spoke to her sons but once on the subject. Not long before her death she called two of them—the Colonel [i.e., Thomas Jefferson Randolph] and George Wythe Randolph [1816-1867]—to her. She asked the Colonel if he remembered when “——— Henings (the slave who most resembled Mr. Jefferson) was born.” He said he could answer by referring to the book containing the list of slaves.

He turned to the book and found that the slave was born at the time supposed by Mrs. Randolph. She then directed her sons attention to the fact that Mr. Jefferson and Sally Henings could not have met—were far distant from each other—for fifteen months prior to such birth. She bade her sons remember this fact, and always to defend the character of their grandfather.

It so happened when I was afterwards examining an old account book of the Jeffersons I came pop on the original entry of this slaves birth: and I was then able from well known circumstances to prove the fifteen months separation—but those circumstances have faded from my memory. I have no doubt I could recover them however did Mr. Jefferson’s vindication in the least depend upon them.

Note that the Randolphs, Randall, and by implication Parton were all interested in Jefferson’s “vindication” from the rumors. We know what they wanted to see in the records, and what they wanted other people to believe about those records.

Randall was vague about which enslaved man he was investigating. Many people interpret the phrase “Henings (the slave who most resembled Mr. Jefferson)” to refer to Eston Hemings, who later took the name Eston Jefferson; at the very least, lots of people who knew the man in Ohio said he looked like Thomas Jefferson. That would put the birth that Randolph and Randall looked up in 1808. But it doesn’t really matter which of Sally Hemings’s documented sons they might have been thinking of.

That’s because neither Randolph nor Randall was accurate. Perhaps they were both mistaken about Thomas Jefferson’s whereabouts for the entire fifteen months before Sally Hemings gave birth that time. But we know better—and from the very sources those men were consulting, the President’s own records.

Dumas Malone wrote the most thorough twentieth-century biography of Jefferson, in six volumes. As part of his research, Malone used Jefferson’s papers to figure out where the man was on every day of his later adult life. He strongly denied the possibility of Jefferson-Hemings children in an essay reprinted in his fourth volume (where I first read the story, about twenty years ago). Annette Gordon-Reed’s book on the issue has shown Malone’s statement of the facts and analysis to be incomplete and slanted, but as a researcher he was thorough.

As Winthrop Jordan wrote in White Over Black (1968), “though he was away from Monticello a total of roughly two-thirds of this period [when Sally Hemings is documented as having had children], Jefferson was at home nine months prior to each birth.” (Jordan did his own calculations of Jefferson’s whereabouts when, and Malone’s research later confirmed them.) Jefferson’s records also never show Hemings being away from Monticello after 1789, and he and his overseers kept careful track of their human property. (That was the whole point of slave records, after all.) There’s thus no evidence for the fifteen-month separation that the Randolph family and Randall claimed to have (“pop”) spotted.

Meanwhile, Sally Hemings’s son Madison had no access to any of those Jefferson family documents, nor control over them. He had no way to make up a story that matched the data inside them. He couldn’t add to them, or erase information from them. He couldn’t claim their authority for his statements about his family. Yet Madison Hemings’s account of his and his siblings’ parentage fits the documentary and biological evidence better than T. J. Randolph’s and Henry S. Randall’s.

TOMORROW: Another claim from Thomas Jefferson Randolph.

Urban Encampments in August

The summer is usually a great time to enjoy military reenactments and encampments, but often those take place well outside the city. After all, the landscape out there looks a bit more like it did two centuries ago. But this month we’ll see some encampments within easy walking distance of subway stops.

Saturday, 9 August, 12:30 to 3:30 P.M.: Glover’s Regiment will set up camp on the front lawn of the mansion that became George Washington’s headquarters in 1775-76, now officially known as Longfellow National Historic Site. The regiment from Marblehead that this group reenacts used that same estate soon after the Revolutionary War began, before the new generalissimo moved it. The reenactors will sing sea shanties, demonstrate the manual of arms, and talk about life during the early days of the American Revolution. (Visiting the encampment and the grounds is free; there’s a small fee to tour the house. The nearest T stop is Harvard.)

Saturday, 16 August, 9:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M., and Sunday, 17 August, 9:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.: The Freedom Trail Foundation will host the first reenacted British army encampment on Boston Common. British regiments arrived there in May 1774 as part of Parliament’s plan to pressure Boston into repaying the East India Company for its destroyed tea. Those troops were in barracks by late fall, but the arrival of more regiments in the early spring of 1775 and the start of the war meant the Common returned to being a military encampment until the end of the siege.

