How Much Did Boston's Patriots Know About Gen. Gage's Orders?

Two hundred thirty-two years ago tonight, British troops in Boston were preparing to cross the Charles River, the first leg of their mission to Concord. William Dawes, Jr., was already riding toward Lexington with a warning for Patriot leaders about that march.

But even before that night, Boston’s Whigs knew that Gen. Thomas Gage (shown here, in a portrait by Copley) was about to take serious action. They just didn’t know what action he was about to take. In fact, they may have had a better idea of what the general’s superiors in London had ordered him to do than of what he was actually planning for himself.

On 12 Apr 1775, the Falcon arrived with orders for Gen. Gage from his government superiors in London. Two days later, the Nautilus brought another copy of those orders. In those papers the Earl of Dartmouth, as Secretary of State, told Gage:

The first & essential step to be taken toward re-establishing government, would be to arrest the principal actors and abettors in the Provincial Congress (whose proceedings appear in every light to be acts of treason and rebellion).

Gage had earlier warned that such arrests could bring on armed rebellion. Dartmouth, believing the opposition was “a rude rabble, without plan, without concert, and without conduct,” insisted that removing their leaders would quash the uprising.

But Gage didn’t arrest any political leader before the war broke out (and had no good opportunity to do so afterward, either). Years later, he explained his situation to the historian George Chalmers this way:

On the arrival of two vessels at Marblehead, on the 8th of April, 1775, an unusual hurry and commotion was perceived among the disaffected. It being on a Sunday morning, Dr. Cooper, a notorious rebel, was officiating in his meeting-house, and, on notice given him, pretended sudden sickness, went home, and sent to another clergyman to do his duty in the evening. He, with every other chief of the faction, left Boston before night, and never returned to it.

The cause, at the time unknown, was discovered on the 14th of said month, when a vessel arrived with Government dispatches, which contained directions to seize the persons of certain notorious rebels. It was too late. They had received timely notice of their danger, and were fled.

I think Gage was wrong on the details, and perhaps too eager to portray himself as powerless to carry out his orders, but I think he was accurate on the basic fact: the Boston Patriots had some warning about what the London government had decided.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper did suddenly leave Boston, on 10 April. In his diary he described “having received Several Menaces and Insults, particularly at Mrs. Davis[’s tavern?] having a scurrilous Song offered me by an Officer,” and seems to have planned to return for “my dear Child, all my [silver] Plate, Books and Furniture.” But he didn’t. Furthermore, his brother William, the longtime town clerk and another firm Whig, joined him in Weston before the 18th.

Other leaders seem to have made up their minds even before those putative ships at Marblehead. Writing from the Provincial Congress meeting in Concord on the 7th, James Warren said:

The Inhabitants of Boston are on the move. H. and A. go no more into that Garrison, the female Connections of the first come out early this morning and measures are taken relative to those of the last.

Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Hancock’s aunt and fiancée stayed in the parsonage at Lexington rather than revisit occupied Boston. However, Adams didn’t get his wife and family out of town before the war began.

On the night of 16 April, Massachusetts Spy printer Isaiah Thomas slipped out of town with the help of blacksmith Timothy Bigelow, a leader of the resistance at Worcester. (Printer Benjamin Edes also escaped from town with some printing equipment, but he seems to have departed after the war began.)

That’s not to say that Boston had no Patriot leaders left on 18 April 1775, but their ranks were certainly thin. James Bowdoin was home sick, and probably too well born and too old to either get involved in the dirty work of rebellion or to be arrested if he had been. Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., was also in town—but since he was spying for Gage, the general had no reason to arrest him. Paul Revere and other politically active mechanics were everywhere, but they still seem to have been deferring to genteel leaders.

So at this moment the Patriot cause really rested on the shoulders of Dr. Joseph Warren. He gathered the decisive intelligence about the army’s march. He sent Dawes off to Lexington and told Revere to send his signal from Old North Church. And he stayed in Boston until after the troops had marched. Jacob Rogers of Charlestown would write of 19 April:

About ten in the morning I met Doctor Warren riding hastily out of town, and asked him if the news was true of the men’s being killed at Lexington; he assured me it was. I replied I was very glad our people had not fired first, as it would have given the king’s troops a handle to execute their project of desolation. He rode on.

So two mysteries about the start of the Revolutionary War that intrigue me are:

• Who was sending the Boston Patriots accurate intelligence about the British government’s plans? Sympathizers in London had leaked documents to the Americans for years, but this seems to have been a particular warning.
• If Gen. Gage had arrested Dr. Warren as Lord Dartmouth had told him to, and used Dr. Church to bottle up the remaining Patriots in Boston, could the march to Concord have succeeded?

Drying Off After Patriots' Day

With the arrival of a storm that caused a few deaths elsewhere in New England, organizers wisely canceled or postponed most of the Patriots’ Day activities scheduled for Sunday and Monday morning.

One group that started their traditional march to Concord early Monday was the Acton Minutemen. As the Boston Globe reported:

Four yellow Acton school buses had been following the group as a precaution, and almost two hours into the walk the Acton police had some strong advice.

“He made it very clear,” [commander Alan] St. Lawrence recalled. “‘Get on the bus. You can’t march to Concord.’”

Always better to have everyone still around to make the 51st annual march next year. The thumbnail above, taken by Joanne Rath and run on the front page of the Globe, is also from Acton; it shows Randy Wilson marching out the storm in the town’s parade.

There are still events planned for 19 April, the actual anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and the following weekend. In addition, I’ve heard that the Bunker Hill Monument’s new illumination system is scheduled to be unveiled this Friday, 20 April, at dusk, but I haven’t found any official announcement about that. Mark Garfinkel of the Boston Herald captured the spire’s new nighttime look during a test this winter.

[ADDENDUM: The Woburn Historical Society has rescheduled its “Pathways of the Patriots” event to Sunday, 22 April, 1:00 to 3:00 P.M.]

Israel Bissell and the Press

Today’s Patriots’ Day posting comes via the Associated Press, which is distributing David Weber’s dispatch on Israel Bissell spreading the news of the Battle of Lexington on 19 April 1775. The first modern expert cited in the story is, well, myself. (Here’s the Hartford Courant link in case the Boston Globe version is unavailable.)

The edited article states:

Dozens of other messengers also raced on horseback to spread the word, making it likely that Revere was a composite of these brave men, said J.L. Bell, a Massachusetts writer who specializes in Revolutionary War-era Boston.

Of course, the historical Paul Revere was real, and an individual, and quite significant in how things turned out. My comment here on Boston 1775 was that Henry W. Longfellow’s Revere, waking “every Middlesex village and farm” including Concord, was a composite. But that’s the difference between narrative poetry and history.

The A.P. story doesn’t quite make clear how Revere (and William Dawes, and Dr. Samuel Prescott, and many other men) rode on the night of 18-19 April 1775, before and during the British march. They spread the word of what the army might do to Massachusetts provincial leaders and supplies, and summoned militia units in response.

Israel Bissell set out for the south on the morning of 19 April after the skirmish at Lexington had occurred and while the army was in Concord. His job was to spread the news of what the army had done, as the Massachusetts Provincial Congress wanted that news spread. Bissell was a professional post rider, or long-distance mail carrier, and he had an official commission from the congress to carry out that job. His news went into many newspapers and printed broadsides along the way.

Bissell rode much further than Revere and Dawes, eventually reaching Philadelphia. But unlike those Bostonians, he didn’t have British officers trying to stop him. Those three riders and the many anonymous men who also carried the messages were all important nodes in the Patriot communication system, but they had different jobs to do at different times.

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

Dr. Thomas Bolton Answers Dr. Warren's Oration

It took nine days for Boston’s printers to issue a pamphlet of Dr. Joseph Warren’s oration on the Boston Massacre in March 1775. When it appeared, the British military officers in town made a parodic reply. Merchant John Andrews described the scene in a letter:

Last Wensday, the day the oration was publish’d, a vast number of Officers assembled in King street, when they proceeded to the choice of a moderator and seven out of their number to represent the select men, the latter of whom with the moderator went into the Coffee house balcony, where was provided a fellow apparrell’d in a black gown with a rusty grey wigg and fox tail hanging to it, together with bands on—who deliver’d an oration from the balcony to a crowd of few else beside gaping officers.

