Fires Big and Small

On Tuesday, 12 May, the Lincoln Minute Men will host a slide show and lecture by John Horrigan on “Great Fires of the American Revolution.”

Among the New England towns he’ll talk about are Concord, scorched a little during the army raid on 19 Apr 1775; Charlestown destroyed during the Battle of Bunker Hill; what’s now Falmouth, Maine, under attack by the Royal Navy in October 1775; and New London, Connecticut, burned during Gen. Benedict Arnold’s 1781 attack. Outside the region he’ll visit Norfolk, Charleston, and New York. Most of those fires were deliberately set since flame was the eighteenth century’s most potent weapon.

This free event will take place in Bemis Hall at 15 Bedford Road in Lincoln, starting at 7:30 P.M.

Storms with Revolutionary Consequences

The September 1775 hurricane that got dubbed the “hurricane of independence” didn’t actually affect the course of the Revolutionary War. But other storms did.

Boston, 5 Mar 1776. Having spotted the new Continental Army artillery batteries on Dorchester Heights, Gen. William Howe ordered an amphibious assault on that peninsula. But, as Boston selectman Timothy Newell recorded, “a Hurrycane, or terrible sudden storm,” arrived, battering the boats and rendering firelocks useless. The general called off the attack. By the time the weather cleared, the American position was too strong, and Howe chose to evacuate Boston, ending the war’s oldest campaign with an American victory.

Trenton, 25 Dec 1776. Because of freezing temperatures and a mix of sleet, snow and icy rain, the Hessian troops at Trenton felt secure enough to pull back their picket sentries. Desperate for a victory, Gen. George Washington led columns of Continental Army soldiers across the icy Delaware River under cover of that same storm. Though not all the American forces managed to get across, those that did routed the Hessians and broke a long string of demoralizing battlefield losses.

Newport, 11-12 Aug 1778. A French fleet and an American army were supposed to collaborate on driving the British military out of Rhode Island. Adm. d’Estaing chose instead to engage the British fleet. Then a heavy storm hit the area, scattering and damaging the French ships. D’Estaing headed to Boston for repairs rather than try another attack, and the British drove back an American advance at the end of the month. Newport remained in British hands.

Yorktown, 16-17 Oct 1781. In a desperate move, Gen. Cornwallis started to have men ferried across the James River from Yorktown to Gloucester Point to counterattack the French and American forces. But after the first trip, the general wrote, “the weather from being moderate and calm, changed to a most violent storm of wind and rain,” and scattered the British boats. With no other options, the next day the British commander opened negotiations with Gen. Washington to surrender.

And there are probably other examples as well, especially when it came to the war at sea. Plus, long-term meteorological or environmental events, such as famine in India, the loss of good farmland in New England, and a dip in the “little Ice Age,” probably had even bigger long-term effects.

TOMORROW: The biggest storm of all.

[The portrait of D’Estaing above comes from this webpage describing how Haitian soldiers fought alongside Americans at Savannah.]

Thick and Stormy

These days, we track storms and hurricanes with planes, radar, and satellites. We all have experience watching big storms pass over Caribbean islands and head for the U.S. mainland, gaining alphabetical and increasingly inclusive names along the way.

Before radio, however, storms seemed to blow out of nowhere. People couldn’t track a hurricane at sea in real time. Any ship lucky enough to survive an encounter with such a storm would limp into port after the storm itself had arrived or passed by. Only in retrospect might scientists string together a series of reports from various islands, ships, and seaboards and posit that they were all about the same storm.

There’s just such a series of reports of bad weather from the late summer of 1775, starting in Santo Domingo and the Outer Banks of North Carolina in late August and then moving to Williamsburg, Annapolis, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston in early September. But the British colony hit worst by far was Newfoundland, where 4,000 people died on 9-11 Sept 1775, mostly fishermen. Waters rose so high there, in fact, that some latter-day scientists suggested there was an undersea earthquake and tsunami, though no one reported shaking.

That storm was labeled the “Independence Hurricane of 1775” in David M. Ludlum’s Early American Hurricanes, 1492-1870. The label might be older, but I haven’t found it in earlier books. It doesn’t seem appropriate to name Canada’s deadliest natural disaster after a political development in the U.S. of A., but that’s cultural imperialism for you.

Tony Williams heard about that storm on television, got intrigued, and started researching it. The result was a book published last year, Hurricane of Independence: The Untold Story of the Deadly Storm at the Deciding Moment of the American Revolution. It tracks the 1775 storm that from its appearance off Santo Domingo to rainstorms in Newfoundland on 4-5 September.

And then the book argues that a second, more destructive hurricane hit Newfoundland a few days later, causing all those deaths—more than 90% of the total. The first hurricane, Williams posits, kept going north from Philadelphia and blew itself out in upstate New York and Upper Canada. So we might have a use for both labels: America’s “Independence Hurricane” and Canada’s “Newfoundland Hurricane of 1775.”

Hurricane of Independence attempts to justify its title by tying the meteorology to the development of the American independence movement. For instance, Chapter 15 is titled “General Washington Battles the British and the Weather.” There’s an ongoing discussion of how Washington and his contemporaries thought of “providence,” a way of thinking about both natural and political events that seemed beyond humans’ control.

The problem with that approach is that this hurricane really didn’t affect the American independence movement. Its biggest impact on the war? A Royal Navy ship called the Otter was washed ashore in Hampton, Virginia, and some locals plundered and burned it.