The foundation,, which is celebrating the Freedom Trail’s fiftieth year, describes its plans like this:

The ongoing scheduled program includes: drills and black powder firing demonstrations, mock tents and bed making, shoemaking, a medical tent, cooking, clothing and uniforms; a cricket game, court martial, stocks, music, and confrontation with colonial militia men. Children can dress in typical colonial dress and experience camp life and have their photo taken.

In addition, sutlers—dry goods merchants who frequently accompanied British camps—will be on hand with their re-created 18th century inventory of historic cloth, games, clothes, hats, accessories, and household items.

Some of the reenactor regiments participating are His Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot; 1st Regiment of Foot Guards; 5th Regiment of Foot; 9th Regiment of Foot; 4th or King’s Own Regiment; 21st Foot R.N.B.F.; and the 24th Regiment. The Freedom Trail Players will be on hand to interpret. Units will start setting up around 3:00 P.M. on Saturday, and folks can visit those areas until sundown, but there are no programs planned until the weekend. (Visiting the Boston Common encampment is free. I don’t know whether Park Street or Boylston will be the closer T stop.)

The Last of the Boston Light

Earlier this month, Christopher Klein, author of Discovering the Boston Harbor Islands, contributed two articles about the Boston Light on Little Brewster Island and the Continental Army’s raid on that lighthouse on 20 July 1775. But that wasn’t the end of the story, or the end of the lighthouse.

Here’s Chris’s conclusion:

Just 11 days after their first attack on Boston Light, the patriots hit again. This time, a detachment of 300 men led by Major Benjamin Tupper set out in whaleboats from Nantasket during the night of 30 July 1775 and landed on Little Brewster Island in the early hours of the morning on 31 July.

The patriots overcame the guard, gained the upper hand on the British marines stationed on the island, and burned the lighthouse and buildings on the island. Tupper’s men killed between 10 and 12 British troops and made prisoners of the rest while suffering only one fatality of their own.

In his letter to the Continental Congress dated August 4 and 5 of 1775, General George Washington reported:

A Number of Workmen having been sent down to repair [Boston Light] with a Guard of 22 Marines & a Subaltern, Major Tupper last Monday Morning about 2 oClock landed there with about 300 Men, attack’d them killed the Officer, & 4 Privates, but being detained by the Tide, in his Return he was attack’d by several Boats, but he happily got through with the Loss of one Man killed & another wounded. The Remainder of the ministerial [i.e., British] Troops, 3 of which are badly wounded, he brought off Prisoners, with 10 Tories all of whom are on their Way to Springfield Gaol.

Washington’s general orders of 1 August 1775 also included this item:

The General thanks Major Tupper, and the Officers and Soldiers under his Command, for their gallant and soldierlike behaviour in possessing themselves of the enemy’s post at the Light House, and for the Number of Prisoners they took there, and doubts not, but the Continental Army, will be as famous for their mercy as for their valour.

By June 1776, the British had evacuated Boston but their ships still lurked in the harbor. When they were finally driven out of the harbor for good on 13 June 1776, the British returned the favor to the colonists and blew up the tower of Boston Light using a timed charge. It was an ignominious “parting gift” from the Redcoats, who were led by the aptly named Captain Bangs.

The British destruction of the lighthouse is the reason why the beacon at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, which dates to 1764, has the distinction of being the oldest lighthouse structure in America, although Boston Light is still the oldest light station in the country. Boston Light would lay dark for seven years before it was rebuilt under orders from John Hancock in 1783.

Today, the distinguished, bold pillar of Boston Light is a postcard-perfect lighthouse, and it is the last to retain a Coast Guard keeper. Tours of Boston Light run from Thursday to Sunday through early October. For more information, visit www.bostonislands.org.

Thanks again, Chris!

Looking for Thomas Woodson and Finding a Blank

Annette Gordon-Reed’s book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and Eugene A. Foster’s genetic study brought a lot more attention to the question of Thomas Jefferson’s African-American descendants in the late 1990s. Among the responses was the publication in 2001 of A President in the Family, by Byron W. Woodson. The author laid out his family’s case to have descended from Jefferson through a man named Thomas Woodson.

