“Stained…with the hero’s blood”

Yesterday I described how the Rev. William Montague of Dedham came to possess the musket ball that supposedly killed Dr. Joseph Warren—or at least was taken out of the doctor’s body after his death.

Alexander Hill Everett brought that relic to public attention during an oration in Charlestown on 17 June 1836. That was the Battle of Bunker Hill’s 61st anniversary, not usually a noted date, so Everett may have had to try extra hard to make a splash. He stated:

The bullet by which he [Warren] was killed had been previously taken from it [the body] by Mr. [Arthur] Savage, an officer in the Custom House, and was carried by him to London, where he afterwards delivered it to the Rev. Mr. Montague of Dedham.

It was brought to me a day or two ago by a son of Mr. Montague with an affidavit authenticating the facts, and is the one, fellow-citizens! which I now hold in my hand.

The cartridge paper which still partly covers it is stained, as you see, with the hero’s blood.

According to chronicler James Spear Loring, in April 1843 the minister’s son, William H. Montague, sent the musket ball to Edward Warren, junior editor of the Boston Daily American, with a note stating that he was to hold it “till called for.” I suspect Edward was a grandson of Dr. John Warren, younger brother of the doctor killed at Bunker Hill.

That prompted a letter from Richard E. Newcomb, widower of Dr. Joseph Warren’s youngest child, Mary, asking for the bullet on behalf of his son as the dead man’s only direct descendant.

But it appears that the younger Montague, who in 1845 became one of the founders of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, enjoyed owning the relic himself. The ball was in his possession when he died, and the N.E.H.G.S. recorded in its proceedings for 1884:

The librarian would also report the gift, in March last, by William H. Montague, of Boston, the only survivor of the five founders of the Society, of a ball, taken by Arthur Savage, who was a personal acquaintance of Gen. Joseph Warren, who fell at the battle of Bunker Hill, from the body of that hero the morning after the battle.

The ball was presented by Mr. Savage to the father of the donor, the Rev. William Montague, while he was on a visit to England, in the year 1789 or 1790. A deposition to this effect by the Rev. Mr. Montague, taken March 5, 1833, accompanies the bullet.

Reportedly ball and deposition were displayed in a frame at the society. However, Samuel Adams Drake had to report in Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston:

The identity of this ball has been disputed by some of the martyr’s descendants, on the ground that it was said to have been taken from the body, while Warren received his death from a ball in the head. The controversy was maintained with considerable warmth on both sides, the general opinion favoring the authenticity of the fatal bullet.

Mucking about with dead bodies? Controversies over how people died? Single-bullet theories? Why, it can only be the return of CSI: Colonial Boston! (And this time we’ll get to the mystery of Maj. John Pitcairn’s body. Eventually.)

ADDENDUM: Note this observation on the musket ball in question.

“This ball I took from his body”

Longtime Boston 1775 readers will recall our keen scholarly interest in Dr. Joseph Warren’s body, head, skull, and teeth after the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In the same vein, we now report that on 5 Mar 1833, the Rev. William Montague of Dedham went to a magistrate and prepared the following affidavit:

I, William Montague, of Dedham, County of Norfolk, State of Massachusetts, clergyman, do certify, to whom it may concern, that in the year 1789 or 1790, I was in London, and became acquainted with Mr. [Arthur] Savage, formerly an officer of the customs for the port of Boston, and who left there when the Royalists and Royal troops evacuated that town in 1776.

When in London, Mr. Savage gave me a leaden ball, which is now in my possession, with the following account of it, viz.:—

“On the morning of the 18th of June, 1775. after the battle of Bunker or Breed’s Hill—I, with a number of other Royalists and British officers, among whom was Gen. [John] Burgoyne, went over from Boston to Charlestown, to view the battle field. Among the fallen we found the body of Dr. Joseph Warren, with whom I had been personally acquainted. When he fell he fell across a rail. This ball I took from his body, and as I shall never visit Boston again, I will give it to you to take to America, where it will be valuable as a relic of your Revolution. His sword and belt, with some other articles, were taken by some of the officers present; and, I believe, brought to England.[”]

Montague had been rector at Christ Church in Boston from 1786 to 1791, and then went out to Dedham to reopen the Episcopal church there.

Arthur Savage (1731-1801) served as Comptroller of Customs at Falmouth (now Portland), Maine, until 1771, when a mob attacked him for seizing a ship. He then moved to Boston and worked in that Customs office until the evacuation.

Montague died only a few months after preparing his affidavit, in 22 July. His son William then reported finding a 1792 letter to his father from Harrison Gray, the last royal Treasurer of Massachusetts, which said:

I hope you will take good care to preserve that relic which was given you at my house, for in future time it will be a matter of interest to you rebels.

And indeed it did become a matter of interest.

TOMORROW: Where is that musket ball now?

Clo Pratt at Old Sturbridge Village, 18 Jan.

I thought I’d finished with announcements of events this month, and then I read how Old Sturbridge Village is offering a historical presentation on an intriguing and hard-to-research aspect of life in colonial America:

Storyteller and museum educator Tammy Denease Richardson will present “Life after Slavery: the Clo Pratt Story” as part of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day activities at Old Sturbridge Village Jan. 18. The performance is based on the true story of Clo Pratt, an African-American woman born into slavery in Massachusetts in 1737. . . .