There was rain in Philadelphia, but the Continental Congress wasn’t in session and that city didn’t see any deaths. In the main military theater around Boston, here’s how the weather played out according to the diary of Pvt. Caleb Haskell of Newburyport:

September 3rd, Sunday.—This morning there was a storm of rain. In the afternoon had several shells thrown at us from Bunker's Hill. Our guard killed and 15 of the enemy.

September 4th, Monday.—This morning is thick and stormy. Clears off pleasant in the afternoon.

September 5th, Tuesday.—A pleasant morning after a long storm. All still here. At night I went on guard at P[rospect]. Hill.

Big whoop.

On the 11th Haskell left with Gen. Benedict Arnold on his march north through the Maine wilderness. In October that column encountered terrible weather, but the “independence hurricane” was long gone.

It’s also difficult to see how early September 1775 was “the Deciding Moment of the American Revolution,” as the book’s subtitle would have it. That was about five months after the war had started, three months after the Congress had adopted the army around Boston and sent Washington north, and half a year before the colonies moved toward independence. What big events occurred in that month, and how did the storm affect them?

Hurricane of Independence spends many pages on quick summaries of what led up to the Revolutionary War, which are generally what we find in many other books. (One glitch: Page 178 mixes up Dr. Samuel Prescott with Col. William Prescott.) But I didn’t see evidence that the hurricane(s) of September 1775 affected even one American’s thinking about the political conflict, or for that matter about providence.

In sum, the old label “hurricane of independence” seems more hysterical than historical. That storm happened to hit a number of American ports near independence, and got a great publicity boost about two centuries later. Williams didn’t come up with the “independence” label, but it was what intrigued him about the topic, so he was stuck with it. He might have been better off setting it aside and looking at how some storms really did shape the Revolutionary War.

TOMORROW: How some storms really did shape the Revolutionary War.

Benjamin Franklin: Lefty or Righty?

Back at this posting, a long-time Boston 1775 reader asked whether Benjamin Franklin was left-handed, as portrayed (by Howard Da Silva) in the movie 1776 and as stated on many websites.

In the book Right Hand, Left Hand, Chris McManus considers the evidence. In 1779 Franklin wrote an essay titled “A Petition of the Left Hand,” which laments the neglect of the sinister. Of course, Franklin also wrote a “Petition of the Letter Z” (1768), and no one argues that we should assume he spelled his name with a Z.

In 1762, Mason Chamberlin (1727-1787) painted Franklin from life, as shown here. This portrait is now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, though this image comes from a Smithsonian webpage. And it shows Franklin holding a quill in his right hand.

Of course, a painting isn’t a photograph; it reflects how the artist chooses to portray the subject. And it’s possible that Franklin learned to write this way even though he was naturally a lefty. But until folks find better evidence, it looks like Benjamin Franklin was right-handed.

Seeking Meaning in Tea Parties

Prof. Benjamin Carp of Tufts is at work on a thorough new study of the Boston Tea Party. He’s been mulling over the connections and disconnects between that 1773 crowd action and the recent political protests that invoke it. It’s been interesting to watch his considerations evolve.

On 10 April he wrote on the Publick Occurrences blog:

I think the easiest thing to do would be to start picking out all the bad historical analogies and use it as an excuse to guffaw at the “Tea Party” movement that’s scheduled to demonstrate on April 15, 2009 (tax filing day). But I’m not going to do that–instead I’m going to try and be even-handed about this, and see if there’s anything to this grassroots conservative invocation of the Boston Tea Party.

Unfortunately, the ideology behind all of this seems rather vague. . . . There’s not much there: the protesters are in favor of “basic free-market principles” and “freedom.” (Well, me too!) The site doesn’t say how the government is ignoring the Constitution, exactly–and if you dig a little further, it all goes back to Rick Santelli’s displeasure with the stimulus plan and the budget.

I believe Santelli’s displeasure actually focused on a single aspect of the Obama administration’s economic policy—the plan to keep people from losing their homes when they can pay only part of their mortgage bills. I doubt he would have gotten much support from his audience of Chicago commodities traders if he’d widened his criticism to, say, the vastly more expensive financial-industry bailouts. (Which is not to say that others didn’t protest those bailouts, at the “tea party” events and elsewhere.)

Ben shared further thoughts on 19 April in the Washington Post after observing one protest in New York:

Although I study early American history, I wasn’t trying to check the protesters’ creative interpretations against my footnotes. Instead, I tried to appreciate the bizarre nature of a day that began for me with work on a chapter on tea boycotts for my new book and ended with a modern crowd’s interpretation of the historical period I study. It was a great reminder that the original Tea Party had made this civilized re-enactment possible and, ultimately, anti-climactic by comparison. . . .

In Boston in 1773, the men who boarded the tea ships had to conceal their identity or risk punishment—perhaps even being hanged for treason. Last week, the merry protesters chatted with journalists about their complaints, then folded up their “Welcome to the Second American Revolution” signs and went home. The original Tea Party had helped make free speech possible, but these modern protests didn't seem likely to change the world just yet.

That editorial also had the most to say about historical parallels—and historical perpendiculars—between the issues of 1773 and today. Back then, Parliament deemed the East India Company too big to fail, for instance. But the fundamental disconnect is that today we have a representative government with wide public support. “Taxation without representation” is no longer a national issue. In addition, the current economic crisis affects far more than a single well-connected company.