Unfortunately, this book doesn’t distinguish between facts shown in contemporary documents and the Woodson family’s understandings. It doesn’t show how early the family story was recorded, and what independent traditions exist in different branches of the family—both useful in establishing the validity of oral traditions. And it doesn’t address the big holes in the theory of a Jefferson-Woodson link:

• There’s no documented link between Thomas Woodson and Monticello or nearby parts of Virginia. (In contrast, Sally Hemings’s youngest sons Madison and Eston are well established in Monticello and Charlottesville records, and there are clear mentions of older siblings as well.)
• Thomas Woodson left no account of his childhood as Jefferson’s son (unlike Madison Hemings).
  
• There’s no genetic match between the Woodson and Jefferson Y chromosomes (unlike the situation with patrilineal descendants of Eston Jefferson, who had been born Eston Hemings).
• Had Woodson been born in 1790, as his descendants came to believe, then he would have been only seventeen when he entered the historical record. At that time he was already a husband, a father, and a landowner in western Virginia. It would have been exceptional for a minor to do those things, much less a minor born into slavery.

I suspect that in the late 1800s, after Thomas Woodson’s long life, his relatives tried to learn more about his origin, and connected hints about his past with statements about Sally Hemings that had been in print for decades. Then that tradition was passed down, feeling more certain with each generation. It’s tough to give up the understandings we grow up with. But Thomas Woodson and his family have plenty of accomplishments of their own (documented in the book) which don’t depend on a presidential past.

The William & Mary Quarterly review of A President in the Family noted the book’s flaws but praised Woodson for drawing attention to a pertinent detail of Jefferson’s farm book. I suspect Woodson consulted a published transcript of that notebook, but we no longer have to. The Massachusetts Historical Society, which owns the farm book, has posted page images online.

Page 31 lists children born enslaved on two Jefferson estates from 1779 to 1799. In the year 1790, according to rumors published by the political journalist James T. Callender in 1802 and the recollections of Madison Hemings in 1873, Sally Hemings gave birth to a boy conceived with Thomas Jefferson while they were in Paris. There’s no record of such a birth in the farm book—but an entry has been erased in the box for boys born in 1790.

Woodson saw this as possible evidence that Jefferson had covered up the birth of a boy named Thomas when it became politically or socially damaging. After looking at the page, I’m not so sure. There are other full or partial erasures in the notebook. The birth of Sally Hemings’s son Beverly in 1798 is still recorded on the right side of the same page. And the remnants of the mother’s name don’t seem to fit the word “Sally’s.”

COMING UP: More about the Jefferson farm records.

On the Trail of the Jefferson Y Chromosome

Yesterday I wrote about Prof. Annette Gordon-Reed reexamining the evidence about the paternity of Sally Hemings’s children in 1997 and concluding that certainty lay in the realm of medical science, not documentary history.

That’s where Eugene A. Foster, M.D., entered the picture. He had been a pathologist and professor of forensic medicine at Tufts and the University of Virginia. Like Gordon-Reed, he was trained to think rigorously about evidence. Foster had read about the question of whether Hemings’s owner, Thomas Jefferson, fathered those Hemings children, and wondered if there could be a genetic answer.

These remarks come from Frontline’s interview with Foster:

The experts and I had thought that, after five, six or seven generations, the DNA of the person who you’re interested in...would be diluted so much that you can hardly find any. In other words, in each generation, a parent passes on only half or less of his or her DNA to the children, so with each generation, it begins to disappear. So even if we knew what was specifically characteristic of Thomas Jefferson’s DNA, we would have very little chance of finding it in people who are his descendants or think they’re his descendants.

And then the whole thing was complicated because of other family relationships, like the fact that Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson’s wife probably had the same father. The Carr brothers, who were also implicated in this affair, had ancestors common with the Jeffersons, and so forth. So it was just going to be impossible. . . .

But the Y chromosome is something that is passed. It’s the chromosome that determines whether you are a man. So a man has the Y chromosome and an X chromosome and the woman has two X chromosomes. The beauty of that is, since you only have one Y chromosome and it’s gotten only from your father, that means it isn’t diluted. It goes from generation to generation, father to son, unchanged. No one had thought of using it for these purposes, because it had not been thought to have enough variation.

Foster’s contribution to history was to apply a new discovery in medical science to an old, seemingly intractable question. He turned what seemed like a boring quality in genetics—“not enough variation” in men’s Y chromosome—into an advantage when it came to studying paternity nearly two centuries before.

