The Mysterious Mezzotints of Thomas Hart

In October the American Revolution Institute published an intriguing article about a British print in its collection, one of only two known copies. (The other copy is at the Yale University Art Gallery.)

The image is titled “The Hero returned from Boston,” and its stated origin is: “London. Printed for Thos. Hart, as Act directs, 7th Sepr. 1776.”

The blog post adds more nuance:

The name of the publisher, Thomas Hart, is associated with a series of fictitious portraits of American leaders, including George Washington (including one on horseback and one on foot), John Hancock, Israel Putnam, David Wooster, Horatio Gates, Charles Lee, Esek Hopkins, Benedict Arnold, John Sullivan, and John Paul Jones, dated between 1775 and 1779. These prints, all of which are mezzotints, are attributed to publishers Thomas Hart, C. Shepherd, and John Morris.

None of these prints bears any real resemblance to its subject, despite the publishers’ effort to persuade customers that they were authentic likenesses. . . . The portraits were mostly fraudulent, turned out quickly to meet public demand for images of the leaders of the American rebellion. All of the prints may, in fact, have been produced for the London market in Augsburg, a German city that was a center of commercial print production. Their style—the markedly heavy features, large eyes, dark shadows, and treatment of details of clothing and accoutrements—is characteristic of Augsburg engravings.

Even more curious, the names of Thomas Hart, C. Shepherd, and John Morris seem to be fictitious as well. With one exception, their names are not associated with any other prints. The only plausible explanation for the use of these fictitious names is that the true publishers wanted to profit by selling images of the American Revolutionaries but preferred not to be closely associated with these products, which were, after all, heroic images of traitors who had taken up arms against the king.

The Hero returned from Boston is the outlier among the odd prints published by the fictitious Thomas Hart. It is the only etching, with aquatint or otherwise, associated with Hart’s name. The Hero returned from Boston is also the only one of the Hart prints in which the subjects are not named. Who is the hero returned from Boston? And who is the woman clinging so provocatively to him?

Before we go on to that mystery, I want to pause to consider the implications of the Hart/Shepherd/Morris portraits being unreliable.

We have multiple images of some of those American Patriots, such as Washington, Hancock, and Gates. In those cases, scholars have no trouble looking at a picture from the same period by Charles Willson Peale or John Singleton Copley and seeing how little the European prints resemble them. Take a look for yourself.

But in other cases, such as Hopkins, Wooster, and Charles Lee (shown above), we have so few portraits that for many decades people have copied or reprinted what are clearly unreliable pictures. I may well have done so myself (except I rarely have anything to say about Hopkins and Wooster, and I like the caricature of Lee with his dog better).

After all, some period image may seem better than nothing at all. But is it?

TOMORROW: Interpreting the oddball etching.

“Safely delivered of three Male Children”?

On 4 Dec 1752, Thomas Bourne and Susannah Beal married in Hingham’s second parish meetinghouse. In 1765 that community was designated as a district, and ten years later it became the independent town of Cohasset.

Susannah was born in February 1737, making her fifteen years old when she married. Calculating back from Thomas’s reported age at death, he was twenty-two.

Thomas and Susannah Bourne did not have their first child within seven months of their wedding. In fact, they didn’t have their first child within seven years. This was apparently a great disappointment.

On 5 Nov 1764, the Boston Evening-Post ran this article:

We hear from the second Parish in Hingham, that one Mrs. Bourne of that Place (a Person peculiarly fond of Children) was on Monday Evening [i.e., 29 October], to the great Joy of herself and Friends, safely delivered of three Male Children, after having lived upwards of Eleven Years in the connubial State without Offspring with one of the kindest Husbands, and enjoying with an unblemished Reputation every other Species of Earthly Felicity.

This is where the story turns sad. The Cohasset vital records say that all three of the Bournes’ babies died on Tuesday, 30 October. A local history says they were baptized that day and died “soon” after.

Either way, by the time the announcement of the birth of triplets appeared in Boston, those babies were dead. They had no recorded names.

This is where the story turns happy again. Exactly three years after the Evening-Post article, on 5 Nov 1767, Thomas and Susannah Bourne had a son they named Thomas, Jr. He grew up as an only child.

In 1774 and the early years of the Revolutionary War, Thomas Bourne, Sr., served on Cohasset’s governing committees. He turned out with the local militia to guard Hull beach in the winter of 1775–76. He died in 1796 at the age of sixty-six.

Thomas, Jr., grew up and married Jane Doane in 1786, when they were both still in their teens. Her uncle, the Rev. John Brown, performed the ceremony, as he had done for Thomas’s parents.

Jane died giving birth on 9 June 1787. Thomas, Jr., named their baby after her mother.

In April 1790, Thomas Bourne, Jr., married twenty-year-old Betty or Betsy Tower. That September, she gave birth to twin boys who died as infants—the family history seemed to be repeating. The following year, they had a daughter, Priscilla, who died at fourteen months. Then, however, Thomas and Betsy Bourne had a series of daughters and sons:

• Eliza, 1793.
• a second Priscilla, 1797.
• Mary, 1799.
• a new Thomas, Jr., 1803.
• Elias, 1807.
• Marshal, 1811.

The Doane genealogy says this Thomas Bourne became a physician; the local history says he was a farmer like his father. Public records show he served Cohasset as a church deacon, a coroner, a selectman, and eventually a representative in the Massachusetts General Court.

Susanna Bourne, widow of the older Thomas, died in 1819. She was thought to be ninety, but she was really eighty-two. Betsy Bourne, widow of the younger Thomas, died in 1846 at the age of seventy-six.

(The photo above shows Cohasset’s First Parish Meeting House, its oldest part built in 1747.)

“The variety of reasons a play might be deemed inappropriate”

Prof. David O’Shaughnessy of the National University of Ireland in Galway just won this year’s British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Prize for Digital Resources for his website The Censorship of British Theatre, 1737-1843.

O’Shaughnessy’s website explains itself this way:

This digital resource hosts a selection of manuscripts of plays submitted to the Examiner of Plays, the office established by the Lord Chamberlain in the wake of the Stage Licensing Act of 1737, who had the primary responsibility of safeguarding the morals of theatre audiences. The manuscripts are drawn from the Larpent Collection (Huntington Library, San Marino) and the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays (British Library) and have been carefully selected to show the variety of reasons a play might be deemed inappropriate through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. . . .

It contains high resolution scans of 40 manuscripts from the period 1737-1843—from the Stage Licensing Act to its successor the Theatres Act—in order that scholars can get a sense of the line-by-line attention given to plays by the Examiner’s office. Each scan is accompanied by a brief note (2000-5000 words) that gives an author bio, a plot summary, a succinct note on the play’s reception history, a commentary on the censorship imposed on the manuscript, and some suggestions as to further introductory reading related to that play.

The U.R.L. for the website is tobeomitted.tcd.ie, and a significant part of the analysis focuses on what the government officials insisted should not go on the stage. Sometimes they marked passages to change, sometimes they just forbade any performance. Impresarios and playwrights also made cuts, and so did audiences—there are numerous anecdotes about producers assuring first-night crowds that certain disliked aspects of a show would be removed.