That “fellow” was Thomas Bolton (or Boulton), a Loyalist physician. He had reportedly left Salem after being attacked and perhaps even tarred and feathered—at least he said so later. Bolton served as a surgeon for the Royal Navy during the war, and may already have been doing so in March 1775.

Dr. Bolton’s oration was eventually printed in the same format as Warren’s—perhaps in New York or after the war had begun, because it would have taken a brave Boston printer to issue it without the protection of martial law. It’s a delightful source for fans of invective and gossip. Take this one sentence alone. It’s an apologia, as Warren had delivered at the start of his own speech (“You will not now expect the elegance, the learning, the fire, the enrapturing strains of eloquence which charmed you when a LOVELL, a CHURCH, or a HANCOCK spake”). But Bolton gets so much more personal about the Patriots:

I cannot boast the ignorance of Hancock, the insolence of Adams, the absurdity of Rowe, the arrogance of Lee, the vicious life and untimely death of Mollineaux, the turged bombast of Warren, the treason of Quincy, the Hypocrisy of Cooper, nor the Principals of Young...

And then Dr. Bolton got nasty.

He said John Hancock “courted popularity and fame almost as Long as he did ——— Miss ——— Miss ——— or Mr. Bernards Cook maid, Betty Price.” (At least two other Loyalists also accused Hancock of having affairs with serving-women, though one said he hadn’t actually been able to complete the job.)

About Dr. Thomas Young, the outspoken deist who had moved to Newport the previous September:

I can only refer you to——his own countenance, wherein you may read his true and genuine disposition. Suffice it to say, this man stands accused of rebellion, not only against his Sovereign, but against his God;—and he makes a mock at the merits of his Redeemer, and uses his God only to swear by.

Bolton accused merchant John Rowe of having “invented the new method of making Tea,” a reference to Rowe’s offhand remark during the tea crisis about mixing tea and saltwater. Rowe was desperately trying to stay on friendly terms with both political sides, at least until he was sure which way to jump. He went home and wrote in his diary: “This day an oration was delivered by a Dirty Scoundrell from Mrs. Cordis Balcony wherein many Characters were unfairly Represented & much abus’d & mine among the Rest.”

The published speech spent extra space attacking the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper of the Brattle Street Meeting, adding several lines in verse about the man (shown above). Bolton insinuated that Cooper was not only a hypocrite but a ladies’ man—something rumored around town for years. The physician also made a cryptic comment about the Seventh Commandment; according to Cooper’s modern biographer, Charles W. Akers, a penciled note on a copy at Brown University says that arose because “Dr. Cooper’s Wife is a Noted Thief.”

Finally, there are Bolton’s remarks on William Molineux, the radical merchant who had died suddenly the previous October:

The fifth of these chiefs is now no more—his name was Mollineaux, he had an aversion to all order, civil or Ecclesiastic, he swore the King was a Tyrant, the Queen a Whore, the prince a Bastard, the Bishops Papists—and the houses of Lords & Commons a Den of theives—through the Strength of his own Villainy, and the Laudanum of Doctor Warren, he quitted this Planet and went to a secondary one, in search of Liberty.

So, according to Bolton, one Patriot leader had supplied the poison that another had taken to commit suicide. Nice.

Dr. Joseph Warren Dresses for an Oration

One of the more picturesque confrontations that led up to the Battle of Lexington and Concord was Dr. Joseph Warren’s oration in memory of the Boston Massacre on 6 March 1775. (The actual anniversary was on the 5th, but that was a Sunday.) The online history magazine Common-Place has published Prof. Eran Shalev’s article on Dr. Warren’s style that day, which sets the scene this way:

On the morning of March 6, 1775, Joseph Warren, a physician-turned-revolutionary leader, stopped his one-chair carriage in front of Boston’s Old South Church [known then as Old South Meeting-House, as I discussed yesterday]. Warren climbed down from the carriage, followed by a servant holding a small bundle. The two men crossed the street and entered an apothecary’s shop. When Warren came out of the store he wore a Roman toga. He now crossed the street once more and burst into the swarming Old South to deliver the fourth annual Boston Massacre oration.

Prof. Shalev seems to imply that Dr. Warren wore only a toga. I strongly believe more witnesses would have commented on the doctor’s undress if he’d fully adopted Roman dress—and undress. Indeed, Judge Peter Oliver made a big deal later of how Warren had been “a bare legged milk Boy” while growing up in Roxbury. How could he have resisted describing the man making a public speech wearing nothing but a blanket? The New York Gazetteer noted that Warren still wore his “breeches,” at least. It was early March in New England, after all.

I rather think the doctor made his sartorial point by wearing a Roman toga over contemporary genteel dress, as in William Rush’s statue of Washington or this similar example by Sir Francis Chantrey, now in the Massachusetts State House.

As Shalev’s account proceeds, it’s weakened by some factual errors, small and medium-sized. This wasn’t the fourth annual oration on the Massacre. There were two in 1771, one on the anniversary offered by radical Dr. Thomas Young, and a second a few weeks later that the town officially requested from a more mainstream Whig, schoolteacher James Lovell. Dr. Warren first spoke in 1772; Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., in 1773; and John Hancock in 1774. So Dr. Warren’s 1775 oration was, depending on how we count, the fifth or sixth.

Furthermore, Samuel Adams never delivered one of those speeches, contrary to the article. Adams generally worked in town meetings or behind the scenes. As his 1898 biographer James K. Hosmer wrote, “He was always in speech straightforward and sensible, and upon occasion could be impressive, but his endowment was not that of the mouth of gold.” Adams had a tremor that affected his hands and voice, which neurologist Elan Louis has concluded was an essential tremor.

The article’s implication that in 1772 Dr. Warren was “a member of the Committee of Safety, a board of selectmen who dealt with security issues,” seems to confuse various groups. The selectmen were the town’s seven highest officials, elected each March to serve the full year and usually reelected for the next as well. The town meeting also appointed committees for various tasks. Immediately after the Boston Massacre, Boston created a committee of safety to demand that the governor remove the army regiments from the center of town, and Warren served on it. But that was an ad hoc committee, disbanding after it had accomplished its purpose. Later, in 1775, Warren served on a stronger and longer-lived Committee of Safety, created by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress to organize military resistance against the Crown.

Prof. Shalov ends his article with the tumultuous ending of the 1775 oration:

After Warren stepped from the pulpit, Samuel Adams stood up and asked for a volunteer to deliver next year’s commemorative oration. Adams apparently took the opportunity to reinforce colonists’ sense that the events of 1770 represented an entirely unjust massacre. Not surprisingly, the redcoats, according to MacKenzie, “began to hiss,” and someone mistakenly heard the words “Fire! Fire!”

I think a better picture comes from Shalov’s original source, the diary of Lt. Frederick Mackenzie of the 23rd Regiment (Royal Welch Fusiliers):

As this meeting was called an Adjournment of a former Town meeting, as soon as the Oration was ended, Mr. Saml. Adams came forward from a Pew in which he and the other Select men sat [sic—Adams wasn’t a Selectman, but Mackenzie was from out of town], very near the Pulpit, and moved, “that the thanks of the Town should be presented to Doctor Warren for his Elegant and Spirited Oration, and that another Oration should be delivered on the 5th of March next, to commemorate the Bloody Massacre of the 5th of March 1770.”

For Bostonians, the word “bloody” was an accurate description of the shootings on King Street. For late-eighteenth-century British gentlemen, however, the word was quite rude. Adams probably knew that, as did the crowds who called British soldiers “bloodybacks.” And, Mackenzie went on to write, the British officers in Warren’s audience took the bait:

On this several Officers began to hiss; others cried out, “Oh! fie! Oh! fie!” and a great bustle ensued. As everyone was now in motion, intending to go out, there was a good deal of noise, and the exclamation was mistaken for the cry of Fire! Fire! Numbers immediately called out Fire! Fire! which created a Scene of the greatest confusion imaginable.

Again, British and Bostonians suffered from being separated by a common language.