With the assistance of genealogist Herbert Barger and others, Foster located patrilineal (i.e., son of a son of a son...) descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s paternal uncle, one Hemings child, Thomas Woodson, and the Carr brothers. Then a team of British and Dutch geneticists tested those men’s Y chromosomes to find close matches, and some British statisticians analyzed the results.

Foster published the team’s findings in Nature in 1998, and the news immediately made headlines. They had found a match between the Jefferson and Hemings lines, and no match between those lines and those of the Woodson or Carr families. Given the elimination of any Carr link to Sally Hemings’s children, the documentary evidence already pointing to Thomas Jefferson as their father, and the total lack of evidence from the nineteenth century pointing to any other Jefferson, Foster’s study settled the question for most historians and other observers.

What I find especially convincing about this analysis is that no one in the nineteenth century could have predicted D.N.A. science, or known who would have patrilineal descendants alive in 1998. In other words, someone making up a story about the Hemings children in the 1800s had no idea what evidence that story would have to match and explain in the future. And of all the detailed accounts of the Hemings family set down in the nineteenth century, only one—the memories of Madison Hemings—was fully consistent with the Foster study.

Foster died last week at age 81, and his obituaries led with his Jefferson work.

TOMORROW: The mystery of Thomas Woodson.

A Sea Change in an American Controversy

Back in 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed, a law professor at New York University, published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. It’s a well argued book, if not a well written one. It looked at two things: all the documentary evidence about Sally Hemings’s children, and all that historians and journalists had written since 1802 about the various reports that Thomas Jefferson or others had fathered those children.

Gordon-Reed’s firmest conclusion was that historians had not given fair consideration to the people who said that Jefferson was the father. And no one could really argue with that after looking at her evidence and arguments. Authors had clearly used double standards to judge those remarks against the denials from Jefferson’s acknowledged descendants.

As for the validity of different people’s claims to be descended from Jefferson, Gordon-Reed later told the P.B.S. show Frontline in an interview archived here how she found some stronger than others:

I researched the question of whether or not Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a child named Tom, who was first Tom Hemings, and then later changed his name to Tom Woodson. I came to the conclusion that that story was not supportable.

There was simply not enough in the documentary record for me to say that I believed that Thomas Woodson, who definitely existed, was in fact the son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. I came to that conclusion because there are no records at Monticello ever listing him as a child of Sally Hemings, even when he would have been a very small child.

Madison Hemings’s memoir says that [his mother] Sally Hemings was pregnant when she returned from France with Jefferson, but that that child had died, and the thinking is that perhaps he just didn’t know. . . . But why would his mother say that the child died?

There was no documentary record of Tom, unlike the Madison Hemings situation, where you actually have a child telling his story. Madison Hemings’s story is not really properly cast as oral history [i.e., a tradition passed down in a chain of people]. He is a witness, a historical witness from the time, who’s telling you about his life.

The oral history of the Woodson family is very strong, but it was not enough for me to say that that story was as wrapped up as the Madison Hemings story.

Gordon-Reed didn’t include Thomas Woodson or any child named Tom on the Hemings family tree in the frontmatter of her 1997 book. She held back from judging Madison Hemings’s claim as valid, arguing only that it needed fairer consideration. Instead, in her introduction she wrote:

It is not my goal to prove that the story is true or that it is false. I suspect that if that is ever done, it will be the result of the miracles of modern science and all the wonders of D.N.A. research, and not because of any interpretation of documents and statements.

Despite that caution, I think that Gordon-Reed’s book produced a sea change in how American historians looked at this question, from believing that a Jefferson-Hemings relationship was unlikely (as had been stated the year before by Joseph Ellis in American Sphinx) to believing that it was more likely than not.

TOMORROW: The wonders of D.N.A. research.

Revolution Comes to Sturbridge?

From Old Sturbridge Village comes this news of a military reenactment on 2-3 August:

The Village is transformed into a military camp focusing on what life was like during the War for Independence. Camped in the fields and pastures from the Common to Freeman Farm, hundreds of Revolution-era troops will be drilling and marching, fifing and drumming, cooking and camping in 18th-century fashion, along with civilian tagalongs—including doctors, wives, and children.

Kids will be invited to learn to march, cannons and muskets will be booming, and there’ll even be a military “fashion show” to enjoy.