In character as former slave Clo Pratt, storyteller Richardson introduces her audience to a fascinating woman whose story has been obscured through history, but who was influential in the African-American community of her day. In 1774 after her owner’s death, Pratt finds she has been willed her freedom and must earn a living and make a place for herself in colonial New England.

Old Sturbridge normally presents life in the 1830s, but also tries to do well by other aspects of life in central New England, and this is one of them.

Clo Pratt was owned by the Rev. Daniel Russell of the Rocky Hill section of Wethersfield, Connecticut; it was common for New England ministers to own a person or two as household servants. Russell died in 1767. His widow Katherine made out a will in June 1773 that said:

my will is that my Negro woman Named Cloe prut Shall then Be free and Have Her time and also I Give to Her the Bead that She Lyeth on and furniture Belonging to it and a Loom that she weaveth in and tackling & a porige pot one old Chest with one Draw one puter pint pot one knife and fork and a plate and one puter platter and one quart Bason one tramil peil and tongs two old Chairs one pail one Small Square table one Large trunk and Several Books that are Called Her own one Small Brass Kittel and my Every Day wearing apperel and a Red Short Cloak and two spoons

I’m especially struck by “Several Books that are Called Her own.”

Eventually Pratt, by then in her sixties, lived with Hagar and Pompey Dorus, who had been enslaved in the house of Silas Deane.

In January, Old Sturbridge Village is offering free admission for children not in school groups when accompanied by an adult. Other King Day activities include “ice skating (bring your own skates), sledding on 1830s-style sleds, and sleigh rides (snow permitting).”

Shifts, Caps, Pockets, and More

The Ladies of Refined Taste & Friends, in partnership with Minute Man National Historic Park, have announced their 2010 schedule of “Hive” workshops for reenactors and park volunteers seeking to improve their interpretation. These Sunday sessions are free for people who want to participate, but some involve a fee for materials and all require advance registration.

Sunday, 17 Jan, 1:00-4:00 P.M., Minute Man Visitor Center, Lincoln: Why We Wear What We Wear — Several speakers will examine primary sources, including New England inventories, wills, advertisements, ships manifests, run-away ads, period art, and extant garments, to explain the background behind the current Battle Road clothing standards.

Sunday, 14 Feb, 10:00 A.M.-4:00 P.M., Noah Brooks Tavern, Concord: SHIFT-O-RAMA — Sharon Ann Burnston, author of Fitting and Proper, will explain the evolution of shifts through the 18th century, and participants will construct their own shifts using period sewing techniques. They will also be entertained during the day with 18th-century prose. Attendees will need to buy, pre-wash, and iron their linen before the workshop; information on yardage and sources will be supplied upon registration. During the same afternoon there will be two-hour sessions on “Sewing” for children aged six and older, “Making a Huswif” ($10 materials fee), and “Learning the Norfolk Drill.”

Sunday, 14 Mar, 1:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M., Noah Brooks Tavern, Concord: Ladies’ Caps — Try on different styles of caps till you find the one that looks good on you. Then construct your cap. Materials cost of $15. There will also be two-hour sessions on “Making a Sampler” for children who took the previous month’s workshop ($10 materials fee), “Musket Tune Up,” and “Learn the Norfolk Drill.”

The Hive is also offering Saturday workshops for higher fees with more advanced projects: how to make a frock coat or jacket, an English gown, a knapsack, a bonnet, a fashionable pair of stays, and a powder horn.

All these sessions are leading up to the big Battle Road events on 17 Apr 2010, commemorating the first major battle of the Revolutionary War, when the reenactors’ hard work will enhance the experience for us ordinary folks. This being New England in winter, visit the “Hive” website for any changes required by the weather.

Shown above is another sort of sewing project: a “dimity pocket” owned by Abigail Adams, which the Massachusetts Historical Society featured on its website last month. Sarah Sikes described it this way:

Measuring a full fourteen inches in length, this pocket is composed of eight pieces of dimity sewn together with an opening halfway down the front. Two ties are attached to the top seams of the pocket to be secured around the waist. The simple and sturdy striped fabric of the pocket—the polar opposite of the sheer cotton known today as dimity—suggests that this was a utilitarian garment to be tied under an apron or worn beneath a skirt and accessed through an opening in the outer garments.

Because this one is so well preserved, Adams probably did not wear it for very long. But the provenance looks quite solid.

Ahoy! Upcoming Talks on the Naval War

I’m looking forward to two lectures about the naval side of the American Revolution in New England coming up in the next two months.

First, the Friends of Minute Man National Park will present Emily A. Murphy speaking on “The War Has Made Such An Alteration in People & Things: Privateering and the Revolution at Sea.” This talk will come on Wednesday, 20 January, at 8:00 P.M. at the Trinity Episcopal Church at 81 Elm Street, Concord, Massachusetts. It’s free and open to the public.