Most recently, on 23 April, Ben wrote at the Oxford University Press blog:

it’s true that many (though not all) of the conservative protesters were invoking the “tea party” mostly as empty symbolism and not as an explicit historical parallel. But such unthinking (not to say cheap) symbolism can be potentially dangerous. After all, the actual perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party destroyed over £9000 worth of goods (the equivalent of between $1 and $2 million dollars in today’s money), and this was after weeks of threatening the British tea agents at their homes and places of business.

Perhaps we might agree today that the colonists were forced to resort to violence and destruction because they suffered under a “tyrannical” empire that ignored their arguments—but in a representative government, we have other alternatives. Despite the signs calling for “tarring and feathering,” in New York City, the strong police presence probably discouraged any real thoughts of violence. But will those protesters who were calling for “rebellion” be content with civil disobedience in the future? . . .

Certainly the tea party protests weren’t primarily populated by hate groups or domestic terrorists—but we still might want to be wary of “heritage” groups who take their revolutionary rhetoric too far. There were plenty of angry left-wing groups when the left was out of power, and now there are plenty of angry right-wing groups now that the right finds itself out in the cold. The vast majority of this anger will never be channeled into violence; but when protesters begin using “tea party” talk, we have to hope they’re not taking the analogy to an extreme.

I think American extremists are no different from any other American political group in seeking to link their causes and methods to the nation’s founders. But the shift to a republic produced a fundamental disconnect between the Revolutionaries and the dissatisfied voters of later generations. After 1776, American white men with property could no longer complain they had no say in their government. Well, they could still complain, and some do, but those complaints hold less water than a teacup.

Another Mistaken Quotation

And speaking of ersatz Samuel Adams quotations, here’s another one that’s been spread around:

When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.

The Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had a bumper sticker with this statement in his possession when he was arrested. I can’t tell if that sticker attributed those words to any particular political thinker, but people writing about McVeigh said they came from Adams.

Other writers, however, give credit to Thomas Jefferson (shown here) and to Thomas Paine.

In fact, the quote appears to be a modern derivation of these words from Amos Pinchot, a Progressive who turned to the right in the late 1930s:

Today, the nations of the world may be divided into two classes—the nations in which the government fears the people, and the nations in which the people fear the government. It is the New Deal’s tragedy that it is moving this country into the second class.

H. L. Mencken picked that up in his 1942 New History of Quotations on Historical Principles. Prof. Gary Dean Best quoted Pinchot in Peddling Panaceas and The Retreat from Liberalism, two histories of twentieth-century U.S. economics.

Some webpages credit Pinchot but transform his name into Pinochet, who really knew how to make the people fear the government.

ADDENDUM: Monticello has found an earlier version of this quotation from 1914. The speaker was John Basil Barnhill, and the occasion was “a series of debates on socialism.” There are so many spurious Jefferson quotations floating around that Monticello has a whole category of its Wiki about them.

Samuel Adams and “Brush Fires in People’s Minds”

In February, Brendan Steinhauser, an organizer for the FreedomWorks lobbying organization, posted advice on “How to Start Your Own Tea Party Protest,” and invited people to contact him at FreedomWorks for more advice. For some people, the result would be a spontaneous, grass-roots protest.

Steinhauser closed those postings with a picture of the torch-bearing mob of Springfield, apparently to show respect for populist politics, and what he claimed was a quotation from Samuel Adams:

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.

Steinhauser is far from alone in crediting those words to Samuel Adams. They appear on a variety of political websites, from both the left and the right, and in several titles on Google Books, all but one published in the last ten years. (The outlier is a study of Sudanese politics dated to 1990, of all things.) Among the books that include this Adams quotation is Bob Gingrich’s Founding Fathers Vs. History Revisionists, which makes what follows amusingly ironic.

One place that sentence about “an irate, tireless minority” doesn’t appear is in the published writings of Samuel Adams. In fact, my Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation of the term “brush fire” is dated 1850, decades after Adams’s death. Its first use of the phrase as a political metaphor is from 1947.

The quotation is not only inaccurate, but it misrepresents Adams’s political situation. He usually led the majority in Boston’s town meeting and in the Massachusetts legislature. He rarely needed to win the majority over to his principles; rather, his challenge was convincing people to follow his plans for action. Therefore, he called over and over for unity, resolve, and mutual sacrifice from the majority, not “an irate, tireless minority keen to set fires.”

Sampling of Events in May

Here are some of the upcoming Revolutionary-history events in greater Boston which have caught my eye.

Thursday, 7 May, 5:15 P.M.
Eliga H. Gould, University of New Hampshire
“An Empire of Peace: The International Origins of the American Revolution”
This is part of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Boston Area Early American History Seminar. Participants are invited to read Gould’s (44-page) paper in advance. Maya Jasanoff of Harvard University will comment on it, Gould will respond, and then there will be an open discussion about the questions he has raised.

Tuesday, 12 May, 6:00 P.M.
Nina Zannieri, Executive Director of the Paul Revere House
“Myth and Memory: The Legacy of Paul Revere”
This lecture at the Massachusetts Historical Society is co-sponsored by the Concord Free Public Library and Minute Man National Historical Park. It’s part of the Minute Man Anniversary Lecture Series celebrating the 50th anniversary of that national park. There will be refreshments beforehand at 5:30 P.M.