One can flip through the website to get a sense of British theater in this period beyond the plays that entered the canon. Class distinctions were important, subtlety not. Here’s a clip from the summary of Thomas Holcroft’s He’s Much to Blame (1798):

Maria, disguised as a man and accompanied by her resourceful maid Lucy, is seeking Sir George Versatile. She had been his lover up until he inherited his title but, at the inn, Maria is informed by the comical German quack Dr Gosterman that Versatile is now in love with Lady Jane Vibrate. . . .

The framing material also offers choice glimpses of the time’s show business and its more showy players, such as this remark about Charles Macklin, author of The Man of the World (1770):

He gained a certain degree of notoriety in 1734 when he was convicted of the manslaughter of a fellow actor after a backstage scuffle over a wig: an unexpected result of this was that he gained a taste for the law and the remainder of his career would see him involved in some high profile cases where he would represent himself.

And Elizabeth Griffith, author of The Platonic Wife (1765):

She stopped acting after becoming pregnant with a second child and [her husband] Richard’s business interests collapsed around the same time. Forced into desperate action, the Griffiths published their courtship correspondence as A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances in 1757. It went through a number of editions and there were follow-up publications. 

Boston of course forbade public theater until years after the Revolutionary War, part of its Puritan legacy. And if the pre-Revolutionary town fathers could see this website, they would undoubtedly feel they were making the right decision.

What Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Book Had to Say

Among the digitized items in the Harvard Libraries’ Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom collection that I mentioned yesterday is A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as related by himself.

Published in Bath, England, in 1770, this was the first autobiography of a black former slave published in English, and one of the first handful of English books of any kind by a black author.

Interestingly, Gronniosaw was literate only in Dutch, having learned to read while enslaved in New York early in the century. His story was taken down by “a young lady of the town of Leominster.”

Gronniosaw dedicated his memoir to Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, the same evangelical noblewoman who financed the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s first book of poems. Gronniosaw also composed a letter to the countess thanking her for financial support a couple of years later—the only other known sample of his words.

Harvard’s copy of this book is labeled the second edition, but it doesn’t state where and when it was printed. (Sen. Charles Sumner, champion of abolition and civil rights, bequeathed this copy to the university.) The first American edition was published in Newport by Solomon Southwick in 1774. The Harvard library also owns a copy of a Welsh translation published in 1779, and there were several more editions in the decades that followed, showing the book’s popularity.

One notable aspect of Gronniosaw’s story is his description of how he first understood reading when he saw a white sea captain doing it—he thought that the book was talking to that man but wouldn’t talk to him as well. Henry Louis Gates traced this “Talking Book” trope through several more slave narratives in his study The Signifying Monkey. (Gates also included Gronniosaw’s text in Pioneers of the Black Atlantic, summarizing his earlier analysis in the introduction.)

Gronniosaw depicted himself as a prince in his birthplace, Bornu, at least by his maternal ancestry. He also said he was a dissenting monotheist among pagans. Gates therefore connects Gronniosaw’s description of himself to the idea of the Noble Savage, already established in British literature.

After being captured and sold into slavery in his teens, Gronniosaw recounted, he was shipped to Barbados, then New York, where he converted to Christianity and learned to read. Freed by his clerical master’s will, he signed onto a privateer and later into the 28th Regiment of Foot, but his goal was to reach England.

Once there, Gronniosaw struggled as a poor laborer. He married a widowed weaver, and they moved from one city to another during the 1760s and early 1770s, raising their children. In Kinderminster, Gronniosaw connected with a Dissenting minister who knew the Countess of Huntingdon, and that led to his life story being published.

Unlike other African-born memoirists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gronniosaw did not condemn slavery. He did condemn racism, but seemed to feel that he deserved equal treatment in Britain because he was a Christian, not because he was a person. 

For many decades Gronniosaw’s book was the only evidence of his life. Then scholars discovered a death notice in the Chester Chronicle dated 2 Oct 1775 and a line in the burial register for that city’s church of St. Oswald. The newspaper repeated the book’s information about Gronniosaw, including both his Christian and original African names, and both sources said he had died at the age of seventy.

Thousands of Curiosities from the Harvard Libraries

The Harvard Libraries have created a set of webpages called “CURIOSity Digital Collections” which provide “Curated views that provide specialized search options and unique content.”

That content comes from the university’s own holdings, and since the Harvard system adds up to one of the largest libraries on the planet, there’s a lot of content to choose from.

Some of the topics covered by these pages are:

• the South Sea Bubble of 1720
• France in the Americas
• American Currency over the centuries (watch the quantity of bills explode during the Revolutionary War)
• The Artemas Ward House in Shrewsbury
• English Crime and Execution Broadsides of the 18th and 19th centuries
• Joseph Story, justice on the U.S. Supreme Court from Marblehead

The newest collection looks at Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom. Linking to more than a thousand items related to black history and culture, this collection is the result of a university-wide effort that digital collections program manager Dorothy Berry has led since 2020, as reported in the Harvard Gazette.

Some of the eighteenth-century items to explore in that section are:

• Nathaniel Appleton’s Considerations on Slavery; in a Letter to a Friend, printed by Edes and Gill in 1767.
• James Swan’s A Dissuasion to Great-Britain and the Colonies, from the Slave Trade to Africa, printed by Ezekiel Russell in 1772.
• A Forensic Dispute on the Legality of Enslaving the Africans; held at the Public Commencement in Cambridge, New-England, July 21st, 1773, credited to Theodore Parsons and Eliphalet Pearson and printed by John Boyle for bookseller Thomas Leverett.
• Jupiter Hammon’s An Address to the Negroes in the State of New-York from 1787.
• Prince Hall’s A Charge Delivered to the Brethren of the African Lodge on the 25th of June, 1792, printed by the Thomas and John Fleet.

Plus, there are pamphlets from the same years printed in Philadelphia, London, and other important British cities.

This collection extends into the nineteenth century, so there are many items from the fight for (and against) abolition in the U.S. of A. and around the world. Plus, more to come.

“Burke surely rolls over in his discreetly marked grave”

Back in December 2020, after the election and before the insurrection, the L.A. Review of Books published an op-ed essay by Jessica Riskin, a professor of history at Stanford University.

Riskin’s started with the way Edmund Burke (1729–1797) defined conservative politics in the 1790s.

Burke had been an ally of the American Whigs. In 1765 he was private secretary to the Marquess of Rockingham, who led one opposition Whig faction in Parliament. Toward the end of that year, the marquess became prime minister. His team found a pocket borough to send Burke to Parliament, where his oratory made a quick impression.

Rockingham was soon out of power, but Burke continued to be his faction’s most eloquent voice, in both speeches and print. In 1774 he won a seat from Bristol and promptly told his constituents that he would vote as he saw best, not as they told him; he didn’t win reelection from that district six years later.

When Rockingham returned to power after the British defeat at Yorktown, he made Burke Paymaster of the Forces. Rather than maintain the job as a lucrative sinecure, Burke introduced a law to reduce its financial latitude. He wrote other reform bills as well, though some stuck only after other people introduced them.