Emily is the Historian and Public Affairs Officer for Salem Maritime National Historic Site. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University, where her dissertation, “To Keep Our Trading for Our Livelihood”: The Derby Family and Their Rise to Power, examined how that Salem mercantile family reached political and social prominence. For the National Park Service she’s written the walking tour guide Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Salem and Merchants, Clerks, Citizens, and Soldiers: A History of the Second Corps of Cadets.

Privateering produced an outsourced navy, with governments (mostly the colonies/states) licensing private citizens to arm vessels, hire crews, and hunt down enemy shipping. Instead of receiving government pay, privateers’ crews would share the value of the ships and cargos they captured. Although serving on a privateer carried a lot of the risks of soldiering (death, disease, imprisonment), there was also the possible upside of lots of money.

On Saturday, 20 February, at 4:00 P.M., the Friends of the Longfellow House and Longfellow National Historic Site will host a lecture titled “Cambridge: Birthplace of the American Navy?” That cheeky title reflects the fact that in Cambridge, within that very historic mansion, Gen. George Washington gave the first orders for an armed ship to attack enemy shipping under Continental authority. In the fall of 1775 he put army funds into a schooner called the Hannah, and assigned men from Col. John Glover’s regiment to serve aboard her.

Sending troops out on a ship was a bold move. For one thing, attacking British supply ships was offensive rather than defensive warfare, and could be read to mean the American colonies were seeking independence. For another thing, Washington’s orders from the Continental Congress didn’t really authorize him to oversee a fight at sea.

“Cambridge: Birthplace of the American Navy?” will focus on what that early naval war looked like from Washington’s headquarters, which had a view of the Charles but was many miles from the useful American harbors. One reason I’m looking forward to that talk is that I’m giving it, so I’m naturally interested in hearing what I’ve found to say.

Choc-Talk at the Old South Meeting House, 7 Jan.

Boston chocolate lovers will be torn this Thursday at midday. Not only is Anthony Sammarco speaking at the Athenaeum about the history of the Baker Chocolate Company, but the Old South Meeting House is hosting a lunchtime lecture on “Stimulating Beverages: A Brief History of Tea, Coffee and Chocolate”:

Before 1650, a New England breakfast often included a mug of ale, beer or hard wine, but with the introduction of tea, coffee, and chocolate the tastes of the Western world were forever changed. Originally prescribed as cures for ailments ranging from headaches to depression, tea, coffee, and chocolate were soon counted among the necessities of daily live. Hear Amanda Lange, curator at Historic Deerfield, explain how these three beverages emerged as the popular drinks we know today.

That will start at 12:15 P.M., and people are invited to bring their lunches in case they develop an appetite. The admission cost for each event in this series is $5, $4 for students, and nothing for Old South members.

This talk is the first of a month of events on a largely libational theme. On Thursday, 14 January, there will be music from Poor Richard’s Penny, and on Thursday, 28 January, two more musicians perform a program titled “Rum and Revolution!”

In between, at 12:15 P.M. on Thursday, 21 January, comes a more genteel refreshment titled “‘One Bowl More and Then’: Punch Drinking in the 18th Century”:

Punch was introduced to England in the 17th Century, and its exotic ingredients immediately made it a staple in English and American parlors. The mixture of spirits, sugar, fruit and spice caught the eyes and inspired the imaginations of painters, printmakers, and cartoonists. Learn from Donald Friary, president of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, as he explains how this beverage and its accoutrements brought conviviality to English and American taverns.

Here are Revolutionarily notable punch bowls from Massachusetts and New York.

Unlikely Events and Unlikely Allies

On Saturday the Boston Globe ran a brief interview with Joel Richard Paul, author of Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution. The paper described that book as “a story too good not to tell—involving the celebrated French dramatist Caron de Beaumarchais, a cross-dressing secret agent named the Chevalier d’Eon, and a boatload of duplicity, hypocrisy, and corruption.”

I hadn’t thought that D’Eon de Beaumont had much to do with the American Revolution, but the book’s jacket copy says the chevalier’s “decision to declare herself a woman helped to lead to the Franco-American alliance.” I’ll have to put this on my list.

The interview contained some interesting observations about researching and interpreting historical documents:

Q. Tell me about doing research for this book. These are three pretty fringe characters you write about.

A. I spent a lot of time at the archives of the French foreign ministry and Bibliotèque nationale de France. I love France, but let’s just say that library science is not their forte. I came away convinced they hadn’t lost their colonies as much as misfiled them.

Q. We like to put the Founding Fathers on a pedestal, and your book paints a quite flawed and human picture of them. What kind of response are you getting?

A. When I speak to groups I always start off saying that the one thing we all know about the diplomacy of the American Revolution is that Ben Franklin went to France in 1776 and forged the Franco-American alliance that provided us with arms. And that’s wrong. Most people are very surprised, and very interested.

Q. Does it make you wonder how many more people are out there who changed the course of history and who we know nothing about?

A. Yeah. I think that most of us start with the assumption that history is shaped by great men or great ideas or great social movements. And one of the things I’ve seen is the extent to which history is shaped by accident, and people acting on the periphery of great events.