Thursday, 14 May, 7:00 P.M.
Ray Raphael, author of Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation
A book talk and signing at the Minute Man N.H.P. Visitor Center in Lexington. Raphael’s previous books include The First American Revolution (discussed here and here), Founding Myths, and A People’s History of the American Revolution.

Wednesday, 20 May, 12:00 P.M.
Jennifer Egloff, New York University
“Popular Numeracy in Early Modern England and British North America”
This is one of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s “Brown Bag Lunches”: a scholar working in that archive discusses the questions she’s researching, along with practical challenges, methodological issues, and preliminary findings. Everyone else eats lunch and discusses the speaker’s work while she becomes more and more hungry.

Wednesday, 10 June, 7:00 P.M.
David Glassberg, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Minute Man Lecture
Another lecture on the heritage of the Minute Man National Historical Park, this time in its Visitor Center in Lexington. At least that’s what the flyer I got in the mail says—nothing’s on the website yet. Looks like the title hasn’t been decided yet, either, but Glassberg’s research focuses on “popular historical consciousness in America as represented in politics, culture, and the environment.”

A Long-Running Revolutionary War Comic

Today is Free Comic Book Day, so I’m featuring another Revolutionary War comic, brought to my attention by Boston 1775 reader Judith Cataldo. This series appeared at different rates from 1966 to 2000—in Italy, of all places.

Il Comandante Mark seems to have been the Italian fumetti version of DC Comics’s Tomahawk, a frontier warrior. Here is a website devoted to him—in Italian, naturally.

This is the most detailed description of the comic I could find in English. The translation mixes up our Revolutionary War with our Civil War, but then Comandante Mark’s costume mixes up the centuries as well. (And the American Revolution was a civil war.) The story begins in 1966:

Pietro Sartoris, Dario Guzzon and Giovanni Sinchetto, or better known has the EsseGesse trio, proposed to Sergio Bonelli a project regarding...a leader of a valiant group of patriots: the Comandante Mark (Commander Mark).

Mark is a French nobleman, as a child he was shipwrecked thanks to the English, but survived when a patriot saved him; he was than raised by a tribe of Native American Indians. His adoptive father teaches him fighting and fencing, as well as the values of liberty, loyalty and defending those oppressed. Following his father’s hanging, Mark becomes the leader of a group of patriots: the Lupi dell’Ontario (Ontario’s Wolves). They fight against the hated Giubbe Rosse (Red Coats) in an idealistic universe that’s severely split into good and bad guys.

The facts that there would have been no distinction between “the English” and “a patriot” when Mark was a shipwrecked child, and that Ontario remained British throughout the war and for decades afterward, might give us pause about this comic’s historical accuracy.

Mark also has two inseparable stooges, the often main characters of comic relief: Mister Bluff and Gufo Triste. The first is an always happy individual from a mysterious past, the second, is an Indian who’s always intent in predicting misfortune and fighting against Flok, Mister Bluff’s dog. Mark also has a fiancée, the blond Betty who he’ll eventually marry...

The fumetti covers indicate that Mark he took time away from redcoats to fight a samurai, a tiger, and ghosts. I would, too, if I were saddled with “inseparable stooges.”

Here are entries on Comandante Mark at the Italian version of Wikipedia and Cartoni Online. In 1971 the comic inspired a Turkish movie called Captain Swing.

“Loyalism” Conference in Maine, 4-7 June

The University of Main at Orono will host a conference on “Loyalism and the Revolutionary Atlantic World” on 4-7 June 2009. The keynote speakers are:

• Robert Calhoon, Emeritus Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
• Philip Gould, Professor of English, Brown University
• Maya Jasanoff, Associate Professor of History, Harvard University

I see papers on the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles and James Murray, prominent friends of the royal government in Boston, and recognize such speakers as Todd Braisted of the Institute for Advanced Loyalist Studies. Registration deadline is 15 May.

The image above shows an encampment of Loyalists in Johnstown, Ontario, in 1784.

Pirates, Corsairs, and Privateers

Earlier this spring many Americans seemed to discover that there’s a piracy problem off the eastern coast of Africa. The international news media had reported about Somali pirates for years, but this time four of them took an American captive, and suddenly all our fond thoughts about Capt. Jack Sparrow vanished.

Folks who at other times express little sympathy for Americans who get in trouble delivering aid to a war zone suddenly advocated severe military action to rescue Capt. Richard Phillips. Some suggested punishing Somalis collectively for the actions of those four young men. The noise tapered off considerably when the U.S. Navy rescued Phillips, killing and capturing those particular pirates, but the larger problems in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden remain.

During that national discussion, many people invoked the historical antecedents of American actions against the Tripolitan states of North Africa starting in 1801. Few noted how for the previous fifteen years Congress had allocated money—up to 20% of the federal budget—to buy protection from those governments and to ransom prisoners from their corsairs.

One of the first popular American novels was Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797), about such a captured sailor. (In the department of meaningless coincidence, that novel’s hero is named Underhill and Tyler became chief justice of Vermont; the rescued Capt. Phillips was from Underhill, Vermont.)

That novel portrays some other facts that Americans don’t always recall in discussing the “Barbary pirates.” Corsairs seized American ships only if they came close to North Africa; their waters, their rules. A lot of the American ships which did sail there were in the slave trade, and the number of Africans taken in captivity to North America was much larger than the number of North Americans held captive in Africa.