After Rockingham died, Burke allied with Charles James Fox. That worked out during the brief Fox-North coalition government, but then William Pitt the Younger became prime minister and stayed in the job for the rest of the century. Because of faction rather than strong ideological reasons, Burke was stuck in the opposition during his final years.

Those were also the years of the French Revolution, which inspired Burke’s statements on conservatism. In her op-ed, Prof. Riskin drew a hard line between that ideology and the political methods of Donald Trump and his followers:

Each time a commentator refers to Trumpism as “conservative” — probably hundreds of times a day — Edmund Burke surely rolls over in his discreetly marked grave in Buckinghamshire.

Burke, the Irish political philosopher and Whig MP who originated Anglo–American conservatism, supported the rebellion of the British colonies in North America but hated the revolutionaries in France, and there you have conservatism in a nutshell. The American rebellion, Burke judged, was not a revolution but a movement to conserve an ancient principle of the British constitution, the people’s power of “granting their own money” to the government. Also in keeping with Burke’s “principle of conservation” was the colonists’ preservation of other longstanding institutions such as slavery, which Burke favored eliminating, but only “gradually.”

In France, on the other hand, people went rushing around hurling kings from their thrones, abolishing feudalism, summarily eliminating aristocratic and clerical exemptions and privileges, and making a lot of vulgar noise about equality. That sort of revolution was anathema to Burke. The discreet marker on his grave was a compromise: he had asked that it be altogether unmarked, sure that the Jacobins would arrive in droves to desecrate his final resting place, if they could find it, as they had desecrated the institutions of the Old Regime.

His abhorrence of the French Revolution led Burke to define the political philosophy that would come to be known as conservatism. His central principle was that abstract political ideals, such as the ideal of absolute equality, were dangerous because they led people to destroy longstanding traditions in their name. A society could not rest upon airy abstractions, Burke argued, but only upon solid things: traditional institutions, such as the institutions of property and inheritance. Burke’s “principle of conservation” held that any reform must be undertaken gradually, keeping always in mind that traditions were the bedrock of society, and that to eliminate them was to invite mayhem. . . .

“Conservative” in reference to Trumpism is dangerously misleading. If you’re a conservative, you’ll think the word denotes wisdom and judiciousness, two things Trumpians don’t even pretend to embrace, but make a show of flouting. If you disagree with conservatism as a political philosophy, you might think it sounds stodgy, benighted, even oppressive, but in a static or at least a slow-moving way, not in a way that poses an immediate threat of civil war. No one associates an attempted coup, even an inept one such as we’ve been witnessing, with the word “conservative.”

Note that Riskin wrote thirteen months ago, before 6 Jan 2021.

On that day Trump told thousands of followers, “we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you,…we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. . . . And we’re going to the Capitol.” And then he went home to watch the resulting violence on television. That habitual deceit isn’t even “Trumpism”; it was just trumpery.

The Ninety-Four Years of Charles Thomson

The second person to sign the Declaration of Independence, after John Hancock, was Charles Thomson.

Thomson wasn’t a delegate to the Continental Congress, and thus didn’t sign the famous handwritten copy of the Declaration.

Rather, he was the Congress’s secretary, chosen unanimously in the first week of meetings and serving fifteen straight years to the launch of the federal government in 1789. He co-signed all the body’s official pronouncements before sending them to the printer.

Last month the American Philosophical Society ran a blog post by Michael Miller about Thomson, inspired by some recently acquired manuscripts from his later years.

Charles Thomson had a remarkable early life—straight out of a melodramatic novel if we believe the details in John Fanning Watson’s Annals of Philadelphia (1830), which I’ll put in brackets. He was born in Londonderry in 1729, and his mother died when he was ten. His father decided to move the family to America but died on the voyage over [within sight of the coast!]. The kids were then split up [after the captain took all their father’s money!], but they remained in touch.

Charles was placed in a blacksmith’s household. [After watching the man make a nail, he pounded out one himself! Overhearing the smith and his wife talk about legally making him an apprentice, Charles ran away! He met a kind anonymous lady who sent him to school!] By 1743, when he was fourteen, Charles was attending Francis Allison’s academy in New London, Pennsylvania, with support from one of his older brothers.

On coming of age in 1750, Thomson moved to Philadelphia. With the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin, he became a tutor in languages at the Academy. He joined some of the city’s intellectual societies, eventually serving as corresponding secretary of the A.P.S., and the Presbyterian Church. He became involved in political matters like the colony’s Indian policy, and after the Stamp Act he allied himself with John Dickinson and other organizers of resistance to Crown taxes.

In September 1774 Thomson married Hannah Harrison, daughter of a wealthy Quaker. This cemented his position in the top echelon of Philadelphia society. That was also when the First Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia and, as I said, the delegates chose Thomson to be the secretary. Anyone who’s seen 1776 can recall how big a presence Thomson was, as played by Ralston Hill—and that was just handling official business.

Since Thomson maintained the Congress’s official records, he exercised influence behind the scenes as well, and he managed a lot of official correspondence, foreign and domestic. When he got fed up with delegates not deciding on the design of an official seal for the U.S. of A., he created the eagle symbol the country still uses. Thomson’s power annoyed some people, and he once got into a physical altercation with delegate James Searle.

The A.P.S. blog post focuses on Thomson’s big post-Congress project:

Upon retiring from politics in 1789, at age 60, Thomson devoted himself to studying the Bible in Greek. He acquired a 1665 copy of the Septuagint edited by the English theologian John Pearson. When New Testament writers quoted Scripture, they used the Septuagint, more often than they used Hebrew sources. In order to better understand the Greek text himself and to share his work with an American audience, Thomson saw the merit in translating the Septuagint into English for the first time.

Thomson completed his translation of the Bible, both Old Testament and New, in 1808. His rendition is titled The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Covenant, Commonly Called the Old and New Testament: Translated from the Greek. Only a thousand copies were printed; most went unsold and ended up as scrap paper.

Undaunted, seven years later Thomson published A Synopsis of the Four Evangelists, a summary of the four canonical gospels into one unified text.

Thomson lived to be ninety-four, dying just a couple of weeks short of the fiftieth anniversary of the First Continental Congress. By that time, Thomas Jefferson had heard, the former secretary had senile dementia and could not recognize family members; “It is at most but the life of a cabbage,” Jefferson wrote. Still, Thomson had outlived all but three of the other men who signed the Declarationa after him.

“A full Display of his truly sublime & extensive Genius”

Francis Hopkinson, designer of the U.S. flag, was another Philadelphia Federalist who disliked Eleazer Oswald’s poetic commentary on how Boston had a parade to celebrate ratifying the new Constitution.

In fact, Hopkinson was still upset at the end of March 1788, more than a month after Oswald’s gibe appeared in his Independent Gazetteer.

Hopkinson’s response took the form of a literary essay purporting to analyze the classical poetic qualities of that newspaper’s “There they went up, up, up” verses. It began:

LITERARY INTELLIGENCE
Extraordinary

On the first of January 1788, it was determined in a certain Seminary of Learning to institute a Professorship of Poetry & the Belle Lettres.

As this was intended to be only an honorary Appointment (the Gratuity being only a Barrel of strong Beer per Quarter to the Professor) it was left to the present Faculty to determine which of their Members should fill the new Chair.