Here’s the text of Warren’s oration. Note that the doctor avoided the word “bloody” even as he wallowed in scenes of gore:

...behold thy murdered husband gasping on the ground, and to complete the pompous show of wretchedness, bring in each hand thy infant children to bewail their father's fate. Take heed, ye orphan babes, lest, whilst your streaming eyes are fixed upon the ghastly corpse, your feet glide on the stones bespattered with your father’s brains. Enough! this tragedy need not be heightened by an infant weltering in the blood of him that gave it birth.

(For the record, not one of the fatalities of the Massacre is known to have had a wife or children.)

From Which Steeple Did Those Two Lanterns Shine?

Boston 1775 reader Bill Welsch, of the American Revolution Round Table–Richmond, has written:

have you considered discussing the controversy over in which steeple the signal lanterns were hung? I’ve read and have copies of material by Frothingham, Watson, Weldon, Booth, Zellner, Fitch, Babcock, and Fischer debating Christ Church versus the Second Church.

Bill refers to a little historic controversy that boiled up in the late 1800s after Henry W. Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” made the signal from the church steeple so famous. Longfellow took that detail from a letter Revere had written in 1798, which said he arranged for those two lanterns to be hung in the “North Church Steeple.” The poet believed that meant Christ Church in the North End, which he visited for research in 1860.

In his History of the Siege of Boston (first printed in 1849, reprinted in 1872), Richard P. Frothingham had echoed Revere’s phrase about the “North Church steeple” [p. 58]. However, later in that book it becomes clear that Frothingham considered “Old North Church” [p. 282] or “Old North Chapel” [p. 328] to be Boston’s Second Congregationalist Meeting-House, which the British army pulled down for firewood in December 1775.

In 1873, the rector of Christ Church announced that Frothingham was mistaken. The historian replied in 1876 with a pamphlet titled The Alarm on the Night of April 18, 1775, making a more explicit case that Revere’s “North Church” was the Second Meeting-House. John Lee Watson and Charles Deane answered the next year in Paul Revere’s Signal: The True Story of the Signal Lanterns in Christ Church, Boston. You can trace the rest of this debate in Bill Welsch’s list of authors above.

It’s true that the Second Meeting was known as “Old North” in Revere’s time, to distinguish it from the “New North” meeting under the Rev. Dr. Andrew Eliot (as well as the “New Brick Meeting” under Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton, which had broken away from the New North). The loss of the Old North building prompted its congregation to unite with the New Brick Meeting during the war.

However, the scholarly consensus is clear that hanging those lanterns in the Second Meeting-House was one of Frothingham’s rare mistakes. (His history of the siege is still the most thorough study of the first campaign of the Revolutionary War, more than a century and a half later.)

The key to Revere’s identification, I believe, is his word “Church.” In the 1700s, Bostonians were still fairly consistent about distinguishing between Congregationalist “meeting-houses” and Anglican “churches.” When Revere wrote “North Church,” he meant the one and only Episcopal church in the North End, formally Christ Church. Its steeple, helped by the terrain, soared above the neighborhood. As a teenager, Revere had signed up for a little society of bell-ringers for that church, even though his family weren’t Anglicans, so he knew the building well. In contrast, when Revere and his neighbors spoke of the Second Meeting, they usually called it “Old North Meeting” or “Mr. [John] Lathrop’s Meeting.”

By the time Frothingham was writing in the late 1800s, however, the meeting-house/church distinction had faded. (He himself was a Universalist.) The congregation of Old South Meeting-House officially became Old South Church when they moved to their new building, but in his book Frothingham had referred to that institution as both a church and a meeting-house. Similarly, he called Old North Meeting a “Church” and a “Chapel,” which no one had called it in the previous century. (The only “chapel” in pre-Revolutionary Boston was King’s Chapel.)

Meanwhile, the “North Church” Paul Revere knew continued to stand tall in the North End, eventually lasting long enough to inherit the nickname “Old North.” Which only added to the confusion.

Who Got the Message from Old North Church?

At a members’ event at Old South Meeting-House last month, one of Susan Wilson’s trivia questions was something like: “In ‘One if by land and two if by sea,’ what does ‘sea’ refer to?” The assembled body decided that the answer is:

the Charles River estuary,
also known as the Back Bay
before it was filled in

But that’s much harder to rhyme than “sea,” even for a writer of verse as skilled as Henry W. Longfellow.

Longfellow’s poem depicts Paul Revere going on to say, “And I on the opposite shore will be.” That’s not historically accurate. Revere arranged to send the signal about Gen. Thomas Gage’s plan across the water to Charlestown. He didn’t need to watch for the lights in the steeple of Old North Church since he already knew the information they transmitted.

In Revere’s own words:

The Sunday before, by desire of Dr. [Joseph] Warren, I had been to Lexington, to Mess. [John] Hancock and [Samuel] Adams, who were at the Rev. Mr. [Jonas] Clark’s [the minister at Lexington]. I returned at Night thro Charlestown; there I agreed with a Col. [William] Conant, and some other Gentlemen, that if the British went out by Water, we would shew two Lanthorns in the North Church Steeple; and if by Land, one, as a Signal; for we were aprehensive it would be dificult to Cross the Charles River, or git over Boston neck.

As a backup plan, Revere later crossed the river to Charlestown himself. He wrote:

two friends rowed me across Charles River, a little to the eastward where the Somerset Man of War lay. It was then young flood, the Ship was winding, and the moon was Rising. They landed me on Charlestown side. When I got into Town, I met Col. Conant, and several others; they said they had seen our signals. I told them what was Acting, and went to git me a Horse; I got a Horse of Deacon [John] Larkin.

It’s significant that there was no horse waiting at the shore or wharf for Revere. Instead, the Charlestown Patriots had sent off a different rider as soon as they saw the signal from Boston. Spreading the word that way was the whole point of the warning: it wasn’t much good to alert Charlestown that the army was about to land in Cambridge and march west.

According to an undated memorandum later written by Richard Devens, a leading Charlestown Patriot, after seeing the lantern signal:

I then sent off an express to inform Messrs. [Elbridge] Gerry, &c., and Messrs. Hancock and A.,...that the enemy were certainly coming out.

Gerry and his colleagues from the Provincial Congress’s Committee of Safety and Supplies were at an inn in Cambridge. (D. H. Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride offers a different wording of this memorandum, which doesn’t match the cited source: Richard Frothingham’s 1872 History of the Siege of Boston. So I’m quoting Frothingham.)

So who was that Charlestown express rider? And what happened to him? (The rider was almost certainly a “him,” the legend of Sybil Ludington notwithstanding.) That’s another mystery about the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

We have a partial answer for the second question, but little for the first. That rider was probably stopped by British officers along the way. Revere encountered the same obstacle:

While the Horse was preparing, Richard Devens, Esq. who was one of the Committee of Safty, came to me, and told me, that he came down the Road from Lexington, after Sundown, that evening; that He met ten British Officers, all well mounted, and armed, going up the Road.

I set off upon a very good Horse; it was then about 11 o’Clock, and very pleasant. After I had passed Charlestown Neck, and got nearly opposite where Mark [a man executed for a murder in 1755] was hung in chains, I saw two men on Horse back, under a Tree. When I got near them, I discovered they were British officers. One tryed to git a head of Me, and the other to take me. I turned my Horse very quick, and Galloped towards Charlestown neck, and then pushed for the Medford Road.

By changing his route and taking a more northern road west, Revere skirted the patrols and made it through to Lexington. Here’s a map of his ride, showing where he first spotted British officers and turned back.

The Charlestown rider probably hadn’t been so quick. Those same officers probably “pulled him over.” And what did they do with him then? When other officers captured Revere later in the night, they held him at gunpoint in a field (along with three riders from Lexington and a disabled peddler named Allen), took away Deacon Larkin’s horse, and finally let him go so they could move more quickly. The Charlestown rider probably also had to walk back home, having accomplished nothing, and no one seems to have recorded his name.

Who Tipped Off Paul Revere?

Next week brings the anniversary and commemoration of the Battle of Lexington and Concord (not in that order), so I’ll devote some postings to mysteries and myths of that event. And just as I’ve previously defined “myths,” I should explain what I mean by “mysteries”: basically, stuff I’d like to know more about. These questions seem significant to me, though they might have had little bearing on how things turned out.