On Saturday evening (August 2) from 5 to 9 p.m., join the troops and their families for a Twilight Encampment and gain insight into camp life beyond the daytime focus on military activities. Free for Village members and the day’s front gate visitors, the evening encampment is also open to walk-ins for a late-day admission fee.

The O.S.V. website promises updates on what reenactor units will attend. In addition, Hitchcock Academy in nearby Brimfield is hosting a U.S. Civil War reenactment on the same weekend, and visitors to either event can receive a discount on visiting the other.

Of course, a Revolutionary-era event in Old Sturbridge is an anachronism. The village is a recreation of a New England town from the 1830s, and displays buildings (the bank) and technology (the carding mill) that didn’t exist in New England during the Revolution. But it’s also a lovely landscape with excellent collections, so we just have to think hard enough not to lump all historical periods together as “yore.”

Tracking Tomahawk through the Decades

Having subtly reestablished my scholarly standing yesterday, I feel free to highlight some images that I gathered for Wednesday’s workshop at Old South Meeting House about using graphic novels (comics) to teach the Revolutionary War.

The most successful American comic book about that historical period was DC’s Tomahawk, published monthly and then bimonthly from 1950 to 1972 (the last ten issues under the title Son of Tomahawk). The character of Tom Hawk, Revolutionary frontier warrior, also appeared in Star Spangled Comics (1947-52) and World’s Finest Comics (1948-59). I linked to Scott Shaw!’s essay about this comic last November, but that link seems to have broken, so I have to point to Don Markstein’s Toonopedia instead.

Most of the time Tomahawk was a western that just happened to be set during the Revolutionary War. The hero’s costume (and that of his boy sidekick) reflected the mid-1900s image of American frontiersmen regardless of time period: fringed buckskin and coonskin cap. Only the dress of other white characters showed that these stories took place in the eighteenth century, along the old northwest frontier.

Tomahawk usually fought Native Americans as well as British soldiers, though (as in the real Revolution) the Continental forces also had Native allies. The covers of the Tomahawk magazine tended to emphasize those “Old West”-style battles, as on this one from August 1954.

But the fad for western comics faded, and Tomahawk had to keep up with the times. In the late 1950s, comics of all sorts were borrowing from science fiction; that was when Batman kept leaving Gotham City to go into space, or into other dimensions. This issue of Tomahawk from Sept-Oct 1958 is one of many which show the frontiersman meeting monsters of one sort or another.
The word “dinosaur” wasn’t coined until 1841, and the Enlightenment was only barely beginning to conceive of the possibility of “prehistoric” times. But such details didn’t stop America’s Favorite Frontier Hero!

Costumed superheroes started to dominate the comic book form again in the late 1950s and early 1960s, eventually driving out nearly every other type of story. Again, Tomahawk reflected that fashion in July-Aug 1962 by adding a costumed heroine who dropped by periodically.

By the end of Tomahawk’s second decade, many comic books were reflecting their young target audience’s concerns about social justice, and trying to offer more emotional realism. This remarkable issue from Mar-Apr 1969 portrays the Indian fighter’s regrets about, well, fighting Indians.
The Tomahawk comic book doesn’t really teach the Revolutionary War, of course, but it shows how comic books changed over time. All these covers, and more, come from the Grand Comics Database.

“Creative and Provocative Analysis”

H-Childhood, the H-Net email list about the history of childhood, has just distributed a review of Children in Colonial America by Prof. Gail S. Murray of Rhodes College in Memphis. The review will eventually be has now been archived at the H-Net website, when you can confirm that she wrote:

The strength of the collection, however, is the way it expands one’s thinking about colonial America, a society dominated numerically by those under the age of twenty. . . .

Marten took care to include studies of the mix of peoples populating colonial America. . . . More familiar British-American childhoods also receive creative and provocative analysis, as in J. L. Bells’s [sic] “From Saucy Boys to Sons of Liberty” and Darcy R. Fryer’s exploration of “Growing Up Rich in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina.”

Also, I missed it at the time because I wasn’t yet reading Philobiblos and it unaccountably didn’t include my name, but in March 2007 Jeremy Dibbell called the book “A useful, current and largely impressive anthology on an under-studied topic.”

Hunting for “The Year of the Hangman”

Yesterday I responded to novelist Laurie Halse Anderson’s question about whether John Adams actually wrote about 1777 as “the year of the hangman.” I quoted Adams’s words from over a decade later indicating that unspecified, untraceable “Tories” had said that 1777 “had three gallowses in it, meaning the three sevens.”