Rep. Ron Paul suggested a response to the current piracy problem based on Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress these powers:

• To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;
• To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;
• To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;
• To provide and maintain a navy;
• To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;...

As a libertarian, Paul sought a small-government, market-driven solution: post a large reward for pirates and “grant letters of marque and reprisal” allowing U.S. citizens to compete for that reward. In other words, charter a new generation of privateers.

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall (a historian who’s found a way to make a living with a website) pointed out the flaw in this proposal. During the Revolutionary War people invested their money, ships, and labor in privateering voyages because they hoped to share in the high profits that could come from selling captured British ships and cargoes. But even with a reward, there really isn’t a market for Somali sailors and their small boats.

I think this whole situation just highlights how much things have changed for the U.S. of A. The young men aiming for easy targets off their coast with the support of their families and neighbors back home—those were the American privateers in 1776, the Somali pirates today. The most powerful navy in the world trying to keep shipping lanes open, supply far-flung troops, and joust with other empires—that was the Royal Navy in 1776, the U.S. Navy today.

Franklin’s Lost “Quire Book of Letters”

While I was away last weekend, Boston 1775 reader Guy Curtis kept me up to date with this C.N.N. report on a recent discovery of copies of lost letters by Benjamin Franklin. Actually, they weren’t lost; they were apparently in the repository’s catalogue. But scholars didn’t recognize their significance until Prof. Alan C. Houston visited London to research his upcoming book Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement. (Franklin’s thoughts on a peculiarly Boston use of the verb “improve” are back here.)

Houston, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, discovered the letters on the last day of his last research trip to London, just before the library’s closing time.

“The first item was a letter from Benjamin Franklin to the secretary of the governor of Maryland, and I looked at it and I started to read, and I thought, ‘This doesn’t look familiar,’” Houston told CNN. “I’ve read everything Franklin ever wrote.”

Houston said he quickly began to realize he had uncovered something previously unknown to historians.

“I swear, I just about shot through the ceiling I was so excited,” he said.

The thrill of discovery can indeed be levitating. The letters documented Franklin’s role in securing wagons for Gen. Edward Braddock during his 1755 campaign against Fort Duquesne—a campaign that ended in disaster, but not for want of wagons.

When Franklin was sent to London in 1757 as a representative of the [Pennsylvania] assembly, he brought with him a collection of letters detailing that success. It was proof of his political value to Great Britain and that the assembly’s loyalties had been on the right side.

This collection of letters, which Franklin referred to in his autobiography as his “quire book,” was never found, however—until now.

Houston said he believes the documents he read at the British Library are copies of that collection. They were made by Thomas Birch, an industrious and obsessive transcriber of historical documents who copied anything he could get his hands on.

The modern equivalent might be a copy of someone’s emails copied onto a forgotten hard drive. The text of these letters will appear in an upcoming issue of the William and Mary Quarterly.

(The thumbnail Norman Rockwell image of Franklin above links to the Benjamin Franklin House in London.)

“A Stop to All Credit Was Expected”

If you haven’t already read the fourth-quarter 2008 issue of Massachusetts Banker magazine (and I know you’ve been busy), you can download a copy here. It’s 4.9 MB, but some of those bytes consist of my article “A Bankruptcy in Boston, 1765.”

Nathaniel Wheelwright was one of Boston’s leading businessmen in the early 1760s: a merchant, wharf owner, supplier of specie to the British army, and backer of financial notes for people of all classes. He had married into the wealthy Apthorp family, and was the father of three young sons. To quote myself:

Then, in January 1765, Wheelwright suddenly stopped honoring his debts. There is no clue about what exactly prompted this decision, but its consequences were staggering. Governor Francis Bernard reported to London: “This was like an earthquake to the town; numbers of people were creditors, some for their all. Every one dreaded the consequences; lesser merchants began to fail; a stop to all credit was expected and a general bankruptcy was apprehended for a time.”

Eventually this financial crisis caught up several men who might be familiar to Boston 1775 readers: William Molineux, John Scollay, John Rowe, and especially Dr. Joseph Warren, whom Thomas Hutchinson as probate judge assigned to administer Wheelwright’s tangled estate. The repercussions of that crisis, I argue, helped to increase Bostonians’ anxieties about the Stamp Act later in 1765.

Check out Massachusetts Banker for the whole story. I wrote that article in a previous financial quarter, of course, but it seems to have only become more timely.

Looking for “Taxation Without Representation”

As I wrote yesterday, most sources credit James Otis, Jr., with coining the phrase “taxation without representation,” but he never actually used that phrase in his writings, and no contemporary quoted him directly as doing so. Otis certainly wrote about the problem, putting it at the center of the American objections to Parliament’s taxes in the 1760s and 1770s, but not in that exact way.

So is the phrase “taxation without representation” authentically Revolutionary, or actually a coinage of later years applied backwards, as the terms Intolerable Acts, lobsterback, and tricorn appear to be?

And I’m pleased to report that yes, we can document the phrase being used in the Revolutionary years. In 1769 the Rev. John Joachim Zubly (1724-1781) of Georgia authored a pamphlet titled An Humble Enquiry into the Nature of the Dependency of the American Colonies upon the Parliament of Great-Britain, and the Right of Parliament to Lay Taxes on the Said Colonies. He wrote:

In England there can be no taxation without representation, and no representation without election; but it is undeniable that the representatives of Great-Britain are not elected by nor for the Americans, and therefore cannot represent them...