The Faculty, having conven’d for the Purpose, it was moved & agreed to that the Candidates should compose probationary Odes to be exhibited on Monday the 18th of February, & that this new Professorship should be awarded to the Author of the most approved Performance.

On the Day of Decision it appeared that none of the Professors except Dr. D——— had enter’d the Lists, & that he had only two of the Tutors for his Competitors. So that there were but three probationary Odes produced on this Occasion. These being read & considered, the Ballots were when, & Dr. D———’s Performance was declared the most worthy, by a very decided Majority. And on the Day following his admirable Ode was given to the impatient Public.

The Doctor had chosen for his Subject the grand Procession made at Boston on the Adoption & Ratification of the proposed federal Constitution by the State of Massachusetts. This judicious Choice gave the Doctor Room for a full Display of his truly sublime & extensive Genius, & he has exerted himself accordingly; as will fully appear by exhibiting the Ode itself verbatim & literatim.

Strophe
“There they went up, up, up,
And there they went down, down, downy,
There they went backwards & forwards
And poop for Boston Towny. . . .”

After the full eight lines of verse came a detailed English and Latin philological analysis that filled more than two pages of the American Literature journal in 1930. Because that was where Hopkinson’s parodic essay first saw print. If he intended it for a general audience in 1788, no newspaper or magazine editor agreed to publish it.

Hopkinson’s “Dr. D———” appears to refer to James Davidson, professor of the Greek and Latin languages at the University of the State of Pennsylvania. Perhaps Davidson was an Anti-Federalist—but he left no evidence of such views. Perhaps Hopkinson was tweaking his alma mater for some reason.

Or maybe Hopkinson didn’t mean to lampoon Prof. Davidson at all, but was simply amused at the idea that a classical scholar penning the silly “down, down, downy” verses. Again, for all the effort Hopkinson put into this response on behalf of the Federalist cause, it reached a very limited audience.

“The ’Vention did in Boston meet”

In 1782 Eleazer Oswald founded the Independent Gazetteer newspaper in Philadelphia with the help of a local printer named Daniel Humphreys.

A couple of years later Humphreys left and relaunched the Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser. 

Oswald was able to publish daily while Humphreys put out issues three times a week. Either way, that was a big jump over the weekly newspapers both men had worked on before the war.

While Oswald opposed the new U.S. Constitution of 1787, Humphreys became one of many Federalist printers supporting that reform.

On 19 Feb 1788, Oswald poked fun at the parade the Boston Federalists organized after Massachusetts ratified the new Constitution, as I quoted yesterday. Three days later Humphreys ran this response:

Mr. Humphreys,
The Independent Gazetteer has been long famous for its Attic salt; and it now lays a claim to Parnassian wit. I am sorry, however, that an Hibernian muse should be invoked to give an account of the proceedings at Boston; for, however meritorious Dean Swift’s “O my kitten, my kitten, my deary,” may be, yet Yankee doodle seems best adapted to this country, and you know we ought to encourage our own spiritu as well as manu factures. So please to accept the following from
A YANKEE.

The ’Vention did in Boston meet,
But State-house could not hold ’em,
So then they went to Fed’ral-street,
And there the truth was told ’em–

Yankee doodle, keep it up!
Yankee doodle, dandy,
Mind the music and the step,
And with the girls be handy.

They ev’ry morning went to prayer,
And then began disputing,
’Till opposition silenc’d were,
By arguments refuting.

Yankee doodle, keep it up! &c.

Then ’squire Hancock like a man,
Who dearly loves the nation,
By a concil’atry plan,
Prevented much vexation.

Yankee doodle, keep it up! &c.

He made a woundy fed’ral speech,
With sense and elocution;
And then the ’Vention did beseech
T’ adopt the Constitution.

Yankee doodle, keep it up! &c.

The question being outright put,
(Each voter independent)
The Fed’ralists agreed t’ adopt,
And then propose amendment.

Yankee doodle, keep it up! &c.

The other party seeing then
The people were against ’em,
Agreed like honest, faithful men,
To mix in peace amongst ’em.

Yankee doodle, keep it up! &c.

The Boston folks are deucid lads,
And always full of notions;
The boys, the girls, their mams and dads,
Were fill’d with joy’s commotions.

Yankee doodle, keep it up! &c.

So straightway they procession made,
Lord! how nation fine, Sir!
For ev’ry man of ev’ry trade
Went with his tools——to dine, Sir.

Yankee doodle, keep it up! &c.

John Foster Williams in a ship,
Join’d in the social band, Sir,
And made the lasses dance and skip,
To see him sail on land, Sir.

Yankee doodle, keep it up! &c.

Oh then a whapping feast begun,
And all hands went to eating;
They drank their toasts, shook hands and sung,
Huzza! for ’Vention meeting.

Yankee doodle, keep it up! &c.

Now Politicians of all kinds,
Who are not yet decided;
May see how Yankees speak their minds;
And yet are not divided.

Yankee doodle, keep it up! &c.

Then from this ’sample let ’em cease,
Inflammatory writing,
For FREEDOM, HAPPINESS, and PEACE,
Is better far than fighting.

Yankee doodle, keep it up! &c.

So here I end my fed’ral song,
Compos’d of thirteen verses,
May agriculture flourish long,
And commerce fill our purses!

Yankee doodle, keep it up!
Yankee doodle, dandy,
Mind the music and the step,
And with the girls be handy.

While the Independent Gazetteer implied the Boston Federalists’ parade deserved questionable Irish praise, this song parodied common Yankee speech—a stereotype carrying the aura of Patriotism.

Pennsylvania’s Federalists didn’t like how their Anti-Federalist neighbors kept arguing their case weeks after they had lost decisively at the state ratification convention. That’s why this song emphasized not being “divided” by “fighting.” Federalist newspapers approvingly quoted the Massachusetts delegates who had voted against the Constitution but then pledged fidelity to the new government.

Of course, the voices of those reconciled Anti-Federalists reached Philadelphia mostly through the Federalist press. I doubt Massachusetts politics looked so peaceful and unified close-up.

“Poop for Boston towny!”

Pennsylvania had its convention to ratify the new U.S. Constitution from 21 November to 12 December 1787.

It was the first large state to approve of the new federal government. The vote was one-sided: 46 to 23.

The Anti-Federalist side didn’t simply accept that vote and shut up, however. Those politicians continued to promulgate their arguments, hoping to affect the votes in other states. The Pennsylvania Federalists doubled their efforts to talk up the new Constitution locally and elsewhere.

Pennsylvanians therefore had a surprising amount to say about the Massachusetts ratifying convention, which met 9 January to 5 February 1788.

In Philadelphia, the Continental Army veteran Eleazer Oswald (1755–1795, shown here) made the Independent Gazetteer a daily Anti-Federalist voice—one of only a dozen American newspapers to publish essays against ratification.

The 19 February issue of the Independent Gazetteer ran a pro-ratification report based on Benjamin Edes’s Boston Gazette from eight days earlier, giving it the ironic headline “The Grand Federal Edifice.”:

WITH the highest satisfaction we announce to the public, that the Convention of this commonwealth, on Wednesday at five o’clock, P. M. assented to, and on Thursday ratified the Constitution proposed by the last Federal Convention.