However, Adams didn’t write “the year of the hangman,” and neither did anyone else I can find in the 1770s. The label doesn’t appear the Archive of Americana database of period newspapers and pamphlets. Nor is it in the Adams family letters, the George Washington Papers, and the other digital databases I usually check for period usage.

In fact, the earliest use of that phrase for 1777 that I found through Google Books is Lynn Montross’s The Reluctant Rebels: The Story of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, published in 1950. That book includes a chapter titled “Year of the Hangman,” and at one point says, “It was the year of the hangman, and the gallows jokes exchanged in the State House were not so humorous after the imprisonment of [Richard] Stockton...”

As far as I can tell, Montross coined that phrase; I haven’t uncovered an earlier usage. He didn’t say the words came from 1777, only that it reflected how the Patriots saw their situation that year. But then the same words appeared in other books, with the growing implication that it was a genuine period phrase:

• The 1966 Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, edited by Mark Boatner, included an entry on “Hangman, year of the.”
• One part of The River and the Rock: The History of Fortress West Point, 1775-1783, authored by Dave Richard Palmer in 1969, carried that title.
• The phrase “year of the gallows” comes from a character’s mouth in Thomas Fleming’s 1976 novel Liberty Tavern.
• John S. Pancake’s 1777: The Year of the Hangman (1977) quotes Adams’s original letter to explain its subtitle.
• Gary Blackwood’s The Year of the Hangman (2002) is an alternate history marketed to teen-aged readers.
• The strategy game shown above, designed by Ed Wimble, is “an operational study of the campaign for Philadelphia.”
• Most recently, Glenn F. Williams’s award-winning military history Year of the Hangman: George Washington’s Campaign Against the Iroquois was published in 2005.

As its subtitle indicates, that last book isn’t really about hangings of American rebels or British convicts, but about the ruthless war on the U.S. of A.’s northwest frontier. It’s a long way from Adams’s original claim that Tories joked that 1777 would see a lot of rebels going to the gallows. I think the phrase’s appearance on that book shows the real appeal of “Year of the Hangman”—it just sounds like a cool title.

John Adams and the “Three Gallowses”

Boston 1775 reader Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Fever 1793 and the upcoming Chains, just wrote to me:

All kinds of books quote [John] Adams as calling 1777 “the year of the hangman,” but I can’t find anyone who cites a primary source document so I can a) verify it and b) put it in context with whatever else he was writing.

Do you have a clue about where this one comes from?

Laurie hit on a mystery that’s been bugging me, too. I’ve seen various writers say that 1777 was called “the year of the hangman” because the date looked like a line of gallows, and because the British authorities were threatening to hang lots of people—either convicts in Britain or rebels in America, it’s not clear which. But I haven’t seen any citation of a primary source. So I went hunting.

In 1789, Adams exchanged letters with Henry Marchant of Rhode Island (shown above, courtesy of Wikipedia), recollecting their experiences in the Continental Congress. The Vice President wrote:

I left Congress on the 11th of November, 1777, that year which the Tories said, had three gallowses in it, meaning the three sevens...

I don’t know the exact date of that letter because it appeared only in a footnote in the third volume of The Works of John Adams, edited by grandson Charles Francis Adams and published in 1851.

Within a decade, historians were taking John Adams’s word for it that Tories had indeed said the year 1777 should be read that way. The November 1859 Atlantic Monthly included an article that stated: “The Tories felt certain of victory. In the political almanac of that party, 1777 was ‘the year with three gallows in it.’”

There are only two problems with that conclusion:

• We still don’t have any citations of an actual Tory saying or writing anything of the sort. The phrase “three gallows(es)” doesn’t appear in the Archive of Americana database for that period. Perhaps there were such quotations—in Britain? in undigitized newspapers? in private letters? But I haven’t found them yet.
• It’s possible that this remark didn’t make it into writing, but Adams heard Loyalists say it. But where would a Continental Congress delegate known for pushing independence hear such remarks?
  
• As I’ve noted before, Adams liked to see himself as facing up to stronger opposition and criticism than was really out there. It seems quite plausible that he heard one political opponent—or even a political ally—joke about the sevens in 1777 and recalled that was what “Tories” threatened in general.
  

TOMORROW: But what about “the year of the hangman”?