The available databases being incomplete, I’m not entirely sure Zubly coined the phrase “no taxation without representation,” but so far his pamphlet is the earliest use I’ve seen.

James Burgh (1714-1775) also used the phrase in his long work Political Disquisitions; or, An Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses, published in 1774. He even titled the second chapter of his Book II “Of Taxation without Representation.”

So “taxation without representation” is authentically American! Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. Zubly was Swiss by birth and, though he represented Georgia in the Second Continental Congress, advocated reconciliation with Britain. He was driven out of Savannah when it was under independent government and returned there and died under royal rule.

As for Burgh, he was a Scottish by birth, and a clergyman in a parish near London. He advocated the American cause, and Political Disquisitions became quite popular in the U.S. of A. But, like Zubly, Burgh considered himself British.

But don’t worry! I’ve also found some examples of Americans using the phrase. “Taxation without representation” appears in statements issued by Dover, New Hampshire, on 10 Jan 1774; by York, Massachusetts (Maine), on 20 Jan 1774; and by John Smith on 6 July 1775, while he was locked up in “Strafford Prison” as a suspected Loyalist. But the fact that I didn’t stumble across more citations might indicate that the phrase wasn’t as dominant as we’ve come to expect.

“Taxation without representation” appeared in several early histories of the conflict:

• David Ramsay’s History of the Revolution of South-Carolina (1785) and History of the American Revolution (1789).
• William Gordon’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America (1789).
• Tobias Smollett’s The History of England, from the Revolution to the End of the American War, and Peace of Versailles in 1783 (1796), discussing how the same issue was raised in Ireland.

So historians might have snatched up that quick, three-word formulation of the colonies’ problem soon after the war, and it became one of the major ways we remember the American Revolution.

James Otis, Jr., on Taxation Without Representation

Until 2 Nov 2005, the phrase “taxation without representation” has almost always been credited to the Boston lawyer and legislator James Otis, Jr. The basis for this attribution is John Adams’s recollection of how Otis argued the writs of assistance case in 1761, in a letter to Otis’s biographer William Tudor, Jr., in 1818. After quoting that letter at length Tudor wrote:

From the navigation act the advocate [Otis] passed to the Acts of Trade, and these, he contended, imposed taxes, enormous, burthensome, intolerable taxes; and on this topic he gave full scope to his talent, for powerful declamation and invective, against the tyranny of taxation without representation.

From the energy with which he urged this position, that taxation without representation is tyranny, it came to be a common maxim in the mouth of every one. And with him it formed the basis of all his speeches and political writings; he builds all his opposition to arbitrary measures from this foundation, and perpetually recurs to it through his whole career, as the great constitutional theme of liberty, and as the fundamental principle of all opposition to arbitrary power.

However, neither Adams’s contemporaneous notes on what he’d heard in 1761 nor his letter contained the “taxation without representation” phrase or argument. We know he was urging Tudor to write about Otis as a way to capture some of the attention that William Wirt’s romanticized biography had brought to Patrick Henry of Virginia. Adams and Tudor had strong motives to present Otis, a Massachusetts man, as the first to establish the fundamental political conflict of the Revolution.

And in fact Otis did so—even if he didn’t use the words we remember. In his 1764 pamphlet The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (extensive extracts here), Otis concluded:

The sum of my argument is: that civil government is of God; that the administrators of it were originally the whole people; that they might have devolved it on whom they pleased; that this devolution is fiduciary, for the good of the whole; that by the British constitution this devolution is on the King, Lords and Commons, the supreme, sacred and uncontrollable legislative power not only in the realm but through the dominions; that by the abdication, the original compact was broken to pieces; that by the Revolution it was renewed and more firmly established, and the rights and liberties of the subject in all parts of the dominions more fully explained and confirmed; that in consequence of this establishment and the acts of succession and union, His Majesty GEORGE III is rightful King and sovereign, and, with his Parliament, the supreme legislative of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging; that this constitution is the most free one and by far the best now existing on earth; that by this constitution every man in the dominions is a free man; that no parts of His Majesty’s dominions can be taxed without their consent; that every part has a right to be represented in the supreme or some subordinate legislature; that the refusal of this would seem to be a contradiction in practice to the theory of the constitution; that the colonies are subordinate dominions and are now in such a state as to make it best for the good of the whole that they should not only be continued in the enjoyment of subordinate legislation but be also represented in some proportion to their number and estates in the grand legislature of the nation; that this would firmly unite all parts of the British empire in the greater peace and prosperity, and render it invulnerable and perpetual.

In case you missed it within that magnificent 311-word sentence, Otis wrote: “that no parts of His Majesty’s dominions can be taxed without their consent; that every part has a right to be represented in the supreme or some subordinate legislature;...”

So James Otis certainly focused on the idea that the Parliament in London couldn’t lay taxes (or Customs duties) on American colonists because that legislature didn’t represent those colonists, that the only legislatures which could impose such taxes were those the colonists elected according to their charters. But Otis didn’t phrase his argument in rhyme.

TOMORROW: So did any Americans in the Revolutionary era use the phrase “taxation without representation”?

Who Coined the Phrase “No Taxation Without Representation“?