Another lively book based, like this one, in Silas Deane’s stumbling attempts at diplomacy and espionage is The Incendiary (also published as John the Painter), by Jessica Warner; I wrote more about it here.

Paul’s third answer above brings up the the question of “agency”—historians’ jargon for the idea that individual decisions can affect the course of major events. Usually that argument gets played out through “great men” and women, leaders making decisions for many other people. But might the real argument for individual effects lie in the plane of peripheral events, quirky accidents, and unintended consequences?

Finalists for the Cybils Awards

The Cybils are a set of awards for children’s books given by bloggers. Their criteria include both literary excellence, as in the awards given by librarians and book reviewers, and kid appeal. A few of the books on this year’s short lists, announced yesterday, may have special appeal to young students of the eighteenth century.

Among the finalists in middle-grade fiction is Chains, by Laurie Halse Anderson. The nomination committee says:

Chains is told through the eyes of Isabel, a slave girl. Sold after her master dies, Isabel is thrust into the middle of the war where both sides claim they want what is best for her. She passes along messages to the Loyalists only to learn that the only one she can trust to help her gain her freedom is herself. Anderson has presented a story that with the proper foundation can be read, enjoyed and understood by the youngest to the oldest middle-grade student.

On the short list for older nonfiction is Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland, by Sally M. Walker:

Written In Bone takes readers along the journey as scientists uncover skeletons and other artifacts from colonial-era Virginia and Maryland. We learn not only about the skeletons themselves, but also about the way of life during this often brutal and even deadly time period.

Finally, in the category of Graphic Novels for Young Adults, two of the five nominees are set in the eighteenth century. There’s the first collection of Lora Innes’s The Dreamer:

Seventeen-year-old Beatrice “Bea” Whaley vividly dreams of a handsome Revolutionary War soldier and she welcomes her nightly adventures. Later though, she finds they might be more than just dreams.

And the second nominee is Crogan’s Vengeance, by Chris Schweizer:

…the saga of Catfoot Crogan, a privateer from the early 18th century. Clever dialogue and Schweizer’s caricature-like drawings merge into a cinematic story of pirates and mayhem.

New Year at Valley Forge

Gen. George Washington’s general orders to the army camped at Valley Forge on 1 Jan 1778 began like this:

As this day begins the new year The General orders a gill of spirits to be Served to each non-commission’d Officer and soldier;

And to avoid the irregular and partial distribution of this Article (which has been a good deal complaind of) he expressly orders that no Spirits shall issue to any part of the Troops in future but in Consequence of general or special orders from Head Quarters.

A deviation from this rule will be at the risque and peril of the Issuing Commissary.

Oh, yeah, that’ll stop the complaints.

“A happy Year may all enjoy”

As in previous New Year’s seasons, Boston 1775 offers a “carriers’ verse,” one of the poems or lyrics that newspaper delivery boys printed at the end of the year as part of their request for tips from customers.

This one with best wishes for 1772 is unique in that it comes from the boys of the Censor. Friends of the royal government paid Ezekiel Russell to launch that magazine in November 1771 as a home for their arguments. This carriers’ verse was thus directed to readers on that side of the political debate, and reflected their views of who was responsible for the turmoil and what was at stake.

The Carrier of the
CENSOR,
Wishes all Happiness to his generous
Customers.

What means this Clamour? why this strife?
To poison all the Joys of Life;
Ah why will Friend ’gainst Friend engage?
And brethren meet with hostile rage?

Say Candidus, rude Mucious say,
“It is such Slavery to obey?”
“Are Rulers Tyrants?—to be free,
“Must we destroy Society?”

Ye Friends to order! ’tis my pride,
To combat on the honest side:
Let Faction rave, or Villains brawle,
The CENSOR nobly scorns them all

May Government her Laws defend,
And foul Misrule to Hell descend;
A happy Year may all enjoy,
And may your FAVOURS bless your Boy.

“Candidus” was one of Samuel Adams’s pseudonyms for newspaper essays. “Mucius Scaevola” was the pen name Joseph Greenleaf had used for his attack on Gov. Thomas Hutchinson in the Massachusetts Spy a few months before; the Censor’s first issue responded to that essay.

Because the Censor stopped publishing a few months into 1772, this is the only New Year’s verse its carriers ever got to distribute. Fellow printers recalled that a woman in Russell’s print shop—possibly his future wife Sarah—composed occasional verses for his newspapers, so this might be one of her compositions.

Lessons from “Blogging History”

Our “Blogging History” panel at this March’s O.A.H. convention attracted a patient audience of about fifty—or, as one participant suggested, more than any panel at the convention that didn’t have the word “sex” in its title.

Here are some lessons I picked up from my fellow panelists.

1) Larry Cebula at Northwest History: Historians’ blogs have tended to have a predictable life cycle. They start out discussing history and history-writing, shift (especially in 2008) into arguing politics, and end up focusing on the blogger’s personal life.

Why had Boston 1775 lasted nearly three years without drifting into that cycle? Perhaps because of my escape valve.