And the first mystery to ponder is: Who was Paul Revere’s counter-counterspy in November 1774? In 1798, the founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society asked Revere about his experiences in the months, days, and hours leading up to the war. In his reply, Revere described how he and other craftsmen collected information on the British military, and how a counterspy seemed to relay their intelligence to Gen. Thomas Gage:

In the Fall of 1774 and Winter of 1775 I was one of upwards of thirty, cheifly mechanics, who formed our selves in to a Committee for the purpose of watching the Movements of the British Soldiers, and gaining every intelegence of the movements of the Tories.

We held our meetings at the Green-Dragon Tavern [owned by the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons]. We were so carefull that our meetings should be kept Secret; that every time we met, every person swore upon the Bible, that they would not discover any of our transactions, But to Messrs. [John] HANCOCK, [Samuel] ADAMS, Doctors [Joseph] WARREN, [Benjamin] CHURCH, and one or two more.

About November, when things began to grow Serious, a Gentleman who had Conections with the Tory party, but was a Whig at heart, acquainted me, that our meetings were discovered, and mentioned the identical words that were spoken among us the Night before. . . . We removed to another place, which we thought was more secure: but here we found that all our transactions were communicated to Governor Gage. (This came to me through the then Secretary [Thomas] Flucker; He told it to the Gentleman mentioned above). It was then a common opinion, that there was a Traytor in the provincial Congress, and that Gage was posessed of all their Secrets.

The full letter is transcribed on the M. H. S. website.

Revere devoted lots of space in this letter to Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., who he and other Massachusetts Patriots had sadly come to believe was Gage’s double agent. In late 1775 the doctor was caught sending coded letters into Boston. The Americans didn’t have enough evidence to be certain of his guilt, though, so the next year they banished him from America. Church sailed away, and his ship disappeared at sea. Not until the 1900s, when Gen. Gage’s intelligence files came to the University of Michigan and were opened to scholars, did Americans have definitive evidence that Church was indeed passing information to the British commander in early 1775, and perhaps in the fall of 1774 as Revere believed.

But who alerted Revere and his comrades that Gage was onto them? Obviously, Revere knew and trusted that man, but in his letter he took pains not to state his name. Instead, he left these clues:

• “a Gentleman who had Conections with the Tory party, but was a Whig at heart”
• “This came to me through the then Secretary Flucker; He told it to the Gentleman mentioned above.”

Flucker (shown above) was number three in the Massachusetts royal government’s executive branch. I’ve found a couple of other anecdotes of him gossiping. But in this case he revealed a very important secret, and must have trusted the man he spoke to. Who was he?

A number of authors have posited that that gentleman was Henry Knox, who in June 1774 had married Flucker’s daughter Lucy. When I first read this hypothesis (I think it was in Esther Forbes’s Paul Revere and the World He Lived In), I thought it was an interesting possibility, but also perhaps an example of picking out the most interesting possibility from all the equally likely possibilities. Was it like spotting a familiar face in a crowd and focusing on it, ignoring all the other faces? We remember Henry Knox; we don’t remember other gentlemen whom Flucker might have spoken to. And didn’t most people write of Knox as a firm Whig? If Flucker knew his son-in-law was on the opposite political side, why would he have revealed this news?

But the more I’ve read about Knox, the more I lean toward accepting this theory. We’ll probably never know, but he does seem like the most likely candidate. He had the family connection to Flucker. He also had an appointment as a militia officer, and his London Book-Store was said to have customers from the royal government and army as well as the Whig upper class.

And was Knox known as a Whig before the war? He doesn’t appear on any of the surviving lists of politically active men: the North End Caucus, the Boston Committee of Correspondence, even the far-too-lengthy lists of men at the Tea Party. Knox was at the Boston Massacre, warning Capt. Thomas Preston not to have his men fire, and testified for the prosecution (i.e., the Whig side) in Preston’s trial. But his testimony was so helpful to the captain that when the soldiers went on trial their attorneys called him as a defense witness.

All in all, I think in late 1774 Knox’s political views may not have been obvious. He was still only twenty-four years old. He hadn’t held public office. His business relied on upper-class patronage. He’d connected himself by marriage to a top government appointee, which meant that under the Crown’s system of patronage politics he might eventually have been in line for some royal appointments himself. Given his son-in-law’s position, Flucker might well have felt safe speaking candidly to him.

After the war started, Henry and Lucy Knox slipped out of Boston. The exact date is uncertain, but the earliest biography of him (published by Francis S. Drake in 1873) says the couple arrived at the provincial lines one year after their marriage, meaning 16 June 1775. At that point, Henry had committed himself to the Patriot cause. His wife never saw the rest of her family again.

Knox had a remarkable rise in the Continental Army after leaving Boston. Drake says he volunteered his services to Gen. Artemas Ward on the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill and, though not involved in that fighting, “was actively engaged in reconnoitering service.” By 5 July, Knox was laying out fortifications in Roxbury and had met Gen. Charles Lee and the newly arrived commander-in-chief, Gen. George Washington. In November, Washington recommended that Congress make Knox colonel of the artillery regiment, appointing him above the regiment’s senior officers, most of them older and more experienced, and other hopefuls.

Part of Knox’s rise was no doubt due to his intelligence and charm. The artillery regiment had demonstrated a lot of dysfunction, so appointing someone totally new turned out to be a good idea. But Knox’s strongest support came from Massachusetts Whigs, as seen in John Adams’s letters to James Warren on 23 July 1775 and to Knox himself on 11 Nov. Did those men see Knox as committed to their cause and deserving of support for a reason they couldn’t spell out? Had he quietly provided crucial intelligence before the war?

If that was so, why would Revere have still kept his informant’s name secret in 1798, after the war ended and Flucker died, both in 1783? By then Knox was a retired Secretary of War, managing large tracts of land in Maine that Lucy had inherited from her father. It may have seemed unseemly to describe Knox as taking advantage of his father-in-law’s trust. But perhaps Revere’s dropped Flucker’s name in his letter as a clue that he expected contemporaries to pick up.

The Market for Originality in History

Last month, Brooks Simpson at Civil Warriors wrote:

Over the last decade or so I’ve pondered whether readers of historical works as a rule value originality and fresh thinking. . . . do more occasional readers – the folks who claim to be avid readers (and in some cases claim to be actual historians) based on a rather meager menu of reading – really care? I’m not so sure.

To which Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory replied:

I will go further and suggest that most consumers of Civil War histories care little for originality because they do not understand the concept as it is understood at the ground-level. . . . it comes down to training in analytical thinking, critical review of primary sources, as well as a strong background in historiography. . . . Let’s face it, somewhere around 80-90% of the literature in our field is unoriginal and usually involves a simple rehashing of what has already been said.

Which made me consider if the same applies to Revolutionary-era history.

I come from a background in book publishing rather than grad school, which gives me a different slant on the question. I think most regular readers of history want new knowledge. Publishers send most history books into the marketplace with the promise that they tell an unknown or forgotten story, use little-known sources, or upend dominant ideas. Even readers who think “revisionism” is a conspiracy to undermine the nation rather than an essential element of studying the past seem to gravitate toward books that promise something new and different. I’ve come to expect books’ marketing copy to play up the originality of their ones. (I drafted enough book jackets myself.)

But that doesn’t mean most books actually deliver on that promise. And, as Levin stated, most general readers don’t have the background to judge original thinking or research. But then I’m not familiar with the latest innovations in insurance, or geotechnical engineering, or knitting, or many other fields where I have no experience. (Often historians themselves are in the same boat as laypeople when it comes to books on periods they haven’t studied; specialization has its costs.)

I agree with Simpson and Levin that many U.S. history books, particularly in military history, retell familiar stories in familiar ways, despite readers’ interest in new knowledge. I see several intertwining reasons. The market for American history, probably like the market for any nation’s own history, includes “heritage” readers—folks who want the past to make us feel good about ourselves. And that limits the topics and conclusions they’ll support with their dollars.