The American Revolution Blog alerted me to a new meme, or misapprehension, about the famous phrase “No taxation without representation.” Brad Hart’s article on the Astroturfed “tea parties” earlier this month said that phrase “had been coined in 1750 by Reverend John Mayhew.”

That should be Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766; shown here courtesy of NNDB.com), but it’s a minor slip. The real question is what evidence suggests that Mayhew wrote those words a full decade before the Boston Whigs started sparring with Gov. Francis Bernard and fifteen years before the Stamp Act.

Mayhew did deliver a famous sermon in 1750 which some people see as a forerunner of the Revolutionary movement. It has this catchy title:

A Discourse concerning Unlimited Submission and
Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers:
With some Reflections on the Resistance made to King Charles I.
And on the Anniversary of his Death:
In which the Mysterious Doctrine of that
Prince’s Saintship and Martyrdom is Unriddled.

In that discourse Mayhew was looking back to a previous conflict within the British Empire, not ahead. He was arguing that the Puritans who deposed and killed Charles I had acted justly because that king had turned into an oppressor. Along the way, Mayhew took swipes at the notion of the divine right of kings and the Church of England. This was the voice of the unrepentant New England Puritan.

But Mayhew’s sermon didn’t include the words “taxation” or “representation.” Nor did he address those political issues. In hindsight, Boston Whigs and chroniclers looked back on Mayhew’s preaching (including a sermon in 1765, shortly before the Stamp Act riots) as offering a theological justification for resistance to the new government measures. But that was just the groundwork, not an actual argument for that resistance. Mayhew actually spent much of his last five years preaching against the Anglican Church and its missionaries rather than about the basis of civil government.

Did Mayhew coin “No taxation without representation” in some other 1750 sermon or essay? I haven’t even found another published, much less cited. Is the phrase in Mayhew’s 1754 Election Sermon, which also touched on a lot of political issues? Nope. Instead, the attribution of that famous phrase to Mayhew seems to have appeared on the internet in the last five years, and we may be able to date it precisely.

On 2 Nov 2005, at 20:21 by the server’s clock, an anonymous user started an article on Wikipedia about the Old West Church in Boston, stating along the way:

Jonathan Mayhew, the church’s second Congregational pastor, coined the phrase, “no taxation without representation” in a sermon in Old West.

There was no source cited for that statement. A minute later, the same user added this sentence to Wikipedia’s entry on “No taxation without representation”:

(The phrase was originally coined by Rev. Jonathan Mayhew in a sermon at Old West Church, Boston, Massachusetts.)

And a few minutes after that this statement appeared in the entry on Jonathan Mayhew:

He is credited with coining the phrase “no taxation without representation”, and with very early advocacy of what became Unitarianism.

Since then, the Unitarianism part of that sentence has been removed, though the Mayhew article still describes the minister’s unorthodox Congregationalism.

TOMORROW: So who did coin the phrase “taxation without representation”?

Fixing Benjamin Franklin’s Wrong Guess

Of course xkcd would have noticed that electrons have too much negativity. But thank goodness they’re also doing something about it.

One Last Look at Lexington and Concord for the Month

Folks interested in military strategy and tactics might enjoy Graphic Firing Table’s long article on what went wrong for the British military in the Battle of Lexington and Concord. There’s more than a little modern military jargon in the article, but the conclusions are crystal clear:

Once he was informed that the security of the mission and, particularly, the objective, had been compromised, [Gen. Thomas] Gage should have known that sending 700 troops unsupported by cavalry or artillery into a hostile country meant that, at the very least, the operation had little or no chance of success at that point. Gage should have either reinforced [Lt. Col. Francis] Smith massively or recalled him.

That critical moment was on the evening of 18 Apr 1775, when Col. Percy told Gage that he’d overheard Bostonians discussing the mission and its goal: “the cannon at Concord.” This account was first published in England in 1794, so it seems quite reliable.

Why did Gage proceed? I can think of three reasons:

• Bureaucratic and individual inertia. Smith (shown above) and his troops were already moving out, crossing the Charles River from the base of Boston Common. It would have been a pain and an embarrassment to pull those men back.
  
• Pressure from above. Gage had received orders from London four days before, telling him to do something about the political resistance. The government ministers were obviously becoming impatient. So Gage was deciding among the options for action, not deciding whether to take action or not.
  
• Hope that everything could still work out. Gage had ordered the guard on Boston Neck not to let anyone out of town. He also had twenty officers patrolling the road to Concord on horseback, stopping messengers. He might have thought that, even though people in Boston had guessed the purpose of the mission, he could bottle up that knowledge in town.

And those precautions almost worked. Paul Revere arranged for a signal from the Old North Church to his fellow Whigs in Charlestown, but their rider never made it through Cambridge, probably stopped by those mounted officers. Revere and William Dawes, Jr., each got out of Boston and carried the news west, but another patrol stopped them before they reached Concord.

But that wasn’t enough. Gage needed nearly complete secrecy. The provincial resistance needed only one man to get through. And the Boston messengers—especially Revere—were telling many people about the approaching soldiers, so militia companies were gathering even as Smith’s column marched west. And before those officers stopped Revere and Dawes, they had shared their news with Dr. Samuel Prescott, who outrode the patrols and brought the warning to Concord.