Larry shared one post from his blog about nineteenth-century facial hair. The contrast with today might have been starker if the audience hadn’t been looking at three panelists with goatees and one with sideburns.

2) Mary Schaff at the Washington State Library: If people at an institution, particularly a government institution, want to create a blog to communicate to the public, it’s more efficient to ask for forgiveness after launching than to ask for permission beforehand. Going the formal route can lead into the hell of mission-statement committees.

Unfortunately, the Washington State Library blog ended in May because it was taking too much staff time. But other organizations have seen the value of the blogging model—i.e., a website anyone can update without having to go through a sixteen-year-old webmaster.

3) William Turkel at Digital History Hacks: Blogging about ways that historians can create more useful searches for data and documentation? That’s productive and rewarding. Creating search techniques simply in order to have something to put on the blog? Time to call it a day. But his blog posts are still up.

4) Ari Kelman and Eric Rauchway at The Edge of the American West: One key to a successful group blog is a shared ethos of not stepping on—i.e., posting shortly after—someone else’s post. Plus, American men can still find really sharp three-piece suits.

For more of what I learned from visiting Seattle, please see the escape valve. This panel was the idea of Larry Cebula, and I’m grateful to him and moderator Bill Youngs for getting me out to Seattle and showing me a good time while I was there.

Exploring a New Medium—as Soon as We Find the Right Plugs

One highlight of my 2009 was participating in a panel discussion at the Organization of American Historians meeting in Seattle on “Blogging History: Explorations in a New Medium.”

I took notes for a posting soon after that event in March, but waited to see if the video that panel moderator J. William T. Youngs had prepared would appear online. And then important matters like Kezia Hincher’s child seized my attention.

But the end of the year offers a fine time to look back and consider the lessons I had a chance to pick up along the way. And right away I can confirm two rules of life:

• The more time someone has spent creating a multimedia presentation, the less likely it is that the multimedia system in the assigned venue is working.
• The more that an event depends on technology for its very existence, the less likely that technology is to work.

In our case, Bill Youngs had prepared a video introduction to each panelist’s history blog, with images and music, on his Macintosh. But the LCD projectors at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center had trouble reading any signals from that computer. Problems with Macs that close to Microsoft headquarters—who would have thought?

That left us not only without a snazzy introduction, but also without a computer for a session in which we were to show off and discuss our blogs. Which is hard to do with whiteboards.

Our projected image was still a blank blue rectangle about five minutes after the session’s scheduled start. I leaned into a microphone and asked if anyone in the audience could loan us a Windows PC. One woman graciously offered hers, and soon we were off and rolling.

TOMORROW: Lessons from my fellow panelists.

Choc-Talk at the Boston Athenaeum, 7 Jan.

On Thursday, 7 January, the Boston Athenaeum will host a lecture by Anthony M. Sammarco on “The Baker Chocolate Company: A Sweet History,” which is also the title of his new book. The talk will start at 12:00 noon. It’s free, but one must reserve a spot by calling 617-720-7600.

The event description says:

The Baker Chocolate Company was founded along the Neponset River in 1765 by Dr. James Baker and James Hannon, a skilled chocolate maker. Over the next two centuries, the company became one of the leading manufacturers of chocolate and cocoa in North America.

I’ve seen notices of similar talks by Mr. Sammarco at other venues, too.

The Baker chocolate factory in Dorchester is often said to be the first in North America. However, the descendants of Joseph Palmer of Braintree wrote that a chocolate factory was among the workshops he and Richard Cranch erected in the Germantown section of that town before the Revolution. And other Bostonians were advertising chocolate in the newspapers as early as the 1720s.

I’m not sure how the Baker Chocolate Company documentation stacks up against the rest. The company has not been shy about promoting its history. Then again, neither were the Palmer descendants.

Revere Communion Vessels on Sale in January

The Boston Globe reports that on 21 January Christie’s will auction off a collection of silver vessels that the First Parish of Beverly decided to sell in order to pay for necessary building repairs.

The items include a ewer, a quart can, and two communion plates made by the workshop of Paul Revere around 1800.

According to the Globe:

Congregants originally used the collection for communion, but the church stopped holding regular communion services after it converted to Unitarianism in 1830. By the early 1900s, church leaders had moved the silver to a vault in a bank across the street for safekeeping. In recent years, according to Charles E. Wainwright, chairman of the church historical committee, only a few of the items were used regularly…

The congregation voted to keep a “baptismal bowl, a tankard, and a goblet”—and, of course, the church roof.

Saratoga Not the Turning Point?

The Smithsonian website offers Prof. John Ferling’s article “Myths of the American Revolution”. Ferling explores how some common generalizations about the war aren’t completely correct, and may in fact be mostly incorrect. As an example:

Saratoga was not the turning point of the war. Protracted conflicts—the Revolutionary War was America’s longest military engagement until Vietnam nearly 200 years later—are seldom defined by a single decisive event. In addition to Saratoga, four other key moments can be identified.

The first of those four moments is the combination of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, which, one might argue, was a starting point rather than a turning point. But those events did mark a turn from a political conflict with threatening military moves by both sides to a shooting war.