I suspect that some history fans read many books on a topic in the same way other readers enjoy mystery novels or other genre literature: to have a somewhat new experience within a familiar frame. A mystery that doesn’t include a dead body, a detective, or a solution would be disappointing, and so would a history of the Revolution that doesn’t make a big deal of Trenton or Saratoga.

In addition, I think a good narrative has its own appeal, and some historical events or types of events lend themselves to a traditional story structure better than others. In a battle, the stakes are high, the action is relatively quick, and there are clear winners and losers. In sum, a battle makes a good story, and as a result military history appeals to story-seeking readers more than, say, economic development over several generations. That increases the market for books that describe a battle from start to finish instead of arguing for a new interpretation of documents.

And that brings us to the question of what originality means. Levin went on to say:

Sometimes we get the old uncovering of a long lost skirmish that somehow rises to the level of decisive moment in a campaign or perhaps even the war. In other cases we read that x's actions did or did not lead to victory or defeat. While some of these studies may give us something to think about it does not necessarily rise to the level of originality. Most of these books involve little or no creativity in the interpretation of sources.

I think that’s true, but it’s also worth examining whether “creativity in the interpretation of sources” is the only yardstick of original historiography. Or is that simply the yardstick that academia privileges? (Or prefers, if you prefer.)

I’ve come to think the measure of originality for historical writing is whether it prompts readers to think in new ways about the past. As I remarked above, not all readers really want to do that. But for those who are up for it (or ambushed by it), the historian’s innovations within the field may be less important than that effect.

An analogy to science and engineering might fit here. Scientists seek discoveries for the sake of discovery. Engineers, in seeking practical solutions to problems, apply scientific discoveries where needed. Some of those applications are quite creative, but they don’t involve scientific discovery. Applying the insights of other historians to a familiar period or event may not involve much conceptual creativity, but it can still produce interesting, ground-breaking work for readers.

Another form of originality separate from the interpretation of sources lies in how authors present historical information. Even within a traditional narrative approach, there are many ways to narrate the same events, and some of those ways can prompt readers to look at the past differently—perhaps when they least expect it.

Jefferson, Kosciuszko, and a Matter of Money

One of Boston 1775’s earliest readers sent me this announcement of a seminar at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania a couple of weeks back. I found both the topic and its treatment interesting:

Thomas Jefferson and Tadeuz Kosciuszko:
Slavery and Freedom, Honor and Betrayal

Gary B. Nash, UCLA, and Graham Russell Hodges, Colgate University

Thaddeus Kosciuszko’s return to the United States in 1797 initiates the narrative we present in this paper. Although crippled by deep wounds, Kosciuszko returned in triumph to reside in Philadelphia as a revolutionary hero. Americans applauded him for his leadership in Poland’s vain uprising from 1792 to 1794. Americans cherished him in the hearts and memories that linked his glory during the American Revolution with their anxieties over the conservative policies of President John Adams. Kosciuszko had more than adulation in mind; he intended to collect some $12,000 plus interest in overdue pay from the American Revolution. The American Congress, aware of his enormous popular appeal, quickly voted to allot the back pay, which, with interest rose to over $15,000.

Kosciuszko remained in Philadelphia, where he befriended Vice President Thomas Jefferson. The pair talked of Poland, France, liberty and slavery long into the night on numerous occasions in the winter of 1797-1798. International anxieties promoted secret actions. Kosciuszko was worried about the newly passed Alien and Sedition Acts and wanted to travel to Paris to gather support for the revitalization of Poland. Jefferson was distraught over the possibility of war between the United States and France and asked Kosciuszko to act as a covert ambassador.

What to do with Kosciuszko’s pension? He gave Jefferson power of attorney; the two men drafted an extraordinary will that gave the American Patriot the power to use the cash to purchase, manumit, educate and give land and cattle to as many enslaved people as could be afforded. Jefferson even had the right to “buy” his own enslaved people and free them. It was a solemn pact between two noble men.

Our narrative then jumps two decades to the time of Kosciuszko’s death in late 1817 and Jefferson’s realization that his promise was now due. We then discuss at length Jefferson’s decision to relinquish executorship of the estate, now worth in excess of $20,000. Nonetheless, we view Jefferson’s eventual decision to shed his oath of honor to Kosciuszko as a betrayal of a promise rich in potential to shift American attitudes about slavery, While Jefferson’s attitudes about black potentials for American citizenship have long been considered, we consider his inaction in this affair of honor deeply troubling for a man deemed America’s greatest symbol of liberty.

Not mentioned in this summary is who took over Kosciuszko’s assets after Jefferson stepped away. How well were the Polish freedom-fighter’s wishes carried out? According to Prof. D. Benjamin Barros’s PropertyProfBlog, the estate was still being litigated in 1834, years after Jefferson had died. (Prof. Barros’s posting also contains the text of Kosciuszko’s will. Thanks to Prof. Mary L. Dudziak’s Legal History Blog and Google for helping me find that.)

I think it’s getting fairly late for American historians to be shocked, shocked at Jefferson’s reluctance to consider African-Americans as equals and work toward their emancipation. Especially at the end of his life, when his debts became more burdensome, Jefferson clearly froze the principles of liberty he wrote about, always putting off emancipation and often arguing against other men’s more immediate plans. Nevertheless, in this case Jefferson’s reluctance might also have been motivated by feeling not up to the administrative tasks. Financial management was not, after all, his strength.

(Today’s illustration, courtesy of the Library of Congress, is a portrait of Jefferson after a painting by Kosciuszko.)

Adding Liberty Tree Site to the Freedom Trail?

Last week, Boston’s Weekly Dig ran a story by Matthew Wilding about plans for expanding Liberty Tree Park in Boston, and questions about whether it should be added to the Freedom Trail.

Liberty Tree was a large elm in the South End of colonial Boston, at the corner of what are now Washington and Boylston Streets. There was only one road out of town at that time, so everyone coming in by land passed that corner. On 14 Aug 1765, the small political club called the Loyall Nine hung effigies in the tree to protest the Stamp Act—the first mass political demonstration of what would turn into the American Revolution.

Later that year, after another protest had ended with a mob ripping apart Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s mansion in the North End, the Loyall Nine and the town’s established politicians moved to encourage more peaceful actions. They made the elm into a symbol of honorable resistance to new imperial laws, naming it “Liberty Tree” and nailing on a brass plaque.

In the following decade, Liberty Tree was the site of many mass public meetings. Eventually the Whigs erected a flagpole through its branches, which they often decorated with banners and lanterns. During violent night-time protests, crowds went there, too: it was a necessary stop when a mob carted around a man covered with tar and feathers.

Other towns up and down the American coast designated their own “Liberty Trees.” Charlestown, South Carolina, for example, chose a spreading live oak. (Newspapers in each town occasionally called the local tree “the Tree of Liberty” but rarely if ever “the Liberty Tree.”)

In late summer 1775, after the war had begun, British soldiers and some Loyalist locals chopped down Boston’s Liberty Tree. But as a symbol it endured, eventually adopted by reformers in other countries, as Al Young traces in his latest book, Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution. Lafayette stopped by the site in the 1820s when he was making his endless tour of America (where he could live more cheaply than in France). And a possibly fanciful engraving of the elm appeared in many history books.

Given the importance of Liberty Tree in pre-Revolutionary politics, why wasn’t the site included in the Freedom Trail in 1958? One possible answer, discussed in the Weekly Dig, is that powers-that-be dislike commemorating mass political activities, as opposed to august institutions like King’s Chapel (largely Loyalist in 1775) or the Old State House (government at work).

I’m not convinced. After all, the Freedom Trail has a stop at the site of the Boston Massacre, a violent and still sometimes controversial confrontation between locals and soldiers. And, though it wasn’t part of the trail (and is now closed for renovation), the Boston Tea Party ship commemorated an illegal, anti-commercial protest.

The main reason for deemphasizing the Liberty Tree site, I suspect, was that it no longer contained a stately tree to look at. And what was visible at that corner wasn’t thought to be appealing to tourists—unless they wanted erotic literature, in which case the Liberty Tree Bookstore would have been happy to sell it to them. (This is not the same Liberty Tree Bookstore that sells political books online.) For a couple of decades that neighborhood was Boston’s “Combat Zone,” a red-light district. Now that technology has helped Americans bring pornography into the home, where it belongs, the neighborhood is gentrifying and might actually be a good place for a historic park.