On this pleasing event, we beg leave to congratulate the public, and to express our sincere wishes, that the general joy which it has diffused through all ranks of citizens, may be an auspicious omen of the superior advantages which shall result from the establishment of such a Federal Government, as this Constitution provides.

Oswald added, “The motion for ratifying was declared in the affirmative, by a majority of nineteen.” The vote in Massachusetts was 187-168, a much closer outcome than in Pennsylvania. Massachusetts’s convention also started a trend of calling for specific amendments, putting implied conditions on its vote.

The Boston Gazette report continued with a detailed description of the Federalist procession that followed ratification. The Independent Gazetteer printed this:

In consequence of which the Boston folks had a GRAND Procession–

There they went up, up, up,
And there they went down, down, downy,
There they went backwards and forwards,
And poop for Boston towny!

This grand intelligence reached Philadelphia, on Saturday evening last, when the bells of Christ Church were rung–

Here they rung, rung, rung,
And here they bobb’d about, abouty.
Here were doubles and majors and bobs,
And heigh for ’delphia city!

These verses parodied a traditional Scottish song published as “The Nurses’ Song” or “Hey my kitten my kitten,” lyrics attributed to Jonathan Swift.

Pennsylvania Federalists felt that Oswald wasn’t treating the Massachusetts ratification with the respect it deserved.

TOMORROW: Two responses.

“Fair the year of glory lies”

It’s a Boston 1775 tradition to post a period poem for New Year’s. Usually I’ve chosen verses written and sung by young news carriers, but this year I’m picking up on this month’s thread of poetry debating the new U.S. Constitution.

“A POEM, Addressed to the PEOPLE of VIRGINIA, on New-Year’s Day, 1788” appeared in the Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser dated 10 Jan 1788. Since that newspaper isn’t in the database I can access, I’ve transcribed the version reprinted in the Pennsylvania Packet on 25 January.

Despite the poem being reprinted in several more newspapers and the American Mercury magazine, it really is meant for a Virginia readership. It boasts about the state’s geographic bounties and drops the names of more than a dozen state politicians in a way that would make John Adams grumble, “You know Virginian geese are always swans.”

So far as I can tell, this poem was not included in the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, perhaps because it was published several months before the Virginia ratifying convention got under way.

Still, there’s no question what the anonymous poet was on about.

A POEM, Addressed to the PEOPLE of VIRGINIA, on New-Year’s Day, 1788.

FAIR VIRGINIA, ever dear,
See arriv’d th’ important year!
While the annual song I pay,
Truth inspires the patriot lay:
Wake!—too long thy sons have dream’d—
Where’s the sister state, that beam’d
Fairer in the dawn of fame,
Glowing with a purer flame?
Shall the ancient wreaths you gain’d
By thy latter deeds be stain’d?
Shall not fed’ral conduct crown
All thy acts of old renown?
Union into ruin hurl’d,
Shall a Tyrant grasp a world?
Or shall sep’rate Unions grow,
Endless source of war and woe?
Or, if Anarchy ensue,
Who hath more to lose than you?

Shall we basely sell the boon,
Bought with so much blood, so soon?
Oh! the muse a tale could tell,
How our heroes fought and fell—
Must our Empire’s short-liv’d reign
Prove they fought and bled in vain?

Blest Virginians, sum the cost!
Shall the price of blood be lost?
Lost the blessings ye possess,
Freedom and the pow’r to bless?
Your’s are planted plains and farms,
Villas fair in rural charms;
Lovely girls and prattling boys,
All the bliss of home-born joys;
When the soothing voice invites
Guests to hospitable rights.—
Your’s th’ illimitable waste,
Flow’ry meads and valleys vast;
Your’s stupendous cliffs that rise,
Bosom’d high in fleecy skies;
Your’s the Alleganian hills,
Spouting forth in num’rous rills.
List ye, how, from many a shore,
Distant sons of ocean roar?
Rivers broad to you belong,
Yet to run in deathless song—
Fair Ohio gently roves
Through the sweet Acasian groves;
Rappahannock (sounding name)
And Fluvanna, slow to fame;
Pohawtan superbly rolls;
Great Potomack, void of shoals;
Mississippi’s waves will gain,
Spite of fraud, for you, the main;
Harvests, by your fields supplied,
Then may float on ev’ry tide.

Go, thou miscreant, from whose tongue
Accents of DISUNION rung;
At the shrine of self, in lies,
Every blessing sacrifice!
Bid the kindling beacons far
Light the realms to civil war;
Bid the drum’s obstrep’rous sound
Rumbling run along the ground;
Bid the trumpet sing to arms,
Swell the cannon’s dread alarms;
Wake the clang of steel again;
Purple every flood and plain;
Make the sick’ning harvest die,
Burning cities scorch the sky:
Heav’n for this shall on thy head
Chosen bolts of vengeance shed.
Round our forests, on our coast,
We have nobler names to boast—
Liberal souls, by none surpast,
Names with time itself to last.
Hail Virginia’s patriot sons.
Griffin, Blair, M’Clurg and Jones!
Join the Pages firm and just:
Steward faithful to his trust:
Maddison, above the rest,
Pouring from his narrow chest
More than Greek or Roman sense,
Boundless tides of eloquence:
Withe, who drank the source of truth,
Skill’d in lore of laws from youth:
Thruston’s mind of ample reach;
Innis, fraught with powerful speech:
Too reluctant to engage:
Pendleton with locks of age,
Mild his eye with wisdom beams,
Lent from other worlds he seems;
Heav’n, resume not such a loan,
Ere we make his choice our own.
Erst the Lees, a glorious band,
For their country made a stand.
Wise and brave, unapt to yield.
In the council or the field;
Why asunder are they torn?
Why his* loss must millions mourn,
Who, to glad th’ astonish’d earth,
Spoke an empire into birth?

The footnote explains, “R. H. Lee made the motion in Congress for the declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.” In late 1787 Lee publicly objected to the lack of specified rights in the new Constitution, though not to a restructured federal government. This poet thought Lee was undercutting his earlier actions while he, of course, felt he was acting on the same principles as before.

While the awful hour demands
Ablest heads and purest hands.
Him, in vain, we call from far,
Second splendor, other star,
Light and glory of the age,
Jefferson, the learned sage!
Yet a name adorns our state,
Great as modest, good as great;
Though unnam’d, illustrious far,
PRIDE of PEACE and STRENGTH of WAR!

Though a FEW, or false or blind,
Strive to taint the public mind;
Trust the muse’s Heav’n-taught strain,
All the noise, the labour’s vain—
Numbers vast will own the plan,
That secures the rights of man;
Gives the States their destin’d place,
High amidst the human race:
Our illustrious hero then,
(First of sages, best of men)
Will the nation’s cares assume,
And again avert its doom.