I’ll let you discover the three other “turning points” Ferling mentions. To make it harder, not all of them are battlefield developments. To make it easier, they all involve the tide turning in favor of the Americans.

But surely there had to be moments when the war turned in favor of the British, right? Otherwise, the war wouldn’t have lasted so long. Gen. William Howe’s sweeping reconquest of New York in 1776 wiped out a lot of the American momentum after successful campaigns at Boston and Charleston. Similarly, Howe’s victory at Brandywine sent the Congress scrambling out of its capital and erased the memory of Gen. George Washington’s smaller battlefield triumphs months before.

Finally, as Ferling notes elsewhere in the article, the British military’s southern strategy looked very good after the battle of Camden, with Georgia back in the Empire, Charleston firmly in British hands, and many Americans sick of the war. At that point, the Americans really needed a new turning point.

“So much for Christmas”

Here are entries from the diary of Manasseh Cutler (1742-1823) in 1765. At the time, this Yale graduate was teaching school in Dedham, starting to court Mary Balch, and trying to figure out his career.

Cutler was a Congregationalist, but on this trip to Boston he investigated the holiday rituals of the Anglicans.

Dec. 24, Tuesday. Set out for Boston in the carriage with Miss Polly Balch; very cold. Spent the evening at Captain Hart’s. Lodged at Mr. Williams’. It being Christmas eve the bells in Christ Church were rung, chimed, played tunes, etc. Christ Church is a large brick building, situated at the north end, and is the first church [i.e., Anglican place of worship, not a meeting-house] founded in the town.

Dec. 25, Wed. Christmas. Went to church at King’s Chapel, where was a very gay and brilliant assembly. Several intervals, in reading service, made for singing anthems, which were performed extremely well. Service was read by Parson [Henry] Caner, and a sermon preached, or rather a harangue pronounced by Parson Trouback [John Troutbeck]. After the sermon a collection was made for the poor. Then the sacrament was administered (which I did not tarry to see).

Dined at Mr. Williams’. A very handsome dinner.

In the afternoon service was read, and anthems sung, but no sermon. This church is built of stone, is very beautifully adorned with carved pillars, several images, etc. Here is a very good set of organs, but no bells, as the steeple is not erected. This is the most grand church in town, where His Excellency [i.e., the governor] is obliged to attend.

This evening we came to Roxbury and spent it very agreeably at Mr. Increase Sumner’s, and lodged at Mr. Samuel Sumner’s.

Dec. 26, Thurs. This morning began to snow. At 10 o’clock we set out for the city of Tiot (Indian name of Dedham), and came to an anchor at Dr. [Nathaniel] Ames’, where we dined, drank tea, and spent a very agreeable evening. We came home at 10 o’clock. As it had cleared up, and was a bright moonlight night, and not cold, we had a very pleasant ride. So much for Christmas.

Cutler tried the whaling business, studied law, and finally became a minister in 1771. During the Revolutionary War he was a chaplain, but also studied medicine. In the 1780s Cutler promoted settlement in Ohio, investigating the pre-Columbian mounds in that territory, but he returned to Massachusetts and ended up serving a couple of terms in Congress. So, though he remained the Congregationalist minister in Hamilton, I’m not sure he really settled on a career.

The picture above is King’s Chapel today, courtesy of Light Boston.

How You Will Spend Your Christmas Vacation

I’m quite pleased to have stumbled into Georgian London, Lucy Inglis’s blog about life in the capital of the British Empire in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and especially life in the capital’s underside.

This week’s posts are dedicated to Hannah Glasse, author of The Art of Cookery, with extracts from her writings. Inglis writes:

Hannah was born in 1708 in London, but raised in the North. She married John Glasse, a man in service and moved with him first to Essex, then to London. As a wife and mother, Hannah spent her time producing the enormous Art of Cookery, but the year it was published, by subscription, her husband died. She struggled to support her family, despite the huge success of her book and it seems likely she was taken advantage of. Hannah would go on to write more books, but nothing equalled the success of her mammoth cooking and household manual, and she died in 1770 with only a short note in the London Gazette to her name.

Of course, that was more notice than most women who had been in service received.

Other topics aren’t so appetizing, such as Inglis’s discussion of the hard lives of child chimney sweeps:

Should any of these boys survive to adolescence, they were prone to the serious malady ‘soot-warts’. For decades it was believed to be a venereal disease resulting from sooty love-making, probably because it arrived at the same time as puberty. It was Percivall Pott, in 1775, who recognised it as the first occupational cancer in his treatise Chirurgical observations Relative to the Cataract, the Polypus of the Nose, the Cancer of the Scrotum. Pott’s treatise is not for the faint-hearted or for anyone in possession of a scrotum…

But there are some happy stories, such as the prosperity of the dwarf couple Robert and Judith Skinner:

With such a large family to support they decided, in 1742, to exhibit themselves in Westminster at intervals over two years in order to raise some money. They were quite the characters about town, being described as ‘very good-looking, perfectly straight and well made, witty, intelligent and jocose’.