But it’s still half a mile from the current start of the Freedom Trail on Boston Common. And the 2.5-mile trail is meant to be short enough for people to walk comfortably in a day (though many folks leave the Charlestown sites for later). So for people to add the extra half-mile, there would have to be more to see than a bas-relief plaque on a wall.

Plans for expanding Liberty Tree Park have been in the air since 1974, as far as I can tell—that’s when the area first got that label. As the millennium approached, an organization called Boston 2000 announced plans to develop the park and lobby for adding it to the trail. There was a grant from Save America’s Treasures. But, as the Weekly Dig article says, the momentum faded. The city estimates that the park would need more money than is now available, and plans for the neighborhood are up in the air. Perhaps by 2015, which will be the semiquincentennial of the first protest under Liberty Tree?

(Thanks to Charles Bahne for supplying me with a copy of the Weekly Dig article.)

Fort Washington Park Going to the Dogs?

Brian Campbell of Cambridge sent a long comment attached to a posting from last year, and I thought it would be more visible in a posting of its own. Mr. Campbell is concerned about Fort Washington Park in Cambridge, the lone remaining geographic feature from the siege of Boston in 1775-76. Here are his comments, somewhat edited:

In November of 1775, by order of George Washington, volunteer soldiers constructed the three-gun battery earthworks at Fort Washington Park at 101 Waverly Street. Of the many siege fortifications built, only the three-gun battery earthworks at Fort Washington Park survive in an original condition.

After the Revolution, the affluent Dana family preserved the earthworks until 1858 and donated the land they occupy to the city. In 1859 Cambridge built the beautiful historic fence around the earthworks to protect them.

In the History of Cambridge, Massachusetts 1630-1877, Lucas R. Paige wrote, “Let no unpatriotic hand destroy this revolutionary relic, now known as Fort Washington.”

Fort Washington Park is now one of Cambridge’s two dog parks. Last year dog-owners petitioned the city to augment the Victorian iron fence around the park because pets could get through it and run away. In Jan 2006 the Cambridge Historical Commission approved a chain-link fence beside the older fence as a temporary measure. Presumably the city is working on a longer-term solution that matches the historic decor.

Mr. Campbell sees that use of the park as a threat to its survival:

The primary historic preservation concern was the 148-year-old fence, which no longer serves as protection to the earthworks. Instead, it keeps pooches caged in, making Fort Washington a legal off-leash park. Dogs burrow holes in the earthworks with impunity, as there is no protection for these fragile Revolutionary relics our forefathers so bravely constructed under British cannonades while suffering sickness and death in the camps and barracks of Cambridge.

As a USN Veteran, I feel this not the proper place to allow dogs to run free. The 231-year-old, Revolutionary relic three-gun battery earthworks are a monument to the labor of volunteer soldiers who constructed them, and deserve the respect and protection afforded the earthworks at national battlefields.

Here is Mr. Campbell’s full letter to the Cambridge Chronicle in February. You can read more of his thoughts on the park here. He has also posted slide shows titled “Ft. Washington Dog Damage.”

On the other side of the issue, folks on such websites as CambridgeDog.org and the SomervilleDog blog are pleased to have the dog park, and pleased that Cambridge agreed to steps that make it better for dogs.

I literally don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t have a dog, I don’t live in Cambridge, and I have no special feelings about Fort Washington Park compared to other Revolutionary sites. But here are some observations from a historical perspective.

First, there were earthworks and fortifications and artillery batteries all around Boston in 1775-76, and inside the town as well. Soon after the war, most were plowed up or built over. Massachusetts farmers didn’t like to see land go to waste. People weren’t that interested then in preserving such reminders of the war. Since then, the geography of Boston and Cambridge has changed drastically, with large landfills creating new areas for construction. The park is now surrounded by streets, parking lots, and train tracks.

Those facts can cut both ways. On the one hand, as Mr. Campbell says, because these earthworks are the only military features that survive, it might be all the more important to preserve them. On the other hand, it’s not possible to get a sense of the siege—its scale, its strategy, its challenges for both sides—from this patch of land, so its value for understanding history is limited.

Aesthetically, I see Fort Washington Park as a relic of the Victorian period. The earthworks (in some form) go back to 1775-76, but the fence, cannons, and carefully planted trees reflect how people of the 1800s treated history and the land. Even the twentieth-century statues there include, as well as figures of Continental Army soldiers at work, a Victorian woman sitting on an earthwork to enjoy the sun.

I agree with Mr. Campbell that it’s valuable to maintain these formations as a physical reminder of the siege. I’m not sure how much of a permanent threat dogs and their owners pose. Those earthworks were piled up to withstand cannonballs, after all. With proper maintenance (not always certain, of course), they could last for more centuries. How about a community effort to fill in the holes the dogs dig, to make sure grass grows back every spring?

Perhaps the issue the more emotional: should this land be treated as a war memorial, akin to a cemetery or battlefield? There were no fights there, no soldiers killed or buried there. One could argue that using the space as a public park will encourage people to forget the soldiers of the Revolution. Then again, visiting that spot might make folks think about the men who built those mounds. All in all, this consideration seems to come down to symbolism, and the meaning and weight of symbols change over time.

Is making Fort Washington Park into a dog run specifically disrespectful? I’m not convinced, for a couple of reasons. While dogs can’t be toilet-trained, dog-owners can be; there’s been a remarkable change even since my childhood in how many urban and suburban owners pick up after their pets. Of course that’s not a perfect solution, but, as with maintaining the earthworks, it seems possible for people to keep the park healthy and clean. And pet-owners would benefit most.

Finally, from a historical perspective, it seems worth noting that Gen. George Washington was fond of his hunting dogs, owning many over his youth and middle age. His colleague Gen. Charles Lee loved his dogs even more, probably more than any person he met; he once insisted that Abigail Adams shake hands with one of his dogs. Gen. Israel Putnam had dogs at his farm in Connecticut.

Among Patriot politicians, Samuel Adams had a pet Newfoundland, and this week Prof. Richard Brown of the University of Connecticut told me that James Sullivan once offered a reward for the return of his dog. Ebenezer Fletcher, who joined the Continental Army in 1777 as a sixteen-year-old fifer, credited a dog with helping him escape from British troops around Fort Ticonderoga. Pvt. Joseph Plumb Martin mentioned American officers having a “favorite little dog” with them in 1780 (alas, he mentioned this in the context of them finally killing and eating the dog because they were so starved for rations).

For the soldiers of the Continental Army, securing Cambridge’s freedom to choose where to let its dogs roam might have been more important than maintaining their earthworks.

Events Leading up to Patriots' Day

Middlesex County is about to enter full Patriots’ Day mode, commemorating the Battle of Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775, the start of the American Revolution. I’ve tried to gather news of the public historical reenactments scheduled for the next week and a half. There are also parades, balls, camporees, a Red Sox game, and the Boston Marathon (starting earlier this year). I apologize in advance if I’ve missed any town’s special tradition, but there doesn’t seem to be a central repository of this information.

SATURDAY, 7 APRIL

Bedford: The traditional first event of the season is the raising and “capping” of a Liberty Pole organized by the Bedford Minuteman Company. This year that ceremony starts at 10:30 A.M. at Bedford Common and moves to Wilson Park. Liberty Poles—basically flagpoles, the taller the better—were an important symbol of the American Whig movement from the late 1760s on. I think that adding the knitted Phrygian cap as another symbol of liberty might have become most popular in the 1790s during the political disputes between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans.

Concord: The Meriam’s Corner Exercise along Lexington Road takes place at 12:30 P.M. Minute companies and fife and drum units recall the fight that marked the beginning of the British column’s six-hour running battle back to Boston.

Lincoln: At 3:00 P.M., the Lincoln Minute Men and other militia and musical units observe the capture of Paul Revere by British officers in the early hours of 19 April 1775, at the site along modern Route 2A.