Furthermore, the very measures that Gage took to preserve his secret—sending out those mounted officers—actually attracted attention and raised suspicions. Richard Devens of Charlestown knew that something was up even before Revere made it across the river; he warned the silversmith about those horseback patrols. When Revere and Dawes arrived in Lexington, they found militiamen on alert and riders already sent toward Concord, again because people had seen those officers come through. Gage’s hopes for secrecy were never realistic.

The Music of Paul Revere

On Sunday evening I had the honor of being the keynote speaker at Boston National Historical Park’s annual “Paul Revere’s Row” reenactment, and the pleasure of hearing Krystal Bly of the Histrionic Academy sing eighteenth-century political songs with the same audience.

Krystal mentioned the challenge of finding songs about Paul Revere, given that he wasn’t that famous until Henry W. Longfellow made him so. But the silversmith did have a musical side.
Revere engraved this frontispiece for William Billings’s The New England Psalm-Singer, which showed gentlemen at a “Music Party” bordered by an oval of musical notation. The lyrics of that psalm:

Wake ev’ry Breath, & ev’ry String
To bless the great Redeemer King.
His Name thro’ ev’ry Clime ador’d:
Let Joy & Gratitude and Love,
Thro’ all the Notes of Music rove:
And JESUS found on ev’ry Chord.

Not Billings’s or Revere’s best work, and not appropriate for every public audience, but directly connected to the silversmith himself.

Back in 2006, I quoted a poem that “Eb. Stiles” published in 1795, meaning that Revere probably heard it himself. Pity it’s not a better poem:

He turned his steed through field and wood
Nor turned to ford the river,
But faced his horse to the foaming flood,
And swum across together.

He madly dashed o’er mountain and moor,
Never slackened spur nor rein
Until with shout he stood by the door
Of the Church on Concord green.

Like Longfellow, Stiles credited Revere with making it all the way to Concord, which he didn’t. (Dr. Samuel Prescott carried Revere’s news that last leg from Lincoln to Concord.) But Stiles remains the only chronicler to suggest that Revere and his horse had actually swum across a river.

In an essay in Music in Colonial Massachusetts, volume 1, the musicologist Carleton Sprague Smith posited that a lot of the early American verses we know only from broadsides were actually meant to be sung to well-known tunes. He even matched some up: “A Verse Occasioned by the Late Horrid Massacre in King-Street” with the tune “Christ in the Garden,” and “On the Death of Five Young Men who was Murthered, March 5th 1770” with “Oh, Have You Heard?”

I don’t know enough about folk music to evaluate Smith’s hypothesis. But it suggests that Stiles’s poem about Revere could also be sung to a popular air of the day, if only we knew which one.

After Longfellow’s poem made Revere nationally famous in 1861, his story inspired a number of composers. Webb Miller wrote “Paul Revere’s Ride” as a “galop brillante” in 1884. The Library of Congress offers the complete sheet music, as Krystal had found.

E. T. Paull published his “march-twostep” treatment of the same theme in 1905. Here’s a MIDI recording on Joe Feenstra’s website on Paull.

And of course there’s always “Hungry,” which wouldn’t be a bad reflection of Revere’s social ambition.

Joseph Palmer’s Letter on Lexington

At the blog of the National Heritage Museum in Lexington, Jeff Croteau offered a look at an official period copy of Joseph Palmer’s letter about the shots at Lexington, sent south with an express rider named Israel Bissell. That letter will be on display in the museum for the rest of this week only.

Joseph Palmer (1716-1788) was born in England and came to Massachusetts in 1746 with his wife Mary and her young brother, Richard Cranch. The two men developed a glass factory (archeological debris here) and other workshops in the Germantown section of Braintree, as explained in this lecture by Warren S. Parker. Cranch married Abigail Adams’s older sister Mary. The Palmers had a son, Joseph Pearse Palmer, and all three men were drawn into Revolutionary politics. Reportedly the older Joseph broke with the London government only after the Boston Massacre.

In 1774, Joseph Palmer became a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, and then of its Committee of Safety. On 18 Apr 1775, he was staying in Watertown at the house of Joseph P. Palmer’s in-laws, the Hunts. That son’s wife, Elizabeth Palmer, later wrote this account:

On the night of the eighteenth of April, I heard the drum beat; I waked Mr. Palmer and said, “My dear, I hear the drum”

He was out of bed with the rapidity of a bullet from a gun and, while he was dressing, his father entered and said, “My son, we must ride, I have received an express. Three men lie dead at Lexington.” My husband was off in an instant.

I entreated the old gentleman not to go, but he would not stay. He told me that there would probably be another brigade along soon and that I had better remove out of the way. They had their horses saddled and their pistols loaded in the barn, for they expected some sudden alarm. They were gone immediately. I never saw anything more of them until the next night at ten o’clock.

I don’t believe all that; the family’s legends don’t all add up. But the letter in the National Heritage Museum’s collection shows that Palmer was active on the morning of 19 Apr 1775, spreading the word about the fight at Lexington on behalf of the Provincial Congress.

Today Jeff has posted about Israel Bissell’s route from Watertown to New York, using Google Maps. It took Bissell only four days riding, which shows how much he hurried. Along the way officials copied Palmer’s letter in order to pass the news on to others, and this document is one of those hurried copies, made for the Committee of Correspondence in Norwich, Connecticut.

[ADDENDUM: Please see Boston 1775’s 2010 postings about Isaac Bissell.]