Their exhibition proved very successful and they had a small carriage made so that they might tour St James’s Park, ‘No larger than a child's chaise, drawn by two dogs, and driven by a lad of twelve years old, attired in a purple and yellow livery’. After the two years they retired and lived in comfort until Judith died in 1763. Robert isolated himself and died the following year in Ripon, ‘of a broken heart’, leaving a fortune of over twenty thousand pounds.

There are also lots of big pictures. I don’t think one can navigate the blog by date, so one is left to the tags, which are intriguing enough to keep you there for days.

Sorting Out the Gossip about Horatio Gates

I’ve been exploring the rumors that Gen. Horatio Gates was secretly the son of a British aristocrat, most likely his mother’s employer, the Duke of Leeds. In The Generals of Saratoga, Max M. Mintz writes:

Enemies and detractors of Gates, skeptical that the son of servants should receive a commission in the British army, have alleged that he was Leeds’s illegitimate son. . . . The unanswered questions haunted Horatio all his life. When he aspired to advancement, he was accused of illegitimate pretensions. If he earned a promotion, it was ascribed to his birth.

Really? This is one of the passages in Mintz’s book that goes beyond the sources cited.

The eighteenth-century British genteel class loved to gossip. Indeed, it often appears that the society was held together by gossip. The third Duke of Bolton’s affair with the actress Lavinia Fenton was talked about almost immediately, and retold often. It appears in a delightfully dishy 1779 publication called The R—l Register, which also says of “the D— of B——“:

no man was ever more indebted to rank and title than this nobleman; for no man stood more in need of the consequence which is derived from them. Weak and whimsical, but persuaded, like many other good mistaken people of the same kind, that he possessed the opposite qualities, he naturally became no infrequent subject of mirth, raillery and cajolement.

Other chapters of that volume discuss the “E— of H——,” “Ld. D—,” “B— of Carlisle,” various monarchs, and so on. (The authors have good things to say about “E— P—,“ or Earl Percy.)

In 1751 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote that the Duke of Bolton’s first wife “failed to give passion”—i.e., wouldn’t have sex with her husband—“and upon this plan threw away her estate, was despised by her husband, and laughed at by the public.” Montagu wrote that with some sympathy, referring to “My poor friend the Duchess of Bolton,” and she wrote it in a letter to her own daughter.

That daughter was the wife of the third Earl of Bute, George III’s favorite minister in the early 1760s. John Horne and others suggested Bute was having an affair with the king’s mother, the Dowager Princess of Wales. Georgian gossip reached very high.

In October 1777, as Londoners were wondering how Gen. John Burgoyne’s attack on the rebel colonies from Canada was going, Horace Walpole wrote of that officer:

He is a natural son of Lord Bingley, who put him into the entail of the estate, but when young Lane [George Fox-Lane, Bingley’s son-in-law] came of age the entail was cut off. He ran away with the old Lord Derby’s daughter, and has been a fortunate gamester.

Walpole and his contemporaries would have been equally interested in sharing the juiciest gossip about Burgoyne’s conqueror, Gen. Horatio Gates.

But the worst they could come up with was that he had no claim to aristocratic status at all.

• Israel Mauduit, though supporting the American cause, reminded London readers that Gates had been “in the service of Charles Duke of Bolton, was never thought to possess an understanding superior to other men; and…[was] scarce equal to the command.”
• Horace Walpole recorded in his diary that Gates “was the son of a housekeeper of the second Duke of Leeds, who, marrying a young husband when very old, had this son by him.”

No biographer of Gates has quoted any eighteenth-century British source suggesting that the general was the secret love-child of a peer.

The first recorded hint that Gates had noble blood in his veins surfaced in America after his death, in guesses by the Stevens family of New York. They had weak evidence, and guessed totally wrong. Only decades later, after Walpole’s diary was published, did writers suggest that Gates had a biological connection to the Duke of Leeds.

As I wrote before, the Stevenses were admirers of Gates, and heirs of his second wife. I also suspect they heard hints about Gates’s father being more than an army captain, “respectable victualler,” or clergyman, as authors wrote in the mid-nineteenth century.

Who was the source of those hints? I think the search has to start with the question of who in America would benefit from people believing that Gates wasn’t simply an ambitious child of hard-working servants who convinced their employer to help him become a British army officer. Who in American would like people to think that the retired general, remarried to a wealthy British heiress, was actually the son of a British lord? I can’t help but think that that list starts with Gen. and Mrs. Gates themselves.

That Time Again

Boston 1775 congratulates Old South Meeting House on the restoration of the clock in its steeple. The clock, installed by Gawen Brown in 1770, had to be shut two years ago because the hands were damaged. An anonymous donor paid for the full restoration.

This article from the Boston Globe describes one discovery during the process:

The two 9-foot clock faces debuted a new look, black paint coated with ground glass. Restorers discovered evidence of the smalt coating when they analyzed the faces under a microscope; it was the original finish on the nearly quarter-ton clocks when they were created in the mid-19th century to replace older dials.

“They probably had that finish for 20 to 30 years, but haven’t been back to a true smalt until now,” said Wendall Kalsow, a principal architect with McGinley Kalsow & Associates Inc., the Somerville-based restoration firm heading the project. “When the sun hits it, it just sparkles—a shimmer like a little jewel in the air.”