SATURDAY, 14 APRIL

Lincoln: At Hartwell Tavern in Minute Man National Historical Park (parking off Route 2A), the annual Battle Road reenactment from 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. features hundreds of British and Colonial Reenactors encamped at the Hartwell Tavern and Captain William Smith house. There will be demonstrations of military drill, artillery, crafts, and games, and a “massed tactical weapons demonstration running over a half-mile of the original Battle Road.” For more information on the site, download this Event Map.

SUNDAY, 15 APRIL

Arlington: At 12:30 P.M., units reenact the fierce skirmishes at Menotomy at the Jason Russell House.

Lincoln: The annual Lincoln Salute offers a concert of fife and drum music from 1:45 to 3:30 P.M. in Pierce Park, hosted by the Lincoln Minute Men. [ADDENDUM: See the comments below for the Lincoln Tattoo’s alternate venue in case of a downpour. Which, not coincidentally, is what the meteorologists now forecast for Sunday.]

Woburn: The Woburn Historical Society presents “Pathway of the Patriots” from 1:00 to 3:00 P.M. Gather at the former Tarky School Lot on Russell Street, where tours start every half hour. Event will consist of narrated tours of Woburn’s Old Battle Road, reenactors, exhibits, and dramatizations.

Acton: The Samuel Prescott–John Robbins Ride reenactment starts at approximately 5:30 P.M. at the former site of the Robbins home on Concord Road, southeast of Woodlawn Cemetery, and then proceeds to the Isaac Davis home site on Hayward Road, the Faulkner House on the corner of High Street and Main Street, and Liberty Tree Farm at about 6:15.

Lincoln: Muster of the Lincoln Minute Men at 7:00 P.M. in Lincoln Center. Captain William Smith will arrive by horse to ring the bell of the White Church and spread the alarm that the British Regulars are coming.

Charlestown: The 8th Annual Paul Revere Row Reenactment takes place from 7:00 to 9:30 P.M., at the Charlestown Navy Yard Visitor Center. It will feature novelist William Martin signing his books, dramatic performances by the Histrionic Academy, and fife and drum music by Prescott’s Battalion Field Music. At the end of Pier 1 in the Charlestown Navy Yard from 8:30 until about 9:30, a special program will focus on Paul Revere. The program will climax with the arrival of a certain rowboat.

MONDAY, 16 APRIL

Westford: The Westford Colonial Minutemen start out along their Col. John Robinson Historic Trail March to Concord’s North Bridge at 4:45 A.M., starting at the Westford town common.

[ADDENDUM: See the Comments for a link on the similar march from Stow. Thanks, Jenn!]

Acton: Likewise, the Acton Minutemen and Davis Blues gather to march the Isaac Davis trail to Concord. Start-points are 5:45 A.M. at Acton-Boxborough Regional High School, 6:00 at the Isaac Davis Homestead on Hayward Road, and 6:45 at the monument in Acton Center. The unit expects to arrive at the North Bridge at 8:45 and take part in the Commemoration of the Concord Conflict. This is the 50th year of this event.

Lexington: The town sponsors its annual reenactment of the skirmish between British soldiers and local militiamen on Lexington Green, starting at 5:30 A.M.

Concord: Commemoration of the shots at the North Bridge starting at 8:30 A.M. British and Colonial Reenactors, Park Rangers, and volunteers reenact the morning of 19 April 1775.

Roxbury: The National Lancers reenact William Dawes’s ride, plus historic talks and trolley tours. Events center on First Church of Roxbury, 9:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M.

Acton: The Acton Historical Society, Acton Woman’s Club, and Iron Work Farm portray the “Spirit of Acton 1775” from 11:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. with tours of the 1760 Hosmer House, the 1728 Jones Tavern, and the 1706 Faulkner Homestead. Tickets will cost $5 per person age 13 and over and $2 per person under age 13.

Concord: At 7:30 P.M., 500 luminaries provide the backdrop for the 6th Annual Candlelight Remembrance Ceremony at North Bridge, a program of patriotic music and remembrance. Bring a flashlight and your singing voice. This event is sponsored by The Old Manse.

[ADDENDUM: Because of the storm, many outdoor Patriots’ Day events have been canceled. One exception: the tours in Acton. Please call ahead to be sure before setting out. And there’s always next year!]

THURSDAY, 19 APRIL

Wayland and Sudbury: Starting at 3:45 A.M. in Wayland center and at 5:45 in Sudbury center, the towns’ militia companies set out for Concord, to arrive at the North Bridge at approximately 10:30 A.M. The Sudbury Minute Men have more information.

Concord: With a Dawn Salute at 6:00 A.M., the Concord Minute Men and Concord Independent Battery observe the opening battle of the Revolutionary War. The North Bridge Remembrance Ceremony that follows at 7:30 A.M. includes historical speeches and wreath-laying.

SATURDAY, 21 APRIL

Lincoln: The Battle Road Heroes program at Hartwell Tavern, 7:00 to 8:30 P.M. is an evening of theater and history featuring the personal stories of people who lived along the Battle Road on 19 April 1775: Capt. William Smith, the Lincoln Minute Men, the Hartwells, drovers, musicians, and His Majesty's soldiers. Admission is $5.00 per person, $10.00 per family. Proceeds benefit the Minute Man National Park Association.

Mysteries of John Childs

In September 1757, John Childs told Bostonians that he would “fly” from Old North Church. He really meant (and most people probably assumed him to mean) that he would slide head-first down a rope pulled taut on a slant. He did so three times in two days, according to the Boston News-Letter. And then, as far as I can tell, he vanished.

I’ve tried to track John Childs on two continents, and come up with nothing. He was said to be an Englishman, and he claimed to have “flown” off the Monument in London. In London’s Guildhall Library (shown here), I found reports of other men doing the same daredevil feat from that tower, but no John Childs. He dropped the name of the Duke of Cumberland, son of the king, as his patron; that’s led nowhere. So, I’m sorry to say, one may not be able to believe everything that traveling performers say about themselves.

We can sometimes trace itinerants along the North American coast through reports from each major port, as with dentist John Baker. But Childs the rope flyer doesn’t pop up in other newspapers of the time. Perhaps if John Childs were a less common name, it would be possible to spot him as an ordinary citizen, soldier, or sailor—a man who did acrobatics on the side. But there were a lot of men named John Childs in colonial America, and even more in Britain. I’ve chatted with Christopher Child, a genealogist at the New England Historic Genealogical Society with an obvious interest in that family name, but we unearthed no leads. So Childs himself remains a mystery.

The other mystery of this episode for me lies in this line from the News-Letter: “As these Performances led many People from their Business, he is forbid flying any more in the Town.” Boston’s selectmen were the officials who usually took such action against disruptive entertainers. They enforced laws against theatricals, including even Punch & Judy shows. There’s no mention of Childs in the selectmen’s official records, but those were often selective.

No, the real mystery is that no one prohibited Childs from doing his act until he was done. Before he flew, he told the town, through the Boston Gazette, exactly what he was going to do “this Day, and two Days following.” He slid down his rope three times over two days. Then, and only then, was he “forbid flying any more in the Town.”

So I sense the town’s politicians doing a little balancing act of their own: not actually interfering with people’s entertainment while it went on, but making a show of putting a stop to it afterwards so as to reassure the more traditional elements in town.

John Childs, Rope Flyer

Yesterday I quoted John Childs’s announcement that he planned to fly from the steeple of Christ Church in Boston’s North End, the church we now call Old North. The 15 Sept 1757 Boston News-Letter duly recorded:

Tuesday in the afternoon, John Childs, who had given public Notice of his Intention to fly from the Steeple of Dr. Cutler’s Church, perform’d it to the Satisfaction of a great Number of Spectators; and yesterday in the Afternoon he again perform’d it twice.

The last Time he set off with two Pistols loaded, one of which he discharged in his Descent; the other missing fire, he cock’d and snap’d again before he reached the Place prepared to receive him.

It is suppos’d from the Steeple to the Place where the Rope was fix’d was about 700 Feet upon a Slope, and that he was about 16 or 18 Seconds performing it each Time.

As these Performances led many People from their Business, he is forbid flying any more in the Town.

The said Child says he had flown from the highest Steeples in England, and off the Monument, by the Duke of Cumberland’s Desire.