Bards! your wreaths immortal twine:
Brighter days begin to shine.
Come, ye freemen! Patriots, come!
Read with me Columbia’s doom—
Lo! involv’d in yonder skies,
Fair the year of glory lies.
Ravish’d far, in vision’d trance,
I behold, with mystic glance,
Towns extend on many a bank,
Late with darkling thickets dank,
And the gilded spires arise,
Grateful to propitious skies—
Arts, refinements, morals blest,
Claim perfection in the WEST—
Peace, with commerce in her train,
Brings a golden age again—
While our woven wings unfurl’d
Sail triumphant round the world.

Among the prominent Virginians not named in these lines were Patrick Henry, Edmund Randolph, and George Mason, all known to oppose the new Constitution.

Also unnamed, but only because he was too “Great” to need specifying, was George Washington.

(The photograph above shows Virginia’s capitol building in Richmond, designed by Jefferson and under construction in 1788.)

Looking Ahead with the Omohundro Institute

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture launched the Across America, 1776 website to help plan and inform the country’s Sestercentennial commemorations.

The Omohundro Institute is based at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, but it takes a “vast” rather than narrow approach to the field, publishing the leading scholarly journal on early American history, the William & Mary Quarterly, and organizing international conferences.

New England will be well represented in the Across America, 1776 initiative because the Project Coordinator will be Prof. Joseph M. Adelman of Framingham State University. In this just-announced role, Joe Adelman will:

• serve as the institute’s representative on the 250th project committee of the American Association of State and Local Historians.
• write posts on the theme of the American Revolution and current commemorations of it for the institute’s Uncommon Sense blog.
• chair a regular online meeting of journalists and academics looking to write public-facing pieces on the history of the American Revolution.
• develop programming for a podcast series on the topic.
• be a liaison with regional historical associations.

Adelman is the author of Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789, and for the past seven years has been the Omohundro Institute’s Assistant Editor for Digital Initiatives, meaning he has deep knowledge of media networks then and now.

Ezekiel Price on “A Great & Glorious Event”

Yesterday’s posting raised the question of when exactly Boston heard about the American and French victory at Yorktown. The most immediate reaction would appear in people’s diaries, so I looked for my usual informants on daily events.

John Adams? In 1781 he was far away in Europe.

Merchant John Rowe? His surviving diaries end in 1779.

Printer John Boyle? He stopped compiling his “Journal of Occurrences” in 1778.

Shopkeeper and selectman Harbottle Dorr? He stopped collecting newspapers assiduously at the end of 1776, adding just a few issues from the next two years.

Robert Treat Paine was keeping his diary out in Taunton in 1781. Fortunately, the folks at the Massachusetts Historical Society have done the hard work of deciphering his handwriting and publishing pertinent entries in the Paine Papers. On 26 October, he wrote: “News came that Cornwallis had Surrendred to Genl. Washington, on 17th. Instant.”

I wanted more detail than that, and I wanted a voice from Boston. Fortunately, Harvard has preserved and digitized the 1781 almanac diary of Boston court official and insurance broker Ezekiel Price (1727–1802), who was a gossip sponge.

Price’s entry for 26 Oct 1781 appears on sequence 37–38 of the digitized version of this diary:

This Morning Mr. Thomas Hulbert [?] came to Town from Providence who brings a Hand Bill printed at Newport Yesterday in which is an Account that the afternoon before one Capt Lovett arrived there from York River who brot an account that Lord Cornwallis & his Army Surrendered Prisoners of War to Genl. Washington on the 18th. instant—

that Cornwallis had wth. him in Garrison 9000 Men with an immense quantity of Stores also that a 44[-gun warship] & one frigate & 100 Transports were Captured—

Mr. Winship who left Newport Yesterday tells me that he saw Capt. Lovett & his Mate who informed him that they say the British Flag lowered & the Continental & French Flags hoisted on the Forts at York Town—that he heard the Huzzas upon the Occasion—

they they saw the French Admiral go on shoar at the Fort that the American Vessells which lay below York Town went up to Town & that he went up so near the Forts that he could throw a Bisket on Shoar—

From all these Accts. it is beyond a doubt that Lord Cornwallis & his great Army with Vast quantities of Artillery & Military Stores are in Possession of our illustrious Genl. Washington & the Allied Army—A Great & Glorious Event—

On this Joyful occasion all the Bells in Town were rang most part of the day & the Sons of Freedom showed evident marks of their felicity. In the Evening the Coffee house was illuminated & Fireworks displayed.

Mr. [John?] Marston tells me that a French Gentleman acquainted him he had received a Letter from a Person who was in York Town at the time of the Surrender & adds that Genl. Washington had ordered 1200 Horse to the Reinforcement of Genl. [Nathanael] Greene.

Price recorded additional information on 27 and 31 October. He came to date Cornwallis’s surrender to the 17th, like Paine. That was when the British general first raised the white flag. It wasn’t until the 19th that the commanders signed surrender terms and the Crown troops gave up their arms, but we now treat that date as the significant one.

Betsey Heath’s Handwriting Lessons

Last month Heather Wilson wrote on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Beehive blog about a copybook written out by Elizabeth Heath (1769–1853) in 1781, when she was a student at the Brookline school.

Wilson wrote:

The cover of her book is plain—the faded, splotched, brown paper does not even bear a title, or her name. Inside, however, Betsey’s personality shines through. At the bottom of each page, after copying lines, Betsey saved space for doodles. She always wrote her name, sometimes her school and the date, and then she added her flair.

On 3 July, twelve-year-old Betsey copied lines of “The living know that they must die” and then got to doodling, adding merry faces into two of her swirling lines.

On 9 August, she added squiggly lines, flashes of red ink amongst the black, and her school and the date crammed inside of a heart.

The doodling, however, was not the only unexpected find within Betsey’s book. On each page, above the doodles, Betsey copied down an aphorism, often one that rhymed.

Handwriting teachers assigned such aphorisms as penmanship practice—doubling, of course, as moral lessons. They even came to be called “copybook maxims.” The choice of sentiment was probably not up to the students. Still, they could reflect the spirit of the day.

The lines Betsey copied on 26 October 1781, however, were different. “Liberty, peace & plenty to the united states of America,” she wrote. The previous day’s lines had included the book’s only explicit Biblical reference (“Uriahs beautiful wife made King David seek his life”) and then the next day took on a distinctly patriotic tone. This was the only entry from her entire school year that was not a piece of wisdom, or advice. But, why?

Wilson deduced that the burst of patriotism at Betsy Heath’s school on that day came from learning about the British surrender to American and French forces at Yorktown earlier that month. Looking at other items in the M.H.S. catalogue, she noted that on 25 October John Carter printed a broadside with that news at Providence.

In fact, we can nail down the date that the news arrived at Boston.

TOMORROW: All we need is the right diary.

A Painter’s Process

William Hogarth’s series of paintings titled A Rake’s Progress have been at Sir John Soane’s London mansion, now a delight-crammed museum, for more than two centuries.

Recently those canvases went to the Tate Britain museum for an exhibit, and while there received close scrutiny from experts at both museums and their machines. The Tate website just published an article about the findings.

It’s not surprising that Hogarth made alterations in the paintings as he went along—everything from small changes in pose to adding or removing figures. Many artists do that.

What struck me is Hogarth’s likely motivation for those changes. It wasn’t just improving the composition or storytelling, but it was also foiling copycat engravers whose work could cut into the sales of his own prints.