I understand there are also plans to add a bell to the clock for the first time since the aftermath of the great fire of 1872.

How Horatio Gates Became an Officer and a Gentleman

Yesterday I mentioned Max M. Mintz’s The Generals of Saratoga, published in 1990. It traces the careers of both Gen. John Burgoyne and Gen. Horatio Gates, and in doing so offers the latest and most comprehensive work about Gates’s muddled ancestry.

Mintz’s notes mention unpublished parish registers, Treasury and War Office records, and a letter Gates received after the Revolution from a second cousin on his mother’s side, discussing their family. (He apparently never replied.) I haven’t seen any of that stuff, but I have looked at some of the published material Mintz cites.

Sometimes his conclusions strike me as going a little beyond what those sources say. For instance, the book says that Gates’s mother was born Dorothy Hubbock, daughter of John Hubbock. Perhaps those names appear in the letter or another unpublished source. But the cited source that I could check—Six North Country Diaries (Second Series)—contains information about two men named John Hubbock, their work as successive postmasters at Durham, and their children. But it doesn’t list either one having a child named Dorothy or Dorothea. So what’s solid and what’s an informed guess?

Mintz suggests that Dorothy Reeves (her first married name) met Robert Gates when he delivered groceries to an estate in Wimbledon owned by the Duke of Leeds, where she was housekeeper. And that she was still employed there when she gave birth to Horatio, explaining why he was born in the nearby town of Old Malden (which people later misspelled as “Maldon”).

However, The History and Antiquities of the Parish of Wimbledon, Surrey, by William Abraham Bartlett, says that while a future Duke of Leeds bought an estate in that town in the late 1600s, his heirs sold it in 1717, a decade before Horatio was born.

Despite holes like that, I still find Mintz’s recreation of events convincing, with the exception of one point I’ll discuss tomorrow. We can’t be sure that the following account of the Gates family is accurate, but it seems like the most likely scenario of any published so far. The parts in boldface appear well documented, the rest—so far as I’ve seen—informed surmise.

Dorothy Hubbock came from a solid yeoman family. There were clergymen among her ancestors and cousins, and she learned to read and write. Dorothy married a man named Reeves and had a child they named Peregrine after her employer, the second Duke of Leeds. By the late 1720s Dorothy Reeves was that duke’s housekeeper, and a widow.

Robert Gates was a waterman who sold food to the estates along the Thames; that was why he was later identified as a “respectable victualler in Kensington.” At times, Gates did other, less legal work, which is how in 1724 he got arrested and fined by the Customs service.

Around 1727, Dorothy and Robert got married and had a child: Horatio. His mother used her friendship with a fellow servant to have Catherine, Lady Walpole’s young son be the baby’s godfather. In 1729, the Duke of Leeds died, prompting a change in the household management. At the same time, the third Duke of Bolton was setting up house with his new love, the actress Lavinia Fenton, and needed a good housekeeper. So he hired Dorothy Gates.

To ensure her services, the duke provided for her family as well. He pulled some strings at the Treasury, and the Customs office dropped Robert Gates’s smuggling case in 1729, and even hired him and his stepson. In turn, Gates and Peregrine Reeves did services for Bolton. When the duke fell out of favor at court for political reasons in 1733, he valued loyalty from his household staff all the more.

Young Horatio Gates grew up in Greenwich, at least at first in the duke’s house—hence Israel Mauduit’s statement that he “lived with his father in the service of Charles Duke of Bolton.” Greenwich had three comprehensive schools, and Horatio attended the “Green Coat” school for sons of watermen, fishermen, and mariners.

Between that education, his exposure to the Bolton household, and his natural intelligence and ambition, Gates gained the skills of a gentleman. He could write, speak French, make allusions to the classics, and so on. Most important for his career, Horatio also learned the art of putting superior gentlemen at ease.

In 1740, the Duke of Bolton squeezed back into favor, and started getting some lucrative sinecures again. The next year, the Treasury made Robert Gates the Customs Surveyor at Greenwich, explicitly on the duke’s recommendation. This post had an annual salary of £60, plus a portion of seized goods. The Gates family accumulated enough money to buy their own house in Greenwich.

During the Highland uprising of 1745, Bolton offered to raise an infantry regiment. Since this was a new regiment, it fell outside the usual system in the British army of officers selling their commissions to men who wanted those ranks. Here was an opportunity for a young man with no fortune but good connections.

Mintz reports the end of this tale:

Horatio was commissioned an ensign in Colonel Thomas Bligh’s Twentieth Regiment of Foot. This was to give him the entry rank from which he was then promoted to Bolton’s own regiment. On October 14, 1745, the clerk in the War Office wrote down, “Horatio Gates, Gentleman to be Lieutenant,” the fifteenth entry on the roster of Bolton’s officers. Astoundingly, the sixteenth name was “John Burgoyne”…

Thus, in his late teens Horatio Gates, son of a “common victualler” and a housekeeper, became an officer and a gentleman.

TOMORROW: Where did those whispers about Gates’s parentage begin?