So what did Childs actually do? The important technical information is his “Rope was fix’d about 700 feet upon a Slope.” The steeple of Old North is 190 feet tall. So even if the rope were tied to the tippy-top, it must have formed a fairly gentle slope to the ground, far from the vertical. Furthermore, despite the newspaper’s clear interest in the speed and angle of Childs’s descent, its printers didn’t describe him as flying with any apparatus. Finally, to fire off two pistols during his second descent, Childs had to have both hands free.

All those clues, I’m sure, helped scholar Peter Benes connect Childs’s feat to a form of entertainment that daredevils had been offering in England for centuries: rope-flying. (Benes’s discussion appears in the article “Itinerant Entertainers in New England and New York, 1687-1830,” in the Dublin Seminar volume Itinerancy in New England and New York.)

A rope flyer started by stretching a long, strong rope from a steeple or other tall structure down to the ground on a slant. Then after making as big a deal of the event as he could, he went up the tower and waved to the assembled crowd. And then...

William Hogarth depicted a London rope flyer in his painting and engraving titled Southwark Fair. The painting is now at the Cincinnati Art Museum, but the online image is too small to see this detail clearly. Instead, I direct you to Benjamin N. Ungar’s thorough dissection of the engraved image [click the X to get rid of the ad if need be] and particularly its close-up of the “flying man.”

As you’ll see, a rope flyer slid down his rope head-first, arms and legs on either side of the cord. To protect his torso, he wore a board with a groove cut vertically down its center. His dangling limbs helped him keep his center of mass close to or even below the rope, so he didn’t fall off. And at the bottom? Samuel Breck’s memoir of growing up in Boston adds the detail, recalled by his mother, that Childs landed on a stack of feather mattresses.

So what John Childs did wasn’t really “flying” at all. It was, as Woody the Cowboy says in Toy Story, “falling with style.” But this was a quarter-century before the Montgolfier brothers sent up their first balloon. Sliding head-first down a rope, pistols blazing, was the closest anyone had seen to a man flying. Only after balloonists like Jean Pierre Blanchard really did fly for the public was that verb taken away from the rope-flyers, and their feat disappeared from the collective memory.

TOMORROW: Lingering mysteries about John Childs, the “flying man.”

John Childs Promises to Fly from Old North Church

On 12 Sept 1757, the Boston Gazette carried this unusual announcement:

This is to give Notice to All Gentlemen and Ladies, that John Childs has flown off of most of the highest Steeples in Old-England, and off of the Monument by the Duke of Cumberland’s Desire, and does intend this Day, and two Days following, to fly off of Dr. Cutler’s Church, where he hopes to give full Satisfaction to all Spectators.

The Monument was the 202-foot-tall column built in London to commemorate the Great Fire of 1666.

The Duke of Cumberland was Prince William Augustus, younger son of George II. As a British army commander, he had just been captured by the French at Klosterzeven, but Boston didn’t know that yet.

Dr. Cutler’s church was Christ Church in the North End of Boston, the same church that today we call Old North. And today a plaque on the building reads:

Here on September 13, 1757, John Childs – who had given public notice of his intention to fly from the steeple of Dr. Cutler’s church – performed it to the satisfaction of a great number of spectators.

In 1923, the year of the first continuous flight across the continent, this tablet has been placed here by the Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America to commemorate the two events.

For perhaps two hundred years now people have been puzzled about how exactly John Childs “flew.” And tour guides love to fill any vacuum of knowledge with confident statements of fact, however shaky. iBoston says Childs flew with “an umbrella-like contraption.” Citysearch says he used “a rudimentary glider.” CelebrateBoston says he was “Tethered to a rope, and attached to a feathered glider.” All wrong. Harvard’s First-Year Urban Program, to its credit, says, “no one really knows what this [flying] means.”

TOMORROW: What this “flying” means.

George Washington's Teeth, Close Up

In 1798, George Washington ordered what was probably his last set of false teeth. Here they are, courtesy of the American Dental Association.

The dentist who supplied these choppers was John Greenwood, who has appeared on Boston 1775 as a ten-year-old boy waiting up nights for a visit with the ghost of his roommate Samuel Maverick, killed in the Boston Massacre; and as a fifteen-year-old soldier during the Battle of Bunker Hill. I love being able to trace people through their lives like that.

The Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore has an online display on the correspondence between Greenwood and Washington from 1791 to 1799. Those pages also include an image of a different set of lower dentures.

Greenwood sent his client this professional advice in 28 Dec 1798:

I send you inclosed two setts of teeth, one fixed on the Old Barrs in part, and the sett you sent me from philadelphia which when I received was very black. Occasioned either by your soaking them in port wine, or by your drinking it. Port wine being sower, takes of all the polish and All Acids has a tendency to soften every kind of teeth and bone. Acid is used in coloring every kind of Ivory. Therefore it is very pernicious to the teeth.

Greenwood’s father Isaac was an ivory craftsman, so he knew what he was talking about.

I advise you to Either take them out after dinner and put them in clean water and put in another sett, or clean them with a brush and some chalk scraped fine, it will Absorbe the Acids which collects from the mouth and preserve them longer.

I have found another and better way of using the Sealing wax, when a hole is eaten in the teeth by acid, etc.—first observe, then dry the teeth, then take a piece of Wax and cut into as small pieces as you think will fill up the hole. Then, take a large nail or any other piece of Iron and heat it hot into the fire, Then put your piece of wax into the hole and melt it by means of introducing the point of the nail to it. I have tried it, and found it to Consoladate, and do better than the other way and if done proper it will resist the saliva. It will be handyer for you to take hold of the Nail with small plyers, than with a tongs thus, the wax must be very small not bigger than this [dot].

If your teeth grows black, take some chalk and a Pine or Cedar stick, it will rub of[f]. If you whant your teeth more yellower soake them in Broath or pot liquor, but not in tea or acid. Porter is a good thing to coulor them and will not hurt but preserve them but it must not be in the least pricked.

You will find I have Altered the upper teeth you sent me from philadelphia leaveing the enamel on the teeth dont preserve them any longer than if it was of, it only holds the color better, but to preserve them they must be very often Changed and cleaned for whatever attacks them, must be repelled, as often or it will gain ground and destroy the works.

the two setts I repaired is done on a different plan than when they are done when made entirely new, for the teeth are screwed on the barrs, instead of haveing the barrs cast red hot on them, which is the reason I believe the[y] destroy or dissolve so soone near to the barrs. Sir, after hopeing you will not be Obliged to be troubled very sune in the same way, I subscribe myself,

Your very humble servant,
John Greenwood

The additional charge is fiveteen dollars

P.S. I expect next Spring to move my family into Connecticut State. If I do, I will rite, and let you know, whether I give up my present business or not. I will as long as I live, do anything in this way for you or in any other way in my power—if you require it.

Washington wrote back, “I shall always prefer your services to those of any other in the line of your present profession.”

Judge Sewall Issues Injunctions

This week I had the good fortune to receive a gift of The Diary of Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), merchant, judge, and eventually chief justice of Massachusetts. He was an important figure in the transition from a Puritan colony to a royal province with a less assured sense of mission. Sewall was also one of the first Americans to argue against the established system of slavery, with his tract The Selling of Joseph.

I thought it was therefore most timely to quote Judge Sewall on an issue that’s more important today than ever. On 1 April 1708 he wrote to Boston schoolmasters Ezekiel Cheever and Nathaniel Williams:

What an abuse of precious Time; what a Profanation! . . . I have heard a child of Six years old say within these 2 or 3 days; That one must tell a man his Shoes were unbuckled (when they were indeed buckled) and then he would stoop down to buckle them; and then he was an April Fool. . . . Insinuate into your Scholars, the defiling and provoking nature of such a Foolish practice; and take them off from it.

Eleven years later this topic still weighed on Sewall’s mind, and in his diary recorded a lecture to his fourteen-year-old grandson and a younger boarder:

In the morning I dehorted Sam. Hirst and Grindal Rawson from playing Idle Tricks because ’twas first of April; They were the biggest fools that did so.

One starts to sense that someone had once told Judge Sewall that his shoes were unbuckled when they were in fact buckled.