The article explains:

Hogarth’s first advertisement of a subscription for the eight prints of A Rake’s Progress on 9 October 1733, indicated that the paintings were complete enough by this time for prospective subscribers to view them. Yet the paintings were not announced as finished until 2 November 1734:

having found it necessary to introduce several additional Characters in his [Hogarth’s] Paintings of the Rake’s Progress, he could not get the Prints ready to deliver to his Subscribers at Michaelmas [Sept.29] last (as he proposed.) But all the Pictures being now entirely finished, may be seen at his House, the Golden-Head in Leicester-Fields, where Subscriptions are taken.

Having engraved and published his own prints for the highly successful earlier series, A Harlot’s Progress in 1732, Hogarth was well aware of the financial advantages of eliminating the print-seller and publisher as middlemen. However, he had also suffered significant loss of income and control over quality due to the prolific plagiarism of his prints.

In response, by 1734, Hogarth had begun ‘An Act for the encouragement of the arts of designing, engraving, and etching historical and other prints, by vesting the properties thereof in the inventors and engravers’, petitioning parliament to support legal ownership and profit for an artists’ own work. Although Hogarth may have initially delayed the print publication due to compositional changes to his paintings, the several months of delays that followed were likely an attempt to negate the piracy, yet again, of his work by copyists.

In a final delay announced on 10 May 1735, Hogarth is explicit about the reasons for postponing the print distribution to subscribers:

N.B. Mr. Hogarth was, and is oblig’d to defer the Publication and Delivery of the abovesaid Prints till the 25th June next, in order to secure his Property, pursuant to an Act lately passed both Houses of Parliament, now awaiting for the Royal Assent, to secure all new invented Prints that shall be published after the 24th of June next, from being copied without Consent of the Proprietor, and thereby preventing a scandalous and unjust Custom (hitherto practiced with Impunity) of making and vending base Copies of original Prints, to the manifest Discouragement of the Arts of Paintings and Engraving.

Hogarth finally released the prints for A Rake’s Progress on 25 June 1735, as the Copyright Act came into force.

The article displays some prints derived from Hogarth’s work, not only more clumsily rendered but differing in the very details that Hogarth repainted. Evidently some competitors had gotten in to see A Rake’s Progress in progress, possibly in the guise of being potential customers, and come out with notes or sketches of the composition they saw—not knowing that the artist would make changes.

Florida’s Foamy Fort

This article from Atlas Obscura about Castillo de San Marcos National Monument caught my eye recently.

Lena Zeldovich wrote:

In 1702, when the Spanish still ruled Florida, an English fleet from colonial Carolina approached Castillo de San Marcos, a Spanish stronghold on the Atlantic shore. . . .

But even after nearly two months of being shelled with cannonballs and gunfire, the fort’s walls wouldn’t give. In fact, they appeared to be “swallowing” the British cannonballs, which then became embedded within the stone. . . .

Built from coquina—sedimentary rock formed from compressed shells of dead marine organisms—the walls suffered little damage from the British onslaught. As one Englishman described it, the rock “will not splinter but will give way to cannon ball as though you would stick a knife into cheese.”

This behavior intrigued people who grew up near the fort, including mechanical engineering graduate student Phillip Jannotti and high-school student Sanika Subhash, daughter of Jannotti’s dissertation advisor.

They formed a team that tested souvenir samples of coquina stone by firing small metal projectiles into the material and recording how it behaved with high-speed cameras.

The result:

coquina had a rare ability to absorb mechanical stress, which stemmed from its loosely connected inner structure. Although the little shell pieces that make up coquina are piled and pressed into each other for thousands of years, they aren’t cemented together, so they can shuffle around a bit.

So when a cannonball slammed into the coquina walls of Castillo de San Marcos, it crushed the shells it directly hit, but the surrounding particles simply reshuffled to make space for the ball. “Coquina is very porous and its shells are weakly bonded together,” Jannotti says. “It acts almost as natural foam—the balls sink in, and slowly decelerate.”

It’s not clear whether the Spanish had known about coquina’s properties when they first built the walls, mining the stone from the nearby quarry within what is today Anastasia State Park. But they certainly learned to appreciate the material’s absorptive properties. When they realized coquina’s unique abilities, they used the fort walls for target practice.

The Spanish thus practice-attacked their own fort, not worrying about weakening its walls. And it worked. Another British colonial force tried to take the fort again in 1740, also without success.

Because of victories elsewhere, Britain held Florida from 1763 to 1783. During the Revolutionary War, therefore, this site was known as Fort St. Mark.

“I sincerely thought I was serving the interest of my country”

Yesterday I followed the narrator of The Wonderful Appearance of an Angel, Devil and Ghost through his encounter with an Angel early on the morning of 15 Oct 1774.

The next stretch of the little book begins:

I continued in my chamber till ten o’clock, my usual hour of rising, then came down and desired my breakfast might be got ready by my return, which would be in about half an hour.

I fully sympathize with the man as a late riser, but can’t imagine going out in the morning without having had breakfast.

Later, the narrative shows the gentleman starting midday dinner at 4:00 P.M., and the editor adds a footnote to assure readers this is common “for these kind of gentry.” That suggests readers of 1774 would have found the character’s habits unusual but not impossible to believe.

The narrator continues:

Afterwards I took a walk (which hath lately been my practice) round the camp in the common, having a card of permission…

There was indeed a contingent of the British army camped on Boston Common; this was the first time I recall reading about a “card of permission” letting civilians walk around that camp.

The gentleman asks a “Captain ———” about any mysterious noises the night before. The captain responds, “you know you was very drunk last night.” Another officer steps in to say, “I was in company with him, and assisted in carrying him part of the way home.” A colonel invites the narrator to dine with him the next day. These details show that the narrator is friendly with the army in October 1774, and thus a Loyalist.

The narrator’s politics come to the foreground in the following pages. He rereads “the late acts of parliament” but “could not discover…that the parliament had any design of distressing the people of America.”

At 12:30 A.M., the gentleman hears “a most terrible shout,” and a Devil appears at his bedroom door. (This apparition carries a book and halter, as shown in the accompanying woodcut, but those details are never significant in the text, suggesting the booklet was written around illustrations printer John Boyle had on hand.) This Devil says he has been ordered there by the Angel “to converse with you concerning the crimes you have been guilty of towards your country.”

The gentleman insists he is “one of the best friends the country has.” As an example, he mentions writing letters to London supporting laws “whereby the inhabitants of the American colonies might be upon an equal footing with their brethren in Great-Britain.” A footnote to this line says acidly, “In regard to TAXES, I imagine.”

The Devil and the man discuss the Stamp Act, Declaratory Act, Townshend duties, and the destruction of the tea. The gentleman complains about how mobs attacked “our late worthy governor H[utchinson], lieutenant-governor O[liver], the honourable Mr. H[allowell], Justice S[tory], &c.” The booklet thus lays out the preceding nine years of conflict through Loyalist eyes, concluding that the Patriots “will expose themselves to the severest punishment in this world, and to damnation in the next.”

The editor pushes back against this view in the footnotes, but the Devil simply tells the gentleman he’s wrong. If he continues to stick to that political position, he’s bound for hellish torment. Rather than try to tempt the man into further wrongs, this unusual Devil says, “I conjure you desist, before it is too late.”

The next night the gentleman receives his third supernatural visitor, a “GHOST of one of my deceased ancestors” (shown here). This specter voices a standard argument of the New England Patriots, still echoed today: that the early English settlers, “for the sake of of enjoying that liberty which was denied them at home, were content to leave everything else that was dear behind, and seek it in the hospitable wilds of America.” The sacrifices of that generation gave the people of 1774 “their liberties and properties,” which they had to preserve and pass on.

The Ghost thus shames his descendant, and the gentleman finally bursts out:

VENERABLE SHADE! ’Tis true, (with shame I acknowledge it) I have gone on in the way you have described; but believe me, I never till the last night had the least apprehension that I was doing wrong, I sincerely thought I was serving the interest of my country.

The narrative closes with its central character “determined, if I could withstand the shining temptation, to be once more an honest man.”

The supposed editor then adds a paragraph hoping the man’s repentance sticks, and the publication ends with thirteen lines about the reality of hell from the British poet Elizabeth Rowe.

All in all, the booklet leaves me wondering about its intended audience. Though there are a couple of hints that the gentleman was paid by a secret cabal to promote stricter laws on America, it never shares details of that conspiracy or how it worked. Instead, it presents the main character as sincere in his belief that obeying those laws is the colonists’ best course. Was this written for other Loyalists who needed converting? For Patriots who enjoyed the sight of an opposing gentleman scared into submission? Did its author mean to change anyone’s mind or confirm readers’ righteousness?

“Having on the usual garb of an ANGEL”

The Wonderful Appearance of an Angel, Devil and Ghost described the experiences of an unnamed “Gentleman of Boston” over the course of three days and nights, 14–16 Oct 1774.

On the morning of 17 October, that man reportedly narrated his experiences to a friend, identified by the initials S.W., in front of three witnesses: S.P., J.W., and P.R.

S.W. prepared the manuscript for publication, adding “a few Marginal Notes,” a preface, and a paragraph and poem at the end. He completed his work on 1 December, and John Boyle advertised the book on sale a week later.

At least, that’s what the booklet said. All but the most credulous readers knew that this presentation was a sham, designed to lend a wild cautionary tale some veneer of veracity.

There was in fact a genre of pamphlets about supernatural visitations, as Robert Girouard studied in a paper published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts in 1982. The printer Ezekiel Russell was especially active in issuing these, and he soon reprinted A Wonderful Appearance.

In the 1769–1791 period Girouard studied, most of the supernatural visitors voiced a mix of religion and politics, as did those in A Wonderful Appearance. There were also older ghostly booklets with more purely religious messages, such as the oft-reprinted Prodigal Daughter.

This gentleman’s story starts with him “supping abroad among a select company of my jovial acquaintance” and returning to his “lodgings”—he doesn’t have a wife or appear to own his home. As the man gets ready for bed:

I heard an uncommon noise, which to me appeared but at a little distance from the house; the sound, though awful, was very harmonious; it continued I apprehended about ten minutes; I was amazingly terrified at it, not knowing how to account for such an unnusual sound. However, being very anxious of knowing what it was, I immediately went to the window, opened it, and looked out, but before I was able to unfasten it the noise ceased, though my astonishment still continued.

The noise recurs for short bursts as the gentleman goes to bed at midnight. (The booklet is interesting evidence about sleeping hours, at least for a wealthy gentleman in Boston.)

Then, “just after the town-clock struck two,” the noise returns along with “a violent wrap against the window next my bed-side.” The shutter bursts open.

About two minutes afterwards a person appeared outside of the window, having on the usual garb of an ANGEL, (with a sword in one hand, and a pair of scales in the other) who unfastened it, and entered the room—— . . .

He…taking a large chair which stood by the bed-side, seated himself close by me, and said, “Arise man from your bed—put on your cloaths—take a chair and seat yourself down by me—I have something to communicate of the greatest importance—your temporal—your eternal welfare are interested in it.”

I like the detail of the Angel (shown above) being able to appear in midair in the midst of unearthly harmonies but needing to unfasten the window and pull up a chair.

The Angel tells the gentlemen he brings a warning to “you, and through you, all those of your cast,…such abandoned, such hell-deserving wretches as you are”:

“…unless prevented by a speedy repentance, and restitution being made to the many hundreds who are now groaning under the weight of that oppression you have been instrumental in bringing upon them, you may expect (and that justly) to meet with the severest punishment, if not in this, in the future state, the hottest place in hell being reserved for all those who have proved themselves TRAYTORS to their KING and COUNTRY.”

The gentlemen begins to repent of being “tempted as I have been, to sell my country for unrighteous gain.” A footnote explains that some suspected he “received an annual stipend for his unwearied endeavors to carry into execution the wicked designs of a cursed Cabal.”

But once the angel “flew rappidly out at the same window” at “about three o’clock in the morning,” the gentleman starts thinking the visitor “might be nothing more than a delusion, as I had drank a little too freely in company the last evening.” He concludes: “I at last determined…to sit up the next night and if the Devil should chance to come, as the Angel had predicted, to arm myself with courage, and stand, if possible, the combat, like a man of spirit and resolution.”

TOMORROW: Oh, yeah, that’ll work.

John Boyle’s Big Publication for December 1774

On 8 Dec 1774, with the Massachusetts government riven, the port of Boston closed, and more redcoat soldiers arriving in town from other parts of North America, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy newspaper ran this advertisement:

This day was published, (price Half a Pistareen) and sold at JOHN BOYLE’s Printing-Office, next door to the Three Doves in Marlborough-street.

THE WONDER of WONDERS!
Or, the WONDERFUL APPEARANCE of an Angel, Devil and Ghost, to a Gentleman in the Town of Boston, in the Nights of the 14th, 15th, and 16th of October last: To whom in some measure may be attributed the Distresses that have of late fallen upon this unhappy Metropolis.

Related to one of his neighbours the morning after the last visitation, who wrote down the narrative from the Gentleman’s own mouth; and it is now made public at his desire, as a solemn warning to all those, who, for the sake of aggrandizing themselves and their families, would entail the most abject wretchedness upon MILLIONS of their fellow creatures.

Adorned with four plates, viz. 1. The Devil. 2. An Angel, with a sword in one hand, a pair of scales in the other, 3. Belzebub, holding in his right hand a folio book, and in his left a halter. 4. A Ghost, Having a white gown, his hair much dishevilled

The young printer Boyle ran almost exactly the same advertisement through early January in the Boston Evening-Post, the Boston Gazette, and even the Loyalist-leaning Boston News-Letter. He arranged for the printers of the Essex Gazette of Salem and the Essex Journal of Newburyport to advertise and sell the book.

In 1775 The Wonderful Appearance of an Angel, Devil and Ghost was reprinted in Marblehead by Ezekiel Russell and in New York by John Anderson.

This 32-page booklet purported to be the account of a wealthy friend of the royal government whose sleep was disturbed by three supernatural visitors warning him to change his ways and start caring more about his neighbors.

COMING UP: Extracts for the holidays.